Rethinking Science: Ways of Knowing
This is my first essay on substack and I want to start a discussion about ways of knowing, more specifically, how people view science. As a former academic, I used to teach a graduate course at the New School in New York City about the role of culture in the management of the environment. In the Western world (for the sake of this essay, I am referring to European derived as Western), most people assume that we solve environmental problems with the implementation of science. I always started my course with a discussion of: what is science? One of the biggest beliefs that I want to debunk in this essay is that Western science is neutral. In fact, it has never been neutral or devoid of cultural values, and is not superior to other ways of knowing in other parts of the world. Although it is presented to us in the west as objective, final, absolute and without bias, I will illustrate the idea that Western science has always been a cultural process, not static, and is not superior to other ways of knowing.
Science is widely defined as “an organized system of knowledge”. So how have we as a human population decided the ways that we organize knowledge? In any system that we come up with, knowledge is organized by the human priorities and preference of the culture it is in. This organized system of knowledge can not be separated from society and there is nothing neutral about the parameters we choose to organize the knowledge. For example, Western science consists of many classification systems. But these systems have never been final, and in many instances have been the source of debate. I will illustrate this point with a few examples below.
The idea that science changes as culture changes is best exemplified by the science of botany, which is the scientific study of plants. The Dutch scientist Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) who is considered to be “the father of botany” believed that botany was too controversial for European women to study. Though Linnaeus was considered one of the greatest botanists in European history, he believed plants got traditionally “married” and claimed to have made scientific observations of plants having "husbands" and "wives." Linnaeus also projected human sexuality onto plants when he described them as having vaginas and penises. It is interesting to note that Linnaeus gave male organs more priority in his taxonomy scheme, rooted in his 18th-century European cultural and gender biases. In the 19th century, his science was questioned and eventually his beliefs came to be considered to be culturally outdated.
Despite the fact that many of his ideas have been discarded, scientists have still accepted and preserved many of his organizational schemes. Linnaeus published descriptions of over 7,000 types of plants in his lifetime. Despite his contribution to science, Linnaeus was once able to contribute to the lack of woman shaping the science of botany by using moral concerns about sexually explicit plants. Linnaeus shows us that science is culturally constructed because as culture evolves, science does too.
When Linnaeus built a way to organize and classify plants, he built a taxonomy which is a system of classification used in science. There is no one way to build a taxonomy. For example, if we wanted to build a taxonomy of different bottles of wine, we could organize the bottles into categories based on where in the world the wine grape is grown, or by what variety of grape that makes the wine, or by any other number of factors. Similarly, herbs can be organized into groups based on their leaf shape, the region of the world in which they grow, whether they are edible or non-edible, and/or what medicinal/pharmaceutical qualities they have. In a non Western culture where an herbalist uses a classification based on whether the herbs are medicinal, they will understand that the difference between a poisonous and a medicinal plant-- is the dosage.
Non Western cultures always have more extensive taxonomies when they are classifying knowledge that is important to them. For example, the Yucatec Maya are indigenous to Mexico and have lived on the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico for the last 3,000 years, and they pay a lot of attention to their soil health. They recognize and refer to more than 80 different criteria for soil characteristics, many more than Western science. Specifically, Leptosols are the most common soils in the northern Yucatán Peninsula and they are very accurately classified using Mayan taxonomies. Their extensive classification scheme is not nearly captured by European-based soil science. Because the Maya soil classification has been proven to result in successful management of their environments, the Mexican government agencies have adopted the Mayan soil classification systems as a diagnostic tool for soil management decisions.
The Yucatec Maya believe that the way they organize and manage their soil is the reason why their land is so fertile and has produced food for 3,000 years without exhausting their soil. Conversely, soils all over the world have been exhausted and degraded, resulting in lost productivity which results in local food shortages. The Maya way of knowing is a result of their collective awareness of their successes and failures in soil management.
When it comes to the power of science, European-based sciences are globally more dominant and prevalent than non-European ways of knowing and classification. We almost never hear about other ways of knowing, or we consider them “folk knowledge”. I believe, and many other people who have studied alternative ways of knowing, believe that non Western scientific classifications are equally valuable. The question is, how do we preserve alternatives to European ways of organizing knowledge that are being disregarded, discredited and in danger of disappearing? How do we make room for different priorities and values within science?
In response to the marginalization of indigenous ways of knowing all around the world, the United Nations (UN) developed a vocabulary to define alternative ways of knowing. The United Nations Education, Science and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has a Local and Indigenous Knowledge Systems program that defines ‘‘Indigenous Knowledge” as “local and indigenous knowledge, understandings, skills and philosophies developed by societies with long histories of interaction with their natural surroundings.” This UN recognition is a way to preserve and understand non-European classification systems. Today, there is a movement among Western scientific researchers to recognize indigenous knowledge as a basis of sustainable environmental management which prioritizes long term resilience, responsiveness and adaptation.
I believe there is room for the systems of knowledge developed by non Western practitioners that possess a vast knowledge of their ancestral environments that they co-evolved with—much of which is still not yet documented by Western science. When we deconstruct the belief that science is “neutral” and non-debatable, we can understand that there are many ways to organize knowledge, there are many ways of knowing.
SOURCES
Narcisco Barrera-Bassols and Víctor M. Toledo, “Ethnoecology of the Yucatec Maya: Symbolism, Knowledge and Management of Natural Resources,” Journal of Latin American Geography (2005): 9-41. www.jstor.org/stable/25765087
Fikret Berkes, Johan Colding Carl Folke, “Rediscovery of Traditional Ecological Knowledge as Adaptive Management” Ecological Applications 10, no. 5 (2000): 1251-1262. https://doi.org/10.1890/1051-0761(2000)010[1251:ROTEKA]2.0.CO;2.