Commons that speak many languages
Community archives, the khipu, and infrastructures governed by those they describe
This event is part of a demonstration of what Lera offers for running knowledge events. Its content is written with care and draws on real sources, but the conference has not taken place, and apart from the convener its participants are fictional.
In Cusco, in a house where the council of a rural community keeps its records, there is a chest full of land registers, old photographs and a few khipus: knotted cords that once held the count of herds and the shares of water. No common cataloguing system has a place for that chest. Either it is labelled 'ethnographic objects' and handed to a museum, or its contents are rendered into Spanish so they fit a catalogue. Both roads end in the same place: the community's knowledge becomes visible only once it no longer belongs to the community.
My argument is that we have been asking the question of open access from the wrong side. We have asked how to put knowledge in everyone's hands, and far less often who decides its form, its language and the rules by which it moves. Elinor Ostrom showed that shared resources do not inevitably end in 'tragedy', provided that those who draw on a resource also write its rules. Knowledge is no exception. A commons whose rules were written by others is not a commons. It is a shop window.
The khipu as an information system
In his work on the khipu, Gary Urton has shown that the cords carried something close to a binary encoding: the direction of a knot, the colour of a strand and the way it was attached to the main cord each made meaning. A khipu was not a text in the European sense, but it was an information system. It had structure, it had rules, and it had trained readers. Spanish colonial rule did not destroy it because it meant nothing; it destroyed it because its meaning was out of reach of the priest and the tax collector. This is not an old lesson. Wherever knowledge is treated today as 'illegible' only because it does not arrive in the dominant language or format, the same logic is at work.
This is where the idea of language-agnostic knowledge becomes political for me. If the identity of a piece of knowledge is not tied to one language, if the Quechua text is the original and the Spanish and English are representations of the same thing, then a community's knowledge no longer has to be translated in order to be seen, and lost in the translation. A translation sits beside the original, not in its place. And every new representation carries a record of where it came from and who accepted it.
Governance, not access alone
The FAIR principles are valuable for research data: data should be findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. But they say nothing about power. The CARE principles, set out by the Global Indigenous Data Alliance in 2019, bring the missing question forward: collective benefit, authority to control, responsibility and ethics. My proposal is simple. Every knowledge infrastructure should be able to answer who allowed this knowledge to be here, in which language its original stands, and who can take it back.
Boaventura de Sousa Santos speaks of 'epistemicide': the destruction of ways of knowing, not only of what is known. Today's digital infrastructures can do the same work quietly and politely, through forms that accept a single language and fields that have no room for oral knowledge. They can also do the opposite. The choice between the two is not technical but political, and it is made every day in the design of every database, whether its designers know it or not.
I bring three concrete requests to this conference. First, that libraries and archives holding Indigenous collections rewrite the description of those collections together with the communities they come from, and stop treating that work as a side project. Second, that every new knowledge system record, from its first day, the original language of every text, and treat a translation as a representation of it rather than its replacement. Third, that European research budgets spent on the Global South hand part of the authority to decide to the people who are the subject of the research. None of this needs new technology. It needs will.
Questions for discussion
- If a community wants to withdraw knowledge it has entrusted to an infrastructure, which existing system actually allows it to?
- Can the original of a piece of knowledge be written in a language that search engines and language models barely know, and still remain findable?
- What do European libraries holding Latin American collections owe the communities to whom that knowledge belongs?
References
Ostrom, Elinor. 1990. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge University Press.
Hess, Charlotte, and Elinor Ostrom, eds. 2007. Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice. MIT Press.
Urton, Gary. 2003. Signs of the Inka Khipu: Binary Coding in the Andean Knotted-String Records. University of Texas Press.
Wilkinson, Mark D., et al. 2016. 'The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship.' Scientific Data 3: 160018.
Carroll, Stephanie Russo, et al. 2020. 'The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance.' Data Science Journal 19 (1): 43.
Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. 2014. Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide. Paradigm Publishers.