Hermeneutics, Eco-Justice, and Indigenous Knowledge

An article just published advocates the use of eco-hermeneutics as a way of bringing place back into the development of curriculum. The authors argue that eco-hermeneutics finds deeper ways of understanding places beyond the walls of academia. The citation of the article is: Andrejs Kulnieks, Dan Roronhiakewen Longboat, and Kelly Young, "Re-Indigenizing Curriculum: An Eco-Hermeneutic Approach to Learning," AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Scholarship 6, no. 1 (2010): pp. 15-24. (go to journal website).

The way that the authors define "eco-hermeneutics" is spelled out in the first part of the essay. For them, one quality of eco-hermeneutics is that it acts as a corrective to the over-emphasis on written texts. Certainly, the aim of interpretation is to seek meaning, and the desire to seek meaning is found in language. But, the authors argue, meaning is also temporal--and this temporality moves us to recognize the importance of place in our quest for meaning. The academic tradition has neglected place and other forms of physically instantiated meaning by concentrating their hermeneutical investigations on written, disembodied language. In other words, unlike traditional hermeneutics, eco-hermeneutics places a priority on oral tradition, opening the door to see how indigenous knowledge can inform our understanding of place.

This critique of the written text is provocative, but also perhaps mistakes what can constitute "text" for philosophical hermeneutics. On the one hand, the authors make an important point in seeking to include local knowledge in the reading of place. This knowledge is not exclusively from contemporary science and technology. In that sense, the description that the authors provide of indigenous knowledge shows how we might approach place in more tentative, open ways--that is, in ways that allow for other perspectives and more environmentally friendly relationships.

On the other hand, the oral narratives (and indigenous knowledge more generally) that the authors point to are also "texts." Therefore it is perhaps extreme to assume that hermeneutics approaches written and oral texts differently. At the root of the authors' argument, then, is the recognition that we form a number of competing narratives of place and nature. Each of these is text, broadly construed. Even if it isn't "discourse fixed in writing" (Ricoeur), oral narratives do exhibit other forms of textuality. Hermeneutics is about more than printed texts: it is about the inevitable interpretion of life. The authors state, "Rather than depending solely upon its reconstruction through print-centred learning, eco-hermeneutics seeks to include interpretive experiential learning in this process of inquiry [into place]. These investigations include properly learning to tell and interpret stories that are indigenous to the places they live" (p. 17). I think we can say that philosophical hermeneutics itself must always be an "eco-hermeneutics" under this definition.

For the authors,eco-hermeneutics (based on indigenous traditions, the use of storytelling and environmental autobiography, and a new hermeneutic that asks the reader 'to develop an understanding of the physical, ecological, and bio-cultural aspects of the story..." {p. 18]) is needed to reform academic curriculum. They write, "Our concern here is for the importance of truth-telling and the revival of practices that seek to establish a relationship between language and place. As academics, educators and teachers, our responsibility is to revitalize the notion that stories and the understandings that they represent are for the benefit of everybody and everything that is of place" (p. 19). I would be interested to see how this informs not only environmental studies classes, but other endeavors in the academy.

Finally, for the authors this goal toward a better understanding of place is tied to the language of eco-justice. Eco-justice language offers the linguistic framework for this new hermeneutical account. I don't know of other attempts to explicitly tie the eco-justice movement to philosophical hermeneutics, but this seems to be a worthwhile conversation to begin.