Table Of ContentINDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE AND
LEARNING IN ASIA/PACIFIC AND
AFRICA
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INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE AND
LEARNING IN ASIA/PACIFIC AND
AFRICA
PERSPECTIVES ON DEVELOPMENT,
EDUCATION, AND CULTURE
Edited by
Dip Kapoor and Edward Shizha
indigenous knowledge and learning in asia/pacific and africa
Copyright © Dip Kapoor and Edward Shizha, 2010.
All rights reserved.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2010 978-0-230-62101-5
First published in 2010 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States – a division of St. Martin’s
Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and
has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the
United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-38311-5 ISBN 978-0-230-11181-3 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230111813
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Indigenous knowledge and learning in Asia/Pacific and Africa: perspectives on
development, education, and culture/edited by Dip Kapoor, Edward Shizha.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-349-38311-5
1. Ethnoscience—Africa. 2. Ethnoscience—Asia. 3. Indigenous
peoples—Education—Africa. 4. Indigenous peoples—Education—Asia.
I. Kapoor, Dip. II. Shizha, Edward.
GN645.I525 2010
001.089—dc22
2009053914
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by MPS Limited, A Macmillan Company
First edition: August 2010
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
List of Figures and Boxes vii
1 Introduction 1
Dip Kapoor and Edward Shizha
I Development 15
2 Learning from Adivasi (original dweller) Political-Ecological
Expositions of Development: Claims on Forests, Land,
and Place in India 17
Dip Kapoor
3 Indigenous Incitements 35
Kaushik Ghosh
4 Against the Flow: Maori Knowledge and Self-Determination
Struggles Confront Neoliberal Globalization in Aotearoa/
New Zealand 47
Aziz Choudry
5 Ethnic Minorities, Indigenous Knowledge, and Livelihoods:
Struggle for Survival in Southeastern Bangladesh 63
Bijoy P. Barua
6 Animals, Ghosts, and Ancestors: Traditional Knowledge
of Truku Hunters on Formosa 81
Scott Simon
7 Development Enterprises and Encounters with the
Dayak and Moi Communities in Indonesia 97
Ehsanul Haque
II Formal Education 113
8 Rethinking and Reconstituting Indigenous Knowledge and
Voices in the Academy in Zimbabwe: A Decolonization Process 115
Edward Shizha
vi contents
9 Education, Economic and Cultural Modernization, and
the Newars of Nepal 131
Deepa Shakya
III Learning and Communicative Mediums 145
10 Clash of Oralities and Textualities: The Colonization of the
Communicative Space in Sub-Saharan Africa 147
Ali A. Abdi
11 Autonomy and Video Mediation: Dalitbahujan Women’s
Utopian Knowledge Production 165
Sourayan Mookerjea
12 Voicing Our Roots: A Critical Review of Indigenous Media
and Knowledge in Bengal 179
Sudhangshu Sekhar Roy and Rayyan Hassan
IV Gender, Indigenous Knowledge, and Learning 195
13 Haya Women’s Knowledge and Learning: Addressing Land
Estrangement in Tanzania 197
Christine Mhina
14 The Indigenous Knowledge System of Female
Pastoral Fulani of Northern Nigeria 213
Lantana M. Usman
V Health Knowledge and Learning 227
15 Traditional Healing Practices: Conversations with
Herbalists in Kenya 229
Njoki N. Wane
16 “To Die is Honey, and to Live is Salt”: Indigenous
Epistemologies of Wellness in Northern Ghana and
the Threat of Institutionalized Containment 245
Coleman Agyeyomah, Jonathan Langdon, and Rebecca Butler
Notes 261
List of Contributors 265
Index 271
List of Figures and Boxes
FIGURES
16.1 Chief Isshaku Gumrana Mahamadu, assistants,
and Loagri community members 252
BOXES
15.1 Diseases treated by herbalists 235
15.2 Names of plants and Herbs 235
C h a p t e r 1
Introduction
Dip Kapoor and Edward Shizha
Any attempt to wade into indigenous waters in the Asia/Pacific and
Africa is a daunting task on many levels—there are the demands of defini-
tion, of positionality/location/optics of the contributors/writing (the trans-
gressions of outsiders and liberties taken), questions of boundaries and spaces,
telling/not telling, knowledge divides/unity, essentialisms and cultural dyna-
misms, the politics of the analysis/depictions of relative power(lessness) and
of colonization/resistance, and so on that this set of readings is perhaps no
less/more successful at addressing or transcending as is probably the case with
many of its predecessors. The collection seeks to be as much about the con-
tributions of indigenous knowledges (IKs), struggles, and peoples today (in
contrast to museumized-mothball approaches that negate contemporary crit-
ical colonial relevance and presence/gravity of the indigenous—see Grande,
2004; Red Pedagogy) as it is about engaging indigenous postmortems/critical
appreciations and expositions of the colonial project of modernity and its
tentacular manifestations; that is, amplifying the political genius that stems
from multiple histories of addressing “colonial assimilation projects, neglect,
diminishment, and racism” (Battiste, 2008, p. 85). There is an attempt here
to learn from and with, to politicize and amplify rather than to anthropolo-
gize and to stifle/objectify in yet another act of colonial representation, that
is, rather than settle for mere descriptive ethnography with no apparent pur-
pose but to mine or engage in academic voyeurism, contributors have been
encouraged to consider, through praxiological engagements, the political and
cultural projects of indigeneity and the simultaneous re/shaping and disembed-
ding of modern epistemic, knowledge, learning, education, culture, political
economy, and human-ecology relations (to consider the contexts of colonial-
ity see Mignolo, 2003; Quijano, 2000): how far the collective contribution
and each contributor has succeeded in this task is a matter for the reader to
ascertain, intentions and commitments notwithstanding.
2 Dip Kapoor and Edward Shizha
While the academic works and political projects of indigenous peoples of the
Pacific, including the seminal contributions of the Smiths, Linda, and Graham,
and of settler-colony indigeneities in North America and Australia have arrived
and continue to make their mark on the colonial project of modernity, including
the decolonization and recoding of resistance (see Aziz Choudry in this collec-
tion, Chapter 4), there is a lot to be learned from the Asian and African contexts
of indigeneity and the relatively unheralded and ongoing historical contributions
of the post/colony, as is pointed out by Kaushik Ghosh in this collection
(Chapter 3). It is with this in mind that the idea for the collection emerged.
Relying primarily on diasporic and indigenous scholars from Asia and Africa
and their relationships and associations with communities/peoples of the Kondh/
Adivasi, the Chakma and Marma, the Dayak and the Moi, the Truku, African-
indigeneity in Zimbabwe and the Sub-Sahara, the Newars, Dalitbahujans, the
Bauls, the Haya and the Fulani and the herbalists from the Luo, Abaluhyia,
Abagusii, Akamba, Agikuyu, Aembu, Ameru, Ambere and Mijikenda and the
bonesetters of Northern Ghana, this collection represents a collective effort to
magnify the contributions of indigenous peoples of Asia/Pacific and Africa.
We recognize that definitions of indigeneity are contested, in some cases
ambiguous and in others, a figment and tool of the state’s governing appara-
tus. However, self-definition and the struggles and aspirations of the groups
who appeal to history/origins, priority, ethnicity, culture, culturally embed-
ded political economies, common struggles with modernist hegemony, and
its sentinels are significant and present—self identification is probably at
the heart of indigenous identity and is the dominant approach utilized by
contributors to this collection. Many would prefer not to define indigenous
peoples at all because, after all, definition/taxonomies (and their rigidities) are
a product/instrument of colonial administration and control, as outsiders
continue the offensive practice of bounding the indigenous while identities
themselves tend to be more fluid. In fact, the UN Working Group on the
Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples expressed concerns and
stated that a “definition of indigenous peoples was unnecessary and that to
deny indigenous peoples the right to define themselves was to delimit their
right to self-determination” (cited in McNeish & Eversole, p. 5). The notion of
peoples underscores the great diversity (identities) signified by this term and the
varied experiences (histories) of indigeneity across the globe, some of which
may include (as perhaps being common to most indigenous peoples): being
original inhabitants of a land later colonized by others; nondominant sectors
of society with unique ethnic identities and cultures; strong ties to land and
territory; experiences or threats of dispossession from ancestral territory; the
experience of being subjected to culturally foreign governance and institu-
tional structures; and the threat of assimilation and loss of identity vis-à-vis
a dominant society (McNeish & Eversole); that is, indigenous understood as
a location and a historical and contemporary experience with colonialism as the
category of common experience.
