Abstract

Zeyad el Nabolsy: Hountondji, while critical of the ethnosciences, namely the study of things like “traditional” mathematical and astronomical knowledge from an anthropological perspective, does defend the importance of studying what he calls “endogenous knowledge”. Can you say something about this? Carmen De Schryver: We should say something about his choice of the term “endogenous” over the term “indigenous”. He really wants to question the idea that, insofar as we are talking about African systems of knowledge, we are talking about “indigeneity” because of the connotations of that term, especially in the anthropological literature that he is responding to, with pre-modernity. The concept of “endogeneity”, by contrast, is really getting at the contrast, not between the indigenous and the modern, but between endogenous and exogenous, where it is a question of where do these systems of knowledge emanate from; are they in the first place of African providence? Are they imported from Europe? That is the key distinction for Hountondji, rather than this tradition-modernity distinction. This idea that something that is contemporaneous with European science is pre-modern is, I think, worth challenging.