Science for the West, Myth for the Rest?

Do Cree hunters practice science? The answer to this question would seem to depend on whether one defines science according to universal features, or culturally specific ones. If one means by science a social activity that draws deductive inferences from first premises, that these inferences are deliberately and systematically verified in relation to experience, and that models of the world are reflexively adjusted to conform to observed regularities in the course of events, then, yes, Cree hunters practice science—as surely all human societies do. At the same time, the paradigms and social contexts of Cree science differ markedly from those of Western science—accustomed as we are in the West to a "root metaphor" ¹ of impersonal causal forces that opposes "nature" to "mind," "spirit," and "culture," and conditioned as we also are to view legitimate scientific procedure and production as the prerogative of particular professional and institutionalized elites. While there is no a priori reason to expect that knowledge generated out of non-Western paradigms or social processes should be empirically or predictively less adequate, it has been an effect of Western ethnocentrism to construe non-Western knowledge processes as "pseudoscientific," "protoscientific," or merely "unscientific." ² Western science, in fostering an ideology of knowledge that supports its own elite status, has assisted the exclusion and disqualification of innumerable "subjugated knowledges" (Foucault 1980a).