Knowledge as a gift vs. a commodity

The following entry is a "free write" - 20 minutes spent writing in response to a question, following discussion with my group members, Hannah and Liz. The question was: "Indigenous Knowledge as an area of academic study has only relatively recently been recognized in a broader sense. The UN has been fostering Indigenous Knowledge for some time but has largely pursued the concept of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) to draw on Indigenous Peoples' understanding of the environment as a means of developing greater agricultural enterprises. Consider what the implications might be for Indigenous peoples and their entitlement to equality and human rights when you examine the differences between TEK and how Indigenous scholars, in particular, are articulating Indigenous Knowledge/s in the braoder sense as being the Intellectual Traditions of a human group."

This is what I wrote in the second "free write" during our discussion group in class today:
What is ownership? Westerners have a particular understanding of "ownership" and "management" that may be very different from indigenous people's understanding of ownership and management. Indigenous people's concepts of owning and managing land, or owning and managing knowledge gets translated into English as "own" and "manage." But much of indigenous understanding and connotation of words may be lost when translated into English. Here, our group just ran into a blank space, a place where it seemed we all realize that we didn't know what the concepts of own and manage mean to indigenous people. We were just stopped, confounded.

Now, this raises a question in my mind -- how fair is it to conduct discussions and legal proceedings concerning ownership and management of country, of knowledge, only in English? How different with such discussions be if whitefellas had to stretch and understand the corresponding words in Aboriginal languages?

We also talked about gifts versus commodities. An object is a gift has a history, social connections, emotional meanings attached to it. A commodity does not; it has only a monetary value. The commodification of something is the stripping-away of its history, so that it becomes an object without context. Traditional ecological knowledge, or any knowledge of indigenous people, is seen by Western commercial interests as a commodity, as something that can be removed from the cultural and ecological and spiritual context that gave rise to the knowledge, and then manipulated for monetary gain. But knowledge, to indigenous people, cannot be, or should not be, de-contextualized in that way. Therefore, the debates on appropriate compensation to indigenous people for their knowledge or , once again, predicated only on Western assumption that knowledge can be de-contextualized and given a numeric value. I have no idea, practically, how one would change the system to accommodate a change in that assumption.

We also talked about "in whose interest is it to keep objects de-contextualized, to keep people ignorant of the histories of objects?" If one knew the true history of objects for sale, would one still buy them? If you knew what the lives of the Asian sweatshop workers who make your clothing were like, if you knew what the lives of the CEOs and sales clerks were like who sold you the shirt, if you knew how much money each of those people made, would you still buy the shirt? Many people would not. So it's in the interests of those who profit most from the sale of objects to keep people ignorant of the histories of what they buy. So we can then ask the same question about traditional ecological knowledge -- in whose interest is it to keep the world ignorant of the history and context of that knowledge? Who benefits from de-contextualized knowledge?