Knowledge Transfers and Indigenous Knowledge
To investigate the various routes for transmitting knowledge and culture, I use a concept relating to knowledge transfer devised by the sociologist H. M. Collins (1993, 95–116): encultured knowledge.
This term is useful for understanding the relationships among the children, the family, and the local community. It refers to a shared understanding achieved through socialisation and acculturation; thus, it is dependent upon and changes with the surroundings. Embedded knowledge, defined as tacit knowledge that resides within structures and routines, also seems an appropriate concept in the context of schooling. It covers the material structure and the organisation of the school. The two concepts do not cover knowledge transfer through the curricula—the topics taught at school—which is an explicit form of communicating what the school authorities recognise as knowledge. The curricula will not be investigated in this chapter, although there are interesting studies available on Sami school history (Folkenborg 2008).Transfer is not a one-way movement, and knowledge is transformed when it is brought into new contexts. The concept ‘appropriation’ has been used to demonstrate that knowledge is not simply passed on but changed in the process (Simon and Herran 2008). One must consider power relations, though, and what role indigenous knowledge played in issues of schooling and education. Was there any room for the ‘otherness’ represented by the Sami? The term ‘indigenous knowledge’ has no fixed meaning, as indigenous peoples are not a homogenous group; indigenous knowledge consequently varies and is ‘place-based’ (Marker 2015, 483; Shanley and Evjen 2015, 20, 62–66). However, it usually denotes collective stories, customs, experiences, practices, spirituality and values, and ways of knowing and seeing that might differ from neighbouring majority societies (Iriye and Saunier 2009, 523–526). In this chapter, the focus will be upon experiences, practices, and values. In that respect, it might be helpful to think of the Sami child as standing between two systems of knowledge, that of their family and local community and the one we, for the sake of simplicity, might call the Western system (Keskitalo, Määttä, and Uusiautti 2012).