Brother Can You Paradigm?

Alternative views of reality exist outside the Western framework of rationalism and science, and these views have an internal logic of their own with their own variety of scepticism.

Consider the following statements, all paraphrased from things I have been told by Papua New Guinean tertiary students:

"There is a strange-looking stone just outside the village. A masalai [malevolent spirit] lives in it. If a woman bears a deformed child, we know that she walked near the stone when she was pregnant."

"We always have to be careful about sorcery being worked on us by jealous wantoks [clansmen or tribesmen]. One of my friends here has marks all over her body. Doctors cannot explain it. It must be sorcery."

"We started using different methods to cultivate traditional crops at my village, and there was serious flooding which destroyed many crops. our tumbuna [ancestral spirits] were angry. We went back to the traditional ways and there has been no flooding since."

Are these statements consistent with sceptical thought? The answer I would like to suggest is "Yes."

But isn't scepticism a philosophical position which challenges claims of the paranormal? Of course, but herein lies an implied challenge to Western scepticism, which defines paranormal in terms of a particular world view and the paradigms which underpin it.

Western science is very much the philosophical progenitor of Western scepticism, and Western science is reductionist. It assumes that the whole is no greater than the sum of its parts, that the isolation of the parts is a valid etological approach, and that anything which does not conform to preconditions specified by its methodological approach is therefore somehow outside the scope of "normality."

Alternative Realities

There are alternative ways of conceptualising reality. There are alternative world views associated with alternative paradigms, resulting in alternative logical frameworks of thought and which, ipso facto, give rise to alternative forms of scepticism.

The acid test is not whether or not such alternative world views are "scientific" (i.e. compatible with Western scientifically derived paradigms) or not; it is whether they are internally consistent or not. For if internal consistency is good enough for Western science and scepticism, then surely it is "cheating" — and maybe just a little intellectually dishonest — to insist that non-Western paradigms must validate themselves against Western ones.

Holisticism, at least in the form of considering all phenomena to be interrelated, is starting to creep into physics. Not that there is anything new about a holistic world view — Papua New Guineans have been conceptualising reality that way for millennia.

World Views

What determines the perceived relevance of a given world view is largely the environment, both natural and cultural, in which that world view operates. Take a traditional New Guinea Highlands situation. The "world" is a fairly small place: an area of bush with a patch of sky above and a chunk of "underworld" below, inhabited by a conceptualisable number of entities — people, animals, plants, rocks, waterholes and so on. These constitute the Whole to which people relate; what is outside that very personal Whole is rather inconsequential, and traditional attitudes towards it tend to reflect Stephen Hawking's attitude towards time before the Big Bang — "of no observational consequence".

It is understandable that such a relevant Whole should be treated as such, and not in a reductionist way. So many entities and events are obviously interrelated that it is a justifiable conceptual extrapolation to posit that all things are related. As it is Man who is at the hub of this natural and conceptual ecosystem, the anthropocentrism of the traditional New Guinean world view is equally comprehensible, given its derivation.

Given these paradigmatic frames of reference, little wonder then that the New Guinean conceptualisation of causality is so different from Western concepts. If the Whole functions as such, and the parts are subservient to it, the very essence of the idea of "cause and effect" takes on a whole new meaning. Statements like "the rain falls to make our crops grow" make sense in the form that our need for crops to grow is the "cause" of the rain falling. They are logical in that they are consistent with a given set of world view parameters.

In fact, the word "because" in the epistemological sense that we Westerners use it doesn't even exist in most New Guinean languages; hence its adoption into the vocabularies of many indigenous languages from English.

Normal And Paranormal

Returning to a small, manageable whole, it also follows logically that.any division between the "natural" and "supernatural," or "normal" and paranormal," is etologically superfluous, as by definition, there is no such beast as the "supernatural" or "paranormal."

What is, is; and what cannot be observed directly can be inferred from its effects — a statement no Western scientist would reject in principle. While paranormality may not exist, abnormality does, and is defined as departure from normality (of course); so "what is normal?" is the ultimate question.

To the New Guinean it is for him and his family and pigs and dogs and crops to be healthy and happy. This state of affairs — or departure from it — is an indicator of the harmonious ticking over of, or disharmony within, the Whole of which he is the principal reference point.

Why then illness, crop failure and so on? "Bad luck" is a meaningless phrase to apply to a world view with no need for the notion of chance, in itself a concept inexpressible in indigenous languages. Something has to give rise to these phenomena, something that we would call a "cause."

The real difference between "cause" as we conceptualise it and "cause" as understood by the New Guinea tribesman is exemplified by Highlands ethnomedical practices. The symptoms of the disease are only signs of problems on a higher plane than the individual, and many treatments are accordingly — and logically — at a sociobiological level rather than paralleling therapeutic practices that we use. (Those wishing to delve deeper into these issues may consult Mayer [1982] and Gardner [1987].

Most causes are, however, what Western skeptics would call the "paranormal" kind — masalais, sangumas (another genre of spirit-being), sorcery, puripuri (magic) and ghosts. But these are not the vacuous zombies which many Westerners envisage when confronted with such terms: they are real, not only in the inferential sense, but often corporeally.

Masalais live in trees, rocks and waterholes, among other sites, and give these natural entities many of their characteristics. Sangumas take on corporeal forms like bats, and may be able to speak through mediums. Ghosts are often visible, and can communicate with the living through dreams. Even a sceptic would regard a dream as "real", albeit outside the scope of scientific instruments, wouldn't he.

There is most certainly as much room for scepticism in a conceptual ecology delineated by the paradigms I have described as there is in one delineated by Western scientifically derived paradigms. As there are rules of logic, so there are ways of evaluating the validity of a claim, which may lead to its being regarded as illogical or irrational.

Paradigms Lost

Problems arise when paradigms are translated from one world view to another. This problem is usually avoided by Western-educated Papua New Guineans adopting a dualistic world view. One set of rules governing reality operates in traditional cultural contexts, and another in non-traditional contexts like a school science laboratory. While conceptual dualism theory generally postulates that each set of rules has its own sphere of influence, it has been found that Papua New Guinean students often apply the same interpretative frames of reference to Western science that they apply to "paranormal" phenomena. (Those with access to PNGJoE may wish to refer to Dart [1971] and Young [1977]).

March 1991 Number 19 My job is the training of science teachers, and I have taken a step which would raise many a Western skeptical eyebrow: the incorporation of Melanesian ethnoscience and its associated world view into science programs, hopefully starting next year (for details of some of the research leading to this, see Vlaardingerbroek, 1990). Perhaps if Papua New Guinean students can be made to see the holisticism, anthropocentrism and functionalism of Melanesian science — something quite a few are embarrassed about, even though they believe a lot of it — they may be able fully to appreciate Western science's reductionism, objectivism and abstractionism. And it's quite possible that the experience will make them a lot more sceptical about both.

Barend Vlaardingerbroek is a lecturer in science education at the University of Papua New Guinea.

References

Dart, F. E. (1971). Towards a scientific attitude in developing countries.

Papua New Guinea Journal of Education 7(2): 19-26.

Gardner, D. S. (1984). A note on the androgynous qualities of the cassowary: or why the Mianmin say it is not a bird. Oceania 55(2): 137-44.

Gardner, D. S. (1987). Spirits and conceptions of agency among the Mianmin of PNG. Oceania 57(3): 161-77.

Mayer, J. R. (1982). Body, psyche and society: conceptions of illness in Ommura, Eastern Highlands, Papua New Guinea. Oceania 52(3): 240-60.

Ollier, C. D.; Drover, D. P.; Godelier, M. (1971). Soil knowledge amongst the Baruya of Wonenara, New Guinea. Oceania 42(1): 32-42.

Vlaardingerbroek, B. (1990). Ethnoscience and science teacher training in Papua New Guinea. Journal of Education for Teaching 16(3): 217-24.

Young, R. E. (1977). Education and the image of western knowledge in PNG (Part 1). Papua New Guinea Journal of Education 13(1): 21-35.