Weaving Indigenous knowledge into the scientific method

Innovation is one of the most popular concepts and desired phenomena of contemporary Western capitalism. As such, there is a perennial drive to capture said phenomena, and particularly to find new ways to incite and drive the same. In this text, we analyze one specific tactic through which this is done, namely by the culturally colonial appropriation of indigenous knowledge systems. By looking to how jugaad, a system of frugal innovation in India, has been made into fodder for Western management literature, we argue for the need of a more developed innovation critique, e.g., by looking to postcolonial theory.

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Indigenous Knowledge Development in Bangladesh

10.3362/9781780445748 ◽

2000 ◽

Cited By ~ 7

Keyword(s):

Indigenous Knowledge ◽

Knowledge Development

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Fictions of the Human Right to Health: Writing Against the Postcolonial Exotic in Western Medicine

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474400046.003.0030 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Rosemary J. Jolly

Keyword(s):

Health Research ◽

Western Medicine ◽

Scientific Method ◽

Medical Humanities ◽

Right To Health ◽

The Body ◽

Health And Wellness ◽

Human Right ◽

Cultural Specificity ◽

The Social

The last decade has witnessed far greater attention to the social determinants of health in health research, but literary studies have yet to address, in a sustained way, how narratives addressing issues of health across postcolonial cultural divides depict the meeting – or non-meeting – of radically differing conceptualisations of wellness and disease. This chapter explores representations of illness in which Western narrators and notions of the body are juxtaposed with conceptualisations of health and wellness entirely foreign to them, embedded as the former are in assumptions about Cartesian duality and the superiority of scientific method – itself often conceived of as floating (mysteriously) free from its own processes of enculturation and their attendant limits. In this respect my work joins Volker Scheid’s, in this volume, in using the capacity of critical medical humanities to reassert the cultural specificity of what we have come to know as contemporary biomedicine, often assumed to be

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