Introduction (Knowing Differently: The Cognitive Challenge of the Indigenous) (original) (raw)

2014, Kowing Differently: The Cognitive Challenge of the Indigenous Published by Routledge

knowing Differently argues for a need to look at the world through perspectives developed and sustained by indigenous communities across continents. It reveals how they construct the world through their understanding of space, time, joy, pain, life, and death. Presenting the specific contexts and locations of the cultural-epistemological clash between indigenous knowledge and the knowledge accepted as universal in the 'modern' world, the essays depict the predicament that indigenous traditions face today, disregarded more out of a lack of interest than any reasoned disapporval. The present volume is one of three in a series, planned on the platform of Chotro, for a ‘polyphonic’ ‘articulation and expression’ of the ‘existential disasters’, faced by marginalized communities the world over (Devy et al. 2012).If the disinherited, dispossessed, migrant communities narrate their struggles to visit, perform and preserve their identities in the first two volumes, in this third volume, they describe the way they know the world around them, to relate with it and protect it instead of exploiting it. They retain the pristine mode of knowing nature homologically, as subject and object at the same time, in consonance with its rhythmic cycles, its visible and intelligible precepts, and live according to them, instead of trying to alter them.