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Participatory Practice
indigenous systems, the individual is only knowable as a member of a specified community, and communities are only recognisable through their constituents. This flows through not just previous generations, but generations to come, and through nature itself. According to Paula Gunn Allen (1986: 67), another indigenous writer, this perception of co-creation actively discourages people from setting themselves up as tyrants or dictators, in other words as ‘entitled’. This, of course, is not always the case. Nonetheless, many such indigenous communities are currently regarded by numerous people as backward and needing to ‘be developed’. However, the destruction of their lifestyle and livelihood means the destruction of potential plants to obviate pests and diseases globally, as such indigenous and traditional communities actually manage 95 per cent of the world’s genetic natural resources, which in turn are important to human survival in the long term (IPBES, 2019).
Theme 6: Participatory practice as inner and outer transformation We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the outside world would also change. As man [sic] changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do. (Accredited to Gandhi) Winter (2011) argues that the transformation of political and economic institutions necessitates the transformation of individual self-awareness. Otherwise, any transformation of institutions will disintegrate into the old forms because they are a product of the motives, interpretations, feelings and aspirations of people who remain stuck in old ways of being and thinking. Thus, former communist countries, he argues, came to reflect centuries of thinking and aspirations embedded in their culture despite economic reform. In the Soviet Union, the culture continued to reflect ways of being found in Russian Tsarist history, with a single dominant dictator and a secret police agency. Despite Mao’s attempt through the Cultural Revolution to break the cycle of history in China, it did not upset cultural norms around the family which re-emerged afterwards. For real transformation to take place, we also need to address what Winter calls ‘our ethical being’ and be constantly self-reflective of our knowledge, our awareness of where it comes from and what motivates us. He argues that in order to challenge prevailing structures and processes we must understand how the nature of their operations are effectively disguised. The processes of distraction and concealment permit systemic injustice to continue or to be transmogrified into an issue involving a few individual corrupt people. Surfacing and making visible the systemic injustice requires a raising of awareness, and an awakening, at a mass level. 28
