The following are eight broad categories of Indigenous knowledge contrasted with Western ways of knowing. They are by no means complete, but will give a broad picture of the differences, complexities and advantages of Aboriginal worldviews and Indigenous cosmologies.
Holistic Knowledge is the cornerstone of a unified Aboriginal worldview. All knowledge in this worldview is inseperable from land, place, spirit, language, kin, law, Story. Natural and supernatural signs guide understandings of the relationships between all these elements, and within these synergistic links culture is created and recreated. Western reductionism on the other hand breaks these into components and studies one element at a time, losing the deep knowledge of the whole in the shallow analysis of its parts.
Communal Knowledge ensures that knowledge is not collected and stored for personal power and ownership by individual specialists, but is developed, retained and shared by groups. This creates a more productive environment for innovative thinking, unlike the western focus on private intellectual property and "knowledge as power", accumulated and jealously guarded for personal gain.
Ancestral Knowingness is about recognising knowledge as a fluid, changing force that flows from land, spirit and Ancestors. This ensures that Aboriginal ways of knowing are not seen as genentic or even cultural, but Ancestrally generated and constantly evolving, and therefore unextinguishable. While western logic treats knowledge as externally driven, the Ancestral urge to learn comes from within. This internal basis for knowing develops learning autonomy, an independent (yet still intensely social) orientation which is the foundation of Aboriginal child-rearing practices that many westerners deem negligent.
Intellectual Biomimicry allows people to develop and draw upon nature-based metaphors for deeper understanding of abstract concepts, as well as using ecosystem-like webs of knowing, a way of thinking that was rejected in western modernism and replaced by synthetic chains of reasoning. Indigenous "webs" of logic mirroring complex natural patterns are better suited to solving new millennium problems of sustainability, and are eagerly sought by the United Nations (IK Systems) and forward-thinking businesses (eg. "journey maps" for company visioning processes).
Circular Logic involves repeptition, returning to concepts for deeper understanding, and cyclic views of time and processes. It represents a deeper, more complex way of reasoning than western linear logic, which presents knowledge as a simplistic progression from one state to another, ignoring interrelated factors and leaving many people scattered along a continuum of progressively exclusive knowledge ownership. This creates hierarchies of knowledge that exclude and marginalise powerless groups and centralises a canon of knowledge to be owned and recreated by the dominant culture.
Indigenous Pluralism is a traditional way of knowing that draws down knowledge from many surrounding language groups, as opposed to dominant cultural thinking that favours a monocultural approach to education. Although the colonial construct of neo-tribalism has shattered this way of thinking, along with traditional trade routes and songlines, our peoples are not customarily insular and static in our thinking. Traditionally, we always traded with other language groups (even as far afield as Asia - consider the archaic Wik words "otamat" and "remat" borrowed from Indonesian), adopting foreign ideas and technologies (eg. the dugout canoe from Asia, Christianity from Europe, Didgeridoo from Arnhem Land) and combining knowledge to create new innovations. We have always learned multiple languages and cultures from the world around us, intermarrying and adopting across language groups.
Synergistic Knowledge comes from the Aboriginal principle that when opposites meet, the result is new creation rather than conflict and destruction. A good example of this is Ganma from the Yolngu of Arnhem Land, which is about the creation of brackish water that occurs in the wet season when salt and fresh water mix, but also represents an entire social system and model for belief and behaviour. Aboriginal Synergistic Knowledge can be used to overcome the western binary oppositional logic that demands adherance to one absolute and rejection of its opposite. Aboriginal rationality instead allows conflicting ideas to coexist simultaneously (eg. autonomy and relatedness are both pivotal to Aboriginal identity). Indeed, tension and balance between opposites is the source of both new creation and social cohesion for many language groups.
Deep Narrative is the final element of Indigenous knowledge explored here . This can complement and enrich western exposition-based learning. In our cultures, stories are not childish fables (as they are constructed in the Anglicised version of Aboriginal culture), but are rich with deep knowledge about law, ethics, geography, medicine and more. (For example, our Dreaming Stories have shown that we knew the world was round tens of thousands of years before Europeans, who only figured that out a few centuries ago.) Narrative is described last here, as it is the vehicle for all the ways of knowing outlined above. I'm calling it deep narrative here to emphasise the difference between sophisticated narrative texts and children's entertainment (or tourist-oriented fables, for that matter). Deep Narrative can contain more complex information than western exposition, which tends to fragment knowledge for specific scrutiny and separate it from cultural/land/social contexts.
Read more: "Indigenous Knowledge Systems: Comparing Aboriginal and Western Ways of Knowing | Suite101.com" - http://aboriginalrights.suite101.com/article.cfm/indigenous_knowledge_systems#ixzz0Ey9BLTRP&A
