Presented at the conference
SCIENCE AND TRADITION:
ROOTS AND WINGS FOR DEVELOPMENT
Brussels, April 2001
CULTURES, SCIENCES AND ENDOGENOUS KNOWLEDGE
PRACTICES :
ANTHROPOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES
by
René DEVISCH *
The ethnography of the civilizational clashes in the (post)colonies, or in so-called
development projects, witnesses to an intrinsic difficulty in modern, objectivist,
anthropological science. Do the anthropologists and the interuniversity development
cooperation merely reproduce professionally self-serving statements about a generalized
Other, or are they able to adequately render, and tune themselves into the multiple voices,
views and dilemmas of the various cultural groups or subjects ? Anthropological
'fieldwork', in a deep and abiding engagement with local people, plants in our academic
experience a vision of meticulous, engaged, historically or contextually grounded, as well
as morally accountable knowledge. Above all, the very endeavour witnesses to the
possible kinship between local knowledge and science. The local knowledge may be
inside the global science, or some dimensions of the latter may be decidedly unglobal and
very culture-bound. Critical-interpretive anthropological fieldwork also learns us that
most practical knowledge is not language-based, yet embodied, gender- and site specific.
*
Member of the Royal Academy of Overseas Sciences ; prof. “Katholieke Universiteit Leuven”
(Belgium).