How wonderful it would be if 99 began with a good debate:  this is good raw
material.

A few years back I was involved with planing curriculum under the auspices
of a NSF grant that was designed to cause ethnic minority student to become
interested in careers in science.  In this case it was Native American
students at a Native American college in Northern California.  The overall
strategy was pretty straightforward, to create a sense of 'cultural
ownership' among our students by showcasing the Native American
contribution to science.

I was pretty much the non-scientist in the panel, but I had a background in
Critical Theory and plenty of experience with California Indian
communities.  What I saw as the original products were curriculum modules
that were blatantly patronizing and guaranteed, in my view, to alienate our
students from 'science' rather than motivate an interest .  Of course, the
scientists didn't agree.  The problem was that 'science' itself was held
both as 'truth' and as the pardigm that all 'sub-categories' (i.e. NA
science) are measured against.  The second problem was that the scientists
designing these modules were also heavily bought-in to the silly
popular-culture notion that the way to make anyting Native American was to
call it 'spiritual.'

My recommendation was that the modules needed to address the cultural
specifics of 'science' as we understand it, i.e. a cultural project of
European and Euroamerican peoples (not to ignore Arabic and other
contributions), rather that proposing 'science' as 'truth.'  I felt that
'science' itself was not a subject that could cross the cultural frontier,
a hermeneutic problem, but could be presented as 'culture' in a way that
was meaningful to the students.  Additionally, Native American cultural
practices that resemble 'science' could be presented for comparative study,
such as the many Native taxonomies derived from linguistic studies,
ethnobotany, ethnozoology and ethnology generally.

Of course the resistance to this idea was based on the notion that
'primitive' man existed in a twilight state of consciousness (ala Jung) and
didn't organize empirical knowledge into rational systems of thought -- in
short build methodologies and taxa with which to organize the world.  I
brought Levi Strauss's "Savage Mind" to a meeting, and read exerpts from
chapter 1 "The Science of the Concrete" to no avail.  The stygma of
spiritual mysticism and the primacy of 'science' was too strong.

In fact, my proposition was met with some hostility, which I couldn't
understand.  I did not feel that putting the idea of 'science' in a
cultural context denigrated 'science' in any way, other than questioning
the absolute 'truth value' of science.  What I learned was that the
'scientists' genuinely felt that 'science' was transcultural and even
metacultural, which is a bit ironic since you could only have that
conviction from a position 'within science."

In the final analysis I proposed an approach that would motivate NA
students to science by comparing cultural manifestations of methods of
organized thought, and my protagonists proposed doing the same by comparing
the material products of science.  The weakness of the material argument in
this context is that the Native Americans will always come up on the short
end due to all sorts of historical and political factors, which the
opposition would justify by citing 'spirituality.'  I walked away from the
debate with the idea that the 'scientists' contribution was yet another
manifestion of 'intellectual colonialism.'

Erik Mattila

>Rudi quotes Radler:
>
>> This makes science the one human activity that seeks knowledge in an
>> organized way.
>
>This as well as the remainder of the quoted selection sounds an
>awful lot like Dewey's, "Logic: The Theory of Inquiry."  (which comes
>to mind probably because I am in the midst of a year long course of
>studying the book).
>
>Dewey suggests that logic, scientific method, methodology,
>organized inquiry, whatever pushes your buttons, is a natural
>consequence of our  interaction with the environment and our ability
>to have an impact upon the same.  Organized inquiry, however, is
>not limited to matters of scientific sense.  Good inquiries using
>common sense or moral sense are also organized in a manner
>derived from our biological nature.
>
>Quite predictably, however, whether the senses be common or
>scientific, some inquiries are better organized than others.
>
>
>--
>                Simon
>
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