My aim in this talk is to consider the increasingly contested topic of how to integrate Indigenous expertise and science as it applies to the case of integrating African Traditional Medicine (ATM) and modern biomedicine in South Africa’s healthcare system. One prevalent narrative against integration is that there is an unbridgeable gap between ATM and biomedicine. Some biomedical practitioners forcefully argue that ATM lacks the scientific evidence base to substantiate its practice. Nyika (2007) argues that ATM should be rejected on ethical grounds: ATM is not guided by Nuremberg code; it is impossible for patients to consent to the ‘unknown’ (i.e., scientifically untested herbal mixtures, or diagnoses and treatment with ‘mystical’ overtones); and ATM is paternalistic. Indeed, the history of the relationship between traditional healers and biomedical practitioners in South Africa is defined by mistrust and conflict. Proponents of a project of integration rely on at least three reasons for the need to find common ground between ATM and biomedicine. The first reason is practical. Studies suggest that up to 80% of Black South Africans consult traditional healers. For many of these people, traditional healers are often their primary source of healthcare before biomedical practitioners. Integration on this reason is to respond to the demand for ATM. The second reason is political. The claim is that recognizing the value of ATM is a matter of social justice and decolonising medicine. The third reason is epistemological – it is the recognition that ATM can contribute invaluable knowledge on disease and healing that modern biomedicine cannot. Building on this latter reason, in this talk, I show how ATM and modern biomedicine in South Africa can be integrated in through an instrumentalist biopsychosocial model of disease. The biomedical model of disease focuses primarily on the biomedical causes of disease prevalence, susceptibility, and presentation. The biopsychosocial model sees disease as a complex interaction of biomedical, social, and psychological factors. This model grounds medical practice in terms of a theory of the patient as a whole person. I argue that this instrumentalist biopsychosocial model accounts for both the prospects and limits of integrating ATM and modern biomedicine. Limits include, for example, reproducing existing hierarchies of knowledge by disregarding the elements of ATM that do not meet Western evidence-based standards of medicine.

The relationship between Indigenous knowledge and science is a topic of increasing global discussion, especially regarding climate and environmental sciences. A lot of this discussion has centred around comparing or contrasting the two on a range of counts, such as epistemic merit, methodological overlap, or worthiness of inclusion in science classrooms. These discussions are not always clear about the precise meanings of ‘science’ and ‘Indigenous knowledge’ (used here as shorthand for a family of related terms) at stake. In this talk we offer a framework for greater conceptual clarity and care in these discussions. We develop our framework through the lens of the relationship between mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge, culture, values and worldview) and science (Hikuroa 2017, Mercier and Jackson 2019). A current high-profile and heated debate in Aotearoa/New Zealand centers on questions such as “Is mātauranga science?” or “(How) are mātauranga and science compatible?”. This local example provides a basis for a broader message about discussions of Indigenous knowledge and science taking place elsewhere in the world. People are talking past each other in debates about mātauranga Māori and science. This is partly due to the topic’s emotional and political entrenchment, but especially, we argue, due to pervasive ambiguities and equivocation on the meaning of ‘science’. Instead of discussing “mātauranga Māori versus science” in the abstract, these discussions should zoom in on more particular questions. A range of questions are presently run together—about the nature and limits of science, epistemic value, how to allocate research funding, proposed school curriculum changes, and other issues—to the detriment of constructively addressing any of them. As a basis for greater conceptual clarity and care in these discussions, we propose thinking of the family of claims at stake in terms of three variables: (1) mātauranga Māori, (2) science, and (3) the specific nature of the relationship being argued for or denied. Participants in these discussions should unambiguously fill in the blanks for each variable. We articulate a range of ways to do so, spanning epistemic, ontological, methodological, and socially or politically normative understandings. We discuss a range of examples from the literature on mātauranga Māori and science, and Indigenous knowledge and science more broadly, illustrating the landscape of ideas at stake in this discussion. Using the resulting framework as a basis, we urge future participants in these discussions to disambiguate any claims about “Indigenous knowledge and (or versus) science”, specify which questions they are asking and addressing, and exercise more conceptual clarity. Hikuroa, D. (2017). Mātauranga Māori: The ūkaipō of knowledge in New Zealand. Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand, 47(1): 5–10. Mercier, O. & Jackson, A.-M. (eds.) (2019). Mātauranga and Science. New Zealand Science Review, two-part special issue: 75(4) and 76(1–2).

Indigenous expertise has become increasingly recognized in a wide range of academic fields including agricultural sciences, ecology, public health, and sustainability studies (Chilisa 2019, Kimmerer 2013). The recognition of Indigenous expertise in academia interacts with a wider shift in the science system towards transdisciplinary and participatory methods that respond to complex social-environmental crises from climate change to food security to infectious diseases (Ludwig et al. 2022). Epistemologically, successful interventions into complex social-environmental systems require diversity of academic and non-academic expertise. Politically, such interventions raise questions about the structure of the science-policy interface and its impact on local livelihoods. As philosophers are increasingly turning their attention to the role of science in responding to social-environmental crises, Indigenous expertise is emerging as a crucial but often still peripheral topic in philosophy of science (Koskinen and Rolin 2019, Kendig 2020, Ludwig 2017, Mncube 2021). This article outlines a positive and critical perspective on the encounter of Indigenous expertise and philosophy of science. We argue that philosophy of science provides intellectual tools for contributing to critically reflexive transdisciplinarity that recognizes the plurality of expertise without neglecting the various - e.g. methodological, ontological, political - tensions between heterogeneous knowledge systems. At the same time, we caution that philosophy of science has also been shaped by demarcation debates that risk misrepresenting transdisciplinary negotiations by focusing on the division between science and non-science rather than fruitful exchange between academic and non-academic forms of expertise. We therefore argue that Indigenous expertise constitutes a core concern for philosophy of science and for understanding the complexity of interventions into social-environmental systems at the interface of science and policy. Chilisa, B. (2019). Indigenous research methodologies. Sage Publications. Kendig, C. (2020). Ontology and values anchor indigenous and grey nomenclatures. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 84: 101340. Kimmerer, R. W. (2013). Braiding sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants. Milkweed Editions. Koskinen, I., & Rolin, K. (2019). Scientific/intellectual movements remedying epistemic injustice: the case of indigenous studies. Philosophy of Science, 86(5): 1052-1063. Ludwig, D. (2017). Indigenous and scientific kinds. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 68(1): 187-212. Ludwig, D., Boogaard, B., Macnaghten, P., & Leeuwis, C. (2022). The politics of knowledge in inclusive development and innovation. In press. Mncube, Z. (2021). On local medical traditions. In Global Epistemologies and Philosophies of Science (pp. 231-242). Routledge.

Kinship was a central topic within anthropology during its first 100 years—roughly 1870-1970—before being made more peripheral to the discipline through several internal critiques. Foremost amongst these were critiques with a political edge to them by David Schneider, who articulated the view that the study of kinship had committed the near original anthropological sin of ethnocentric projection, and by feminist anthropologists, who saw that same tradition as reifying gendered categories (Bamford 2019). In this talk, I will re-explore some of this history but will do so with more recent turns or theoretical trends in cultural anthropology and the study of kinship in mind. In particular, I will discuss contemporary kinship studies via a consideration of (a) the “ontological turn” associated with anthropologists as diverse as Eduardo Kohn (2013, 2015), Marilyn Strathern (2020), Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (1998), and Morton Axel Pedersen (Holbraad and Pederson 2017); (b) the “decolonizing generation” (Allen and Jobson 2016; Jobson 2019) and its challenge to cultural anthropology’s racialized history; and (c) kinship beyond the human realm (Haraway 2008; Kirksey 2015, Clarke and Haraway 2018). I will give special attention here to the relationships between politics, metaphysics, and the human sciences. Allen, J. S. & Jobson, R. C. (2016). The decolonizing generation: (race and) theory in anthropology since the eighties. Current Anthropology 57(2): 129-148. Bamford, S. (2019). The Cambridge handbook of kinship. Cambridge University Press. Clarke, A. & Haraway, D. (eds.) (2018). Making kin, not population. Prickly Paradigm Press. Haraway, D. (2008). When species meet. University of Minnesota Press. Holbraad, M. & Pedersen, M. A. (2017). The ontological turn: an anthropological exposition. Cambridge University Press. Ingold, T. (2013). Anthropology beyond humanity. Soumen Antropologi / Journal of the Finnish Anthropology Society, 38(3): 15-23. Jobson, R. C. (2019). The case for letting anthropology burn: sociocultural anthropology in 2019. American Anthropologist, 122(2): 259-271. Kirskey, E. (2015). Species: a praxiological study. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 21: 758-780. Kohn, E. (2015). Anthropology of ontologies. Annual Review of Anthropology 44: 311-27. Kohn, E. (2013). How forests think: toward an anthropology beyond the human. University of California Press. Strathern, M. (2020). Relations. an anthropological account. Duke University Press. Viveiros de Castro, E. (1998). Cosmological deixis and Amerindian perspectivism, Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute 4 (3): 469-88.