Indigenous Knowledge and Sustainability

Abstract

In this article, “indigenous knowledge” and its relationship to tradition and to reinvented religion are explored. Indigenous people around the world have a rich body of knowledge about the ecology of the local flora and fauna and of ecosystem processes, accumulated and applied through many generations of observation and experience. But this knowledge extends to the entire process of “dwelling” (Ingold, 2000) in their habitat, including particular ways of thinking and acting that may be seen to constitute a “habitus” in Bourdieu’s sense.

Geertz (1983, p. ix) writes, “Having called various sorts of spirits from the vasty deep I thought it necessary to show that at least some of them had come.” These spirits comprised, of course, less a set of specific anthropological observations than a particular approach to the study of social phenomena: a semiotic, context-dependent, cultural hermeneutics, or “thick description.” Local Knowledge—the book—is to be read “as a series of demonstrations of the explanatory power of setting sui generis phenomena in echoing connection” (Geertz, 1983, p. xi). Geertz, here, has privileged knowledge over culture, or, as Barth (2002) puts it, “Knowledge provides people with materials for reflection and premise for action, whereas ‘culture’ too readily comes to embrace also those reflections and those actions.” Furthermore, actions become knowledge to others only after the fact. Thus, the concept of “knowledge” situates its content in a particular and necessarily equivocal way, relative to events, actions, and social relationships.

In this article, I explore some aspects of what we call “indigenous knowledge” ¹ and its relationship to tradition and to reinvented religion. Indigenous people around the world have a rich body of knowledge about the ecology of the local flora and fauna and of ecosystem processes, accumulated and applied through many generations of observation and experience. But this knowledge extends to the entire process of “dwelling” (Ingold, 2000) in their habitat, including particular ways of thinking and acting that may be seen to constitute a “habitus” in Bourdieu’s sense.

The term “indigenous people” was first used in 1957 in the International Labor Organization’s (ILO) Convention 107. From 1993, which was declared the International Year of the Indigenous People, it has gained wide recognition. ² The concept of indigenous people is associated with notions of land and territory: they are regarded as original inhabitants, referring to the descendants of peoples who first occupied a certain territory. But in practice, as Gray (1995, p. 39) remarks, this simply means prior inhabitants.

Ghosh (2010, p. 37) aptly remarks that the declaration extends the power of the well-known secular historical narrative (of the non-indigenous) to indigenous populations. He further shows that the concept of people is often understood in a “narrative of progress”: “Why do the indigenous and the modern appear as such opposed terms?” Why should indigeneity always evoke an opposite temporality—“fast-changing,” “modern,” “contemporary,” and “twenty-first century?” How does this binary structure invest our discourse of indigeneity even in its most critical moments? I would add: “Can this narrative of progress pervade the consciousness of being indigenous and can it influence the degree of autonomy that indigenous people try to achieve?” In my view, this degree of autonomy is necessary to allow for the expression of indigenous knowledge.

I shall place indigenous knowledge in different cultural contexts, to show its different uses and examine its ideological premises. By privileging indigenous knowledge as a departure point, I argue that indigenous people are able to produce strategies of resistance, not simply through protest but also by opening new paths of thought. In India, today, the problem of the states is to recognize social, economic, and cultural differences while ensuring a degree of redistributive justice.

Indigeneity

Indigeneity is a sensitive topic in political and academic spheres. Kuper (2003) has criticized the term “indigenous” as it connotes pre-modern ways of life and thus serves as a euphemism for the term “primitive.” But others take the term seriously. Merlan (2009, p. 304) defines indigeneity as implying first-order connections (usually at a small scale) between group and locality. It connotes belonging and the sharing of a common origin and deeply felt processes of attachment and identification, and so distinguishes “natives” from “others.” But during the past decades, the concept of indigeneity has expanded in its meaning to define “an international category taken to refer to peoples who have great moral claims on nation-states and on international society, often because of inhumane, unequal, and exclusionary treatment.” Today, indigenous people generally want to preserve their distinctiveness, and this has often led to the association of indigenousness with cultural authenticity, with spiritual ties to the land, and, in some cases, like Brazil, where it is called “indigenismo,” with a powerful set of images about national identity (Ramos, 2012). But as Bellier (2014) stresses, indigenous peoples are not necessarily essentialized ethnic groups, but they are groups of persons that by and large correspond to one or several criteria of ILO’s working definition: historical continuity; experience of colonization; social and cultural divergence from the majority population; and economic and social marginality, meaning a lack of adequate control over the economic and political institutions deciding on their living conditions. To the state, however, indigenous identities are potent symbols of history and place that may resonate internationally when these groups attempt to get their rights acknowledged.

While the word “indigenous” has become part of the legal discourse since the indigenous peoples’ rights promoted by the United Nations are now covered by international law, there is a discrepancy between the notion of indigenous as it appears in the international discourse and the many local ideas about indigenousness encountered in different cultural contexts (Kingsbury, 1995).

In my current work on indigenous peoples in India—who use the term “Adivasi” ³ for themselves—I am trying to articulate their answers to exploitation and deprivation, as a species of indigenous knowledge, taking the Adivasi sense of history into account, as well as their efforts to organize their survival and their representation. Here, I shall reflect on the implications of indigenous knowledge for politics, in situations where indigenous perspectives confront non-indigenous views on development.

In India, the principle of redistributive justice emerged between 1946 and 1950, when all citizens were declared equal in the constitution, which confers fundamental rights to all citizens irrespective of caste, class, language, and creed. To achieve equality, special reservation quotas were introduced for members of “scheduled tribes.” During the past decades, the term “tribe” has been deconstructed through scholarly writings and replaced by the term “Adivasi.” ⁴ The word “Adivasi” is derived from Hindi ādi (beginning) and vāsī (resident)—an equivalent of the word “aboriginal” in that it literally means “(descendants of the) original inhabitants” of a given place (Karlsson & Subba, 2006; Xaxa, 1999, p. 3590). Adivasis in India are given special rights, and special provisions are made for tribal peoples. These provisions include statutory recognition for tribal peoples’ proportional representation in parliament and state legislatures, restrictions on the rights of nontribal citizens to settle in tribal areas or acquire property there, and further enjoining the public authorities to ensure the protection of tribal languages, dialects, religion, and culture in order to promote the economic and educational interests of these weaker sections of society. These principles were applied to the groups listed as Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, with the prime objective of promoting their social mobility through education. Despite these juridical safeguards, the Adivasis are still facing the oppression of the dominant groups (Carrin, 2021a; Xaxa, 1999).

To anthropologists, indigeneity is ontological. Several authors have discussed whether one can become indigenous or lose one’s indigeneity. Wolf (2014) tells us of a Kota doctor in the Nilgiris who at one moment in his life declared, “I become an Adivasi”—in other words, a “tribal.” This statement means that this Kota doctor is allowing his always-present Adivasi self to re-emerge and gain primacy over a more modern assumed identity. Indigeneity is an experience and may be expressed in different cultural ways.

The Rediscovery of Indigenous Knowledge

In the 1950s and 1960s, theorists of development saw indigenous and traditional knowledge as inefficient, inferior to Western knowledge and as an obstacle to development and planning (Agrawal, 1995, p. 413). But even Marxist advocates of indigenous knowledge admit that indigenous knowledge does not always live up to its expected potential for agricultural production and sustainable development (Warren, 1991). Indigenous knowledge is often accepted as an additional tool in development projects, a situation that deprives indigenous people of their agency. Agrawal also underlines that development professionals and scholars discuss the merits of indigenous knowledge, which has permitted its holders to exist in sustainable equilibrium with nature. Thus, indigenous knowledge is seen as pivotal in discussions of sustainable resource use (Anderson & Grove, 1987). The new agency of the underprivileged tending to promote sustainable development fits in with emergent themes in development studies (Scott, 1985).

The rediscovery of indigenous knowledge and its political renaissance has its roots in the “sixties counter-culture,” where indigenous people figure centrally because of their cultural otherness. Some scholars attribute a particular ecological wisdom to indigenous people (Gadgil & Guha, 1995), a view that has been criticized as an environmentalist myth. On the other hand, scholars who give privilege to science over local knowledge have often used indigenous knowledge as “a quick fix,” write Ellen and Harris (2000, p. 15), who remind us of the importance of studying indigenous knowledge as an encompassing cultural matrix. Ellen (2006, p. 54) remarks:

While for some ethnobiologists, the Linnean scheme provides no more than a grid on which to map folk categories, … for others that grid is the crucial part of the argument either for demonstrating the degree to which folk classifications may match or deviate from their scientific counterparts in terms of categories boundaries or representations of diversity, or by demonstrating the cultural significance of biological information.

Yet, science defines the universal referent of indigenous nomenclatures since any folk term expressed in any language tends to be translated in Latin.

The present interest in indigenous knowledge among scholars and developmentalists ⁵ is long overdue, as a shift from the preoccupation with the centralized and technically oriented solutions that were dominant in the past. The role of ethnography has been crucial in forging this interest, with a number of ethnographies since the 1980s documenting active resistance to capitalism and modernity (Taussig, 1991). For long, indigenous knowledge was seen as the knowledge of the poor and the marginalized, but we now recognize that derogatory characterizations of such knowledge are hasty and naïve.

What Makes Knowledge Indigenous? The User?

Is indigenous knowledge to be characterized by the inability of the practitioner to systematize and abstract the principles guiding his or her behavior? For Agrawal, this is one of the main questions concerning the separation of traditional or indigenous knowledge from knowledge that is rational or scientific. He stresses that the positive evaluations of indigenous knowledge echo the earlier attempts of anthropologists to study the savage mind from a Lévi-Straussian perspective. But even so, development professionals and scholars now discuss the merits of indigenous knowledge seriously: it forms the capstone of several convergent trends in the social sciences, including ecology, soil science, forestry, veterinary medicine, ethnozoology, and ethnobotany.

Work on indigenous knowledge often lacks theoretical coherence, mainly because it has been scientized and rewrapped in ways that are distinct from existing anthropological theories. Indigenous knowledge is largely classificatory, usually lexically grounded, and the organization of categories imputed to be “indigenous” is not always recognizable to local peoples themselves, precisely because of their abstract representation in taxonomies. One problem for anthropologists and development specialists alike is the tendency to assume that all knowledge worth having can be encoded verbally and articulated by local people. ⁶

Since the 1980s, with the failure of the grand theories of development, the focus in social science has shifted to favor middle-range theories that are specific to site and time. There are two strands of writing about indigenous knowledge, and they have remained largely independent of each other: one purely academic and the other founded on a focus on development.

In the past decades, engagement with development has implied not only considering technical matters but also confronting political issues and considering alternative views of human development (Silitoe, 2006). Some practitioners of development now argue that development from below should be seen as a participatory experience. ⁷ At the same time, the agency of the subaltern actors, directed against the manipulative strategies of the elites, has come to occupy a significant place (Scott, 1985). It is realized that indigenous people want to be part of decisions concerning their future.

Indigenous Knowledge Versus Science

Geertz (1983) contrasted experimental science in search of laws with interpretive knowledge in search of meaning. Similarly, for Ellen (2006), folk taxonomies exemplify the opposition of indigenous knowledge to science. Ethnobiology, having as one of its missions the translation of the cultural other’s biological knowledge, has also served to compare the categories of international science and folk knowledge (Ellen, 2006).

The difference between indigenous and Western knowledge is often thought to lie in their objects. But indigenous knowledge should be understood as ways of solving a problem rather than inherent in the goal itself.

In the 1960s and 1970s, under the influence of the Marxist left, historians of science insisted that we treat science as intellectual history embedded in cultural perspectives. Much later, in the same vein, Latour and Woolgar (1979) saw science, like other forms of knowledge, as a cultural practice. Later, Marcus (1995) presented scientists in conversations, autobiographies, and open interviews, showing science to be a situated practice. Though these works narrow the epistemological gap between our concepts of science and practical knowledge, science and indigenous knowledge are not yet on an equal footing.

Defining Indigenous Knowledge

What makes knowledge indigenous? Indigenous knowledge is a mode of place-based consciousness, endowing the world with meaning. Indigenous knowledge is made of place-based consciousness of the universe as a well-ordered whole (Trigger and Williams).

I shall define indigenous knowledge as a class of experiences related to activities, or to the acquisition of certain skills, which are simultaneously markers of a particular identity as a base for being in the world.

Agrawal (1995) stressed that recent evaluations of indigenous knowledge echo Lévi-Strauss’s study of the savage mind, but we must realize that the French scholar’s conception of the bricoleur has been useful in aiding anthropologists to understand indigenous ontologies as ways to build meaningful worlds. The bricoleur is building or constructing something, and Lévi-Strauss (1966) effectively asserted the agency of “savage” or indigenous thinking.

Is it important to mark elements of knowledge as indigenous or Western? Rather, we should talk of multiple domains and types of knowledge with different logics and epistemologies. We must get away from the sterile dichotomy between Western and indigenous, to recognize how particular groups talk about what it takes to engage with their world (Ingold, 2000).

Banuri and Apfell-Marglin (1993, pp. 13–18) define indigenous knowledge according to five criteria: (a) It is embedded in its particular community; (b) it is contextually bound; (c) it does not believe in individualist values; it does not create a subject/object dichotomy; and (e) it requires a commitment to a local context, unlike Western knowledge, which values mobility and weakens local roots. The point concerning the subject/object dichotomy is crucial, since it makes us understand that indigenous knowledge is holistic and mobilizes different layers of consciousness, where knowledge may be validated by cosmic forces or deities. This is why transmission of indigenous knowledge is not a simple learning process. It may proceed by unveiling different levels of hidden truth, as when the Baktaman initiates must endure pain to access the secret knowledge of the elders (Barth, 1975). Richards (1975, p. 62) analyzes indigenous knowledge among Hausa farmers as performance, suggesting that the range of skills and strategies employed by people extends beyond simple applied knowledge. It is performance knowledge, representing difficulties for the recording of these practices elsewhere or even in the same location the next year.

Knowing mobilizes different layers of consciousness, as shown by Morphy (1991) when he deconstructs the processes through which Australian Aboriginal art (bark paintings, body decoration, dances, and songs) expresses “multivalent” cultural meanings. Here, the transmission of knowledge implies decoding the imagery used to tell ancestral stories, describe totemic identity, define customary law, draw maps, delineate land ownership, mark the location of resources (describing their use), and above all, materialize or “manifest” the powerful ancestral forces of the land.

Thus, it is the recent efforts among anthropologists to redefine their understanding of culture that have led to a sharper conceptualization of knowledge and also carved out a niche for indigenous knowledge in social science. Both Haraway (1980), in her work on the skills and knowledge of primates, and Strathern (1992), who questions the naturalness of biological reproduction, redefine what is meant by science. These approaches exemplify a cultural hermeneutic of knowledge practices that foregrounds the constitutive role of metaphor, analogy, classification, narrative, and genealogy in the production of natural facts. Knowing is inseparable from desiring and imagining.

Knowledge, Power, and Identity Assertion

Agrawal (1995) refers to the “rhetoric” of indigenous knowledge, which often speaks of empowering marginalized groups. Is this just rhetoric? We will have to look at this more closely. Neo-indigenistas commit themselves to the conservation of indigenous knowledge by claiming that it is disappearing. To them, it possesses deontological significance rather than utilitarian value. They want to store indigenous knowledge while simultaneously viewing Western knowledge with suspicion because of its links to centralized institutions.

But indigenous knowledge is implicit as well as explicit. Explicit knowledge is formal and systematic in nature, expressed in symbols and words. Thus, it can be communicated with relative ease and converted into product specifications, scientific formulae, or computer programs. Tacit knowledge, on the other hand, is informal, represents personal knowledge, and involves individual beliefs, values, intuitions, and insights. It is hard to formalize and difficult to communicate.

For Berkes (1999), the advocate of “deep ecology,” “local knowledge … far exceeds scientific knowledge and is being increasingly recognized as valuable for improving scientific understanding, conservation programs, and management practices.” Thus, in ethnoecological studies with locals from the Brazilian Pantanal, it was found that indigenous knowledge can bridge gaps in scientific knowledge (Calheiros & de Oliveira, 2000).⁸ There is a growing literature on the links between indigenous language and ecological knowledge, as well as the importance of recording indigenous knowledge in the vernacular. Here, the idea that successful development strategies must incorporate indigenous knowledge is clear. But this approach does not exclude strategies that deny the agency of the indigenous, facilitating the appropriation of these practices and techniques by non-locals.

For non-European indigenous communities that occupy a minority position in postcolonial societies, their concern about control of the cultural knowledge that is their primary social and political capital is serious. As observe, “Some indigenous people still feel that …knowledge is being appropriated by being taken into another system of information management—one which places non-Indigenous people in positions of authority”. Indigenous writers have criticized the imposition of non-indigenous methods of social research and described the difficulty of achieving equal relationships in institutional terms.

Tradition is now understood as an invention designed to serve contemporary purposes. People invent their traditions to legitimate or sanctify current realities or aspirations (Handler & Linnekin, 1984). The purpose varies according to who does the inventing. Thus, Brigg shows that the Warao are seen as the quintessential representatives of the indigenous roots of Venezuela’s mixed population. “Warao culture” enacted as dance and music purports to display Venezuela’s multicultural roots (Brigg, 1996, p. 438). Brigg examines the practices deployed in creating and legitimating authority in discourses that “discover” Warao traditions as well as those that deconstruct them. To do so, he tries to assess the political and economic location of the metadiscursive practices used by indigenous actors. He suggests that those who appropriate extensive rights to decontextualize or recontextualize such highly politicized discourses negatively impact the authority of others who claim that they, too, have rights over these discourses.

Indigenous Knowledge as Ontology

The “ontological turn” and the concept of “animism” as defined by Viveiros de Castro (1998), Descola (2005), Ingold (2000), and others refer to new perspectives on the relationships between indigenous people and their environment. We may agree with Descola (2005) that animism implies a view of the reproduction cycle where humans and non-humans form a closed whole. The alternative suggested by the Amerindian myths, quoted by Viveiros de Castro, is that all beings see the world in the same way as persons do (Viveiros de Castro, 1998). What differs is the world they see; every species sees a nature different from the others. There are multiple realities, of which one is ordinarily visible. But if we take the perspectivist view seriously, we are led to believe that there are many possible worlds (Viveiros de Castro, 1998).

I use the term “ontology” to speak of indigenous theories concerning the natural world and humans in relation to non-humans. The Santals, like other indigenous people, speculate on their existential being in the world and on their fate after death. These speculations are not necessarily expressed in language, as if they were theories: they may be indicated through sacrifice, cult, or taboo. For example, Santal oral literature (riddles, similes, metaphors, and folktales) has its own devices, such as analogical reasoning, to sustain knowledge, which, of course, have been influenced by the ideology of writing (Carrin, 2015a).

Santal myths allow us to understand how these continuities are woven into narratives. These continuities have a subjective dimension, as the sense of belonging to a place is shared with non-humans. In the Santal worldview, plants and humans are identified as living entities in dialogue with each other. These continuities counter the ruptures observed at the level of taxonomies, which are no longer shared and only survive precariously as the toolbox of Santal healers (ojhas). For laymen, it is important to compensate for the loss of knowledge by keeping some sense of continuity and intimacy with non-humans. The semantic patterning that translates this intimacy into words is sustained by ritual practices, such as the annual hunt or pilgrimage to sacred sites. These confer a new meaning to the damaged landscape, evoking collective memories and, more importantly, people’s experiences of their own daily lives.

Indigenous Knowledge as Fabric

An important feature of indigeneity in most definitions is the permanent attachment of a group of people to a fixed area of land in a way that marks them as culturally distinct. But dispossession and displacement have been a constitutive part of Adivasi subject formation in India since colonial times. In my book Le Parler des Dieux, I show how the introduction of writing and the collection of Santal texts under the aegis of Scandinavian missionaries—who arrived in the region in 1867—allow us to hear Santal voices from the nineteenth century (Carrin and Tambs-Lyche, 2008). Discussing these texts, I argue that the Santal articulated their own politics of time as they became conscious of the cultural loss they had endured due to displacement and exploitation. I discuss the reactions of Santal villagers when I confronted them with the nineteenth-century texts (Carrin, 2015a).

This leads me to consider indigenous knowledge as a kind of fabric, its texture woven through history. It is part of the constitution of meaningful worlds and the practice of identity as a process. Self-definition does not occur in a vacuum, but in a world defined along with it, in a dialectical process. As such, it invariably fragments the larger identity space of which its subjects are a part.

The Santal Example

The displacement of the Santals during the colonial period produced a split in their clan system as they spread out to find employment in indigo factories or in building railways. They were recruited to clear the jungles of the Rajmahal Hills and other regions from around 1850. Displaced from their original homeland in Chota Nagpur (Hazaribagh), the Santals were exposed to the exactions of zamindars and moneylenders. The rebellion (Hul) of 1855 was above all an expression of economic and social revendication, and the Santals organized massive looting of Hindu and British property (Andersen et al., 2011). The rebellion remained as memories, which, as framed by the Hul, were transformed into material for resistance. This became important to voice identity, as the memories contained all that the Santals had endured. The indigenous knowledge that emerged revolves around two dimensions: a new historical consciousness and a shared identity related to language. For the Santals and other Mundari groups, the past is often experienced as a loss that must be retrieved from oblivion through ritual performance. Today, we are witnessing a major surge of cultural activity with a strong affirmation of Adivasi identity.

Beyond the imagery of the mythic loss, the Santals are conscious of having forgotten some part of their taxonomies as well as their ancestral skill of wood carving. In the evening, when old tales are told, senior people often deplore the loss, saying that they are unable to recite the end of the story.

Santal local knowledge can be structured in two parts. The first concerns Santal ontology, analyzing the role of spiritual beliefs and cultural representations in shaping the vision of local communities vis-à-vis natural resources and their conservation. Among the Santals, many beliefs of the villagers and their vision of the world find their basis in the forest and in the sacred grove of the village, which represents the forest in the village. Then, we see how the Santal ojha, a healer and exorcist, plays a crucial role as an herbalist who knows the forest. He conceptualizes indigenous knowledge as a “knowledge-practice-belief complex” that he has interiorized and enriched as a habitus.⁹

In the Santal Creation Myth, we see how the Santal ancestors merged into the landscape and “engaged” in the world (Ingold, 2000) as hunters and gatherers. But they also arrived at a form of sociality as the ancestors debated the “custom” (colon).

The natural species that figure in the system of clan names are recurrent in taxonomies, but it is the sub-clan myths that furnish their exegesis and evoke landscape features (Carrin, 2015a). Plants enter into a number of metaphors that concern the human body. Plant metaphors are also used to describe ceremonial friendship. The Santals hierarchize the vegetal species, which they consider as more or less close to the human body. The relation between plant and animal is often expressed as a relation of contiguity, as when the ancestors, stooping in the bush, hold an animal in their arms or pluck a creeper, so that humans merge with the animal or plant. The Santals associate anthropomorphic components with the classification of the flora. Trees are supposed to have properties similar to those of human beings, such as life and soul. Human beings are placed in parallel with the natural series, through analogical relations, which appear to be fundamental for the formation of categories. For example, the opposition of flesh (ba) and bone (jan) organizes the gender opposition. This also entails the opposition of the stone (diri), which is hard and permanent, and the flower (baha), which is soft and ephemeral. Like humans, plants have bones (bark) and flesh (skin).

Metamorphoses have ritual significance, as when an ojha’s disciples change into birds to gain knowledge: birds stand as models of intelligence and intuition. But the hunters deplore that they have forgotten some of the spells they used to address birds in the forest, and they suspect that, for this reason, birds fail to send them omens these days.

The Sharing of Knowledge

Indigenous knowledge is shared, but all do not have equal access to it. While men are supposed to know the oratory art (kulhi durup), which helps villagers to reach a consensus before making decisions, women are traditionally excluded from knowledge. In myth, women listened to Maran Buru—the chief of the spirits and creator of the world—who was teaching the art of healing to men. The women were there secretly, but the knowledge they stole became witchcraft. Today, Santal children usually oppose school knowledge (sarkar vidya), which is only true in the classroom to ancestors’ knowledge (ato vidya), “which catches us at time of death” (Carrin, 2021b).

Explicit indigenous knowledge has certainly been reinvented. This reinvented knowledge, I argue, represents the Adivasi answer to dispossession. In the 1970s, the gurus of the reinvented religion, Sarna Dhorom, staged village theater performances—accessible to the illiterate—while promoting the new Ol’ Chiki script, the Santali language, and the development of literature. These gurus, as well as the Santal writers, were driving forces behind the social struggle that took place in the context of the Jharkhand movement, which led to the creation of the Jharkhand state in 2000 (Carrin, 2015a).

The Sense of Place

In The Perception of the Environment, Ingold (2000) argues that life is the skillful weaving together of materials: a process arising without a specific plan in the course of emergent involvement within the lifeworld. In the Santal lifeworld, as among other indigenous peoples, the sense of place is crucial.

The Santal use the word “Sarna,” the sacred grove, for their reinvented religion. The grove is a piece of virgin forest left untouched when the village was founded. Village rituals represent the cosmic order, as well as the agricultural cycle and its associated taboos. Men communicate with the bonga spirits through possession, and malevolent deities, as well as ghosts, must be driven away by the diviner during exorcism. While the bonga of the sacred grove are worshipped during the main agricultural rituals, the spirits of the forest (bir bonga) cause misfortune and illness.

In his more recent work, Ingold (2011, p. 12), while further developing the fusion between ecology and phenomenology, distances himself from the “localism” connoted by dwelling, which he replaces with habitation, which better takes into account wayfaring as “the fundamental mode by which living beings inhabit the earth.”

For the Santal and other Adivasis who have experienced much displacement during the colonial period, the sense of place is part of the reinvented religion. Making a place meaningful is part of performing indigeneity. I will refer to two examples: a pilgrimage and the reinvention of hunting.

The pilgrimage to Logo Buru, one of the places of the ancestors’ migrations, exemplifies the re-sacralization of a mythic place. Organized annually by Santal intellectuals, it attracts thousands of Santals from the neighboring states. The pilgrimage works to revive the sense of belonging to a sacred landscape, untouched by development, which is important for those who work in mines. The pilgrims must contemplate the Harata cave, where their ancestors used to stay. They peep through a hole to contemplate Cae Champa, the old Santal kingdom. Some say the image is rather like a dark hole, since the past cannot be seen (Carrin, 2015b). Still, the pilgrimage works to revive the sense of a “pristine place” and to experience a sense of loss.

Men’s sense of place is also expressed during hunting rituals, which unite several villages. During the night, the men sing songs that exult in forbidden relationships. Hunting displays the complementarity of masculine and feminine while stressing the taming of wild passions. Though the hunt is banned, the Santals still perform these symbolic episodes, to claim hunting as a cultural right. The main thing is not to kill game but to tell old stories and to discuss recent events, often connected with environmental issues or mine accidents.

Competing Threads of Knowledge

Some anthropologists assume that knowledge is better controlled by the elders in small-scale societies (Barth, 2002). But if knowledge can be controlled in small societies, what happens in a society of 10 million? When discussing the disappearance of knowledge, Santal villagers usually underline that the religious movements have contributed greatly to the regeneration of indigenous knowledge. Prophets, gurus, and writers—such as Raghunath Murmu, the inventor of the Ol’ Chiki script in the late 1930s—periodically recreate ways of sharing knowledge, giving more agency to the youth.

In large-scale societies, then, multiple threads of knowledge coexist, pertaining to different sub-systems, as Hanson (1989) has shown for the Maori. Here, the movement known as Maoritanga (Maoriness) or Mana Maori (Maori Power) is one of the most important cultural developments in contemporary New Zealand. The earlier national vision was to create one culture, European in form, into which Maoris would be successfully assimilated. To promote this goal, it was necessary to identify similarities between Maoris and Europeans. Thus, the Maori tradition that Maoritanga invents is one that contrasts with Pakeha, or “white” culture, which is out of step with nature, pollutes the environment, and lacks a close tie with the land.

Examples such as this illustrate some of the different ways indigenous peoples see the world we live in. We should not homogenize these differences in opposition to dominant understandings of the world, for it is precisely the embeddedness in particularities that characterizes indigenous knowledge. Discussing recent politics in Andean societies, De La Cadena (2010) notes how indigenous ideas and practices have become influential in the public domain, with references to Andean rituals in official events. Debates about mining projects have been influenced by indigenous understandings of Andean Mountain peaks as persons and the need to treat them with respect. These interactions redefine the political notions, since the mountains are recognized here as political actors, and decisions about new mining projects must take their well-being into account. De la Cadena refers to these new forms of politics as cosmopolitics.

In India, the Dongria Kondh of Odisha succeeded in having their sacred mountain acknowledged as such by the Supreme Court, where they opposed the Vedanta Aluminium Company’s interests (Borde & Bluemling, 2021). In New Guinea, the Yonggom were affected by pollution from the Ok Tedi copper and gold mine and compared the mining company’s behavior to the way sorcerers ignore social relations when they harm others (Kirsch, 2006). The Yonggom protest, voiced as an indigenous political movement, led to international litigation and eventually resulted in the transfer of $1.4bn from the mining company to Papua New Guineans (Kirsch, 2014).

Is Indigenous Knowledge Sustainable?

Indigenous knowledge defines a worldview of people and provides a direction for their survival socially, economically, politically, and spiritually. It explains the evolution of cultural behaviors that resulted from the efforts of people to adjust to their environment. Indigenous knowledge is holistic and cannot be compartmentalized as it is rooted in the culture and the language of the people. It is integrative, in the sense that any element can be understood only in conjunction with its particular use and setting, while these elements are situated within a broader cultural tradition. It is shared to a much greater degree than other forms of knowledge, including global science. Although it may be focused on some individuals and may achieve a degree of coherence in rituals and other symbolic constructs, its distribution is often fragmentary, and it does not exist in totality in any individual, but in the interactions in which people engage. Indigenous knowledge, I feel, should be monitored by the locals as subjects of their own history and life projects and should be used to defend their own interests.

There are two basic reasons that explain why indigenous knowledge is important. First and foremost, indigenous knowledge contributes to local empowerment and increases the self-sufficiency and self-determination of the population. One common misuse of indigenous knowledge is to take for granted that indigenous people can provide only input—however valuable—about the local environment to “those who really know” —scientists or development agencies. To be successful, indigenous knowledge needs instead to be embedded in family and community ties, which can help decision-making. Investing in disseminating indigenous knowledge can help to reduce poverty, and finally, sharing indigenous knowledge within and across communities can strengthen cultural understanding. The recognition that they possess knowledge is a major factor in making indigenous cultures sustainable.

But what do we mean when we say that a culture is sustainable? We must distinguish sustainability from preservation. A culture is a living entity subject to development and change. Folklore shows or museum exhibits may preserve aspects of culture but do not in themselves sustain it. The crucial point here is agency, and to express this active dimension, knowledge is a term more apt than culture, as I have argued above. The term “culture” becomes not just too static but also too monolithic when we want to cover the activities of what may be millions of people living in different places and under very different conditions.

I would go further, suggesting that not only there are not only differences within societies but also individuals themselves possess multiple worlds that may be complementary or even contradictory. People may have ideas about appropriate relationships defining the custom, or they may relate differently to objects: some may have knowledge about the uses of trees, calculating their potential market value, but they may equally concentrate on the symbolic value of the same trees in myth.

The question of sustainability of indigenous knowledge, then, is also related to the way knowledge is embedded in the individual. Such knowledge is linked to the way social actors become conscious of what they still know, and this implies that only the explicit part of indigenous knowledge can be reinvigorated, while its implicit part may well remain muted. This raises the following question: to what extent can indigenous knowledge be reinvigorated by the members of a culture when they do not share the same view? The answer must lie in communication: as we know, a discourse may construct an object that does not correspond directly to the view of any of the participants.

But discourses, as Bourdieu and the subalternists have taught us, can be controlled or directed. This brings us to the question of power. Indigenous knowledge can become a useful political tool when effectively deployed in discourse, but, as Shah (2007) warns us, appropriation of the discourse can maintain a class system that marginalizes those who are unable to take initiatives. Probably since they started to reinvent their culture long ago, the Santals have been able to improve the sharing of such aspects of indigenous knowledge as local taxonomies and recognition of medicinal plants, as healers in some villages have organized medicinal plant banks for everybody. Since the 1960s, the Ol’ Chiki script movement has allowed new generations of Santal writers to emerge, boosting literacy and consciousness of Santali language.

Today, Santal authors use different scripts and address different audiences. But it is probably the Santal jatra (theater) that, more than anything else, succeeds in negotiating the space between traditional culture and modernity. Theater allows illiterate villagers, who still remember the custom, to discuss recent events with intellectuals or youth in relation to the plot. Another important negotiation between indigenous knowledge and the wider world lies in efforts to indigenize the curriculum in Adivasi schools, criticizing textbooks written from the viewpoint of urban middle-class families and proposing to replace them by texts based in village reality.

By such means, indigenous knowledge becomes a mode of discovery that allows for shifting perspectives, since traditionally minded actors can confront their vision of society with that of youth, of writers and intellectuals, and of people engaged in different projects such as Santal films, literature, or community museums. These interactions help us to see indigenous knowledge in a new light, but they also provide alternative perspectives on many political and economic institutions that affect indigenous peoples, including legal systems and the state.

Can such exchanges provide a fresh vantage point on globalization? Can they help people—not only indigenous communities—to imagine new solutions to environmental problems?

Indigenous knowledge is changing, being constantly produced and reproduced, discovered as well as lost, though it is often represented as static. Though it is shared, specialists may exist by virtue of ritual or political authority. Still, indigenous knowledge pervades indigenous societies as an implicit relationship where human ecology and aesthetics define a way of life and a natural philosophy. Indigenous knowledge is defined as a bundle of orientations and emotions influenced by the rhythm of the seasons and the memories of places—a life-world where past and present together inform the future, even if it does not exclude “some thinking.”

Experiencing the loss is a way to revive the image of the ancestors, who wandered from place to place in a landscape not yet destroyed by mining or forest exploitation. Indigenous knowledge, in the Santal case, is inspired by the wandering of the ancestors in the mythic forests in search of a spring or a plant. The movement of hunters in the forest is a way to perceive and know the world. In Ways of Walking, Ingold and Vergunst (2008) show how walking becomes an act of education, a practice of enskilment, a way of knowing, a process of storytelling, and a ritual of communion or interagentivity between the human and the more-than-human world.

To be sustainable, indigenous knowledge must be alive, that is, encoded in a didactic process where it is constantly employed in new situations. Thus, when Santal youth, with the help of elders, select an incident happening in the village (like a mining accident) to construct the scenario of a drama, they transform and regenerate the sociocultural context of a traumatic event to make it a pedagogic process, introducing the audience to a body of knowledge that incorporates various aspects of Adivasi life. But this process also implies questioning the event through the lens of justice or even calling the tribal deities to validate the heroic status of the characters in the play. In fact, the tribal deities are often the silent witnesses of the changing knowledge, as if lending legitimacy to new contents. Indigenous knowledge has become fragmented but is continuously regenerated, as when young Santal boys put their ear to the ground before a sports competition and call the bongas, the tribal deities. “Are you still there? Are you still with us?”