Ethics and Politics in Indigenous Research

1
Ethics and Politics in Indigenous Research

• Bobby Banerjee
• International Graduate School of Management
• University of South Australia

2

• The masters tools will never dismantle the
  masters house.
• Audre Lorde

3
Discourses of Aboriginality

• Anthropological discovery of the Aborigine
  produced objective knowledge that excluded any
  possibility of dialogue.
• The creation of a particular form of knowledge
  about Aboriginality is linked with the power of
  organizing and regulating Aboriginal life
  (Anderson, 1995)..

4
Orientalism

• Orientalism (is) a Western style for dominating,
  restructuring, and having authority over the
  Orient. This cultural production of the Other
  provides the West with a flexible positional
  superiority, which puts the Westerner in a whole
  series of relationships with the Orient without
  ever him losing the relative upper hand (Said,
  1979).

5
Knowledge as Conquest

• Biotechnology and intellectual property rights on
  biological resources as technologies of
  colonialism.
• Profound incommensurabilities between indigenous
  and western epistemologies.
• No separation of ecology, society, economy,
  polity and ethics in indigenous epistemologies.
• Western knowledge becomes science whereas
  indigenous knowledge remains tradition.
• Common property as bundle of relationships vs
  common property as bundle of economic rights.

6
Whose Knowledge?

• The Neem dispute Plant genetics as a novelty,
  constructed as intellectual property of
  corporations requiring protection.
• The problem of biopiracy.
• Patenting plant genetics The transformation of
  seed custodians into seed consumers.

7
TRIPS

• (We were able to) distill from the laws of the
  more advanced countries the fundamental
  principles for protecting all forms of
  intellectual propertyBesides selling our concept
  at home, we went to Geneva where we presented or
  document to the staff of the GATT
  SecretariatWhat I have described to you is
  absolutely unprecedented in GATT. Industry
  identified a major problem for international
  trade. It crafted a solution, reduced it to a
  concrete proposal, and sold it to our own and
  other governmentsthe industries and traders of
  the world have played simultaneously the role of
  patients, the diagnosticians and the prescribing
  physicians. (Monsanto manager).

8
Whose Forests?

• The measures to mitigate climate change
  currently being negotiated are based on a
  worldview of territory that reduces forests,
  lands, seas and sacred sites to only their carbon
  absorption capacity. This world view and its
  practices adversely affect the lives of
  Indigenous Peoples and violate our fundamental
  rights and liberties, particularly, our right to
  recuperate, maintain, control and administer our
  territories which are consecrated and established
  in instruments of the United Nations (IIFC
  2000).
•  

9
Resistance?

• When we rose up against a national government,
  we found that it did not exist. In reality we
  were up against financial capital, against
  speculation, which is what makes decisions in
  Mexico as well as in Europe, Asia, Africa,
  Oceania, North America, South America
  everywhere.
• Subcomandante Marcos
• Zapatista Spokesperson

10
Resistance?

•  
• The government will need to eliminate the
  Zapatistas to demonstrate their effective control
  of the national territory and security policy.
• Mexico, Political Update, Chase
  Manhattan bank.

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Research Ethics

• Research which is culturally safe, which
  involves mentorship of kaumatua (elders), which
  is culturally relevant and appropriate while
  satisfying the rigor of research, and which is
  undertaken by a Maori researcher, not a
  researcher who happens to be Maori. (Irwin,
  1994).
• Research by Maori, for Maori and with Maori.
  (Smith, 1995).
• Kaupapa Maori challenges a universal approach. It
  must be able to address Maori needs or give full
  recognition of Maori culture and value systems
  (Reid, 1998).

12
Academic Skull Measuring

• This is where academic research has failed
  Indigenous communities. One portion of
  non-Aboriginal society tries to understand more
  about Aboriginal communities and once the
  communities are analyzed, subjectified and
  reconstituted, the task is done, the research
  over with no value to the Aboriginal communities
  who are the subjects of the research (Katona,
  1998).

13
Zapatismo

• Zapatismo is not an ideology, it is not a
  bought and paid for doctrine. It isan
  intuition. Something so open and flexible that
  really it occurs in all places. Zapatismo poses
  the question What is it that has excluded me?
  What is it that has isolated me? And the
  response is different for Mexican Indians than it
  is for North American Indians or the immigrants
  in Europe or the resistance movements in Asia or
  for blacks in Africa. In each place the response
  is different. Zapatismo simply states the
  question and stipulates that the response is
  plural, that the response is inclusive and must
  be tolerant
  
  Subcomandante Marcos

14
A Reminder

• I believe my own culture. Black fella way.
  Right way. Proper way. Bining way. Balanda
  should listen. And believe. How many times we
  gonna tell him?
• Yvonne Margarula