Practical Wisdom, Leadership and Culture

Indigenous, Asian and Middle-Eastern Perspectives

Ali Intezari, Chellie Spiller, Shih-Ying Yang, Ali Intezari, Chellie Spiller, Shih-Ying Yang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367151782
• eBook ISBN: 9780429619267
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Despite the growing attention towards the importance of practical wisdom in business today, little research has been done about the concept of practical wisdom in the Indigenous, Asian and Middle-Eastern traditions. Contemporary studies of wisdom are dominated by the philosophical traditions of Western thought, which is based on the ancient Greek concepts of wisdom. Much less is known about how practical wisdom, as illuminated by these other traditions, can be implemented in today's organizational settings. This book thus fills an important gap in understanding wisdom and how it is applied in a poly-cultural world.

Wisdom is culturally bound. Wisdom is poly-cultural and interweaves individuality and communality. Practical wisdom is inextricably connected to many needs of contemporary personal and professional life. Moreover, the increasingly growing poly-culturality around the world requires a better understanding of how practical wisdom is understood in different cultures and traditions. Accordingly, there is a need for a) poly-cultural understanding of the concept of wisdom and b) the role of practical wisdom in a world crying out for wisdom.

This book underlines the importance of developing a poly-cultural and interdisciplinary understanding of the concept of practical wisdom in today's complex environment. The book offers significant insight into the implications of the non-Western traditions of wisdom and how such an understanding of the non-Western traditions can help us better and more critically understand and appropriately address new multi-faceted complex emerging phenomena. While the Western traditions offer valuable insight into the implication of wisdom in modern life, an integrated view that brings together the Western and non-Western traditions can provide a more critical and practical insight into how to apply practical wisdom in a contemporary poly-cultural environment.

Section I The Indigenous perspective

1 Ecological sustainability and practical wisdom from the Maasai and Hadza people in East Africa

Aloysius Newenham-Kahindi and Charles E. Stevens

Introduction

Indigenous wisdom traditions of ecological sustainability are embodied, implicit, and embedded in Indigenous people’s practice (Battiste, 2013). As such, they cannot be ‘boxed in time and space’ (Dei & Asgharzadeh, 2006, p. 54) or objectified. Traditional ecological wisdom on sustainability represents a body of knowledge held by Indigenous people and provides lessons for contemporary organizations on how to learn from this knowledge and ways of knowing. This wisdom is based on exploring the importance of Indigenous knowledge as a complement to scientific ecology and its cultural and political significance for Indigenous groups themselves. It is based on the traditional dependence of many Indigenous communities, embodying traditional lifestyles, on biological resources and the desirability of equitably sharing benefits arising from the use of traditional knowledge and innovations and practices relevant to the conservation of biological diversity and the sustainable use of its components. Indigenous people’s traditional wisdom of living in harmony with nature and society is wisdom that is contextual and place-specific in nature; it is dynamic and dependent on the culture, place, tradition, history, and geographical position of a given community of people (Gardner, 2016).

Our discussion is based on exploratory research conducted in East Africa. We focus on two Indigenous people: the Maasai and Hadza in Tanzania, whose culture, heritage, and identity have been intimately linked with nature for millennia, resulting in wisdom that is based on countless generations of accumulated tacit, practical, and experiential knowledge. Heritage defines these people’s destiny, as it represents the past, present, and future of their geographical places, such as the famous Great Rift Valley and Lake Eyasi, including the Serengeti and Ngorongoro national parks and the natural wealth across the savannahs in East Africa, as their ancestral heritage for spiritual rites and livestock grazing (Gardner, 2016; Goldman, 2009). Both the Maasai and Hadza cultures are embedded in nature and depend on immediately available resources for daily livelihood. They strive to preserve and defend their way of life. For the Maasai, as pastoralists in particular, this means maintaining livestock productivity, defending their rights and access to water and grazing resources, and ensuring political and economic security for their survival and their animal populations. Cattle are central to Maasai life and their main food supply. Leather from the skin of the cattle is used for clothes and sandals, and cattle dung is used to plaster their houses (known as bomas). The Hadza are hunter-gatherers who depend on naturally available food for daily consumption.

Ecological conservation is key to the stewardship of Indigenous people across the world. However, Indigenous people continue to experience stewardship challenges from external forces leading to deforestation, poaching, problems related to climate change, and poverty (Goldman, 2009). Their ‘way of knowing’ also is threatened by conservationist organizations that have different ways of preserving nature and heritage. For non-Indigenous people, the notion of ecological conservation typically results in a strict Westernized separation of people and nature, thus denying the possibility of the Maasai and Hadza people in sharing their land with wildlife as a viable and sustainable practice. For example, the Maasai live side by side with wild animals while tending their livestock (e.g., cows, goats, sheep, and donkeys). While tending their livestock, they sustainably manage their ecosystem to ensure food security and nature are preserved. They do not kill lions, elephants, and rhinos for sport (Gardner, 2016). Similarly, the Hadza people do not hunt and kill wild animals without purpose. Instead, they hunt for small wild animals such as porcupines, rabbits, and boars for food, and they ensure that they do not destroy the ecosystem of these animals and the natural environment. Instead, they share their land in ways that promote biodiversity. This knowledge is a form of science, which they practice by continuously adapting and evolving their way of life in response to changing environmental conditions. Such stewardship is deeply rooted in their ancestral knowledge or wisdom – living in harmony with their natural, rich ecosystems by sharing land with wildlife and protecting the land by promoting biodiversity (Berkes & Turner, 2006). Also, the land contains their history; it is a keeper of their memories and culture, and thus, the land is entrusted to the living and to future generations (Zeleza, 1994). Because these people have undergone many such challenges and threats to their identity and traditional way of living, this increases the importance and urgency of understanding these people’s traditional wisdom and then gleaning lessons for contemporary organizations (Douglas, 1986).

Empirical context and methodology

Approaching our empirical context

Indigenous people in Africa are multicultural and multilingual, as are non-Indigenous people in Africa (Maho, 2004), where children grow up speaking several languages. One of the authors of this chapter hails from Tanzania and worked with local graduate researchers from the University of Dar es Salaam to organize focus-group interviews and meetings with officials and elders across communities where the Maasai and Hadza live. As a group of intercultural researchers, understanding the interplay between culture and language, code of dress, and code-switching during interviews and observation was key to engaging the Maasai and Hadza people in conversation. Some Indigenous respondents who were interviewed spoke Swahili, and some spoke their mother languages. For them, switching and sometimes intermixing words from other non-native languages, such as English, among the urban-educated individuals (as a symbol of social power or identity of education) reflected their multilingual capabilities. To establish empathy, interviewers needed not only to be linguistically competent but also flexible enough to appreciate the diversity in their respondents’ varying arts of expression. In doing so, we strove to be seen as engaging and a legitimate part of their social fabric. In order to establish trust, this also required us to be ready at any time to respond to each of them when they code-switched.

We dressed appropriately to meet community leaders’ expectations. Inappropriate dress (e.g., formal dress) could be judged by respondents as intrusive, derogative, or disengaging. ‘Softness’ of voice while talking to community elders and leaders indicated respect, even submission. Treading this delicate issue extremely carefully, we ensured that our intended research questions agreed grammatically and syntactically with the local sociolinguistic flavor while managing code-mixing and code-switching interchangeably during interviews so as to maintain relevance and authenticity of data. Semistructured or even unstructured questions were always open ended as opposed to an interrogatory approach: it is seen as disrespectful to interview Indigenous elders unless the interviewer allows them to speak freely in an open-ended manner. Often, several hours of conversation would ensue, as allowing a minimum of one hour, and customarily at least two, is seen as a gesture of respect and evidences the interviewers’ genuine interest in the research topic and the leaders’ feelings about the topic. Often, community leaders wanted to see us relaxed and not bound by time punctuality.

Empathy has to be maintained not merely through the interview process but over many interactions often over long periods of time. We returned to the field sites many times during the period of our data collection and met many of the same Indigenous people. Building long-lasting, trusting relationships with respondents was critical. Closer personal relationships also meant more information, additional respondents, new ideas, and a better understanding of that respondent’s sociocultural surroundings, challenges, and joys, which we now present below.

The Maasai

The Maasai are found across the Rift Valley region stretching from central Kenya to the northeastern part of Tanzania (Zeleza, 1994). We focused on one of the largest Maasai communities found in Loliondo Ward in the Arusha region of northeastern Tanzania. It is also part of the Great Rift Valley ecosystem, which is home to a rich diversity of natural flora and fauna found across the Serengeti national park and the Ngorongoro crater in Tanzania. Our data collection in the Maasai communities in Loliondo took place between June and August 2013 and June and September 2014, followed by data follow-up between 2015 and 2016. Our data collection fieldwork involved Maasai community leaders, youths, and elders and academic researchers from the University of Dar es Salaam. During our data collection, our aim was to give voice to the participants with respect to the following question: How does the traditional Maasai wisdom regarding the use of physical places and nature guide their sustainable livelihood identity?

We were guided by Indigenous research methodology, an alternative way to tell a story (Wilson, 2008), in that we attempted to understand their ecological wisdom and resilience that emphasized the values of relational accountability with physical places as their identity, and not in an attempt to answer questions of validity or reliability or make deductive judgments for better or worse. Establishing a respectful research relationship with our Maasai informants was central to our data collection (Battiste, 2013; Kovach, 2005). Building relationships with participants during the course of our data collection, and learning and following cultural protocols based on our research question above, we collected data through open-ended, semistructured interviews (Yin, 1994).

Sixteen one-on-one interviews were conducted, including six with Maasai elders, four with Maasai male leaders, and two with government officials for the Arusha region, including Loliondo Ward. In addition to the 16 individual interviews, we held five focus groups in the bomas (Maasai traditional houses), each comprising 15–25 Maasai members led by one elder male or community leader, making the total number of participants between 75 and 125 individuals of varying ages and genders.¹ Although the groups were large, the key speakers in each focus group were the elders; everyone else provided clarification as appropriate, and affirmed their elders’ views by murmuring ayeh as appropriate. Since we were able to develop a good rapport with the Maasai during our fieldwork, we were granted permission to tape-record most of the interviews (conducted in Swahili);² following Strauss and Corbin (1998), these were subsequently transcribed verbatim into English. We also took field notes in the form of a diary that documented aspects of the interviews and other pertinent observations (Cornelissen, 2017), following principles of grounded theory in qualitative case studies (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) as well as using hand-drawn pictures (see Diagram 1) in focus groups to probe Maasai ecological knowledge and imaginations of their values (Gardner, 2016). All the interview participants were assured of strict confidentiality, and their names were never disclosed.

Diagram 1

The Hadza

The Hadza’s homeland lies on the edge of the Serengeti plains, in the shadow of the Ngorongoro Crater, in Tanzania. It is also close to Olduvai Gorge, one of the most important prehistoric sites in the world, where Homo habilis – one of the earliest members of the genus Homo – was discovered to have lived 1.9 million years ago. The Hadza have likely lived in the Yaeda Valley area around Lake Eyasi for millennia (Sands, 1998). Genetically, they are one of the oldest lineages of humankind. They are hunter-gatherers who are members of the Hadzabe family of about 1,300 people and speak a click language that is unrelated to any other language on Earth (Skaanes, 2015).

Our data collection with the Hadza took place between June and A...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributor bios
• Foreword
• Introducing Practical Wisdom, Leadership and Culture: Indigenous, Asian and Middle-Eastern Perspectives
• SECTION I The Indigenous perspective
• SECTION II The Asian perspective
• SECTION III The Middle-Eastern perspective
• Index