“… as an anthropologist working in Gujarat, a group of tribal leaders and activists came to me saying they knew I worked in science and needed my help.
The search for cognitive justice, Visvanathan, 2021
They sat down and one of them said: ‘Can you arrange a seminar between our ojhas, our wiseman, our healers and western psychologists and psychiatrists?’
He explained that they did not want the usual World Bank concessions to participation or a subaltern sense of voice.
‘We want our theories to talk to their theories. Our democracy needs a citizenship of knowledge; a dialogue of knowledges.’
The leader asked me if I could coin a word for this process, a concept which unfolded what they wanted to say.
I coined the idea of cognitive justice: the right of different knowledges to coexist so long as they sustain the life, livelihoods, and life chances of a people. “
From Visvanathan’s article linked above:
“As a project and thought experiment, cognitive justice realises that democracy needs a wider repertoire of ideas beyond pluralism and multiple time. The first of these is a concept of nature that moves beyond the idea of it as a commodity to become instead an act of trusteeship.
Second, the formal framework of a constitution must coexist with that of a tacit constitution. While a formal constitution is a legal enactment on the role and rules of the state, it leaves behind a world that is recognised but unsaid; the unwritten worldviews which determine its dynamics. A tacit constitution acknowledges the unconscious and unspoken ideas about ecology, technology, and time that underlie a formal framework.
Third, the right to information, while precious, is not enough. Information alone is raw and incomplete. One needs a right to knowledge, to different and diverse ways of knowing. Fourth, we must revive the idea of the ‘knowledge commons’ to challenge the aridity of the information chain. The profit-hungry entrepreneur who discards all that is known in pursuit of incessant innovation is an idiot in the forest of knowledges.
The commons was once a place where villagers shared access to grazing land, timber for building and firewood, and herbs for medicine. More than a collective space for resources, it was a site which sustained skills, competence, and improvisation. It went beyond the idea of individual rights and private property to an idea of collective access; and, while a commons sustained life, it was not an annexe to affluence. This old idea of the commons as a space and metaphor is now being revived online and beyond. Some working in this field have suggested the idea of a knowledge panchayat: a knowledge village, where all citizens meet to debate the future of ideas. Here, the equal exchange of knowledge and ideas becomes fundamental to decision-making.
