ABSTRACT
For the past 500 years, indigenous knowledge systems (IKS) have been viewed and expressed through the lens of Western thought, language and perception. As Europe spread its influence across the globe, it also projected itself as the source of the only knowledge that counted in the world. The Western world has hence come to see other cultural traditions and sources of knowledge through the ~lters of the modern view of the world, their own view of the world. Colonization deliberately created paradigmatic opposites: traditional vs. modern; oral vs. written and printed; illiterate vs. literate; rural and agrarian vs. urban and industrialized. In this classification, the traditional, oral, illiterate, rural and agrarian were considered to be inferior and backward, and so were their knowledge and their theories of knowledge. The role of the colonized was consigned to that of consumers of western knowledge. Technology and science, as perceived in the western sense, was used as a measure of the level of civilization of the societies that were brought under colonization. This resulted in the trivialization of the entire mode of life and spiritual framework of millions of people.
