Indigenous Knowledge Systems And Development In Africa

This edited volume analyzes African knowledge production and alternative development paths of the region. The contributors demonstrate ways in which African-centered knowledge refutes stereotypes depicted by Euro-centric scholars and, overall, examine indigenous African contributions in global knowledge production and development. The project provides historical and contemporary evidences that challenge the dominance of Euro-centric knowledge, particularly, about Africa, across various disciplines. Each chapter engages with existing scholarship and extends it by emphasizing on Indigenous knowledge systems in addition to future indicators of African knowledge production.

African social development is often explained from outsider perspectives that are mainly European and Euro-American, leaving African indigenous discourses and ways of knowing and doing absent from discussions and debates on knowledge and development. This book is intended to present Africanist indigenous voices in current debates on economic, educational, political and social development in Africa. The authors and contributors to the volume present bold and timely ideas and scholarship for defining Africa through its challenges, possible policy formations, planning and implementation at the local, regional, and national levels. The book also reveals insightful examinations of the hype, the myths and the realities of many topics of concern with respect to dominant development discourses, and challenges the misconceptions and misrepresentations of indigenous perspectives on knowledge productions and overall social well-being or lack thereof. The volume brings together researchers who are concerned with comparative education, international development, and African development, research and practice in particular. Policy makers, institutional planners, education specialists, governmental and non-governmental managers and the wider public should all benefit from the contents and analyses of this book.

The continent of Africa is richly endowed with diverse cultures, a body of indigenous knowledge and technologies. These bodies of knowledge and technologies that are indeed embodied in the diverse African cultures are as old as humankind. From time immemorial, they have been used to solve socio-economic, political, health, and environmental problems, and to respond to the development needs of Africans. Yet with the advent of colonialism and Western scientism, these African cultures, knowledges, and technologies have been despised and relegated to the periphery, to the detriment of the self-reliant development of Africans. It is out of this observation and realisation that this book was born. The book is an exploration of the practical problems resulting from Africa's encounter with Euro-colonialism, a reflection of the nexus between indigenous knowledge, culture, and development, and indeed a call for the revival and reinstitution of indigenous knowledge, not as a challenge to Western science, but a complementary form of knowledge necessary to steer and promote sustainable development in Africa and beyond. This is a valuable book for policy makers, institutional planners, practitioners and students of social anthropology, education, political and social ecology, and development, African and heritage studies.

Monograph on traditional knowhow and information dissemination systems used by indigenous peoples and their potential role in rural development - presents case studies in the agricultural sector, discusses research methods for the study of ethnoscience, ethnolinguistics, etc. Bibliography pp. 409 to 443 and diagrams.

This collection derives from a conference held in Pretoria, South Africa, and discusses issues of indigenous knowledge systems (IKS) and the arts. It presents ideas about how to promote a deeper understanding of IKS within the arts, the development of IKS-arts research methodologies, and the protection and promotion of IKS in the arts. Knowledge, embedded in song, dance, folklore, design, architecture, theatre, and attire, and the visual arts can promote innovation and entrepreneurship, and it can improve communication. IKS, however, exists in a post-millennium, modernizing Africa. It is then the concept of post-Africanism that would induce one to think along the lines of a globalized, cosmopolitan and essentially modernized Africa. The book captures leading trends and ideas that could help to protect, promote, develop and affirm indigenous knowledge and systems, whilst also making room for ideas that do not necessarily oppose IKS, but encourage the modernization (not Westernization) of Africa.

Contributed papers presented at the Conference.

This book explores the role of the social and natural sciences in supporting the development of indigenous knowledge systems. It looks at how indigenous knowledge systems can impact on the transformation of knowledge generating institutions such as scientific and higher education institutions on the one hand, and the policy domain on the other.

This book is an intellectual journey into epistemology, pedagogy, physics, architecture, medicine and metallurgy. The focus is on various dimensions of African Indigenous Knowledge (AIK) with an emphasis on the sciences, an area that has been neglected in AIK discourse. The authors provide diverse views and perspectives on African indigenous scientific and technological knowledge that can benefit a wide spectrum of academics, scholars, students, development agents, and policy makers, in both governmental and non-governmental organizations, and enable critical and alternative analyses and possibilities for understanding science and technology in an African historical and contemporary context.