Indigenous Spaces In Sociology: Article Analysis

I chose to look at the “indigenous spaces in sociology” article (chapter 3). The premise of the article is that it is difficult to describe a non-western culture or society (indigenous culture in this case) using western knowledge and concepts. It states that we need to consider indigenous understanding of the world and “indigenous knowledge” to formulate a good sociological theory about their society. To quote the article “Knowledge, in order to be meaningful, needs to be rooted in the very realities that it’s attempting to explain (Tepperman, Kalyta, p.12)” sums this up perfectly. The article goes on to state that western knowledge is largely “binary”, meaning our view of the world is largely black and white, negative vs. positive, based

in absolutes, etc.; whereas indigenous knowledge is based more on relationship with life, spirituality, and is more metaphysical than western the western equivalent. It states that for us to have an all-encompassing unifying sociological theory we need to take into account these differences in knowledge between societies and attempt to incorporate them into the theory. The author also mentions how there is a language barrier and hints that language is part of the fabric of a specific culture/society, and that using western language to describe an indigenous society/culture is a challenging task. The article emphasizes the need to study indigenous society using indigenous understanding of the world, and not to view it through a “western lens” as we are doing right now. It mentions that a side effect of this western view is that our perspective of indigenous society focuses largely on the negative socioeconomic aspects of their lives such as poverty and high suicide rates, and largely ignores the positive aspects of concepts such as spirituality.
In my opinion, the author brings up some very strong points. Using “western knowledge” to describe indigenous society is akin to describing concepts/words unique to one language using a different language; of course, some of these descriptions will be objective and correct, however I feel that the bigger picture would be missed and lost in translation. On the contrary, there are likely some parts of indigenous sociology that cannot be described using “indigenous knowledge” alone, and thus it is important for both views to be taken into account and for there to be open communication between the two societies.