Local Knowledge
I was raised as an only child in a small village with approximately 8,000 inhabitants in the Sabine hills, 40 km away from Rome. My mother was a teacher in the local primary school, while my father was a technician who commuted to Rome daily for his job at the national radio network Radio RAI.
My grandparents on both sides left school after finishing primary school. My maternal grandparents worked as daily labourers in the fields of the local landowner, picking olives and seasonal fruits that were then sold in Rome’s main market (Mercati Generali). I was the first to obtain an undergraduate degree from the University of Rome “La Sapienza” and then to continue with a PhD from the London School of Economics.
We were a small close-knit family. As the only child and grandchild on my mother's side, I spent most days having lunch with my maternal grandparents after school. I vividly remember my mother teaching my grandmother how to hold a pen whenever she needed to sign a form at the post office. Additionally, I recall my grandfather misspelling the names of the fruits he picked, but being deeply moved when I read Dante’s Inferno to him during my senior school years, sitting on the balcony of his flat during the long and hot summer months.
I faced various obstacles growing up. Linguistic barriers, for a start. At home, we mainly spoke dialect, but we learned Italian in school, through radio and national TV. Between the ages of 12 and 16, I studied French at school. None of us spoke English or had ever met an English-speaking (or French-speaking) person. I started learning English by myself with an old grammar book that my father had used for work.
It is the book in the picture. It was full of grammar rules that I did not understand and words that I had to guess how to pronounce. It goes without saying that my educated guesses were a far cry from the actual pronunciation. Years later, when I moved to London, I had to retrain my made-up English phonetics entirely.
There were also more substantive cultural barriers. We had very few books at home. My father enjoyed reading Ignazio Silone and Italo Calvino. We had a handful of novels (e.g. Fontamara, Il Barone Rampante), and the popular Enciclopledia Treccani, but no academic monographs. Nor was there a bookshop or a public library in my village. For years in secondary school, I would ask my father to buy books for me in Rome (he had to commute to Rome on a daily basis for his job). I didn’t know that academic books from the 1920s–1930s would be more likely found in libraries than in bookshops.
Finally, there were aspirational barriers. What the local culture would expect of me as a girl growing up in a small village was clear: get married, have children, and get a respectable 9am–2pm type of job that can be combined with childcare. The idea of me studying for another decade, going abroad, or simply embracing the uncertainty of a not-clearly defined future caused a lot of anxiety and worries in my grandparents. Thankfully, my parents valued education and my enthusiasm for learning. They were able to overcome the (spoken and unspoken) pressure that aspirational barriers set on them and myself. Their lingering worry was the prospect of unemployment. It was unclear to them (and to me) what would come from a degree in philosophy.
I was lucky to go through the Italian state school system and find inspirational teachers. In my Liceo Classico, philosophy was compulsory for three years. I loved philosophy from my first encounter with the subject. My teacher explained Plato’s Meno and his theory of knowledge as recollection. I did not know that a career as a philosopher was an option when I enrolled as an undergraduate student in philosophy. I was fascinated by the subfields I encountered at university (especially philosophy of science, which I did not know existed from my senior school years). The support and encouragement of my Italian university mentors were key to my decision to apply for a PhD at LSE.
Looking back, I owe a lot to my sociocultural background. Over the years—and mostly through the intellectual journey of writing my monograph Perspectival Realism—I have come to appreciate the feminist literature on situated knowledge, pluralism in science, the value of local knowledge, and the varieties of artisanal and experiential knowledge involved in the production of scientific knowledge. My book operates with the notion of scientific perspective, conceived as a historically and culturally situated practice. As I see it, varieties of local knowledge are an integral part of these situated practices. I also discuss the epistemic injustices that come about once local knowledge gets severed from the scientific canon. Today I continue to further explore the role and value of local knowledge, in relation to questions around the so-called 'right to participate in science': Who produces scientific knowledge? And who ought to benefit from it?
It has taken me a long time to rediscover and appreciate my origins through the lens of the situated and experiential knowledge rooted in my socio-cultural background, rather than viewing them through a deficit model focussed on what my family and community lacked, in terms of certified knowledge. Local knowledge affords an epistemic upper-hand when it comes to grasping particular phenomena (e.g. pollination peak for particular plants, among many others). The current rise of transdisciplinary philosophy of science and the excellent work done in this area by several colleagues who do fieldwork with local communities is a fantastic new trend from which our field has so much to learn. It debunks some of the epistemological and ontological stereotypes that—knowingly or unknowingly—operate in our scientific canons, philosophical narratives, and educational curricula.
I think it is important to push the boundaries of deeply entrenched philosophical narratives that for too long have portrayed science and scientific knowledge production as the exclusive product of intellectual elites. The work of brilliant theoreticians in physics, chemistry, and medicine is often celebrated without paying much attention to technicians, engineers, artisans, and farmers—those who built the cables, constructed cathode ray tubes, assembled the magnets, and with their local knowledge identified new botanical phenomena. The multi-ethnic working class with its local knowledge continues to be (at best) an afterthought in epistemological narratives.
To conclude, I want to recognise my positionality here. I think it is easy to theorise about the value of local knowledge and associated epistemic and ontic injustices when one already occupies a privileged position of epistemic power—being educated in the Western world, having access to books, with the prospect of higher education within reach, etc. When one is born and raised in a socio-cultural context where local knowledge is all there is (like my grandparents and my parents), it is often difficult to see it as anything other than a constraint on one’s own life and one’s ability to carve a different future for oneself and one’s children.
In my case, thanks to the conceptual tools that access to philosophical education gave me, I can now clearly see the epistemic treasure trove of local knowledge that was under my eyes but that I could not appreciate when I was growing up.
Michela Massimi is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh.
