Indigenous Philosophy and Multiple Modernities

The inception of the project of modernity resides in the projection of a self-fulfilling subjective rationality that leads both to better self-understanding as well as a control of the environment. Still, failing to serve a truly universal human agenda, modernity narrowly propagated the values of Western culture. Part of justifying such an ideological status quo is made possible by the colonial sciences that ascribed reason, logic and objectivity to Westerners and emotion, affection and oneness to the “other”. Operating within a binary framework of tradition and modernity and emotion and rationality, the colonial sciences like anthropology and ethnology created the notion of an indigenous culture and knowledge that is strictly traditional, static, oral and non-progressive. As such, rather than studying others in their entire milieu, the colonial sciences propounded an antithesis between traditional indigenous culture which is a seat of mythology, and scientific modernity that is empirical and technical. Such a quest systematically degrades indigenous knowledge, culture and philosophy for the paradigm of scientific and technological rationality. This paper argues that the solution to such Westernization of all human knowledge resides in the concept of multiple modernities which situates alternative movements in the world of globalization as attempts to contextualize modernity in different sites of knowledge and also allows for different cognitive dimensions that are mutually incommensurable. This allows for the contestation of indigenous, scientific, secular and other modes of knowledge.