Economics is grounded in what Berkes (1998) calls the “Cartesian paradigm” (p121): a rationalist approach that assumes the existence of a knowable external reality governed by absolute laws. Whether economics is a science is an ongoing argument in the Academy, but economics does reflect Western science’s reductionism.
“The development of positivist-reductionist science was closely linked to the emergence of industrialization (sic) and to economic theories of both capitalism and communism. Through the technological domination of the Earth, scientists and economists promised to deliver a more fair, rational, efficient and productive life for everyone” (Berkes 1998, p122).
The Western scientific framework underpinning economics has meant the negotiated meaning of the science has embedded assumptions in its narrative that are considered so self-evident as to be non-existent. Societies that fail or have failed to fit these assumptions have found themselves floundering against a wall of mutual incomprehension. Examples of this mutual incomprehension can be found in the interactions between mainstream Australian society and Indigenous Australians.
As Christie and Perrett state, the need for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people to engage with each other requires discussions between divergent systems of knowledge, language and power. “In many such engagements,” say Christie and Perrett, “cultural miscues, misunderstandings and profound incomprehension can have consequences for relations between Aboriginal people and non-Aboriginal development processes” (p57).
Christie and Perrett, along with Berkes (1998) are discussing Indigenous ecological knowledge. Nonetheless, the statement that Indigenous knowledge systems are fundamentally inconsistent with the positivist-reductionist tradition (p122) applies to economics as well as science, firstly because economics embodies the same positivistic-reductionist paradigm and secondly because of the holistic nature of many Indigenous cultures.
The Australian Aboriginal worldview is essentially holistic (Gostin & Chong 1994, p123) and in many ways it is impossible to separate out different facets of Aboriginal life and examine them in isolation of each other. While the European world view tends to separate the spiritual, natural and human domains, the Aboriginal world view sees every aspect of human life and the environment as equal manifestations of a spiritual or cosmic order (Gostin & Chons 1994, p123). Social factors are inextricably linked with political and economic factors (Young & Doohan 1989, p35) and therefore discussions of property, hierarchy, land, kinship and language must also incorporate spirituality, science, art, politics and economics, as each of these contains elements of the others.
“It is not possible to separate Indigenous science from other areas of life such as ethics, spirituality, metaphysics, social order, ceremony... (and therefore) remains inseparable from the cohesive whole, from a way of being and coming-to-knowing (Peat 1996, p139).
This holistic, versus atomised, conception of a society’s structure has traditionally been ignored by anthropologists, who “have contributed to naturalizing (sic) the constructs of economy, politics, religion, kinship and the like as the fundamental building blocks of societies” (Escobar 1995, p 61).
Like all practitioners of the social sciences, economists, notes Capra (1982) make the mistake of dividing the world into independent fragments thereby failing “to recognize (sic) that the economy is merely one aspect of a whole ecological and social fabric; a living system composed of human beings in continual interaction with one another and with their natural resources” (p189). Capra (1982) argues that practitioners of sciences, such as economics, attempting to emulate the methods of the “hard science” prototype of physics relied too much on the Cartesian framework and their models became consequently unrealistic.
According to Escobar (1995), this means that the dominance of modern economic thought has resulted in the suppression, appropriation or disregarding of other societal models and enshrining one hegemonic view of the economy.
Christie (1992) who has worked for many years in education systems describes the way in which the Western reductionism (which he refers to atomism) and abstraction embedded in our education system was conceptually almost impossible for his Yolgnu (Aboriginal) students to comprehend because of the highly metaphorical and negotiated nature of Yolgnu knowledge systems.
Wertheim (1995) contrasts the two knowledge systems: Western scientific knowledge is logically-underpinned by mathematics while the Yolgnu system is based on kinship, called gurrutu. As Peat (1996) asks, “why would people whose philosophy speaks of relationship, the primacy of direct experience, and the interconnectedness of all ever wish to divorce themselves from their world and fragment their experience with such acts of abstraction?” (p138).
Broader though than the implications for inter-cultural interactions, the assumption of objective truth underlying economic thought has, according to Berkes (1998), been accompanied by the belief that all cultures would eventually adopt Western notions of human development and well-being.
“Development economists have typically projected social and economic change in a way that leads all cultures to adopt one correct Western way of thinking. This then justified, for example, policies like exporting development to Africa and the assimilation of indigenous peoples” (Berkes 1998, p123).
What is at stake?
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