Indigenous Peoples and Western Science

Abstract

IT WAS THANKS PRIMARILY TO THE GROUNDBREAKING ANALYSES of Aime Cesaire, Frante Fanon, Albert Memmi, and Edward Said that colonialism's hegemonizing discourse on non-European peoples began finally to be dismantled.1 The deconstructive process launched by these seminal studies was complemented and extended in the 1980s when new proponents of what had by then come to be known as postcolonial theory made their appearance on the academic scene.2 Since then, postcolonial studies have become firmly established in universities worldwide, postcolonial theoretical frameworks have been applied to research carried out in all aspects of colonial history, and a 'postcolonial approach' has been increasingly adopted in the critical overhauls regularly taking place in fields as disparate as literature and ecocriticism, linguistics and economics. One result of this radical revisioning has been the gradual exposure of the ideological (colonial or just plain ethnocentric) ambience in which many areas of Western knowledge are steeped.The sciences have, naturally, not escaped postcolonial scrutiny. Specialists from both within and outside a variety of scientific disciplines have identified Western science as being deeply implicated in the subjugation - the extermination even - of Indigenous peoples during the colonial era. The best of these analyses offer us illuminating insights into the political, ethical, and racial dimensions of today's genetic science and technology. They also help us recognize and understand the historical experience of scientific abuse that has made 'Third- World' peoples generally and the Indigenous peoples of former white-settler colonies in particular such resolute opponents of human genome diversity research.Even today, there is an ingrained tendency in the West to equate science with truth, progress, intellectual independence, and enlightenment. Yet we do not have to look very far to discover multiple instances of the more valueladen, less purely disinterested positions from which scientific inquiry has often been launched. scientists have never inhabited the socio-political vacuum in which the lay imagination locates them, nor are they endowed with any automatic resistance to the dominant ideologies, political currents, or cultural influences of their time.In her examination of traditional views of scientific truth, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, drawing on the Polish microbiologist Ludwik Fleck, indicates the social conditioning, the collective assumptions, and 'highly contingent cultural and political factors'3 that contribute to the production of this truth. Fleck's fundamental postulate can, she claims, be summarized thus:there are no pure observations, complete descriptions, or 'raw' data. All observations, including or especially those of a highly trained, extensively experienced scientist, are shaped and selected by prior belief and experience - that is, by the ideas, assumptions and practical knowhow that, operating together, induce the perceptual expectations and perceptual-behavioural dispositions that, duly mutually adjusted among the members of a collective, yield what we call (scientific) knowledge.4As social beings, pioneers of nineteenth-century racial science in Britain were far from being isolated [...] in a scientific 'republic' of their own.5 On the contrary, they were typical products of the rigid, class-bound Victorian society to which they belonged; positioned subjects whose own elite social status predisposed them to a profoundly hierarchical view of the world - a model that was seamlessly incorporated into their schema of how the different 'races of mankind' were related.6 For the members of a collective who share a given thought style, certain entities, categories, and connections will be especially salient and ready-to-hand and others less noticeable or invisible.7In terms of ideological immunity, Victorian scientists in Britain had no greater resistance than any other section of the population to the imperialist propaganda that permeated British culture during the era of colonial expansion. …