Among the knowledge interpreters

14 min read

Rahul Goswami

Abstract:

Who decides today what 'knowledge' is? What means do they use, technical or ideological? In an attempt to answer these questions, this commentary draws out the ties that bind formal and informal arenas of knowledge, based on personal experience in the field: documenting local knowledge systems, while engaged with government projects on agriculture and environment, and through association with inter-governmental agencies.What comes to be considered knowledge is found to be represented in as many ways as there are interpretations of it. In the administrative view, knowledge comes to have very much to do with the processes of administration, while in the cultural field, knowledge is described very often as being associated with the cultural codes that surround traditional practices and handicrafts. Elsewhere, , the apparatus that pertains to how knowledge is managed is considered knowledge whereas a particular subject is then reduced to serving as raw material for the activity of management.The threat of silicon 'intelligence' has taken over as the main preoccupation of those who study knowledge systems. Where once electronic lists and databases were treated as electronic representations of real-world knowledge systems and their practitioners, artificial intelligence and machine learning, which have abundant media at their command, may generate entire simulacra of knowledge.

Keywords: traditional knowledge, living heritage, development

The seductions of the 'knowledge economy'

In the early 2000s I was stationed in Singapore for a few years. The small city-state was at the time passing through one more reinvention of its economic persona, and so I came to hear two terms used, by city planners and very quickly thereafter, by ordinary Singaporeans (for that is quite the norm there). The terms were "knowledge economy" and "knowledge worker". The terms were meant to signal to Singaporeans - and to the outside world - that the city-state was not only about shipping and marine industries, that it was from then on going to put in much effort and government investment to attract the best biotechnology, information technology and innovation specialists wherever in the world they may be.

All this sounded grand, but I could not understand what was meant by the terms "knowledge economy" and "knowledge worker". Surely workers of all kinds, whether they hauled bricks to a construction site or whether they operated a machine in an ultra-modern clean room that affixed integrated circuits into printed circuit boards, had to apply some kind of knowledge in order to properly carry out their tasks? And when they did, how was calling it "knowledge economy" going to make it different, in any way, compared to what they were already doing?

My attempts to clear this terminological fog were met, from the Singaporeans whom I asked for explanations that might clear the confusion, in one of two ways. One was somewhat pitying superiority, since I obviously had not the wit required to understand what "knowledge economy" meant, and that it was imply not worth their while to educate simpletons. Two was irked testiness - didn't I know that Singaporeans were every so often being nagged by their government to regurgitate buzzwords, and who cared what it meant just so long as you repeated it every now and then, if possible within earshot of your superiors.

Some years thereafter, having returned to India, I became associated with a programme of the Ministry of Agriculture, which had to do with finding readily available remedies for common problems faced by farmers in their cultivation of crops. There too knowledge was a central concept, a term used in a variety of contexts, and its recording and dispersion was considered to be an important reason why the programme was run in the first place. From quite early in the programme (which was one of several under India's National Agriculture Innovation Project) there was a palpable tension between the formal knowledge system - represented by the laboratory-based crop science of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research - and the informal knowledge system, represented by farmers' groups. This latter was also called traditional crop knowledge.

When not engaged in keeping up-to-date with what were called project 'deliverables' (a thoroughly dislikeable term, which suggests more the factory assembly line than genuine enquiry), I had attempted to gauge what 'knowledge' meant to those in the 'formal' side of the field, these being crop scientists and senior administrators of state agriculture universities. By the end of the programme, I had gathered enough to reach my own conclusions. These were: formal crop science knowledge is of a superior order compared with informal crop knowledge; that what I and farmers' groups called traditional crop knowledge was rarely if ever considered to be knowledge at all; that among farmers' groups what I considered was their communal pool of traditional knowledge was not considered so by them, rather they preferred to refer to what they knew - individually and severally - as a "way of doing things" that could be relied upon.

Boundaries, informal and formal

Yet the farmers tended for the most part to accept that formal crop science knowledge was somehow superior to their own. So far as I could make out then, and since (using the benefit of other experience in fields such as cultural heritage, climate change, rural development), this acceptance had a good deal to do with the position of authority government has among rural peoples. Local administration officials in early 21st century India continue to be regarded with fear and awe, and it seemed to me that a similar set of feelings was evoked in farmers' groups by the laboratory-trained 'sarkari' crop scientist.

I found this situation to be more curious than it has been described as. For here were two kinds of knowledge - on the same subject no doubt but with very different approaches to crop problems - and while there was a hierarchy between them, it was both asserted by one side and accepted by the other. In contrast, I had observed in North-East India that the formalistic approach by a non-tribal to a tribal society - taking the anthropological or the ethnological route of inquiry and documentation - was generally considered by the member of a tribal community as being a stilted, rather alien, somewhat blinkered, jargon-riddled, representation of his own life and customs. Nonetheless, it was a representation that was (and continues to be) considered knowledge. This too was one subject, two systems of knowledge. But here, there was conditional or leveraged acceptance. There was a way of observing, there was a way of living, and these inhabited and represented two quite different knowledge worlds.

In 2010 I was introduced to a Unesco cultural convention, largely because of work done on documenting traditional knowledge systems. This was formally called the Unesco 2003 Convention on Intangible Cultural Heritage. It had to do, as I saw it then, with the cultural codes and expressions that surround any system of traditional knowledge (whether humble or grand), and its safeguarding, which is a term that means to find ways that encourage its practice even while accommodating changes in form and content and material.

This was indeed most interesting, for it extended to a considerable degree the constellation of ideas that we call knowledge. What's more, it moved the idea into the space of culture, and therefore, also into the spheres of art, performance, ritual , spirituality, handicraft, cosmology, conceptions of nature, and ways in which communities organise themselves to attend to these activities. At the level of an undercurrent, albeit I should say a strong undercurrent, was the relation between the concepts culture and knowledge. The worlds brought about by the industrial era, the so-called post-industrial era, the electronic era, and the internet era have for the most part tended to associate the term knowledge with science or with economy or with both. Culture and spirituality have been quite severely under-represented with regard to the knowledge concept.

How was knowledge of this sort - resting upon cultural codes and values while being associated with a spiritual view of man and nature - to be named? An attempt to answer this had already begun during the several years preceding what became known as the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, which had as its subject environment and development. These two terms were already growing in use and popularity by the early 1990s, and came to dominate the next 30 years. Whereas development had a good deal to do with what was needed to help people, in the first place escape poverty, and thereafter better their lives, environment was quite another matter.

When in 1990 the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) published its first 'human development index' report, it caused something of a sensation. For the first time at a world-wide scale, the measurement of development had been attempted and presented. From now on, so it seemed, development could be assigned numbers, and those numbers could be interpreted. Development, an abstract concept, could now be grasped, because measures and an index now existed, and what could be measured could be given form, of a kind.

At first, the environment concept appeared difficult indeed to assign quantities to. What could one measure? The answers were not long in coming: the spread of dense forests, the distribution of wetlands, river basins, fishing regions along the coast, grasslands, shifting cultivation, wildlife densities, and so on. Very soon, it became clear that for the environment concept, the problem was one of an overabundance of what to measure, or to record. Development, in contrast, had been given a small set of characteristics and these were strictly followed.

A duopoly of dominant concepts

Both these concept-terms, development and environment, have been omniscient for well over 30 years. I cannot recall any of the programmes and projects that I have been associated with - whether for NGOs small or large, or for government and then inter-government work - in which they have not figured. The pursuit of activities in both spawned what soon enough came to be called 'industries': university courses, government campaigns, advanced study institutes, think-tanks, distinct treatment by multi-lateral financial organisations, and armies of professionals.

At the level of practice however, what were we witnessing? Was it the generation of new forms of what could be called knowledge? Was it the organisation, under new ontologies, of existing knowledge? Was it deployment of a new semantics that brought about the illusion of new forms of knowledge? For the most part, none of the organisations I have had any connection with, for 30 years, has formally considered such questions. Nor, I should say, did I, until more recent years, when reflecting on where culture stands in relation to development and environment.

But the rapidity with which the two concept-terms - development and environment - were advanced in the 1990s, and especially from the early 2000s, siphoned away the time available for such reflection. I had witnessed this phenomenon at close quarters during, as mentioned earlier, my research role for a project on agriculture and, from 2005, my role as an adviser to the Centre for Environmental Education Himalaya (supported by the Ministry of Environment).

The welter of new terminologies was often overwhelming. There were validated knowledge, formal knowledge, there were knowledge models and these required the adoption of specialised vocabularies to use, there were hierarchies. What I had until then understood, howsoever incompletely, as traditional knowledge simply wasn't sufficient any more. No, this had to be apportioned to indigenous knowledge, local and indigenous knowledge, traditional ecological knowledge, folk knowledge, tacit knowledge, folk wisdom, embodied knowledge and several other terms.

Nor was that all to be grappled with. Every inter-governmental body and agency had some territory in a traditional knowledge landscape that was becoming distinctly crowded. There were the UNDP and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), there was the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD, effective since 1993, and which paid some attention to connections between biodiversity and cultural diversity, and there was the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which in 1997 had issued 'principles and guidelines' on indigenous and traditional peoples and protected areas.

Not one to be left behind was the World Bank, which had commenced its Indigenous Knowledge for Development Program in 1998. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) introduced the Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems programme in 2002, and in the twenty-odd years since then, the ranks of organisations engaging with traditional knowledge (in all its colourful terminological diversity) has only increased. In 2003 came the UNESCO 2003 Convention on Intangible Cultural Heritage, which provided a compelling cultural wrapper to the subject of traditional knowledge.

During the last two decades I have seen, perhaps in the manner of a boy wide-eyed at a mela, a growing profusion of knowledge hermeneutics. These have been thrust into public spaces via all manner of instruments and summits: the Global Environment Facility and its 'inclusive resource initiative', the World Summit of Indigenous Peoples and Nature, the International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) and its task force on indigenous and local knowledge, the UNESCO Local and Indigenous Knowledge Systems programme and its 'technical support unit on indigenous and local knowledge', the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and its programme on 'genetic resources, traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expressions', the Global Biodiversity Framework, and a host of others.

Knowledge-power struggles

What can one make of it all? What should one? The interpretations of knowledge for the last 30 years (and a bit more besides) have caused its classification to fall into either of two camps. The one is scientific and technological. It is vested with all sorts of authority, and is therefore accepted as being autonomous, rational, objective, universal, quite unimpeachable. The other is social and cultural. It has scant authority other than that which is granted to it by the power structures of today, and these structures include all those organisations that either produce the first sort, or those which deploy it. But the structures also include - and this may still be a source of bewilderment for all those who inhabit what used to be called the Third World, the post-colonial countries, the 'developing' world - the administrative agencies of countries, government ministries and departments, universities, various sorts of private research organisations and foundations.

In the forms that have enabled it to survive into today, and which give it character and meaning, traditional knowledge is very much the antithesis of 'formal' - that is, scientific and technological - knowledge. That is also why, so far as I have been able to see during some thirty-odd years of observing and documenting it, traditional knowledge is continually being interpreted. At some theatrical level it is amusing, because those who are called the practitioners and bearers of traditional knowledge (or intangible cultural heritage, as Unesco has called it) find such interpretation unnecessary, pointless, semiologically crippled and mostly off the mark.

Alas, in this third decade of the 21st century, when so much is digital and automated, interpretation of lesser knowledges by a dominant knowledge has become a kind of applied science itself, guided by economic rationality. Far too much has been invested in the authority and credibility of a narrowcast scientific and technological knowledge, and in the superiority of what since the mid-19th century has been called the scientific method.

Nor has - as I see it from my position as a documenter and researcher of knowledge traditions (and therefore neither a practitioner nor tradition bearer, nor a scientist) - the scientific method itself been insulated from change. An anecdote here will help describe the manner in which the ordering of knowledge underwent change. Unesco's cultural conventions, chiefly the 1972 World Heritage Convention and the 2003 Intangible Cultural Heritage Convention, are arranged around lists. These are lists of what are called 'elements' - structures and sites of tangible heritage, named practices and expressions for intangible cultural heritage.

In around 2013-14 I had expressed, to the Unesco administration, what I considered the futility of maintaining lists of these elements, when the actions needed to ensure the survival and continuity of many cultural expressions and forms (that were not listed) were lacking. The curt reply that had been shot back to me was that Unesco's lists were not born of the enumerating impulse that had gripped Europe from the Renaissance era, and which had persisted to the end of the 20th century.

What the reply had referred to were the encyclopaedists. Some of the best known had been Ephraim Chambers, Denis Diderot and Jean d'Alembert and indeed their peers and predecessors and successor encyclopaedists elsewhere in Europe (such as Meyers in Germany, Piccola in Italy) were legion. Their works were, to put it as simply as I came to understand the reference, the ordering of knowledge and the presentation of that ordering. The products that contained ordered knowledge were of course encyclopaediae (mainly) but also dictionaries and universal grammars and talases. They were the vehicles for transmitting the thought of the European Enlightenment.

The electronic matrix

Yet the rebuke carried scant substance. Unesco's lists were lists, no matter how they were and continue to be presented as winning examples of community participation. They could not be otherwise, because the agencies of the UN system have, since their inception, absorbed the impulse to order what they take to be socially useful knowledge and give to these productions the structure of reasoned utility.

The human development index I mentioned earlier is very much the star exemplar, for it has now been adopted at the sub-national (that is, at the provincial or state) level in a number of countries. Organisations like the FAO, Unicef and WHO maintain large arrays of lists pertaining to, respectively, agriculture, education and health. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which are considered parts of the UN system of agencies (and are both the macroeconomic and the development loci of the multi-lateral system) maintain enormous and detailed databases now, on all manner of measurements and indices.

All these have been weighty influences on the Indian state and its agencies of governance. Much weightier has been the inheritance of the colonial-era mechanisms of ordering knowledge: the great trigonometrical survey, followed by the anthropological, geological, botanical and zoological surveys, And so the decennial population census, numbers of job card holders under the MGNREGA programme, micro-watersheds, crop quantities and prices at agricultural markets, and many other accumulations of data besides, all are now considered to be the prerequisite for what the state explains is the essential scaffolding for its brand of knowledge.

Such large arrays became visible on the internet 20 years ago. Their number and complexity has increased very rapidly indeed since then. By 2015, I began to see a sort of governance-by-'dashboard', wherein numerical trends were represented as developmental or economic outcomes. The massaging of such trends came to be considered knowledge, as were forecasts and predictions based on the movements of vast numerical sets. The widespread adoption of this method gave rise to 'data-driven' decision-making and 'evidence-based' development. The central government practiced it, so did state governments, so did the non-governmental and voluntary sector, so did the corporate sector in its pursuit of social responsibility, so did academic field studies, and so did philanthropic organisations and donor agencies.

Knowledge became numeric, electronic, shaped by algorithms, vast arrays updated every day that could be 'mined', data scientists were sought, and as the volume of numbers swelled, so did the sophistication of the methods to manage the inflation of indices, which propelled the exercise speedily into the realm of what we today call artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).

This is a departure so extreme from what has preceded it that I am surprised it has been so little commented upon. As I see it, the very nature of the set of conceptions (some formal, some indigenous, some spiritual, some heterodox, but all cognisant of each other) has been altered and is being altered, without review and without apparently any mechanism to arrest its trajectory. Why is it important to rein it in, and examine what the idea of knowledge has become? Some 350 years ago, a group of natural philosophers banded together in what became the Royal Society, and took as their motto 'nullius in verba', or 'take no one's word for it', which also meant all knowledge of nature could be based on personal observation rather than the notations of some authority.

What we have instead been conditioned to tolerate, if not to accept and use, are crude and incomplete representations of what purport to be signals of phenomena. The natural philosophy which flexibly arranged itself between the margins of science, of cultural codes and of humble rural industry is an anachronistic occupation. It has been ousted by battalions of sensors, GPS-enabled devices, the internet of things, real-time telemetry, and allied toys, for what else are they? The true instruments of perception lie within.

Until now, it has been culture-centric views of our world - so very many of them - that have shaped the sociologies of knowledge. Will these and must these yield to the ice-cold logic of artificial intelligence and machine learning? I think not, for the roots of traditional knowledge are the very substance of our world.