Whether you see a duck or a rabbit, both perspectives are valid and true.
Dr Marama Muru-Lanning highlighted a unique approach to research that was designed for her way of knowing her world. Her research prioritised the respect for her environment as an ancestor, taonga and a source of mauri.
Oftentimes, worldviews such as the one that Dr Muru-Lanning holds is shunned under scientific knowledge and facts. This is possibly because traditional schooling has taught us science on the grounds of positivism. It assumes that science is objective, that science has all the answers, and that scientists do the research which will be transmitted to end users.
What this ignores is the legitimacy of values, experiences and contextual information that are not existing within the immediate parameters of academia. Knowledge can be defined as the collection of interconnected ‘schemes of interpretation’ (Leeuwis, 2004).
When we come to understand that certain ‘schemes or interpretation’ are common through the observations of different people, we establish this as ‘fact’. However, everybody has a different version of truth and this is usually defined by how we see ourselves fit into a narrative or situation. Further, certain realities are privileged, especially when the ‘value-free’ objective approach to science is seen as the ‘safest’ to believe in.
Dr Muru-Lanning’s scheme of interpretation is different to many as she had grown up differently to most people, for example, within an iwi that discouraged attendance in Pakeha universities. Her Maori world-view was reinforced by her whanau so her priorities are in accordance to the way she has been brought up.
Society isn’t just made up of researchers, it’s comprised of multiple actors and hence multiple subjective realities. Therefore, in the pursuit of knowledge we must consider multidisciplinary interactions to neutralise our disciplinary bias and value the qualitative data of non-expert ‘knowers’.
References
Leeuwis, C. (2004). Communication for Rural Innovation: Rethinking Agricultural Extension, 3rd Edition, Oxford, U.K: Blackwell Science
Hey Eda, I love your write up and I completely agree with you, about the existence of various kinds of knowledge. I think it’s very important for us as individuals, then broadly as communities, societies and institutions to be open-minded to all forms of knowledge so long as they have connection to truth. In particular, I am excited to see an ushering in of indigenous perspectives when it comes to managing environments. You’re right about theirs being value-based, and that’s critically missing from the dominant engineering types of approach, so often based on economic gain.
Anna