Knowing From the Inside seeks to reconfigure the relation between practices of inquiry in the human sciences and the forms of knowledge to which they give rise. Its fundamental premise is that knowledge is not created through an encounter between minds furnished with concepts and theories, and a material world already populated with objects, but grows from the crucible of our practical and observational engagement with the world around us. Knowledge, we contend, comes from thinking with, from and through beings and things, not just about them.
My paper will explore how the hugely endangered tribal people of Odisha, who survive despite the aggression of the state, the destruction of the eco-system, and in the midst of a strange juxtaposition of an age-renascent savagery and a conquest-ridden civilization. Perhaps, we the Indian people and those others who come from essentially multi-lingual and multi-cultural nations around the world, who survive with the essences of their own cultures intact, really want to make contributions first and foremost to the continued survival of these cultures, rather than to something called ‘civilization’, which is, after all, alien to their traditional cultures, and usually antagonistic to them as well. This seems a sinister marriage and yet this precisely is the situation that may offer us an answer to the enigma of vision as a capacity to rediscover a scale of community, a primordial voice. For, as Carl Jung suggests, “he who speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices”. My paper will essentially look at how slowly but surely the many voices in this mosaic is being re-sensed in terms of “Orality” rather than the literate discourse, and how the cognitive process of the “indigenous”, “non-literate” is at variance with the “modern”, “literate” youth of today.
