[Fourth in a series] – 1 2 3 4 5 6

In the last half of this essay, we will explore a variety of approaches from several disparate fields that may offer pathways to answering these questions. In doing so, we must suspend our need to recognize familiar constellations among an array of points and allow for different metaphors and unfamiliar perspectives. Once again, Hodja has something to teach us…

A beggar had only a stale piece of bread to eat. Hoping to get something to go with it, he went to a nearby inn to beg for a handout. The innkeeper turned him away, but the beggar snuck into the kitchen where he found a large pot of soup cooking over the fire. He held his piece of bread over the steaming pot, hoping to capture a bit of flavor from the good-smelling steam. Suddenly the innkeeper came in and accused him of stealing soup. “I took nothing – I was only smelling the soup!” cried the beggar. “Then you shall pay for the smell,” answered the innkeeper. Since the beggar was poor, the angry innkeeper dragged him before the qadi, Nassreddin Hodja. Hodja heard the innkeeper’s complaint and the beggar’s explanation. “So you expect this poor man to pay for the smell of your soup?” Hodja asked the innkeeper. “Yes!” was the answer. “Then I will pay you,” said Hodja taking two coins from his pocket. Rubbing the coins together, Hodja said, “I will pay for the smell of your soup with the sound of money.” And he sent them both on their way.

This story reminds us that sometimes the answers to our questions may be found in unlikely places – in spaces between traditional paths. The following considerations are meant to apply specifically to the problems of incorporating indigenous knowledge in ICT4D programs and more broadly to the philosophical problem of mediating the differences between Western and indigenous ways of knowing.

First let us address Haraway’s “suspect technology for the production of meanings.” Humans are particularly fond of binary dichotomies. Some common examples:

figure | ground
hot | cold
man | woman
dead | alive
vertebrate | invertebrate
man | machine
good | evil

Without much work, we can begin to see why the technology is suspect. By the logic of the chart, both woman and machine are the opposites of man. Some dichotomies are a matter of degrees (hot and cold), others a matter of physical difference (vertebrate and invertebrate), and yet others a matter of moral difference (good and evil). In common usage (not mathematical, for example), they are rarely jointly exhaustive.  With this in mind, the idea that Western and indigenous are somehow opposite or critically incompatible is fallacious. They are different to be sure, but as Rist argues:

“To consider modern society as different from others, on the pretext that it is secular and rational, is actually a result of Western arrogance. As there is no society which is not based upon traditions and beliefs, nothing indicates that Western society is lacking them either – even if they are different from those of other societies. It is necessary to reject the ‘great divide’ between ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’, for modernity itself lies within a tradition” (21).

The title of this subsection is somewhat confusing at first. The idea that something might not be one thing or another but possibly both – or neither, defies the rule of binary logic that cuts in two the world around us. I am not the first to suggest deconstructing dichotomies, nor is it particularly original to discussions of cultural understanding. Recently Pickering (1992) recast science, not as the opposite of indigenous thinking, but as itself, a culture. He explored the ways in which scientific understanding is situated within specific cultural contexts. As Irani notes, invoking Verran and Turnbull, “What this suggests, then, is that the encounters between western science and other cultures is not simply an encounter between different technologies and different capabilities, but between different culturally-bound ways of knowing” (2). If we accept this construction, by what means then can one translate between different ways of knowing?