Indigenous Ways of Doing: Synthesizing Scholarly Literature on Ethno-Engineering

Disclaimer: This paper was written by two authors1 who grew up in the developed part of the Western world with experience in different countries and cultures within the developed Western world and to a limited extent in the southern hemisphere world. One of the authors brings with him an academic background in engineering. The other author brings a background in education and Religious Studies, a field of study concerned with the cultural phenomenon of religion, not the doctrine of a particular religion. Both received academic training in philosophy. The frame of reference for this paper is mixed as it draws from the literature of the social justice and engineering reform movement within the United States and from literature, which originated on an international level such as UNESCO and locally at different places around the world. We are cognizant that our backgrounds impact how we frame this paper and do not presume to have escaped them; we attempt to reflect at our personal and professional mindsets, along with our own cultures’ presumptions about indigenous cultures. Our focus on indigenous knowledge could be perceived as a secondary form of colonialism, this time robbing the cultures of their knowledge and innovative processes. For us, by looking at what we can learn from indigenous cultures we attempt to de facto reverse existing prescribed roles making us, as “Westerners,” the listeners and learners in this situation. While our approach and mindsets might be interpreted as naïve, we argue that they are respectful, as we are explicitly conscious that our own cultural norms, including our research approach, may not do justice to other cultures, and our findings are at best approximations.