• Aucun résultat trouvé

LEGITIMIZING KNOWLEDGES. The reconfiguration of social hierarchies around African wetlands of international interest.

N/A
N/A
Protected

Academic year: 2021

Partager "LEGITIMIZING KNOWLEDGES. The reconfiguration of social hierarchies around African wetlands of international interest."

Copied!
2
0
0

Texte intégral

(1)

HAL Id: hal-02293976

https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02293976

Submitted on 22 Sep 2019

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access

archive for the deposit and dissemination of

sci-entific research documents, whether they are

pub-lished or not. The documents may come from

teaching and research institutions in France or

abroad, or from public or private research centers.

L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est

destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents

scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non,

émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de

recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires

publics ou privés.

LEGITIMIZING KNOWLEDGES. The reconfiguration

of social hierarchies around African wetlands of

international interest.

Luisa Arango, Guillaume Christen, Aurélien Losser, Eurydice Devos

To cite this version:

Luisa Arango, Guillaume Christen, Aurélien Losser, Eurydice Devos. LEGITIMIZING

KNOWL-EDGES. The reconfiguration of social hierarchies around African wetlands of international interest..

Upper Rhine Cluster for Sustainability Research, Sep 2018, Strasbourg, France. �hal-02293976�

(2)

LEGITIMIZING KNOWLEDGES.

The reconfiguration of social hierarchies around African wetlands of international interest

HYPOTHESIS

Knowledge has not legitimacy in essence. Its validity emerges in particular situations where converge the personal biographies of participants, the weight of institutions involved, the tools and methods employed and the frames of reference evoked. These elements produce original legitimacies that appear against binary and conventional categorizations of knowledge (North/South, Skilled/Unskilled, Intellectual/Manual, Masculine/Feminine).

Our aim1is to test this hypothesis in situations involving different knowledges around the declaration of a wetland of international interest in Sudan2.

CASE 1: The distribution of tasks in the

counting of migratory water birds

January 14, 2018, it is 8 a.m., C. gave me an appointment at the Kehl station. Other people arrive at the meeting point, with binoculars, spyglasses, bird guides and a detailed map of the Rhine divided into different counting areas. Indeed, each year in January, the Wetlands International Wetlands Census takes place, where volunteers carry out a census of migratory waterbirds in order to have an overview of the migratory bird population. There are different teams of counters, most of which are volunteers. Although this system is based on a principle of participatory science, it is possible to identify within a counting team differentiated legitimacies of knowledge .

According to the Wetlands monitoring coordinator, each team is lead by a sector manager who has a certain legitimacy following his counting experiences : "For the Rhine sectors, there is always a whole hierarchy, there is always a sector manager who we try to retain, the person with the best experience in the field, it is him who will organize the team, the distribution of tasks, who sets appointments and schedules. When someone sees a rarity, or something they can't identify, it's the sector manager who will validate the information”.

Such way of knowledge construction raises questions about the functioning of participatory science and the limited role of volunteers as "sentinels“. The issue of participation is not limited to the simple involvement of stakeholders. It also questions a pluralist conception of knowledge production and the legitimacy accorded to non-formal knowledge.

From February 14thto 16th2018, members of the RESSOURCE project came

to Tendelti to proceed to the counting of migratory waterbirds in the Khor Abu Habil region. We were twelve, divided in three groups according to our bird watching experience: 1-Five “experts” coming to identify and count these birds, amongst which two French specialists, a Tunisian expert, a Sudanese Professor of biology and an administrator from the national police); 2-Four Sudanese “learners” ; 3-Two Sudanese drivers and a French junior anthropologist, all without experience in bird watching.

In order to count the birds, we first had to reach their habitat: waterpoints called mayaa. To find them, the team relied on satellite data provided by a French cartographer. Maps, printed, squared and paired to a GPS, enabled us to orientate ourselves through dunes and fields. This method worked well for most of the mayaa, but we didn’t find one of them. We thus required the help of a local inhabitant whom got in one of our cars to lead the team to this waterpoint which he knew. He brought us there, a few kilometers further, without any map telling us that “sometimes, water goes over the dunes” transforming the landscape. To spend everyday life there enables the learning of the local geography (Ingold 2010) and could become a guarantee of legitimacy in the knowledge of this place, questioning the “scientific” legitimacy (Fassin and Fassin 1988). The combination of these two spheres of knowledges – “scientific” and “local” – enabled the team to fulfill its goal.

CASE 2 : Using local knowledges to find

bearings in the Sudanese desert

K h o r A b u H ab il A re a, C . D es ch am p s, 2 0 1 7

CASE 4 : The

untranslatable local

realities

During a collective work reunion, Sudanese men and women coming from different backgrounds, be it geographic or professional, attempted to adapt to the Sudanese context the methodology and concepts used by the agents of CIRAD in their qualitative questionnaire. This questionnaire, also used in other countries but every time adjusted, must be now made effective in Sudan in order to learn more on the different usages of the avian resources . English is used here as the lingua franca, enabling the French and Sudanese teams to communicate together. After several misunderstandings about the local actors and resources usages, and despite the presence of an interpret, they realized that these difficulties were rather of an ontological kind. The problem

was not the language but the categories used to think the local

institutions by Sundaneses and Frenches

After three hours of work and in short of ideas to account for, the CIRAD agent stepped aside and let them discuss and debate between themselves in Arabic. All of them spontaneously stood up and discussed together at length around the board to re-organise completely the heuristic outline. Not without surprise, he let them do so. It resulted in a profound but more complete work, with new conceptual elements and a better understanding of the Sudanese reality, particularly highlighting the importance of the local political and religious powers unknown from French team (the sheikh in particular).

CASE 3 : Reconfiguring generational

hierarchies at an international scene

In February 2018, the partners of the RESSOURCE project held their first plenary session in Sudan. It summoned about forty Sudanese, French and German partners at the headquarters of the national police force. A young Sudanese, Phd candidate in hydrogeology at a German university, presented her work in Sudanese Arabic. Her speech was nevertheless pointed by words in English as « ecosystem services » or « sandy soils » that she tried to explain in Arabic, creating some confusions among the audience. During the presentation, the ancient RAMSAR focal point, a Sudanese researcher, of about fifty years old, asked the young lady to shift her presentation into English, as lingua franca in the scientific world. Yet, the student, convinced that a large part of the public could not then follow her speech, decided to continue her presentation in Arabic.

In this situation, the dominant place allowed to English in sciences is disputed by a young student with a biography marked by a multicultural family, studies in Germany, and the participation to Pan-African reflection groups in Europe. This case joins the recent discussions about "youth" as a category of analysis useful to understand new social strengths that, in the Sudan, have brought young people to the forefront as primary actors in a number of settings (Hale and Kadoda, 2015). At the same time, it shows, as others have done, how the introduction of new technologies and knowledges in the country allowed young people to challenge the moral authority of their elders (Calkins, 2016). It also evidences how the legitimacy usually granted to the elder in the Sudan is shaken by the introduction of new international institutions as well as by the individual history of social actors.

RESSOURCE Workshop, Hichem Azafzaf, February 2018

Luisa ARANGO, Guillaume CHRISTEN, Aurélien LOSSER, Eurydice DEVOS

Institut d’Ethnologie, Faculté de Sciences Sociales Université de Strasbourg, Laboratoire SAGE UMR 7363 arangocuervo@unistra.fr C e p o st er e t le t ra va il d e re ch er ch e d o n t il es t is su o n t ét é ré al is és d an s le c ad re d e l'I d ex U n is tr a et o n t b én éf ic ié d ’u n e ai d e d e l’E ta t gé ré e p ar l’ A ge n ce N at io n al e d e la R ec h er ch e au t it re d u p ro gr am m e d ’In ve st is se m en ts d ’a ve n ir

1. SavNat Africa project

https://sage.unistra.fr/programmes-contrats-de-recherche/ projets-dexcellence/idex/sav-nat-afrique/

2. RESSOURCE project

http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/445405/icode/

Bibliography

- Fassin, É., Fassin, D. (1988) « De la quête de légitimation à la question de la légitimité : les thérapeutiques “traditionnelles” au Sénégal », Cahiers d’Études Africaines, vol. 28, Cahier 110, pp. 207-231.

- Ingold, T., (2000), The Perception of the Environment. Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill, Londres, New York, Routledge.

- Hale, S., Kadoda, G. (2015), “Introduction. Identities evolving, mobilities expanding, and technologies intervening – Things come together” in S. Hale and G. Kadoda (eds.). Networks of knowledge production in Sudan: identities, mobilities, and technologies. Lanham; Boulder; New York; London: Lexington Books, pp. 1–22. - Calkins, S. (2016), « How “clean gold” came to matter. Metal detectors, infrastructure, and valuation», Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, n° 6, vol. 2, pp. 173–195.

CIRAD Workshop, Alice Noulin, february 2018

"T h e co u n ti n g ar ea s o n t h e R h in e“ , G ra n d E st R eg io n , Fe b ru ar y 2 0 1 1

Références

Documents relatifs

From left to right: original relief (gradient of the flower image of Fig. 7), effect of the viscous transformation of size 30 (mercury model: ˜ T ), effect of the viscous closing

Toutes les données fournies par les Parties sur chaque site Ramsar sont consignées dans la Banque de données Ramsar tenue par Wetlands International sous contrat de la

On the other hand, it is well-known that the middle Betti number of a hypersurface with isolated singularities is not a purely local invariant but it depends on the

(4) In the Republic of Korea, cancer patients accessing the National Cancer Centre experience a deeper and more significant meaning of continuity of care as patients doing

The programme was implemented in phases and key actions included strengthening local management skills, developing outreach initiatives, integrating primary

B~ing regard to the invitation of tne Government of the Kingdom of Morocco, Decides to hold its second session at Tangier, between January and March 1960 - (the exact date to be

The CCITT V.22 standard defines synchronous opera- tion at 600 and 1200 bit/so The Bell 212A standard defines synchronous operation only at 1200 bit/so Operation

year (1958-1959) for the Licence de Lettres Arabes and ,rill be exteridedto courses leading to the Licence d'Histoire and the Licence de Sciences Economiguesi for which students