What is perceived as real, is real in Consequences
‘Knowing in part makes a fine tale; but wisdom comes from seeing the whole’
(reflection of a restless mind)
: aküm longchari
I recall with fond respect a conversation I had with a Navajo man from Window Rock; who with a great sense of pride stated, ‘ you know, we invited Columbus - who was lost - to stay with us for a night; and they have now lived with us for five hundred years ….’ This insightful construction of the meaning-making process is a reflection of the manifestation that though history and policies are written and created by the oppressors and victors; we often experience that stories, legends and truths are found in the minds and hearts of the people. The distortion of a peoples story, history, spirituality and identity is not only dehumanizing but has also become one of the most critical fundamental reference point in human history that has blatantly contributed to a systematic breakdown of human relationship and it continues to remain an obstacle in creating a just political, social and economic order.
Thus, for any social and political movement seeking proactive change towards justice, dignity and equality, it is imperative that in due process the people must seize and reclaim their past and construct its meaning from their own indigenous knowledge system. If the people do not seek to create their own version of their past, some other people - in most cases strangers - will do it from them. Such an act would result in the breaking down of the indigenous knowledge system and its cultural value system, which in due process would subsequently reduce the space and the capacity of the indigenous society to pass on their own stories to following generations. In any struggle for change it is imperative to realize that when any society loses its capacity to articulate and pass on its stories and visions it begins to lose sight and control of its own path of destiny because ‘no stories means no hope.’
Culture is probably the most undermined yet one of the most influential and dynamic concepts that affects and determines international relations and human association. In contemporary history the sensitivity to the multitude of cultures has been relatively more progressive but the emerging monoculture of mind through the ever-globalized westernization of human cultures has been intolerant towards accommodating the richness of the human cultures. It is therefore imperative to seek whether westernization is itself human if we are to confront the agenda that is promoting monocultural values? It is imperative not to equate culture with either tradition and custom; while the later two concepts tend to be static, culture in itself is a dynamic concept.
However, to understand the essence of culture in its whole representation, we need to transcend the dominant and academic understanding and definition of culture itself. ‘Culture’ comes from the Latin verb ‘cultus’ that means to cultivate or act upon the land, transforming it for production. ‘Cultus’ involves human action to transform the world, to make the world humane. It demonstrates a people’s collective wisdom, history, traditions, worldviews and its capabilities, empowerment and capacities in confronting with conflict and social change. According to Fanon, culture is thus the whole body of efforts made by a peoples in the sphere of thought to describe, justify and praise the action through which that people has created itself and keeps itself in existence.
Ali A. Mazrui an Albert Schweitzer Professor of Political Science in the State University of New York says that there are seven functions of culture - provides lenses of perception and cognition; provides motives for human behavior; provides criteria of evaluation; provides a basis of identity; a mode of communication; a basis of stratification and that it determines the system of production and consumption.
According to Vandana Shiva, it is culture that enables us to establish and understand what constitutes knowledge and who the knowers and producers of intellectual value are. Culture helps us to further evolve concepts of wealth and economic value and who the producers of wealth and economic value are. Culture constructs the meaning of the reality around us. It can also be said that culture is the most influencing factor that determines the ‘center’ of every being. According to E.F. Schumacher the center is constituted by our most basic convictions; by those ideas that really have the power to move us. The center is the place where one creates for oneself an orderly system of ideas about oneself and the world that can regulate the direction of the various strivings. We are all connected with a center. It is culture that helps us to construct and deconstruct the meaning-making process and is at the core of a peoples capacity for peacebuilding and reconciliation.
Culture has to be at the very heart of the peoples struggle for freedom and social change. If the peoples struggle is unable to adequately address and recognize cultural forces or if it bypasses the culture of a peoples in the struggle for change, its strategy for social change would prove to be counter-productive. We need to recognize that in strategy the longest way round may actually be the shortest way home!
Our understanding of peoples struggles and movements too are frozen in time and space largely due to our perceived inability to grasp the ‘story’ in whole, which has been a result of conditioning through the monoculture of dominant educational, political, cultural and social forces.
Therefore, it is imperative that self-realization and political consciousness of the individual for social change towards a more just and equal society is paramount for personal transformation. We must begin to address the fact that just being a ‘good person’ is not sufficient, because we are part of the collective and we must contribute and participate in the process of making a society based on justice, freedom, respect and dignity. Attaining political consciousness is a process of spiritual companionship that is realized through the liberation of the human spirit.
Creation of political and social consciousness through education is what helps sustain the vibrancy of the movement for social change. However, having said that, it would also be detrimental not to recognize that education is not a neutral means. Education can either promote the liberation of humankind or can be used as a means to suppress people and maintain the hegemonic status quo. Educational policies and models often contribute in conditioning the human mind to certain patterns of thinking and behavior. It is part of the dominant political system to ensure that dissent disappears, and education is often used as a tool to ensure just that. In this ever-changing world we have seen the emerging trend of a globalized dominant system of knowledge and education. Though promoted as universally applicable, it is merely a globalized version and product of a particular worldview that emerged from a dominant and colonizing culture. As a result of which, indigenous knowledge system has been denied the status of systematic knowledge and has been branded as unscientific and primitive thereby ensuring its collapse.
The conscious attempt by the dominant knowledge system to ensure the non-existence of indigenous knowledge system has resulted in the disappearance of alternatives by erasing and destroying the reality that they now attempt to represent. It is imperative to recognize that the dominant knowledge is unrelated to human needs and aspirations; rather it is more deeply wedded to economic production and profits by its very structure.
The political and social implications of the dominant system are inconsistent with equality and justice. It has a tendency to break away from concrete context. Thus, any movement that is socially and politically conscious must recognize the need to take steps towards democratizing the knowledge system, as it is perceived as a central precondition to human liberation.
Democratizing the knowledge system would imply the need to promote and empower indigenous knowledge system and to legitimize its existence. This indigenous knowledge system must be the source and the guide of the educational process initiated by the movement seeking change that enables the capacity of the people to see into the reasons of their action. It represents a paradigm that embraces and enhances life and nature. Empowerment of the collective struggle begins with indigenous knowledge system that represents their worldviews, values and aspirations.
Without this conscious recognition and implied paradigm shift of the knowledge system, no peoples movement can adequately confront the status quo, rather it may only go as far as reconstructing the status quo. Therefore, there is an imperative need of the collective struggle to ensure the promotion and existence of socially and politically conscious people whose understanding transcends the level of traditional national consciousness. Its task is to ensure the promotion of the transmission of ideas and values of what to do with our lives and one that would enhance an entire new system of thought that gives priority to peoples lives and aspirations.
I believe that the western paradigms have lived off its usefulness in contemporary politics and that it is time to turn our attention and focus towards indigenous paradigms, which have remained suppressed and dormant for a very long time. The recovery of the indigenous principles is a response to multiple domination and deprivation of nature and non-western cultures. It sustains its very existence on the principles of accommodation, diversity and sharing. It is thus an inclusive process that seeks to recover nature, woman and man in creative forms of being and perceiving. There is thus, a shift in the concept of activity from one of destruction to creation and the concept of power from domination to empowerment. Its nature of assuming the role of a sustainer and provider needs to be recovered for the survival of all life.
The indigenous knowledge system disagrees with the dominant perspective of universal prosperity as being the soundest foundation of peace and terms such understanding as misleading and suggests that this view of peace has completely bypassed the whole question of ethics. The indigenous principle is closely related to the system of nature that tends to be self-balancing, self-adjusting and self-cleansing and propounds the need to have a system of technology and a model of production that is humane in nature. It constructs the meaning of freedom, democracy, equality, dignity and self-determination in terms of peoples and not in terms of goods! It seeks to evolve a more democratic and dignified political and industrial system that is more human and one that seeks to make human wickedness disappear.
Social change is an integral and fundamental natural process of human progression. Without transformation human life would become stagnant. Right now if we were to look around the world we would find many situations that just cannot contain itself from change, but it is we - humans - who have failed to be socially and politically responsive to the need for social and political change because we have engulfed ourselves with despair and hopelessness in a very unjust intolerant system.
Our failure to recognize and respond to the natural call for transformation only indicates that we have lost our humanness and our capacity to make adjustments with change. In the process we have become immune to the cries for truth and justice and have fallen victim to the ‘dialogue of the deaf.’ The dialogue of the deaf has forced the circumstances on people to readily turn to violence as the only means of ensuring change. As a result of this blindness, the movement is unable to recognize that through its actions it would only succeeded in reconstructing the status quo and in enhancing the viscous cycle where the oppressed becomes the oppressor.
Therefore, we have a responsibility towards embracing a more holistic understanding of knowledge, culture, patterns of interaction and relationships in the struggle for social change. One of the greatest challenges for the collective struggle is to seek ways in which it can restore the transformative elements of relationship not only between peoples but also between people and the structures in which they co-exist. Unless this restoration takes place, movements for social changes will invariably continue to perpetuate the dominant understanding of relationship, which is violent in itself.
Theories of social change are contextual and contentual in nature. Strategies and design for social change must be made on the needs of the people. However, what we must recognize is that we cannot completely focus only on one knowledge system. The dominant knowledge system needs to realize that for the survival of all life, it needs to provide the space for other knowledge system to take its rightful place in human history. There is an immediate need to begin building a bridge between the western knowledge system and the indigenous knowledge system. We cannot live in isolation and therefore we must find way that would be able to accommodate and respect the richness of the human cultures.
…and he continued ‘but we have allowed them to remain calm.’
"we must become the change we envision" - mohandas k gandhi
back to the Wall
NagaTalk 2002