Compas: Supporting Endogenous Development

COMPAS: SUPPORTING ENDOGENOUS DEVELOPMENT Mr. Don Philoris Wijenayaka in his ceremonial dress carries out a ritual in a rice field. With mantras and sounds the water is chanted. The spirits of rats, mice, elephants and wild boars are asked to take no more than their fair share of the crop. Mr. Wijenayaka is the shaman, or the Kapu Mahattaya as he is called in Sri Lanka. In Sinhalese this means : the link between the spirits and human beings. Mr. Rukman Wagachchi of the Sri Lankan Network of Agri-Cultural Revival is taking part in this kem ritual. According to the owner of this field, there was less pest damage, lower costs and higher yields after the kem has been performed last season. This season, the farmer wants to observe more carefully and collect more accurate data. The tindana is the earthpriest among the Tallensi in northern Ghana. He exercises spiritual power, especially over land and sacred groves. Tribal people in India use gonads (chalk marks) to communicate with the spiritual world. As part of its traditional organisation, the community has special people, jilakatas, to protect the cultivated fields. They also have to protect the plots against negative influences which are perceived as the result of bad human behaviour (Bolivia). The spirit mediums are the educators on how to live with nature. Nature as the habitat of both the spiritual world and the animal kingdom reaffirm the tripartite relationship between the people, ancestral spirits and the material world (Zimbabwe). With the help of self-made posters, a farmer and spiritual leader explains traditional rituals to other farmers and encourages them to experiment (Sri Lanka). Farmers from Capellani, Bolivia made drawings of their environment and cosmovision during the first COMPAS workshop (1996). The COMPAS network for comparing and supporting endogenous development began in 1995 when NGOs and universities in India, Sri Lanka, Ghana, the Netherlands, Norway, Mexico, Bolivia and Peru agreed to take a fresh look at the farming communities they were working with. They were concerned about the quality of the development activities they were supporting. The development organisations that became partners in the COMPAS programme had gone through a variety of experiences. In the early stages, many had been involved in efforts to enhance agricultural production by the application of fertilisers, hybrid seeds and mechanisation in mono-cultures. Most of them had realised the limitations of this approach in the rainfed farming areas in which they were working and had subsequently built up experiences with agriculture using lower levels of external inputs that made better use of locally available resources. They became engaged in activities such as agroforestry, soil and water harvesting, the use of botanical pesticides, organic manure, multiple cropping and the improvement of local seed. In these efforts they realised that, in most cases, the farming communities themselves had a great wealth of knowledge about the physical and biological environment in which they lived. Farmers know their own soil, their own climatic conditions, their own land races, have learned to manage local water resources and have observed the effects of local herbs on animal health and when used as botanical pesticides. Therefore, many of the technologies developed were largely based on farmers' knowledge. But the partners also learned that rural communities have their own processes for testing new practices and that in seemingly traditional societies, farmers are continuously adapting their farming practices in the light of their experiences. This insight led to many experiences with Participatory Technology Development (PTD), an approach in which farmers and outside agencies cooperate to develop new farming techniques, and where the experimental capacity of farmers determines the choice of topic for experimentation and the criteria for success and failure. The outcome of PTD activities are generally better insights into the possibilities and limitations of new techniques, as well as an improved capacity amongst farmers and outsiders to develop technologies that are appropriate to the local conditions. Working within the cultural context of the rural people, starting with their knowledge, their technologies, and some of their tools, and trying to evolve together with them was a rewarding approach for development agencies. In general, these approaches led to enthusiasm amongst partners and the farmers with whom they worked. It also led to a better relationship between the farming community and outside agencies. In this process, however, several partners also realised that their professional background made it difficult to free themselves from conventional approaches. It proved difficult for them to fully appreciate the real meaning of indigenous knowledge. Formal science was the dominant paradigm and a pace-setter for development. From the formal perspective, indigenous knowledge and rural peoples' cultures matter in so far as they fit into this dominant paradigm. Indigenous technical knowledge was given attention, validated, processed and judged by the standards, criteria and rules of conventional science. 'It is only when we have proof for farmers' knowledge that it is scientific'. And rural peoples' knowledge was only considered relevant to the extent that it could be understood within the dominant paradigm. Participatory Technology Development often meant that farmers participate in processes of technology development that were defined by outsiders. Development intervention based on conventional science often has a negative perception of indigenous knowledge: it is seen as traditional, obsolete, irrelevant, a curiosity or folklore of romantic value. Sometimes, in relation to the use of herbal medicine, it is seen as a source of extraction or as partially useful. Indigenous knowledge is rarely seen as a source of learning and a basis for the exchange of ideas. Of herbal medicines, for example, only the recipes are seen as interesting. This notion led a number of organisations to look deeper into the basic features of indigenous knowledge. Understanding farmers' cosmovisions Historical perspective. The experiences of COMPAS partners first led to an understanding that apart from the western based concepts of science that emerged with the work of Descartes in the seventeenth century, there were many other scientific traditions, past and present. Since mankind became engaged in agriculture, some 10,000 years ago, people have taken an active position towards nature. This required an explicit concept of nature and a definition of the relationship between mankind and nature. In different parts of the world people developed their own interpretation and in the course of history the Chinese, the ancient Indians, peoples from South America, Africa, Middle East, Australia, Greece and Europe developed their own science. The early scientists' main goal was to understand the meaning of things, rather than to predict and control. Questions relating to divine beings, the human soul and ethics were considered to be of the highest significance. Only in the seventeenth century did western science replace the notion of an organic, living and spiritual universe with the notion of the world as a machine. The new methods of enquiry, as advocated by Bacon and developed by Descartes and Newton, involved a mechanistic and mathematical description of nature and an analytical method of reasoning. Descartes concluded that 'mind' and 'matter' were two separate and fundamentally different things. To make it possible for scientists to describe nature mathematically, they had to restrict themselves to studying the essential properties of matter: those that could be quantified by shapes, weights, numbers and movement. Other properties, like colour, sound, taste or smell were considered subjective mental projections and were neglected or excluded from the scientific domain. Aspects related to the mind such as the spiritual worlds, gods, the human soul and emotions were no longer considered part of science, and were left to priests. As the social sciences as we know them today began to develop, they initially applied the same mechanistic approach in these domains. Since the eighteenth century Europe and western countries have adopted an approach to science that reduced the perception of the world to that of a machine. Science became organised in highly specialised disciplines, each focusing on a narrowly defined part of the material world. In the course of the 20th century scientists like Einstein (physics), Heisenberg (quantum physics), Sheldrake and Lovelock (biology), Jung (psychology) and Prigogine (chemistry) brought forward research results and insights that made major corrections to the Cartesian materialistic- mechanistic approach. New concepts include the laws of thermodynamics, chaos theory, the world as a living entity (Gaia), synchronicity (event A and B happen 'when the time is ripe for it, and not necessarily as a consequence of a particular cause'). These new concepts in fact have again brought together 'mind' and 'matter' as part and parcel of one entity. These scientific insights make or rather restore the bridge between the material world and the spiritual world. It should be emphasised that also in the West, in addition to mainstream scientists, agronomists and farmers, there have always been those who maintained a more holistic and spiritual worldview. Examples in Europe are Gnostic movements such as the

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