The Show recently spoke to Kelly McDonough, a professor at University of Texas at Austin who has just published a book called “Indigenous Science and Technology.”
McDonough’s research centers on the Nahua community in Mexico, and among other things, she writes about Nahua people who consider themselves scientists not because they work in a laboratory, but because they use science every day in their work, whether they’re farming, weaving, or writing poetry.
But McDonough’s goal with this book extends well beyond profiles from the Nahua community. She writes, “In choosing the term ‘science,’ I am not attempting to ‘elevate’ indigenous sciences in order to be equal to Western science … It is instead to insist that Western science technology and knowledge are only one of many sciences, technologies, and knowledges, rather than the pinnacle.” Rather than a single dominant perspective on science, McDonaugh envisions what she calls an “ecology of knowledges."
Full conversation
KELLY MCDONOUGH: I think when we allow for different ways of knowing, different ways of thinking, and we actually celebrate that and put that into operation, I think we can all have better lives.
I don't want to instrumentalize only non-Western science. What happens a lot is — and we're seeing this a lot in the news lately — oh, in California, they're realizing that Indigenous peoples did controlled burns before, and that's what helped them survive. I don't want to necessarily think about Indigenous science as something that can be extracted and utilized because that's sort of the experience that has been going on and on, this extraction and utilization.
But, we always talk about thinking outside the box, right? And when we bring all of these different ways of knowing, different knowledges, together. I think we have a better chance of surviving.
SAM DINGMAN: The word that kept coming to mind for me as I was going through the book is "fluency." And this sense that somebody who's a weaver or a poet, they have to have a fluency with natural phenomena in order to do their work.
And that level of awareness, sensitivity, to the rhythms and processes of the natural world is not something that we tend to find outside of a laboratory in mainstream academic, scientific culture. And it struck me that that would be another benefit of this "ecology of knowledges" that you're talking about — this sense that by having an embodied understanding of science, we would appreciate it a little bit differently and think of it less as a kind of sterile, laboratory process. Sort of like a secret code that only some people have access to.
MCDONOUGH: Right. One of the things I talk about is there are a couple of ways that people gain this fluency that you're talking about. And one is ancestral knowledge that's just passed on and on and on and that is communicated in the household on a regular basis. So, there's learning in the field, there's learning at the fireside. And they're not discounting what's in books, and they're not discounting what is happening in what we call Western laboratories at all.
But what they have is this knowledge based on experience coupled with that ancestral knowledge that has been passed on.
DINGMAN: Speaking of the passing on of knowledge, a lot of the book is also focused on this remarkable document called the Florentine Codex. Tell us about the Florentine Codex.
MCDONOUGH: It's actually an unfinished work. It was a 16th century — I would maybe describe it today as an encyclopedia, a 12-book encyclopedia. It was the brainchild of a Franciscan friar, Bernardino de Sahagún, and Nahua scholars that he was working with. In fact, we have documentation that some of these Nahua scholars were actually students of his, and that's how he really brought them into this project.
Sahagún and these Nahua scholars would — in a couple of different places in what we know today as Mexico City — would talk to elders and talk to bean sellers and talk to folks that worked as fishermen. Some books have to do with their descriptions of the gods. Others are descriptions of advice that elders would give.
And Sahagún was a Franciscan friar, so he had this idea that if you are going to root out heresy or idolatry, you need to know what it looks like. And so, he really wanted to get in there and document “what do these people believe?” How do they ceremoniously connect with what they believe? He saw a people, and in his mind, they were in decline.
Of course, they were physically in decline because they were living through a series of pandemics. And there are some different places in the Florentine Codex where I feel like the many, many Nahua people that had a hand in this weren't necessarily thinking about helping Sahagún root out heresy or helping the next priest that comes along learn their language.
This was an opportunity — and you might think of it as salvage documentation. The priests previously had burned all of their books because they were supposedly carrying the word of the devil. So, a lot of these things that had been burned, this was their chance to put it back in writing, and it was a chance to make sure that those memories didn't die.
DINGMAN: Yeah. I have this image as you're describing it, that it's almost like — the Codex itself is almost like a documentary or, maybe to use a more academic term, an ethnography, where instead of publishing this highly edited, curated version of this study of some group, you just released the transcripts.
MCDONOUGH: Right, exactly. So, some have called Sahagún a proto-ethnographer or one of the early anthropologists. I mean, he certainly wasn't doing what we consider ethnography or anthropology today, but there was that sort of, let's get it all down.
DINGMAN: Yeah. Well, so one of the things that is interesting about your incorporation of this document is that it seems to represent — as we've been discussing — a flawed but earnest attempt on the part of a non-Indigenous community to, in some ways, integrate Indigenous ideas into their understanding of the world.
And it made me wonder: Have there been any other attempts on the scale of the Florentine Codex in the ensuing centuries to undertake a similar effort?
MCDONOUGH: Well, I definitely think that the Florentine Codex is unique. There's really nothing like it in the world.
DINGMAN: I actually wondered if your book was almost implicitly calling out the scientific community for not making a similarly holistic attempt in the ensuing 500 some years.
MCDONOUGH: Well, I think lots of scholars have been doing that, for, I want to say, 50 years now. What I'm doing isn't new. It's just that that doesn't tend to — what my grandma would say? It doesn't take. It doesn't stick. So, if somebody that reads this book that grew up having only one science and it being Western or dominant culture science, and starts to think a little differently about what science means, that's great.
But what I'm really trying to do? I'm really trying to make sure that young Nahua people know what their science was, what it is, and what it can be.
DINGMAN: Yeah. Well, Professor Kelly McDonough at the University of Texas at Austin, author of “Indigenous Science and Technology.” Thank you so much.
MCDONOUGH: Thank you.
