Dear Friends,
I have been reflecting on a question that underlies many conversations today about culture, knowledge, and civilizational renewal: What are the conditions under which knowledge itself arises?
Much of what we call knowledge today is shaped within modern epistemic frameworks that privilege abstraction, representation, and control. This raises a particularly important concern in the current efforts to revive Indian Knowledge Systems.
Across civilizations, many indigenous knowledge traditions emerged under very different conditions—through direct engagement with life, disciplined observation, and an integration of value, knowledge, and aesthetics.
A deeper question, however, remains largely unexamined: To what extent are our attempts to understand these traditions still framed within the cognitive structures of modern Western education? Can traditions that emerged from lived inquiry truly be understood within frameworks that separate knowledge from life?
These reflections led me to frame a set of foundational questions about the nature of knowing itself—about the roles of experience, values, and aesthetics in cognition; the relationship between text and lived practice; and how research might be approached within knowledge traditions that were never organized as academic disciplines.
I have gathered these questions in a short essay titled “The Colonization of Cognition: Foundational Questions for Cultural Regeneration — The Indian Case.” While the immediate context is India, the inquiry speaks more broadly to all cultures attempting to rediscover the living foundations of knowledge.
Please read the full article here
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/colonization-cognition-jinan-kb-zjizc/
Substack: othingparenting.substack.com/p/the-colonization-of-cognitio
Medium: https://jinankb.medium.com/the-colonization-of-cognition-13f78f5ea278
Warm regards,
Jinan K. B.