Suchergebnisse

Book reviewed in this article:The Crosslinguistic Study of Language Acquisition, Volume 1: The Data. Dan Isaac Slobin, ed.The Crosslinguistic Study of Language Acquisition, Volume 2: Theoretical Issues. Dan Isaac Slobin, ed.

We show in this article how modernization, disguised as "community development," continues to fail rural villages in Solomon Islands despite the supposed movement toward a more people-centered, bottom-up philosophy in development education and practice. We focus on the case study of a Kwara'ae (Malaita island) rural, locally owned and operated project aimed at giving unemployed male youth a stake in the community and preventing their off-island migration. Successful for a decade, the project was destroyed by the intervention of a retired government official who, because of his education, training, and work with outside development agencies, imposed a modernization framework, including centralization of leadership and the valuing of Anglo-European knowledge over indigenous knowledge. While agreeing with the theoretical argument for indigenous knowledge in development, we argue that it is equally important that development be guided by people's indigenous epistemology/ies and indigenous critical praxis for (re)constructing and applying knowledge.

We examine Kwara'ae (Solomon Islands) indigenous epistemology and indigenous critical praxis, including sources of knowledge and strategies for validating and critiquing evidence and knowledge construction. To illustrate indigenous epistemology in action, we focus on the Kwara'ae Genealogy Project, a research effort by rural villagers aimed at creating an indigenous written account of Kwara'ae culture. In recording, (re)constructing, and writing Kwara'ae culture, project members are not only doing indigenous epistemology, but also reflecting on and critiquing their own indigenous strategies for knowledge creation. We hope that the work illustrated here will inspire other Native Pacific Islander scholars to carry out research on their native or indigenous epistemologies.