"How We Know": Kwara'ae Rural Villagers Doing Indigenous Epistemology

Abstract

Around the world today indigenous ethnic groups are asserting the validity of their own ways of knowing and being, in resistance to the intensifying hegemony of mainstream epistemology from the metropolitan powers. This assertion is not happening only among third-world scholars familiar with the challenges to Anglo-European cosmology and epistemology fro m p o s t m o d e rnists over the past several decades. It is also happening among rural villagers with little or no schooling or awareness of the debates going on internationally in philosophy and the social sciences. More o v e r, the a s s e rtion is not only about ethnic identity and revitalizing culture. Vi l l a gers are also themselves exploring how they construct knowledge: instead of always being the subject of re s e a rch by outsiders, which they often see as exploitation, they are undertaking the re c o rding and writing of their own cultures based on their indigenous epistemologies. Indigenous epistemology refers to a cultural gro u p 's ways of theorizing knowledge, as we discuss later. The Kwara'ae Genealogy Project is just such an assertion by a group of rural villagers in West Kwara'ae, Malaita, Solomon Islands (map 1). Officially constituted in early 1994 by members of several small villages, the p roject has continued to grow and to involve multiple activities. We examine how project members are doing indigenous epistemology as the basis of their re s e a rch. Not only are they discussing, arguing, and re c o rding cult u re, but they are also critiquing and examining in a self-reflexive process their own indigenous strategies for creating knowledge. Indigenous projects like the one examined here offer us Native Pacific Islander scholars a direction for the next stage of decolonization-d e h e g em o n i z a t i o n. 1 To bring decolonization to the level of dehegemonization means that we Native Pacific Islander scholars need to find our own 55

Cultural Studies for Oceania

“…2 I have adopted the phrase "sea of knowledges" after hearing Edvard Hviding use it in answering a question from Epeli Hau'ofa at the conference, "Pacific 3 See, for example, the work of Gegeo , 1998Gegeo and Watson-Gegeo 2001), Vilsoni Hereniko (2000a), and Manulani Aluli Meyer (1998;2001). Issues of epistemology are further discussed later in this article.…”

“…The documentary film Man Without Pigs explores Waiko's efforts (Owen 1990). Some more recent examples of researchers working to keep research findings within their communities are the book-length histories of Känaka Maoli by Kame'eleihiwa (1992), Osorio (2002), and Noenoe K Silva (ip b); Gegeo's studies of contemporary Kwara'ae epistemologies 1998;with Watson-Gegeo 2001); Hereniko's monograph on clowning in Rotuma (1995); and Thaman's several articles on the place of Oceanic perspectives in Pacific Islander education (eg, 2000; 2003). Though many of these researchers do not reside full-time in what Hau'ofa called their "homelands" (2000,470), none base their expertise on being an "objective" outsider; none renounce the web of reciprocal obligations their homelands membership entails.…”

Making the case for a pluralistic approach to intellectual property regulation in developing countries

“…For example, according to Gegeo and Watson-Gegeo, amongst the Kwara'ae people of the Solomon Islands 'all knowledge is subjective knowledge … there can be no detachment of the knower from the known as in mainstream Anglo-European epistemology'. 97 Sanga similarly observes that in the Solomon Islands 'indigenous knowing is socially constructed and mainly exists in tacit form'. 98 Given these fundamental differences to knowledge generation and sharing, intellectual property policies should be based upon understandings of how new knowledge is generated and transferred in particular cultural contexts, and make use of the institutions that have traditionally supported such generation and transfer.…”

Navigating the Revival of Voyaging in the Marshall Islands: Predicaments of Preservation and Possibilities of Collaboration

“…Recent studies of indigenous epistemologies in Oceania have illuminated the ways in which cultures construct and theorize about knowledge (Gegeo and Watson-Gegeo 2001;Lauer and Aswani 2009;Meyer 2001;Nabobo-Baba 2006), and in doing so have emphasized a plurality of knowledges and equally valid ways of knowing. In particular, Matthew Lauer and Shankar Aswani have provided ethnographic evidence from the western Solomon Islands to show that fishers' ecological knowledge is less about intergenerationally transferred cognitive information-a prevalent conceptual predisposition in Western science-and more about knowledge embedded in daily practice (2009).…”