A slow-motion standoff is being witnessed in the relationship between communities and researchers from formal institutions. Linda T. Smith captures the most poignant expression of this face-off:
The term ‘research’ itself stirs up in local communities a silence, conjures up bad memories that still offends the deepest sense of our humanity …. It galls non-Western societies that western researchers, intellectuals and scientists trained in that tradition can claim to know ALL that there is to know about other societies, on the basis of brief and superficial encounters with those societies. It often appalls indigenous societies that Western science [and researchers trained in that tradition] can desire, extract, and claim ownership of people’s way of knowing, and then simultaneously reject those people who created those ideas, and deny them the opportunities to be the creators of their culture and own notions.
(Smith, 1999, p. 1)
Coming from Africa, I assume an African perspective in my analysis of the broader implications of recognising community knowledges worldwide. On entry to the system that associates the non-Western, the non-‘developed’ with ‘bad’, it quickly becomes known to indigenous and African children that what is relevant for the West, its insights, its values, its tastes and eccentricities alike, becomes the model for the world. From then on, everything one does and thinks, is defined and compared using Western norms, leaving all else bundled together as the ‘rural other’, the ‘non-urban’, often equated with ‘community’. This ‘other’ is the cosmologies of Africa, the Native American, Saami from Scandinavia, Asia and Latin America – otherwise collectively known as the ‘Third World’. In fact, it took less than 20 years since President Truman launched the concept of ‘underdevelopment’ in his inaugural speech in 1949 (Sachs, 1992), to make two billion people define themselves as such (Illich, 1981). With the launching of this concept, all social totalities were collapsed into one single model; all systems of science into one mega science; all development to growth, to GNP. The attitude to what is referred to as ‘rural’, or ‘community’, in development jargon, still bears, like father, like son, the hallmarks of subjugative paternalism.
Critiquing the Western, scientific research model without offering an alternative will not be helpful for universities to play a different role and give voice to those who don’t have voice. Bridging Knowledge Cultures addresses this need
In urging the fostering of community knowledge cultures and co-construction of knowledge, leading to transformation and healing between the academy and the communities, knowledge power inequalities between the two have been taken into account in this book. These power differentials at individual and institutional level not only influence the role of partnership members in the entire research process, but also create hierarchies of knowledge(s) based on existing institutional or socio-cultural norms and assumptions. What we need to do is deepen our analysis at the diagnostic level so that action can proceed. This book is a step in that direction.
The intractable problems of modernity cannot be solved within the paradigms of modernity (Odora Hoppers & Richards, 2011). The universities must see to it that its roles include the verification, validation and legitimation of community knowledge, locally and internationally, through sustained dialogue. Equitable relations between the academy and the indigenous knowledge holders must create within its strategic objectives a process in which the marginalised have a ‘presence’ and ‘voice’. It is through affirmation of the multiplicity of worlds, and the recognition that forms of knowledge other than that sanctioned by science exist, that it becomes possible to redefine the relationship between objectivity and representation, between subject and object (CODESRIA, 1998), between university and community – a healing moment (Nouwen, 1972) in this long chain of vicarious disenfranchisement.
Catherine A. Odora Hoppers
References
CODESRIA. (1998, September 14–18). Introduction to the international symposium on social sciences and the challenges of globalization in Africa (pp. 1–2). Johannesburg.
Illich, I. (1981). Shadow work: Vernacular values examined. Marion Boyars Inc.
Nouwen, H. (1972). The wounded healers. Doubleday.
Odora Hoppers, C. A., & Richards, H. (2011). Rethinking thinking. modernity’s “other” and the transformation of the university. UNISA.
Sachs, W. (Ed.). (1992). The development dictionary: A guide to knowledge as power. Zed Books.
Smith, L. T. (1999). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. Zed Books.