What do we loose when Indigenous knowledge is reduced to "culture"?

I recently went to Kakamega expecting a forest,.I came back thinking about knowledge. My trip was in some many ways a trip into a landscape I thought I already knew,as one of Kenya's most important forest ecosystems, but what's stayed with me wasn't simply what I saw growing in the forest it was also the culture surrounding it, the stories,the traditions and the relationship between the people and the place.

The things that have been passed from generation to generation. As I encountered more of the cultural history of the Luhya people and later learned about other Indigenous communities in Kenya, including the Sengwer, I found myself returning to one question:

What exactly do we mean when we call something “culture”?

We use the word so easily.We talk about Indigenous culture as though it is a collection of things: traditional food, clothing, music, dances, ceremonies, stories and rituals.

And, of course, those things are culture.

But what if they are also something else?

What if, underneath what we call culture, there are entire systems of knowledge?

The culture we can see

Culture is easiest to recognize when it is visible.We notice the dance, photograph the clothing,taste the food,listen to the songs,watch a ceremony,we admire the beauty of a tradition and call it cultural heritage.

Photo courtesy of Sydney Odhiambo

But sometimes the visible practice is only the surface of something much deeper.

A story can carry history,a language can contain concepts that are difficult to translate into another language, a ritual can communicate values and social responsibilities.

A relationship with a particular plant can contain generations of knowledge about where it grows, when it can be harvested and how it is used.

And a relationship with a landscape can contain knowledge about the landscape itself.

This isn't merely a philosophical idea.

UNESCO describes Indigenous and local knowledge as encompassing knowledge, skills, practices and ways of understanding developed through communities' interactions with their natural environments. Such knowledge can be expressed through language, oral traditions, memory, spirituality, attachment to place and worldview.

Suddenly, the word culture begins to feel almost too small.

Kakamega: when the forest becomes more than a forest

This is where my experience in Kakamega became particularly interesting to me.

A forest can be described scientifically.

We can talk about biodiversity, species, habitats, rainfall, soil and ecological processes.And those descriptions matter.

But a forest can also exist in someone's world as something much larger.

It can be a source of food and medicine, a place of memory and ceremony and also a source of stories.

A landscape through which knowledge has been passed from one generation to another.

Research around Kakamega Forest has documented extensive Indigenous knowledge of medicinal plants among communities living around the forest. Researchers working with elderly local informants identified dozens of medicinal plant species and noted that this knowledge could contribute to conservation, rural health planning and understanding environmental change.

There is also research specifically examining the Indigenous Abaluhyia worldview in relation to conservation in Kakamega Forest. It describes songs, wise sayings, prohibitions, folktales and cultural ceremonies as channels through which conservation knowledge and responses to climatic events have been communicated.

That fascinated me.Because suddenly, a song isn't simply a song,a story isn't simply a story,a prohibition isn't simply an old rule.

They can also be ways of transmitting information.And perhaps that is something we miss when we look at Indigenous culture only as heritage.

The forest is not experienced in only one way

This also made me think about other Indigenous relationships with forests in Kenya.

The Sengwer, for example, are associated with forest landscapes in Kenya's Rift Valley, including the Cherang'any and Embobut areas. Their history and relationship with forest environments are distinct from the Luhya communities around Kakamega, and I don't want to collapse these different peoples into one generalized idea of “Indigenous culture.”

But their experience raises a related question.

What happens when a forest is understood not merely as an ecosystem, but also as part of a people's identity, history and knowledge?

Research into Sengwer Indigenous environmental knowledge around the Cherang'any Forest has examined how knowledge accumulated across generations relates to forest-resource management and conservation.

Other research has explored the spiritual dimension of the Sengwer relationship with forests, including beliefs concerning ancestors and sacred landscapes.

This doesn't mean that every Indigenous relationship with nature is automatically sustainable, or that traditional knowledge should be romanticized.

It means something much simpler:

A landscape can contain knowledge that isn't immediately visible to an outsider.

And when we discuss conservation without understanding the people who have historically interacted with that landscape, we may be leaving part of the story out.

When knowledge becomes “folklore”

Perhaps one of the most interesting things about Indigenous knowledge is how easily it can be transformed into folklore.

Imagine a community has a traditional story about a particular place.

An outsider might record the story as folklore.But what if the story also contains information about the landscape?

What if it tells younger people where they should or shouldn't go?

What if it encodes a historical event?

What if it communicates a moral rule?

What if it teaches people how to relate to other members of the community or to their environment?

The story has now been reduced to something that is interesting rather than something that is knowledge-bearing.

The same thing can happen with traditional medicine.

We might document that a particular plant has medicinal uses,but the knowledge system surrounding that plant can be much larger: identifying it, locating it, knowing when it appears, understanding how it has traditionally been prepared, knowing who possesses that knowledge and how it is taught.

The plant is only one piece.

The knowledge is the relationship between all those pieces.

We can preserve the shell and lose what was inside

This is perhaps what concerns me most.

We can preserve a traditional dance while losing the history behind it.

We can preserve a language in a museum archive while fewer people speak it.

We can photograph traditional clothing while forgetting the social meanings attached to it.

We can turn a ceremony into a performance for visitors while its original context gradually disappears.

We can document medicinal plants without preserving the intergenerational relationships through which knowledge about those plants was transmitted.

In that sense, preserving culture does not automatically mean preserving knowledge.

UNESCO makes a similar observation about Indigenous languages: knowledge is often embedded in language, and the disappearance of a language can threaten the transmission of cultural and ecological knowledge.

This is why I have started thinking about culture differently.

Perhaps culture is not simply the product of knowledge.

Perhaps culture is also one of the places where knowledge lives.

But Indigenous knowledge is not infallible

There is an important distinction to make here.

I don't think Indigenous knowledge should be romanticized.

Being traditional does not automatically make a belief scientifically accurate.

Indigenous communities, like all human societies, have changed, experimented, adapted, disagreed and made mistakes.

Nor should Indigenous knowledge be presented as an alternative that must replace modern science.

That isn't the argument.

The more interesting question is:

Why must different knowledge systems compete for legitimacy in the first place?

Modern science has extraordinary tools for testing hypotheses, measuring phenomena and building models.

Indigenous knowledge can contain generations of observations rooted in particular landscapes and lived experience.

The two aren't identical.

But they don't necessarily have to be enemies.

UNESCO itself recognizes the potential of bringing Indigenous and local knowledge into conversation with natural and social sciences when addressing biodiversity loss, resilience and environmental change.

Perhaps the future isn't about choosing one system over another.

Perhaps it is about learning how to listen across systems without assuming that only one way of knowing deserves to be called knowledge.

And then there is the question of who gets to define knowledge

This is where the conversation becomes uncomfortable.

Throughout history, Indigenous knowledge has often been classified by outsiders using categories such as tradition, belief, custom, folklore or even superstition.

Meanwhile, knowledge produced through universities, laboratories and written institutions is much more readily recognized as science or expertise.

Of course, there are real differences between these forms of knowledge.

But categories also carry power.

Who gets to name something as knowledge?

Who gets to decide what counts as evidence?

Whose observations become published?

Whose language is considered academically legitimate?

Whose understanding of a forest is included when conservation policies are designed?

These aren't merely academic questions.

They affect whose knowledge survives.

They affect whose history is remembered.

And sometimes, they affect who gets to remain connected to the places from which that knowledge emerged.

So what do we actually lose?

Maybe the loss isn't simply “culture.”

Maybe it is ways of knowing.

We can lose ecological observations accumulated across generations.

We can lose words that describe places, plants, seasons and relationships that don't have easy equivalents elsewhere.

We can lose oral histories.

We can lose memories attached to landscapes.

We can lose methods of teaching.

We can lose relationships between generations.

We can lose ways of understanding humanity's place within the natural world.

And once those relationships disappear, they can be incredibly difficult to reconstruct.

A book can record a story.

An archive can preserve a photograph.

A database can document a plant.

But knowledge isn't always contained in an object.

Sometimes knowledge exists in practice.

It exists in knowing what to do, when to do it, why to do it and who taught you.

That is much harder to preserve.

I went to Kakamega looking at culture. I left thinking about knowledge.

That may be the biggest thing my trip changed for me.

I began the journey thinking about culture in the way many of us do.

I expected to encounter traditions, stories and history.

And I did.

But I began to see those things differently.

I started wondering what knowledge was being carried inside them.What does a story remember?What does a ritual teach?

What does a language preserve?

What does a community know about a landscape that an outsider might never notice?

And what happens when the tradition survives, but the knowledge that gave it meaning disappears?Perhaps we need to be careful about treating Indigenous culture as something frozen in the past,something to be displayed, photographed and admired.

Because Indigenous knowledge is not merely a relic. It is knowledge that has been developed, practiced and transmitted by people living in particular places and responding to particular environments.

And perhaps the question isn't simply:

“How do we preserve Indigenous culture?”

Perhaps we should also be asking:

“What knowledge is hidden inside the culture we are trying to preserve?”

Because if we preserve only the visible traditions, we may preserve the shell while losing what was inside.

And maybe that is what we stand to lose,not culture itself, but the countless ways human beings have learned to understand, remember and live in the world.

Article by Michelle Okah.