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MODERNIZATION AND INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE: Ideas for Development or Strategies of Imperialism?
Author(s) -
Pfeifer Kimberly
Publication year - 1996
Publication title -
peace and change
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1468-0130
pISSN - 0149-0508
DOI - 10.1111/j.1468-0130.1996.tb00254.x
Subject(s) - modernization theory , indigenous , ethnocentrism , contradiction , sociology , traditional knowledge , field (mathematics) , epistemology , hegemony , power (physics) , environmental ethics , political science , law , anthropology , philosophy , ecology , physics , mathematics , quantum mechanics , politics , pure mathematics , biology
Writings on modernization and indigenous knowledge are viewed as two distinct approaches, often opposed to each other. This essay illustrates that while scholars of modernization and indigenous knowledge may understand and explain issues of development in different ways, they share three characteristics. First, they both participate in the construction of a unified field of development as they produce knowledge that simultaneously bestows power on the discursive field they form. Second, they both adhere to the distinction between the traditional or indigenous, and the scientific. Third, they both assume the existence of a development/undevelopment polarity. These shared qualities prevent any significant change in reconceptualizing development and any possibility of escaping criticisms of ethnocentric bias. Theories based on these shared assumptions fail, ultimately, to acknowledge peoples' own construction of identities, thus creating a contradiction within development projects that attempt to empower “indigenous” or local peoples.