A Note for Community knowledge networking (draft)
In this note my attempt is to figure out some issues and perspectives that come up on the way taking forward community knowledge activism in the contemporary globalised 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 does not want to create any form of paternalistic missionary structure, instead of allowing the real actors to be participants and self representatives. Keeping this in view, an initiative has already been taken to forge a network of persons and collectives working in different areas of C-K. The concieved networking is meant for 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 is to give stress upon the radical nature of autonomy and diversity of C-K forms that are due to their collective and evolutionary history. These factors need much attention in the engagements with them, especially when promotional or advocacy measures and theoretical interpretations are undertaken at the level of secondary or middleman agency.
The conception of C-K sinifies all those ideas and skills that are embedded in different modes of living and livelyhood practices of the community of people in their natural and cultural territoriality. In contrast to the institutionalized formal knowledge systems, it embodies a 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 of areas such as Kalarividya, Marmavidya, and Siddhavaidya. It is out of some strong convictions I had from the above work in the limited field of traditional health care practices of Kerala that now I have ventured for networking of C-K activisms in general. As it is found, the issues that encountered in the health care C-K are equally relevant for all other C-K forms in India and outside. In other words, it is strongly felt that problems and solutions relating to health caring may not be raised in an isolated manner. So it has become an imperative for me to think about them in the wider context of C-K in general. It is strictly out of such a practical concern that i am interested to interact with others with my limited capacity.
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 to undermine the inherent potentials of C-K practices. And there are found different types of hegemonic structures of knowledge as affecting the very survival and independent growth of people's own knowledge traditions and the concerned initiatives. Interestingly, most of C-K perspectives may give an impression that they want to provide some accommodative spaces and justification grounds for C-K practices, in spite of their technological imperfections compared to modern scientific achievements. However, the friendly accommodative frameworks too can be found sustaining impediments detrimental to C-K in the long run.
Following may be some of the important perspectival issues that hinder C-K practices:
Firstly, the supremacist approach that the modern science advocate. That it is the most relevant and progressive knowledge applicable everywhere in the world. From this view, what continues to remain as C-K has rather to be treated as historical vestige. Hence it may have some curiosity values as museum piece. Most of the heritage promotions based on tourism industry seems to be operating as corollary to this approach.
Secondly, there is the foundationalist view that the Vedic literature and traditions are the entire source of every form of knowledge and belief practices in Indian subcontinent. This homogenizing approach has its intertwinement with the Casteist hierarchy.
Thirdly, there is one apparently pro C-K perspective that springs from two different contexts. One tends to construe the C-K practices as nothing but nationalistic. They are seen as those regional adaptations and manifestations of essentially national. The national or patriotic science argument seems to view that the C-K practices as embodying a pan Indian science. Indeed it has a resistance angle against the Western colonialism of science that derogates C-K as unscientific and superstitious. The second pro C-K view treats it as folklorist and ethnic knowledge that are having great significance as complimentary arts.
Fourthly, there is the one, which appears to be libertarian perspective. Though this view tends to ascribe the status of alternate knowledge system to C-K practices, the implied idea of status of something else being core or mainstream still gets maintained here. Some alternativist claims are also being made for the mainstream status to C-K
Fifthly, each C-K form may be undermined from particular ethnic and religious culture and nationalism.
Sixthly, numerous scientizing projects are emerging to cull out the scientific elements and insights inherent within C-K, and thus it goes with its pretentious claims of value addition.
The above approaches may not be considered as exhaustive, and further, it is possible to figure out many more specific issues and perspectives in relation to every particular C-K practice respective of its sociocultural and territorial context.
As getting revealed from the above, the wider scenario of knowledge debate seems to have been filled with contradictions. That is to say that the divisions and oppositions such as orthodoxy and heterodoxy, regressive and progressive, tradition and modern do not get maintained consistently, and so their differences have become redundant or superfluous. Similar is the situation that exists in the perceived opposition between C-K and S-K (systemic, scientific, university or institutional knowledge). The shift in approach can be as the apparent overture to C-K from the side of S-K. Such an opening up towards C-K cannot be construed as taking place in isolation to knowledge forms alone. It has also been entangled with different cultural aspects. Thus the process of overture to C-K is very complex, and so it assumes to different cultural manifestations. Its multiple aspects are found happening as another process of the return of something that has been taken to be passé in the evolutionary history of human civilization. It is not a negligible fact that there is the wide presence of all those cultures that doomed to have become extinct due the onset of modern science. Of course, the significance of S-K needs to understood by
contextualizing it as being part of the return of what is perceived as dead or gone.
As enumerated above, there may be having a wide ranging interest with which C-K activism has been carried out. If such a common interest can be taken as a sign anything, there is much scope for critical debate and collective engagament towards the cause of C-K. That may be point for the initiative to facilitate a public/social debate on CK whereby to show how knowledge-matter should become the major parameter for social justice thinking and political engagement. There are numerous streams of thinking and sociocultural engagement that have been drawn to the conceptualisation of knowledge as the crucial instrument hegemony and oppression. Such engagements have a stated pathway to deviate from the glorified epistemological projects that tend to construe any intellectual exploration of knowledge or wisdom to be inherently liberating, either socially or spiritually. The process of facilitating network for CK seems binding to figure out all those streams against hegemonic epistemological projects that have been undertaken or emerged from different perspectives and contexts of engagement.
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