TOK situations for knowledge and indigenous societies
How knowledge is held, transmitted and validated in indigenous societies, including knowledge embedded in place, practice and oral transmission, and the questions raised by its documentation by outsiders.
What knowledge and indigenous societies asks of a knowledge question
- East Asia
Recognised as indigenous, at last
Japan legally recognised the Ainu as indigenous only in 2019, after generations of assimilation policy that had suppressed language and practice while…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Power
- Culture
- Southeast Asia
The divers evolution equipped
The Bajau of Southeast Asia free-dive to remarkable depths, and genetic studies found enlarged spleens consistent with selection for diving over generations.…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Culture
- India
What the Chipko villagers knew
In the 1970s, Himalayan villagers, many of them women, embraced trees to stop commercial felling, arguing the forests' real yield was soil, water and air…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Values
- Culture
- Oceania
The painting that hides what it shows
When Central Australian artists began painting for outside markets in the 1970s, senior custodians adapted designs so that restricted ceremonial content was…
Enduring · The arts
- Power
- Culture
- Africa
Historians without paper
West African griots have carried genealogies, epics and political history across centuries through trained recitation, with lineages of transmitters…
Enduring · History
- Evidence
- Culture
- Oceania
Sailing to Tahiti without instruments
Scholars long argued Polynesian settlement was accidental drift, doubting deliberate navigation across such distances was possible. In 1976 the Hokulea sailed…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Justification
- Culture
- Africa
The appetite plant and the patent
South African researchers patented an appetite-suppressing compound from hoodia, a plant the San had long used on hunts, without initial benefit-sharing;…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Power
- Values
- India
Two forecasts of the same monsoon
Farmers across India read bird behaviour, flowering patterns and wind for the monsoon's arrival, while the meteorological department runs ensemble models, and…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Culture
- Global
When oral tradition entered the courtroom
In the Delgamuukw case, Canada's Supreme Court held that Indigenous oral histories must be admitted as evidence of land rights on their own terms rather than…
Enduring · History
- Evidence
- Culture
- Latin America
Records tied in knots
Inca administration ran on quipus, cords whose knots encoded census and tribute data and possibly narrative, and Spanish authorities destroyed many precisely…
Enduring · History · Mathematics
- Interpretation
- Culture
- Oceania
Maps you must sing
Aboriginal songlines encode routes, water sources, law and cosmology in song cycles tied to travel across country, with fuller layers restricted to those with…
Enduring · History · The arts
- Interpretation
- Culture
- East Asia
A malaria cure found in a fourth-century text
Screening traditional remedies, Tu Youyou found a fourth-century Chinese text describing cold extraction of sweet wormwood, adjusted her method accordingly,…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Culture
- India
The turmeric patent and the grandmother's proof
In 1995 a US patent was granted for using turmeric to heal wounds, a practice Indian households had relied on for generations. India's research council…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Power
- Latin America
Telescopes on other people's mountains
The Atacama's dry altitude makes it ideal for observatories, and the same plateaus carry deep significance for Indigenous communities who were rarely central…
Current · The natural sciences
- Power
- Values
- Latin America
The vine, the lab, and the elders
As clinical interest in ayahuasca-derived compounds accelerates, Amazonian communities that developed and ritually govern the brew's use are often absent from…
Current · The natural sciences
- Power
- Values
- India
Ayurveda meets the randomised trial
India funds research ministries for both biomedicine and traditional systems like Ayurveda, and disputes recur over whether centuries of documented clinical…
Current · The human sciences · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Culture
- Oceania
Fire knowledge, re-admitted
After Australia's catastrophic 2019 to 2020 bushfires, agencies expanded engagement with Aboriginal cultural burning, low-intensity fire practices refined over…
Current · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Culture
- India
Mapping rights onto a forest
India's Forest Rights Act asks communities to document customary use of land their ancestors never surveyed, converting remembered practice into GPS points and…
Current · The human sciences
- Power
- Culture
- Oceania
Ancestors in the storeroom
Museums worldwide hold Maori and Moriori ancestral remains collected in the colonial era, and New Zealand runs a standing programme negotiating their return…
Current · History
- Power
- Values