International Symposium on Global And Local Knowledge Systems February 19-23, 2001: German Festival in India 2000-2001 (Deutsche Festspiele in Indien)

German Festival in India 2000 -2001

Deutsche Festspiele in Indien

International Symposium on GLOBAL AND LOCAL KNOWLEDGE SYSTEMS

February 19-23, 2001

Host INDIRA GANDHI RASHTRIYA MANAV SANGRAHALAYA; BHOPAL (National Museum of Mankind)

Background and Objective

The German Government and the Government of India had agreed, in 1989, to hold Festivals in each other’s country. The Festival of India took place in Germany in 1991-92. The German Festival in India will now follow from October 2000 to March, 2001. As part of the Festival program, the Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Manav Sangrahalaya (National Museum of Mankind) is hosting an International Symposium on ‘Global’ and ‘local’ knowledge systems from 19th to 23rd February 2001 at Bhopal, in Madhya Pradesh, India.

The Symposium will offer an opportunity for the Indian and German scholars to come together, interact with custodians of different cultural patterns and their knowledge systems. This event is expected to bring the Museum Mission and Festival objective of representing different human communities and their world views to a luminous, comparative focus. In a modest way, this should enlarge our understanding of the relations that human communities should viably maintain among themselves, and with other non-human, organic and inorganic communities, which share the earth planet,

Concept

The issue of choice between knowledge systems has assumed fundamental importance in the biological history of the earth planet, in which the rate of extinction of species has sky rocketed to 40,000 times higher than the background rate of extinction; in which, greed has outstripped need, and man is changing the environment faster than he can adapt himself to the change biologically, assess it politically and economically, or tackle it scientifically. He appears to be in the ‘cockpit of a flying jet with a car driver’s licence’, and his survival itself appears to be in question.

It is, therefore, necessary to assess the comparative validity of different human ways of viewing the universe. Is man the Lord or Shepherd of Beings? Are the cognitive beginnings of humanity, mighty and uncanny, or awkward and feeble? Should a knowledge system categorize, supersede and absorb other knowledge systems as its very own other, or acknowledge and let them be in their otherness? Should the discourses be hegemonic or Homo-logic? Should we prefer representational over non-representational thinking? Should the universal be conflated with the universalizable? Should facts and values converge? Which is prior, context or content? belongingness, or truth? Is socially embedded knowledge a source of prejudice, ignorance and inequality, or an engine for empowerment of the marginalized and disadvantaged? What should be the model of knowledge? Bipolar, deterministic, anthropocentric, or multipolar, fluid and holistic? These are fundamental, normative questions, to be addressed at the outset.

We have to then ask whether it is a correct approach, in the pursuit of knowledge, to differentiate, essentialize and reify ‘we’ and ‘they’, subject and object, active and passive, colonial and pre-colonial, traditional and modern, binary and holistic, global and local, deductive and inductive, natural and social, empirical and non-empirical systems. Are the cognitive roots of knowledge systems irreconcilably different and continue to be so? Should the validity of the division between global and local knowledge, be subjected to questioning, when boundaries are getting blurred between matter and particle, verbal and genetic codes; when, all objects are being seen as processes in a universal flux; when, certainties are making way for probabilities, subject, object, rational intuitive, space time distinctions are being dissolved; and, the observer is becoming a participant, who is changing reality by his observation.

The Symposium would then have to deal with the problems of understanding of one knowledge system by another. Is it possible to build bridges between the text and context, written and the oral, the formal and the informal, the collective and the individual, the ideographic and nomothetic, the etic and emic, nature and culture? Is it possible to unite monotheism of reason with the polytheism of imagination, mythos and logos, the physical and the symbolic universe? Is there any need to initiate a dialogical, hermeneutic, circular movement between knowledge systems, to achieve such a fusion of horizons, in the hermeneutic of a global we? Or, should each knowledge system be allowed to retain its inappropriable otherness and isolation, in order to duly fulfill itself? Is it likely that one knowledge system will assume the historical entelechy to commodify, objectify and misuse the other knowledge system, in the process of understanding and translating it?

A further issue would be the unprecedented changes in the concept of knowledge in a new borderless, centre less, cyber world, in a society of spectacle and simulacra, connected by information super highways. What happens to knowledge, with the replacement of real by virtual relationships, languages and images? How do we deal with the widening, cognitive gulf between the connected few and the unconnected many, on the cyber road, which is infested with toll barriers and apartheid? Have the gate keepers of knowledge in the cyber space contributed to bio-cultural democracy and collaboration, or, to the reduction of sacred and ecological categories to economic and production categories, in primary, secondary and tertiary industries?

A corollary question would be that of intellectual property right in knowledge systems. Is IPR obsolete in the age of copy? Should concepts of individual IPR and language of commodity, based on alien jurisprudence, be applied to knowledge, cherished and nourished by a community trans-generationally, and to the language of ethics and traditions? Which is the correct legal concept for IPR in a theory of knowledge, lex loci rie sitae, res nullius or terra nuilius? Does IPR protect knowledge or sequester it from the public domain, colonize it and destroy it?

A final question that will follow would be that of the relevance of knowledge systems to sustainable development. Should knowledge concern itself with itself, or, also with its impact on the surrounding world? Should sustainable development be achieved through a jointly negotiated advance, or through a mediation between knowledge system poles? Are phenomena like the accelerated extinction of species, or the destruction of their bio-cultural habitats, caused by problems inherent in knowledge system paradigms? Or, are these due to the misinterpretation and misuse of such knowledge systems, by bio-cultural pirates? Are there only true or false discourses in knowledge systems, or, only more or less powerful ones? Is the flow of knowledge between gene rich and capital rich countries sustainable?

The Symposium will thus search out, through systematic interrogation, the ontological, epistemological and existential implications of two ostensibly conflicting world views, a fragmented world view, which characterizes man as the dominant player and classificatory categories as fixed and immutable, and a holistic world view, which describes man as a micro unit in a vast cosmic flux, in which all such categories are fluid and interrelated. It will juxtapose and examine the validity of abstract scientific proof and the proof provided by lived experience, exact knowledge and its ethical obligations, the extent of man’s power and his responsibility, the oral transmission of knowledge from the master to the pupil, on a one to one basis, as against its mass production and textual transmission.

The Host

The Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Manav Sangrahalaya (The National Museum of Mankind) is a unique post-colonial Museum, which is trying to change the colonizing, museumising, homogenizing approaches of development by documenting, revitalizing and celebrating a variety of eco-specific community resource management strategies and subsistence technologies. It is engaged in a ceaseless exploration of the intellectual roots, the historical development, the practical ramifications, and the ethical implications of knowledge, both ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’.

The Museum complex is predominantly open air, spread in 797 thousand sq. mtrs. of undulating hillock, on a seven mile long lake front in Bhopal, the capital of the central Indian land mass of Madhya Pradesh. The land is part of the ocean floor, churned up in the clash of central Indian and Tibetan plates. It is also part of a cultural landscape, which has one of the largest concentrations of prehistoric painted rock shelters in the world. Fossils of vanished floral, faunal and human {Homo Erectus, called Narmada Man, between Sangiran 17 and Nangdog 12) species continue to be discovered in this land. It has been leavened by major movements in eclectic versions of Buddhism, Jainism and Sufism. It is perched at a height of about 1900 ft. above the sea level, in a city, in which three settlements, industrial, bureaucratic-political, and agricultural-commercial have come together. The Museum thus lives at the threshold and boundary of diverse perceptions of culture and human adventure.

Unlike any other Museum, the Museum of Mankind has built up platforms for constant discourse between knowledge system spokesmen of remote hill and forest based communities, and scholars and practitioners, schooled in various academic disciplines, in order to determine tine limits and relevance of their ideas about inhabiting, shaping or dealing with the world around them. It has organized village, district, provincial, national and international level events, to document, replenish and disseminate the myriad ways of human beings for understanding, conceptualizing, visualizing and celebrating their identities, and managing their environment. Some of the areas, in which it has taken initiatives, are the history, movement, management, sharing and celebration of waters; community strategies, taboos and prescriptions for conserving forests, biota, and sacred heritage landscapes; demographic impact assessment of mega developmental projects; improvements in rural technologies, within available local resources; inter--dialect dialogue and translation of ancient and vanishing languages of visual and performing arts and architecture, recollection and re-contextualization of oral knowledge of foundation legends, creation myths, life sustaining and life enhancing belief systems and therapeutic practices.