Kidding aside, it’s exhausting the way these self-appointed decolonizers want to muddy all useful categories into nebulous mush in the name of taking down hegemonic patriarchies or whatever.
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Indigenous knowledge can be a distinct useful category and epistemology without trying to co-opt the category of “science” to try and access the perceived cultural power affordances
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In India bullshit “Vedic science” is already a toxic contaminant of grade school education.
Study it on its own terms as an interesting category with much to offer, sure.
Don’t create incoherent fusions for political gain.
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As a strong Feyeraband-Lakatos methodological anarchist I’m actually highly disinclined to attribute any special epistemic authority to “science” that’s worth lusting after anyway.
It’s just the “indigenous knowledge” of 19/20th century globalized modernity.
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Literally the only reason to make up bullshit equivalences like “indigenous knowledge is science” is to reach for the reins of institutional political power.
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Yeah. And besides European heritage people doing this kind of patronizing infantilization, there’s a shitload of self-exoticization and self-infantilization by non-Europeans too.
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Replying to @vgr
This is a form of racism because it treats anything which comes out of indigenous folks' mouthes as amazing and worth of applause -- isn't that how we treat toddlers? It's utterly infantilizing.
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Indian WhatsApp is *full* of bs claims to “science” not just for actual trad knowledge, but newly made up stuff with trad optics. “Indigenous” knowledge made fresh in 2022 after a Wikipedia trawl
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I’m in training for the next phase of the culture war, don’t @ me 😝
Trad is actually a surprisingly convenient catch-all category for everyone who annoys me — actual trads both dominant and minority, and reactionary larpers thereof
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Touché but Scott is actually an anarchist in the feyerabend sense and I’ve always qualified my endorsement of Scott for precisely this kind of abuse of the legibility critique 😆 twitter.com/cainandsable/s
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In my original 2011 essay on Scott that I think helped popularize it, I took care to make these qualifications explicit. Unfortunately the illegibility fetish kinda acquired its own runaway logic. ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-b
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Actually abuse of the arguments of SLaS in the sense of meme image above is about 80% of why I resist/am hostile to postrat crowd co-opting ribbonfarm into postrat extended universe. They misread both Scott and my gloss of Scott in service of annoying trad larps.
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