Last week I wrote an exam on the topic of the anthropology of environmental knowledge, broadly defined. This included sections on both traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) and scientific knowledge about the environment, and it also involved thinking about ways of reconciling them as they often conflict with one another. I have yet to see my grade for the exam, but I think it was a valuable paper and hopefully I’ll be able to use some of it in my dissertation work later this year.

When dealing with different kinds of knowledge, we often have to start with the question of “what is knowledge?” This is often taken to be an epistemological question, where knowledge is treated as a reflection of a deeper reality. From this perspective, the debate is largely about how accurate is the reflection that knowledge provides, to what degree knowledge reflects a true reality or whether it is merely a reflection of itself, or about the different ways we go about developing this reflection. However, for me, the question “what is knowledge?” is, first and foremost, an ontological question – that is, what is the nature of knowledge, how does it exist, and what effects does it have in the world? This becomes apparent from the ethnographic study of knowledge systems. Knowledge cannot be easily separated from that practices that contribute to its production. We see this in embodied theories of knowledge that have emerged from TEK research, and also from the ethnographies of science that show how scientific knowledge – supposedly objective – is, in fact, the product of situated, embodied, and social practices. Furthermore, these practices are not only about producing knowledge as a reflection of the world, they are also involved in the production of the world itself – the composition of new entities, and new relationships between existing entities. In other words, knowledge is entanglement with the world such that the world is co-produced through our own practices and those of other entities with whom we share it.

What does this view of knowledge mean for reconciliation between different kinds of knowledge? As I discussed somewhat in my previous post, if knowledge is understood to be an ontological entanglement with other beings in a world constituting practice, then the reconciliation of knowledge is not an epistemological process of trying to reconcile two forms of belief, and it is certainly not a process of trying to fit other belief systems to the scientific world view. Instead, it is an ontological process of composing a new world – a hybrid reality. The process requires not just a rearrangement of knowledge in order to make the different ways of knowing fit, it requires a rearrangement of the very relations that compose the different realities in which the knowledge is embedded. It’s not just a learning process, but a process of building associations. Viewing the process this way places different forms of knowledge – such as scientific and traditional – on equal ontological footing, whereas from a purely epistemological perspective, scientific knowledge tends to have an ontological advantage as a form of knowledge that has unique access to a singular and stable reality (or we deny realism altogether). From this equal ontological footing, different forms of knowledge and the worlds in which they are embedded are able to negotiate a new relationship that is, hopefully, well composed.