Community Knowledge Activism Series – Part 1: 

 

Community Knowledge traditions and practices are increasingly being valued for their cultural, ecological, spiritual, and health care significance, even as they face the onslaught of hegemonic knowledge systems backed by the power of global capital and state patronage. P.K. Sasidharan, who has extensively worked on community knowledge practices in Kerala and beyond, argues that there’s an urgent need to forge networks of individuals and groups working in this area to ensure the collective survival of these practices.

 

P.K. Sasidharan 

In India, Community Knowledge (C-K) traditions and practices are being undermined either by those who promote science and technology advanced by the developed industrialised countries, or by those who reduce the source of every knowledge to the Vedic traditions. These two hegemonic cultural/knowledge streams have already established their institutional and ideological structures to marginalise and devalue people’s own cultural and knowledge practices. They have also been functioning as instruments for social and economic suppression of productive social forces and the working-class population in every society.

The role that hegemonic knowledge structures play in society has not gained much attention from the side of wider social justice thinking.  Hence, theoretical and activist engagements with the question of knowledge require specific consideration in the processes of social wellbeing. Critical engagement with these sociocultural process that operates in relation to the hierarchy of knowledge and imposed structures of supremacy, may be termed the politics of knowledge.

In the Indian context of caste-based hierarchy, sociocultural discriminations have been very much mediated through knowledge monopolism. Therefore, the politics of knowledge, as a critical engagement with the monopolistic ideas of knowledge, assumes greater importance in the process of social justice from the perspective of knowledge communities.

The present-day world order has been very much defined by the conditions wherein knowledge is rendered as an instrument of exploitation and domination. The neoliberal globalized world order is presently centred around the knowledge-economy or knowledge society. This is the socio-cultural condition in which knowledge-politics has become imperative, and so every welfare concern or social justice imagination needs to be analyzed from the framework of C-K freedom.

The network for C-K activism has to be conceived at different levels. The primary level network has to consist of those actual C-K practitioners and their associations from different fields as its major participants. This may not be possible until the consciousness of knowledge politics assumes a crucial status in society. Therefore, one may encounter many hindrances and confusions in the efforts to forge a network of activism relating to C-K practices.

A major difficulty would be connected to the identification of proper areas and practitioners of C-K practices. There may not be many forms that can strictly be termed C-K in the original sense of the term. Each of these practices are likely to be existing against all odd conditions that pressurize them to modify themselves by formulating standards and principles commensurate with the requirements of the state and the market. Or its practitioners may be under pressure to adapt themselves to chanin norms and laws, as well as market forces even though such adaptation could lead to the elimination of the practice in the long run. Similarly, C-K communities may have lost their definitive nature.

The lack of definitive character of the C-K scenario might pose difficulty to the formation of a primary level network of C-K practitioners. Therefore, the kind of C-K activism that could be conceived or suggested now has to go with a limited purpose of generating a critical understanding of the supremacist knowledge regimes and thereupon the life worlds of C-K. Such a  secondary level initiative must be taken up by all those consisting of its sympathizers and beneficiaries in the larger society.

Now the major problem that remains ahead seems to be about the ways of identifying who are the sympathizers of C-K Where do we locate them, and how do we go about the networking process? There are already many organisations, which recognise the importance of C-K practices, and indulge in activities promoting products and livelihood means connected to it. They operate mainly as NGOs working with different areas of production and services that have a major thrust upon C-K heritage. But the question that remains unstated may be this: to what extent they do have a critical perspective to challenge the epistemological and ideological frameworks within which C-K practices have been kept in marginalised state? 

Similarly, there are many sociopolitical and community associations that work for the welfare of C-K practitioners without holding any critical stance to challenge the epistemological frameworks advanced by the institutionalised sciences and other academic disciplines. However, it is absolutely unfair to say that the scenario of critical thinking and engagements are totally absent or unavailable. Of course, it may be rare to see those who retain exclusive focus and action to engage critically with knowledge regimes of hierarchy, but there still are many people and organisations that raise the issues of knowledge politics indirectly, including those focused on areas other than C-K practices.

The above range of sympathisers seems to provide a better reason for seeking dialogical partners and network participants for knowledge activism, making C-K matters the common cause for coming together while retaining one’s own specific focus and area of interest. Keeping this purpose in mind, an attempt is made here to figure out some issues and perspectives that come up on the way to taking forward community knowledge activism in the contemporary globalized world.

C-K activism has its specific reference to the promotional or advocacy measures for the cause of people’s knowledge and cultural practices. However, it ought not want to create any form of paternalistic missionary structure, instead of allowing the real actors to be participants and self-representatives. 

Such networking could start by facilitating critical dialogues and engagements with the agencies that impose centralised knowledge structures and their market conditions. It has also been felt that ground level or internal situations are to get a primary consideration in the matters related to validity, credibility,  authority, and justification of C-K, instead of getting forfeited to external pressures and motivations of any kind. This approach emphasises the radical nature of autonomy and diversity of C-K forms that have emerged spontaneously from their collective evolutionary history. 

The conception of C-K signifies all those ideas and skills that are embedded in different modes of living and livelihood practices of the community of people in their natural and cultural territoriality. In contrast to institutionalized formal knowledge systems, it embodies collective ownership that has been shared by generations of people through the process of adapting and modifying according to the requirements of life and its survival. 

What is attempted here emerges from the long-term research and dissemination activities undertaken by me relating to the areas of traditional health care practices in Kerala, especially in areas such as Kalarividya, Marmavidya, and Siddhavaidya. It has been found that the issues encountered in health care related C-K are equally relevant for most other C-K forms in India and beyond. In other words, it is strongly felt that problems and solutions relating to health care may not be raised in an isolated manner. So it has become imperative for us to think about them in the wider context of C-K in general. 

Knowledge problems and perspectives that have been articulated here are those often being confronted during the work undertaken for the cause of C-K practices. They are rather presented as the structures of knowledge hierarchy that keep targeting C-K practices to undermine their inherent and demonstrated potential. We can trace different types of hegemonic structures of knowledge that affect the very survival and independent growth of people’s knowledge traditions and activities derived from these. 

The author teaches Philosophy at the Sree Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit, Kerala, and is the founder of Pillathangi Pothakam, a non-profit venture dedicated to preserving C-K practices He can be reached at pksasidharan4@gmail.com