Session 156: Traditional/Indigenous Knowledge Systems in Asia: Perspectives and Practices

Organizer and Discussant: Jason X. Yu, University of Windsor, Canada

Chair: Naran Bilik, Carleton College

This panel focuses on traditional/indigenous knowledge and its transformations in Asia. It aims to contribute Asianists’ perspectives to the current social science inquiries concerning indigenous knowledge systems, in which the conceptual framework centers on the articulation of cognitive universals and cultural particulars. The papers in the panel critically examine the traditional/indigenous knowledge in Asia (primarily China and Southeast Asia at this time), by positioning it in the broad spectrum of social science issues such as distributed cognition, locality versus globalization, cultural politics, and discourses of international sustainable development. The discussions are founded on a long-term tradition of social science concerns with human knowledge systems, including cognitive anthropology and psychology’s conceptualizations of local/folk knowledge, Mannheimian and Mertonian sociology of knowledge, and political scientists’ conceptions of knowledge and power.

One paper in the panel, by a sociologist and ecologist (T. Yang), presents a comparative study of indigenous ecological knowledge systems and the cultural politics of their use in Western China. Another paper, by an American anthropologist and cognitive scientist (F. Lehman), reports his ethnographic findings on differentially distributed knowledge systems embedded in the social-economic system of inter-ethnic gem trade on the China-Burma border. Through an analysis of the recent portrayal of Chinese martial arts as an instance of traditional Chinese wisdom, a paper by a social anthropologist (A. Wang) dramatizes the transformation of the Chinese martial arts from a weapon of resistance to transnational cultural capital. The last paper in the panel, by a linguist (N. Bilik), provides us with ethnolinguistic evidence to illuminate that languages as practiced, structuring systems for organizing and representing indigenous knowledge in local contexts, are living means of everyday cognitive processes and important source of cultural capital and collective dignity in response to a globalization challenge.

Indigenous Ecological Knowledge and the Cultural Politics of Its Use in Western China

Tingshuo Yang, Jishou University, China

Based on my fieldwork of many years and a variety of historical records, this paper shall present a comparative study of indigenous ecological knowledge systems and the cultural politics of their use in Western China, particularly among local Han Chinese and ethnic groups including the Hmong (Miao), Kam (Dong), and Tibetan. The Tibetan case from Gansu, Northwest China, unfolds the "hidden" indigenous ecological ontologies concerning grasses for husbandry, and illustrates how local knowledge has been perceived and used in relation to power relations and cultural politics over time. The ethno-forestry knowledge and techniques as distributed in Kam and Hmong communities in Guizhou, Southwest China, as well as the local resistance to "scientific" ways of state official forestry, reveal a deeply buried ethnohistory in which three questions can be answered: (1) how the indigenous ecological knowledge system has been preserved in local social-economic practices and languages; (2) how it has been suppressed in asymmetrical cross-cultural interactions; and (3) how it has been recently re-discovered and transformed for the agenda of international sustainable development.

Drawing on recent interdisciplinary inquiry into indigenous knowledge as orchestrated by anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, and human ecologists, the paper examines the traditional/indigenous knowledge systems in the spectrum of broad social science issues such as distributed cognition, locality versus globalization, cultural politics, as well as discourses of international sustainable development. Thus, the core conceptual framework in the paper concerns the articulation of the cognitive universals and cultural particulars, the local and the global, and the ethnoscience and the formal science.

Differentially Distributed Knowledge Systems in the System of the Interethnic Gem Trade on the China-Burma Border

F. K. Lehman, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

I shall be reporting on the preliminary results of a ten-months’ fieldwork in 2003 on the China-Burma border concerning the organization and functioning of the cross-border trade, with emphasis upon the gem trade. This part of the work, mainly regarding jade, was a study of what has come to be called (since the work of E. Hutchins Cognition in the Wild, 1995, MIT Press) "Distributed Cognition," where the organizing knowledge of a social system is unevenly distributed amongst its participants.

In the present case, it turns out that the main ethnic participants, Chinese and Burmese, have, as I shall make clear, radically differing understandings about the stone, about what it is good for, about how it is evaluated or graded, and so on. Therefore, the question arises, what enables the network, nonetheless, to "settle down" (say, in a Connectionist sense) into a stable, functioning, interactive knowledge system.

This is not a trivial question in the context of the theory of distributed cognition, if only because hitherto studies, such as that of Hutchins, have dealt with systems in which there is a central, "governing" element that keeps the distributed knowledge coordinated. In the present case, however, there is no such central coordinator. What I shall show is that what keeps the system working is the existence of patron-client relations between and amongst the various ethnic groups (Burmese, Chinese, Dai [Shan], Kachin [Jingpo, etc.]) involving varying degrees of what can be termed "bicultural" membership.

From Weapon of Resistance to Transnational Cultural Capital: The Transformation of Chinese Martial Arts as an Instance of Indigenous Wisdom

Aihe Wang, University of Hong Kong

In 1900, local peasants, armed only with indigenous martial arts, fought China’s largest war thus far against the foreign powers. In 2002, Shaolin monks toured the world, presenting authentic Chinese martial arts as an instance of traditional Chinese wisdom at Western metropolises. The two events illustrate the theme of this paper: the cultural transformation of the indigenous Chinese martial arts.

The paper has three parts: (1) A century ago, rebellion movements used the indigenous martial arts as the weapon against the Western intrusions. While defeated by firearms, martial arts emerged as a marker of the authentic Chinese identity—symbolizing the ancient and mystical China opposing the modern West; (2) The Maoist state suppressed martial arts as an internal threat. But it invoked one kind, Taiji, and popularized it as a national sport, thus a symbol of national identity; and (3) In post-Mao era, martial arts have become an important resource for the national and transnational imagination.

The rediscovery of the martial arts as an instance of Chinese indigenous knowledge has taken place both at home and globally. What used to be an indigenous weapon of resistance has now become transnational cultural capital, creating new networks, organizations, hierarchies, cultural markets, and consumption. Thus, the imagined alternative to the late capitalist condition revived ironically when it appropriated the latter’s logic and became a distinct form of accumulation while promising its opposition.

Local Knowledge, Ancestral Soul: Minority Languages as Indigenous Knowledge Systems in China

Naran Bilik, Carleton College

In China, since the inception of a new era of "marketization," minority languages and culture are blamed for reducing the speed of modernization in official discourses of the Chinese state. Some officials argue that minority languages are not fit for expressing modern ideas and only hamper minority education when used as a medium of instruction; therefore, Chinese should replace minority languages wherever it can. In light of the recent theoretical development in social linguistics and linguistic anthropology such as linguistic ideology, drawing on Peirce’s Thirdness, I argue that minority languages as practiced, structuring systems for organizing and representing indigenous knowledge in local contexts, are living means of everyday cognitive processes and important sources of cultural capital and collective dignity, which are vital to modernization, education, and sustainable development.

The ethnolinguistic cases in my presentation will illuminate that minority languages in China are repositories whereby minority peoples’ traditional knowledge of the life world are preserved and can be rediscovered and evoked for the course of development with sustainability and dignity. Speaking a minority language is a constituent of social practice that restructures a minority community in response to a globalization challenge.