When it comes to talk about Human Security (HS), "people" would quickly appear in the center of the discussion. However, most of the times "people" looks just like an empty word, a rhetoric must but a mystery in its interpretation. In order to advance the understanding and reaches of the HS approach, it will be meaningful to review some of the elements that lurk inside that huge black box.
One of the first issues that jump to sight once community is studied from a developmental perspective is "Indigenous Knowledge". That is to say, the knowledge held by the communities of the addressed territory. In this short and neat article, Professor Agrawal identifies three ways in which academics differentiate indigenous from Western knowledge, and poses a critique to their validity and consequences. In Summary, the arguments are as follow:
- Substantive grounds: or differences in the subject matter and characteristics of knowledge - the perception that indigenous knowledge is concerned mainly with immediate issues, in contrast with general scientific approach of Western knowledge. The author remarks how diverse Western knowledge is on these grounds, full of inner tensions around the broadness of the studied subject, and also how indigenous works do address similarly a variety of themes, too.
- Methodology and Epistemology: Professor Agrawal comments on how the ongoing discussion on "Western knowledge" foundations has not been - and probably, would never be - ended, opening space for the acknowledgment and consideration of divergent views. Besides, the author points out how ignorance about the context in which the knowledge was created has been responsible for disregard towards local ideas.
- Contextual grounds: On the one hand, most of the critiques about the failures of Western knowledge regarding technical solutions and development have been centered on its ignorance in relation to the context. Besides, analysis of society and science, such as Khun’s analysis, has successfully showed how culture and knowledge are tied. So the author concludes that this categorization of knowledge is irrelevant.
Furthermore, the author criticizes the ongoing process of local knowledge preservation: collecting information in the field and compiling it in databases - made available on the Internet. Not only does the strategy take out the knowledge from its context - the place where it is most valuable, but also benefits outsiders - specially scientists - more than those from which the knowledge is taken. Sadly, in the worst case scenario, those databases become just a mausoleum for knowledge.
As Professor Agrawal concludes, the real challenge, beyond useless categorizations of knowledge into indigenous and Western, is to preserve knowledge in situ. In HS terms, this implies to empower locals to work out their own solutions in a framework by which knowledge brought by different stakeholders is placed at the same level, and a productive dialogue can conjugate adequately the different views of reality, bringing success and avoiding cultural uneasiness.
Oscar A Gomez S
Second Year Master Student
Graduate Program on Human Security
Tohoku University