Rural Development Knowledge: Indigenous, Necessary, Appropriate

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the varieties of knowledge that are actually or potentially useful in the process of rural and agricultural development in the Third World. Two broad categories are recognized: the first is official, either practical or academic, external, stored in documents, testable experimentally and purporting to universal generalization; the second is informal, largely practical, largely oral, indigenous to specific times and places. In the post-colonial period throughout the Third World indigenous knowledge has rather belatedly earned official acknowledgement and respect from the world community, but there are dangers and contradictions inherent in this new status: official recognition and conservation are often a sign both that something is in danger of extinction and that it is no longer intrinsically valued by the people on the ground; official recognition also can turn indigenous knowledge into academic knowledge with all that this implies. These issues logically lead to the author’s own concept of ’necessary knowledge’: what type of knowledge does the contemporary peasant deem worthy of possessing and why? Decisions about what type of education children and adults in Third World villages receive raise ethical as well as economic arguments.