Indigenous Knowledge Systems
The Knowledge:
To become a cab driver in London one has to pass a knowledge test appropriately referred to as “The Knowledge”. It requires the aspiring driver to memorizing over 300 routes and 30,000 points of interest. The test takes about four years to prepare for, and has a well documented neurological impact on those who accept the vocation. Today, when everyone has a full map of London readily available on her/his phone, some question the relevance of “The Knowledge”. Black cab drivers will argue that an instinctual knowledge of the cities routes is higher quality knowledge than the knowledge produced by phone apps like Wayz. The Black cab knowledge does not require one to take one’s eye off the road, or pay attention to the navigation rather than the moving environment around the car because the map of London’s streets exists inside the Black cab driver’s head.
I have a hard time defining Indigenous knowledge systems and many text books and online resources fall into reductive and dangerous ideology of the “noble savage” trope. It seems as though this Area of Knowledge is often interpreted as any knowledge found in non-western traditions. To avoid this pitfall I have defined Indigenous knowledge for myself in two different ways.
(1) Any knowledge that is in danger of being replaced or devalued by new technologies or systems. This definition would include some classic examples of indigenous knowledge like oral storytelling traditions, traditional production of Turkish carpets, or the Black cab drivers of London. If any of these traditions officially die out, no doubt knowledge will be lost, but new knowledge in other Areas of Knowledge will be created in the process. Often this type of knowledge is threatened by technological production cane produce a similar value at scale. In short, this definition could be summarized by saying it is knowledge that has been divorced from power. The problem with this definition is that the types of knowledge included are too broad, in some ways like the Human Sciences, and would include wildly different uses of the Ways of Knowing.
(2) In an anecdote made famous by a David Foster Wallace commencement speech two young fish swim past an older fish. As they pass the older fish says, “Hey boys, how’s the water?”. The two continue to swim on and eventual one turns to the other and says, “What is water?”. My second definition is any knowledge of “water” from this anecdote. In other words, any knowledge that you do not know you have until you step away from your own culture and your own people and witness ways of being that challenge your understanding of human nature. I, for example, have a pretty strong indigenous knowledge of western libraries. I walk into them with confidence and understand how many different kinds of libraries function intuitively. I didn’t notice that I had this knowledge until I entered a library with an acquaintance who did not have this knowledge. Conversely, in my early twenties I once found myself in a club on the Jersey shore. I definitely felt my lack of indigenous knowledge in this moment. I did not know how to order a drink or how to engage with any member of the community. This definition benefits from a consistent use of Memory and Intuition as key players in the Ways of Knowing, but fails to address some key examples of Indigenous knowledge that people intentionally build and are entirely aware that they possess, like my Italian Grandmother’s knowledge of how to make the perfect meatball, the biodynamic farmer who can discern the quality of his fertilizer by smell, those Black cab drivers in London.
This Area of Knowledge, similar to Human Sciences, has so many discrete sub disciplines that operate in vastly different ways that going through the Ways of Knowing seems both impossible and reductive. So I won’t be doing it.
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