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Traditional Wisdom and Modern Knowledge for the Earth’s Future pp 79–102Cite as

Plural Knowledges and Modernity: Social Difference and Geographical Explanations

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Part of the book series: International Perspectives in Geography ((IPG,volume 1))

Abstract

My paper critically examines the ways in which different forms of geographical knowledge production are positioned in relation to place, environment and Indigenous peoples. Drawing on research in the postcolonial context of Latin America, I explore how the social differentiated power relations and the politics of knowledge production play out in how geographers describe and analyse places, landscapes and livelihoods.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In the paper, the term racial-cultural difference signals the exclusionary categorisation between humans that rests upon a valorisation of socially-produced embodiments. Although ‘culture’ has come to stand for ‘race’ in certain settings, innate genetic difference remains a criteria of differentiation.

  2. 2.

    The Kunak Warmi starting point is arbitrary—one could start from an analysis of the film ‘Avatar’ (cf. Bebbington and Bebbington 2011; Briones 2011), but my collaborative work with Ecuadorian Indigenous women provides my example here.

  3. 3.

    The capital letter in Indigenous is widely used, denoting a status equivalent to Western, Italian etc.

  4. 4.

    The Indigenous geographies’ initiative appears to be most strongly associated with white settler societies—Canada, the United States, New Zealand and Australia—where first nations/aboriginals experienced forms of post-Enlightenment violence and colonisation. By contrast Latin America—also Algeria and Kenya—is considered to comprise deep settler colonies where “the coloniality of power endured with particular brutality” (Mignolo 2000: 99).

  5. 5.

    However the relative scarcity of Indigenous geographers in the discipline is also noted.

  6. 6.

    Spivak draws the notion of cathexis/cathect from Freud, who used it to diagnose the investment or injection of libidinal energy (Spivak 1985a). By ‘worlding’ Spivak refers to the process whereby dominant discourses come to distinguish one part of the world from others e.g. ‘Third World.’

  7. 7.

    “Whilst indigenous knowledge may indeed be represented as a valid and relevant alternative to western science, realistically it needs to be seen as something more nuanced, pragmatic and flexible, perhaps even provisional, highly negotiable and dynamic” (Briggs 2005: 111).

  8. 8.

    Jambi Huasi documents note the “Andean Medical School is a space in which the community midwives and the Yachaqs [literally ‘knowledgeable ones’ in Kichwa, translated as Shamans/healers] support communities with their knowledges. Additionally, research is undertaken about agricultural production and the conservation of the environment.”

  9. 9.

    Pace Mohanty (1998), I deliberately use this outdated label precisely to signal how project funding is embedded within colonial discourses of North/South difference which pinpoint female subjects as the most ‘Other’ and less powerful in global power dynamics.

  10. 10.

    The Jambi Huasi initiative has international funding and institutional support from—among others—the German development agency, the Dutch Embassy, the Ecuadorian export promotions team, the United Nations Development Program, and Japan.

  11. 11.

    I am highly conscious of the fact that in a regular length article it is impossible to address all facets of the question, so these comments are complementary and supplementary to the piece.

  12. 12.

    Established in 2008, the Socio Bosque Program garnered technical assistance from Conservation International, and represents one facet of Ecuador’s efforts to present itself in the vanguard of emissions-reducing measures, most famously in the Yasuní-ITT Plan in which petrol would remain unexploited in return for international payments. The Socio Bosque Program aims to protect over four million hectares of forest, reduce emissions, and improve wellbeing of around one million people in the poorest areas. At the latest count, 12.8 % of target forests had been protected, and 5.6 % of potential beneficiaries incorporated into the Program. There is a large, mostly technical and partially geographical, literature emerging on Socio Bosque that is beyond my scope here.

  13. 13.

    For reasons of space, I leave aside here questions about the process of gathering and comparing information on transnational Indigenous movements.

  14. 14.

    By coloniality, postcolonial critic Walter Mignolo building on Anibal Quijano’s work refers to the ways in which colonial power relations and forms of difference co-emerged with modernity, being the dark side of modernity and intrinsically shaping it (Mignolo 2000).

  15. 15.

    That is, the Socio Bosque program has to comply with a constitutional commitment to Sumak Kawsay.

  16. 16.

    Drawing on Actor Network Theory, Blaser suggests different narrations of modernity and their embodiments in practices “contribute to perform different forms of globality” (Blaser 2010: 9).

  17. 17.

    In their texts, Blaser (2010) and Castree (2004) coincide in interpreting Massey’s diagnosis of geographical imaginations as non-innocent, and her argument that certain geographical imaginations are constitutive of dominant understandings of modernity. They differ in that Castree (and Massey herself) script power-geometries as if they personally were outside them, whereas Blaser situates himself within practices of knowledge production (cf. Fall 2014).

  18. 18.

    Across the South, countermovements through colonial and postcolonial history attempted to separate out Indigenous/Tribal places from land sales and market mechanisms (see Li 2010 on African and Asian examples).

  19. 19.

    Following a similar argument, Briones points out that metropolitan alternativism’s self-critique “does not escape the dynamics by which indigenous systems of knowledge are reified by the very modern structures that marginalize them” (Briones 2011: 318).

  20. 20.

    This ‘greening of the Tribal slot’ during a period of neoliberal retrenchment is at times perceived as ‘contradictory’ (e.g. Greene 2006: 347), yet from my perspective it is not contradictory if we place the constitution of the Tribal slot and neoliberal measures within the broader frame of coloniality and its forms of knowledge production.

  21. 21.

    Consider for instance the 1992 Global Biodiversity Strategy, “Cultural diversity is closely linked to biodiversity. Humanity’s collective knowledge of biodiversity and its use and management rests in cultural diversity; conversely, conserving biodiversity often helps strengthen cultural integrity and values.”

  22. 22.

    Here the project might explore how Frantz Fanon imagined the path “toward a new humanism ....” (Fanon 1986 [1965]:9; Bhabha 1986: xx; cf. Boyle and Kobayashi 2011).

  23. 23.

    Specific “forms and uses of comparison that take a responsible ethic as their starting point, precisely by seeking to unsettle and destabilise the certitudes of knowledge and theory as it is produced through links across cultures of knowledge production and in the process seeks to develop new lines of inquiry” (Jazeel and McFarlane 2010: 118, 117).

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Acknowledgements

I particularly want to thank Delia Caguana for accompanying me intellectually through my work in the Andes. Claudia Briones, Noel Castree and Kay Anderson all kindly read an initial version of this paper; of course I remain fully responsible for the views and interpretations offered here.

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  1. Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, Downing Place, Cambridge, CB2 3EN, UK

    Sarah A. Radcliffe

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  1. Sarah A. Radcliffe
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Correspondence to Sarah A. Radcliffe .

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  1. Nagoya University, Nagoya, Japan

    Kohei Okamoto

  2. Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan

    Yoshitaka Ishikawa

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Radcliffe, S.A. (2014). Plural Knowledges and Modernity: Social Difference and Geographical Explanations. In: Okamoto, K., Ishikawa, Y. (eds) Traditional Wisdom and Modern Knowledge for the Earth’s Future. International Perspectives in Geography, vol 1. Springer, Tokyo. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-54406-7_5

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