Science, Traditional Ecological Knowledge, and Anthropology: Managing the Impacts of Mining in Papua New Guinea

A little knowledge is apt to puff up, and make men giddy, but a greater share of it will set them right, and bring them to low and humble thoughts of themselves

—A. B., The Mystery of Phanaticism, 1698

More than a decade of monitoring the social impacts of mining required numerous collaborative relationships. One instance of this provided a more complicated example of collaborative research as it involved working directly and concurrently with three distinct groups of people, each group not only having different conceptions of the problems at issue but also drawing on a different knowledge base and occasionally on quite distinct epistemologies. We do not want to exaggerate this latter distinction, as we think that has happened too often in studies of “traditional ecological knowledge.” The Papua New Guinean people with whom we have worked are in many ways as empiricist as any Western scientists, and they usually base their knowledge on careful observation. They also test to see if something works and to verify claims made by others. Just one example is evidence—the willingness of Papua New Guineans to plant new crops and adopt new gardening techniques. Bourke (2009) estimates that prior to European settlement, some 170 plant species were cultivated for food (2009: 15). Since about 1870, 90 food crop species and more than 2,200 varieties have been introduced (2009: 18). Bourke’s surveys revealed that the embrace of these new foods was so rapid that in many instances people now believe they are indigenous crops.

Science and Traditional Ecological Knowledge

Over the past three decades there has been a growing awareness of, and academic interest in, Indigenous or traditional ecological knowledge, inspired mainly by Western conservationists but incorporating varying degrees of radical political stances on the marginalization of minority Indigenous peoples in nation states (Tuckwell 2012). Often these stances are critical of scientific knowledge and the privileging of Western knowledge and “epistemic standards” (Haack 1998: 146). According to the United Nations definition in documents prepared for the establishment of intellectual property rights, Indigenous ecological knowledge is “in general terms . . . traditional practices and culture and the knowledge of plants and animals and of their methods of propagation; it includes expressions of cultural values, beliefs, rituals and community laws, and it includes knowledge regarding land and ecosystem management” (United Nations 2007, n.p.). Anthropologists and biological scientists have developed a range of interpretations of the concepts, and as Davis and Ruddle observe, “there is no consensus on the content” of Indigenous or local or traditional ecological knowledge. “This means it connotes different qualities for different researchers” (Davis and Ruddle 2010: 880). They include a valuable detailed table of the interpretative variations. Our own research proceeded with a working definition approximating that of the United Nations, although we also pursued direct inquiry of local explanations of what Western science deems natural phenomena, such as fish spawning, water springs, seasonal variation, and plant habitats. This aspect of the research was directly related to changes that were occurring, or were possible, because of the mining operations and was aimed at determining issues that might become contentious where explanatory models diverged.

Scientific knowledge is perhaps even more diverse in the range of interpretations of its epistemology, ontology, rationality, and methodologies. Not only is it divided into academic disciplines as different from each other as physics and biology, but within each discipline there are debates about the subjects and objects of study, the claims to truth, and the methods appropriate for testing verifiability. Our approach was ultimately pragmatic, in that we considered it important to work with the sciences as understood by the educators and environmental scientists with whom we were collaborating. In the main they were rational, skeptical, and materialist in their understandings of the natural world. The Papua New Guinea education department’s science curriculum draws much of its inspiration from that of its Australian counterpart. It is not relativist; nor does it include material on philosophy of science that raises theoretical questions about scientific truth claims. We were...