Taboos, Animations, and the Genealogies of Moral Authority in Kenya: Decolonizing Knowledge, Pedagogy, and Power

Abstract

This chapter examines shifting genealogies of knowledge and moral authority in Western Kenya by unsettling the hierarchical opposition between “indigenous” and “scientific” knowledge regimes as ways of knowing and acting. Treating pedagogy as a critical mode of social reproduction, it juxtaposes practices of taboo in the Mount Elgon region, as inherited prohibitions that regulate relations among people, animals, and land, with the deployment of animated educational media in Mumias by Scientific Animations Without Borders (SAWBO) as a technocratic apparatus for imparting new agrarian knowledge and practices. By staging an encounter between these two modes of social knowledge reproduction—both understood as moral technologies that shape conduct, sustain ecological balance, and transmit communal values (one grounded in taboo, the other in technical instruction)—the paper re-situates an “indigenous”/“scientific” inequality within longer genealogies spanning precolonial, colonial, and contemporary postcolonial and developmental formations. By foregrounding commitments to these knowledge traditions, the paper stages how taboos and educational animations alike can embody evolving modes of community self-determination and ethical stewardship. It ultimately argues that the force of the “indigenous < scientific” inequality lies primarily not in correcting its hierarchical opposition but in the ongoing struggle over which modes of life will be allowed to endure. Decolonizing these genealogies requires attending to the marked/unmarked distinctions that structure bodies, discourse, and social reproduction in the present.

1. Introduction

East Africa has long been narrated through powerful external frames: as a site of origins for “humankind,” as a field for imperial extraction, as an experimental ground for postcolonial development, and, more recently, as a testing ground for digital innovation (Asingia 2019). These frames have generated colonial and postcolonial genealogies of power that foreground the projects of states, empires, and donors while “(un)doing” the histories of local communities and reducing their status to illustrative background (Parashar and Schulz 2021). The result is not only the familiar problem of Eurocentric theory applied to African material and accompanying calls to decolonize those processes (Arowosegbe 2014; Asante 2006), but also the deeper erasure of how East Africans have themselves narrated and negotiated shifting regimes of knowledge and authority (cf. customary/traditional versus nation-state forms of governance, Verweijen and Van Bockhaven 2020).

This paper contributes to ongoing efforts to decolonize East African genealogies of power by centering the people whose lives have been organized, constrained, and sometimes enabled by violently or gradually evolving architectures of governance, pedagogy, and expertise. It does so by placing in the same analytic frame two “pedagogies,” understood as a type of social reproduction (Heydorn 2024; Winders and Smith 2019): namely, select regimes of taboo in the Mount Elgon region in western Kenya, and the deployment of Scientific Animations Without Borders’ (SAWBO) animations in the agricultural landscapes of Mumias. While the former are commonly framed in terms of “indigenous knowledge” about forest life (Borona 2017), the latter are framed as “scientific” agronomic knowledge-transfers for smallholder farmers (Asingia 2019). Both, however, operate as “moral” technologies: that is, they shape conduct, define proper relations between humans and nonhumans, and transmit values across generations.

Considerable research already describes how community practices in the Mount Elgon region have been reshaped and reimagined by colonial forestry, conservation bureaucracies, and postcolonial land conflicts (Amakanji et al. 2025; Cavanagh 2017; Maseno and Mamati 2022; Namunyu 2020; Ndiema et al. 2024). Equally, through work within international development contexts, SAWBO’s use of educational animations has aimed to leverage and at times unsettle technocratic developmental logics around the purposes and goals of knowledge transfer and agricultural extension, especially in Africa (Bello-Bravo et al. 2022a, 2025; Bello-Bravo and Neuenschwander 2025; Lutomia and Bello-Bravo 2024; Medendorp et al. 2023b). In terms of the epistemic commitments surrounding governance and education, considerable research describes how (1) pre-colonial taboo systems constituted moral economies embedded in kinship, ritual, and ecological practice (Cirani 2020; Opande 2023), (2) colonial administrators in Eastern Africa co-opted some of these practices into their own categories—e.g., “tribe,” “custom,” “native law,” “traditional conservation”—while dismissing or suppressing others (Illert 2023; Ocran 2006), and (3) postcolonial governments, missions, NGOs, and international governance structures have inherited and further reconfigured these categories (Ocran 2006), adding digital media as new instruments within extension services (Aker 2010). In this way, the present-day social reproduction in these spaces—through taboos in the Mount Elgon region and the use of SAWBO animations in Mumias—can both be read as contemporary episodes in a longer history in which various actors seek to shape conduct by codifying and circulating particular forms of knowledge (Leps 1992).

1.1. Methodological and Conceptual Framing

Methodologically, this paper adopts an interpretive qualitative design that combines decolonial genealogy with comparative case study. Genealogy is understood here in a broadly Foucauldian sense, as a tracing of how present categories and inequalities—in this case, indigenous/scientific and doing/knowing—crystallize from contingent historical struggles over rule, subjectivity, and knowledge. The empirical material consists of two unlinked cases of moral-pedagogical technologies in western Kenya: taboo regimes around wild buffalo in the Mount Elgon region, and digital agricultural animations produced by Scientific Animations Without Borders (SAWBO) in Mumias. The analysis draws on (1) existing historical and ethnographic scholarship on land, conservation, taboo, and extension in the Mount Elgon region and (2) textual and visual analysis of SAWBO animations and associated project documentation. Read comparatively, these data show how both taboo and animation function as modes of social reproduction within longer colonial and postcolonial genealogies of knowledge, authority, and moral regulation.

However, a key challenge when intervening into these histories involves using the current era’s analytical frameworks, what Leps (1992) calls the “truth of the period,” to conduct analyses of prior eras (Bello-Bravo 2025). The issue is not simply whether decolonizing an indigenous/scientific inequality should proceed by taking it at face value or abandoning it (Agrawal 1995). The unequal distributions of discursive speaking power mandate that engagements with the binary do not begin to resemble the sorts of color-blind arguments one can encounter in discussions of race (Alexander 2012) or, worse, an advocacy for the perpetuation of existing social inequalities (Adorno 1974). Indeed, the required stance (Daré et al. 2014) will not be reached simply by a sparing or circumspect overlaying of European theoretical frameworks onto East African materials (Kusimba and Kusimba 2005; Vasiliev et al. 2021); concerns are well-placed that invocations of “indigenous” and “scientific” knowledge/practice may already be too fraught with conscious and unconscious misprisions and anachronisms inappropriate to an East African context (Verweijen and Van Bockhaven 2020). The particular concern of this paper, then, is how the hegemonic imaginary of indigenous/scientific—similarly to other formations like taboo/governance, female/male, Black/White, or homosexual/heterosexual, following Derrida (1973)—already carries the weight and implication of a “<” sign. In other words, the point of departure for decolonizing “indigenous/scientific” in this paper assumes a hierarchical opposition of indigenous < scientific knowledge.

The starkness of this hierarchical opposition can be used productively. That is, one advantage of the word taboo—as a form of pedagogy in its sense as a mode of social reproduction—is how clearly it contrasts a “superstitious” and “irrational” pedagogy and governance with the current era’s “technocratic” and “rational” modes in a way that is almost impossible to bracket out. Even simply to suggest the validity of an “indigenous” taboo—for example, where adherents refrain from proscribed behavior so as not to incur a forest god’s wrath or spiritual reprisal by dead ancestors (Bello-Bravo and Neuenschwander 2025)—can read, in many contexts, as self-discrediting or orientalizing. Within such a horizon, not to deprecate any such avoidance as “supernatural”—or not to programmatically reduce that avoidance to some form of symbolic, not literal, functionalism—can appear to capitulate to “superstition” or, worse, reaffirm a colonial imagery of the credulous indigenous subject who needs correcting by scientific authority. Equally, across social contexts more generically, this horizon recurs whenever broadly spiritual themes that are observed playing a significant role are muted or bracketed out, e.g., by downplaying faith as a critical component of Malawian immigrants’ cultural integration (Chuma 2025) or muting the historical role of churches for Black populations in the United States (Cooke 2003).

One methodological counterstrategy is to move beyond attempts to recuperate “taboo” in functionalist, albeit still explicitly colonialist, terms (Harris et al. 1966; Malinowski 1948; Radcliffe-Brown 1952) and instead to reframe it as specifically rational or systematically classificatory (Lévi-Strauss 1963; Mohan and Devi 2025; van der Veer 1992; Wu 2008). However, this move is so infrequent that one might conclude the very notion of a “rational taboo” is itself a fantastic and oxymoronic beast—where belief in it already constitutes a form of superstition. Instead, much more common is verbiage about non-rational taboos; hence, (1) the religious “progression from non-rational taboos to an ethically rational demand for righteousness” (Hick 1970, p. 341), (2) descriptions of “how non-rational taboos and duties are inculcated through cultural habituation” (Haskins 2023, p. 364), or (3) that “irrational/pre-rational taboos and rituals … can be considered today as archaisms or a sign of backwardness” (Krasovskyi 2020, p. 107).

Another methodological counterstrategy would be to expose any irrational, superstitious, or supernatural (metaphysical) commitments embedded within the hegemonic imaginary’s framing of “scientific”. (That such commitments are not typically “marked” as such but are defended as rational or normative is addressed more below). Here, one can acknowledge the untenable metaphysical realisms and truth-correspondence claims in “scientific” epistemologies (Putnam 2013), as well as formal food taboos (e.g., prohibitions on eating dogs, cats, horses, roadkill, raw meat, certain types of offal and internal organs) and the use of the term taboo in its more informal sense, as things “we” do not talk about or “rationales” we refuse to accept as valid (Kanga 2004; Weru 2017). This informal use often discloses merely a culturally specific discrediting of another group’s warrants for some cultural prohibition. Cultural relativism in principle exposes the prejudice of such dismissals but generally fails to unsettle them when the difference at stake is a metaphysical warrant that can be written off as a “superstition”.

It is worth remembering that term superstitio appears in classical Latin, where Roman authors used it to denote excessive or misdirected reverence toward the gods and cultic service generally. We can draw on Weaver (1953) to more broadly reframe this as an excessive or misdirected reverence toward some god-term, where god-term names the same structure of ultimacy as in Roman usage but across both sacred and secular discourses. Thus, the god-term functions as a supreme authority and good, gathering all subordinate positive values under itself and authorizing action without needing further warrant (McGee 1980).

Polemically, “superstition” specifically delegitimizes and stigmatizes others’ religious, spiritual, or supernatural values, rites, fears, and explanations but is by no means limited only to scientific aspersions of indigenous knowledge (Gandugade et al. 2017); sociologically, this delegitimization can involve any other out-group’s collective knowledge—be that another tribe, another political group, another school of thought within an academic discipline, or another sports fandom (Lopez and Lopez 2017; Reysen and Branscombe 2010)—framing them as irrational, groundless, less than, or superstitious.

1.2. Doing < Knowing: Indigenous Taboo and Scientific Extension

Methodologically, dismantling the hierarchical opposition of “indigenous taboo” < “scientific extension” in its sense as an epistemic governance (a knowing and doing) can help to decolonize modes of social reproduction (“pedagogy”) in Eastern Africa. However, this requires drawing on three mutually implicated strands of biological, psychological, and sociological insight that underscore “knowing” and “doing” as logically and conceptually distinguishable analytically but not actually separable in existing things (following Aristotle’s distinction of ‘form’ and ‘matter’).

Thus, in the domain of the biological body, Maturana and Varela (1987) disclose knowing as effective doing in a given setting; cognition is not the mental representation of an independent world but a pattern of action already under structural coupling with that world. Similarly, in the psychological domain of the mind, numerous traditions in India emphasize the imbrication of knowing and doing; for Mahāyāna Buddhism, wisdom (prajñā) is unintelligible apart from an accompanying compassionate action (upāya); for Kashmir Śaivism, the triad of icchā-jñāna-kriyā (will-knowing-doing) characterizes the co-implicated aspects of agency itself. These formulations synthetically account for knowing and the actual doing of life as it is actually lived. Hence, in the sociological realm of culture, Williams’s (1977) account of structures of feeling explicitly observes that what we retrospectively analyze or reify as distinct ideas or values are first lived as historical experiences, “social experiences in solution” (Williams 1977, p. 133). This notion of “in solution” is a condensation of the idea developed earlier, in Preface to Film: “We examine each element [of a time and place] as a precipitate, but in the living experience of the time every element was in solution, an inseparable part of a complex whole” (Williams and Orrom 1954, quoted in Williams’s (1961, p. 63) The Long Revolution). Aptly, the very word scientific derives etymologically from the Latin roots for knowledge (scientia) and making, doing (-ficus), and was used to translate epistēmonikos (“making knowledge”) from Aristotle’s Ethics.

That “doing” and “knowing” are analytically distinguishable as precipitates in hindsight but only realized together in solution as lived, historically situated and patterned activity and feeling discloses an even more archaeologically sedimented and pervasive hierarchical opposition of “doing” < “knowing.” Thus, from (1) Greek and scholastic legacies that privilege theoria over praxis, through (2) liberal technocratic emphases on evidence-based policy in which certified experts ‘know’ while others merely implement, to the familiar deprecation of (3) manual versus intellectual labor and (4) craft versus artistic aesthetics, Euro-modern discourse has steadily elevated abstract, propositional knowing above situated, embodied doing (Varela et al. 1991). As one of the earliest examples, Puttenham in his 1589 Art of English Poesie not only makes the then-conventional “scientifike” > “mechanicall” assertion, but goes further to state that the “sciences” of a liberal education—specifically those involved in poesie—gain “no smal dignitie and preheminence, aboue all other artificers” (emphasis added).

Within this doing < knowing formation, the “indigenous”, “customary”, or “taboo” are conventionally relegated to the realm of instinctive or unreflective doing (Jackson 2024), while “scientific” expertise, “good governance,” and “pedagogic extension” appear as rational knowings that warrant action, with liberal education again as the highest form of the latter. More broadly, the < serves to “mark” the less valorized term of the hierarchical opposition while treating the valorized one as tacitly unmarked and, in that sense, rhetorically normative and neutral (Derrida 1973). Thus, as non-White people are marked as “raced” and White people are the normative default (Bonilla-Silva 2017; Dyer 1997; Frankenberg 1993; Jackson 2024; Omi and Winant 2015)—analogously to other hierarchically opposed marked < unmarked distinctions around gender, sexuality, rural/urban, and periphery/center formations—indigenous knowledge is habitually “marked” as either “superstition” (Gandugade et al. 2017; Nemutandani et al. 2016) or a left-handedly celebrated, timeless, and immemorial “heritage” (Bendix 2000), which must not become “contemporary” lest it risk or lose its status as indigenous (Barcham 2000; Bello-Bravo 2019; Bendix 2000; Corntassel 2008; Waller and Reo 2018).

Within this hegemonic imaginary of doing < knowing, doing is the site marked by power relations, desire, fallibility, failure, and questions of guilt, while knowing is cast as transcendently neutral, disinterested, ideally true and above all politics and power relations, and not to be held liable for its misuse (Bourdieu 1977; Foucault 1977). Thus, as the activities of White identities maintain their claim to rationality and civility by projecting their superstitious and savage heritage onto marked Others (Brewster 2020), indigenous knowing is made the receptacle for the epistemic irrationalities, violences, and metaphysical commitments disavowed within scientific forms of knowing (de Sousa Santos 2015; Lephakga 2015).

Of course, numerous counter-traditions to this hegemonic imaginary collapse the doing < knowing gap or reverse the direction of the < sign—especially pragmatist, feminist, and decolonial critiques—but these struggle against marginalization, circumscription by hegemonic truths of the period, and framings in relation to the dominant technocratic grammars that organize development. It is precisely this deeper opposition of doing < knowing that makes the pairing of Mount Elgon taboo and SAWBO extension as pedagogies (as modes of social reproduction) illuminating: both are ways of doing that already embody contested forms of knowing, even as the dominant discourse may read one as an irrational or superstitious practice and the other as a neutrally warranted knowledge for behavior change and action. Consistent with these countertraditions, this paper intervenes in that gap.

Lastly, this paper approaches decolonization as an implicit answer to the problem of colonization and its colonialities of power (Gandarilla Salgado et al. 2021)—via those durable structures by which an alien rule normalizes three linked forms of domination: the material exploitation and expropriation of land and bodies (Rodney 1972; Tuck and Yang 2012), the epistemic rewriting and subordination of discourse and subjectivity (de Sousa Santos 2015; Fanon 1963; Wa Thiong’o 1986), and an unjust social reproduction of inequities of power and social relations (Mignolo 2007; Quijano 2000; Wynter 2003). In each of these domains of being, knowledge, and power (Quijano 2000; Wynter 2003), an unasked-for and disadvantageous (settler-colonial) erasure or (neocolonial) distortion of existing life-ways occurs, whether through forced dislocation from traditional land (Corntassel 2012; Coulthard 2014; Wolfe 2006), racialized denigration of language, values, and customs (Fanon 1967; Smalls 2020; Smith 1999; Smitherman 1977), or assimilation to disadvantageous cultural forms (Cronk 2004; Desai 2017; Watson 2001), such that the afterlife of those changes makes life unrecognizable (Achebe 1958; Hartman 2007; Sanya 2021). In international development, this often images as a disruptive modernity whose purveyors do not stay long enough to be accountable for that disruption; hence, Corntassel (2008) can note, “Unfortunately, what is considered sustainable practice by states comes at a high price for indigenous communities, often leading to the further degradation of their homelands and natural resources” (p. 108).

2. The Indigenous < Scientific Inequality

2.1. Indigenous

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, both terms in the hierarchical opposition indigenous < scientific enter English in the first third of the seventeenth century. Significantly, the former initially denotes an event—“born or originating in a particular place” (1632 CE)—while the latter describes a quality of knowledge, “axiomatic or certain knowledge, esp. as contrasted with more or less probable conjecture or rhetorical argument” (1637 CE). By the end of the century, “indigenous” could be applied to plants and animals (1697 CE); thus, one can already detect the connotative drift of the term toward its use to describe indigenous people, especially in Africa, as animals (Jackson 2024). The more familiar, present-day sense of indigenous arises in the middle of the eighteenth century (1747 CE), not simply post-contact; as such, any use of the term pre-contact is decidedly anachronistic (Bello-Bravo 2019; Corntassel 2008).

Currently, the collective term “Indigenous” remains contested, both in legal theory and cultural practice (Barcham 2000; de la Cadena 2000; Dei and Jaimungal 2018; Wiedman and Leon-Leon 2025). At times, it is used in some Indigenous politics as a class self-designation, even as states and institutions also deploy it as a collective legal category (Barcham 2000; ILO 1989; Law Commission of Canada 2008; United Nations 2007).

This collective legal use reflects at least one linkage with colonial governance. For example, colonizers and others used the now-pejorative term “Ndorobo” to erase the cultural specificity of some peoples in the Mount Elgon region and beyond, specifically the Ogiek, Sengwer, Benet, and Akie. This was largely because these peoples’ modes of life could not be easily fitted into colonial governance categories; notably, even casually designating these peoples as “hunter-gatherers” or “forest-dwelling” situates them within a progressivist hierarchy of hunter-gatherers < pastoralists < agriculturalists < industrialists (despite the fact that these “hunter-gatherers” have also practiced forms of pastoralism and agriculture). This erasure of these groups’ cultural specificities and life-ways continues internationally in debates around the rights of Indigenous peoples abstracted collectively, again especially where specific peoples’ modes of land inhabitation do not fit nation-state governance categories.

2.2. The < Sign

Because Reason constitutes only one part of the totality of experience, any rationalist framework—especially in its European Enlightenment configurations—can only offer relatively impoverished explanatory accounts of experience generally compared to less narrowly rationalist or more capaciously not-rationalist-only frameworks (de Sousa Santos 2015). Specifically with respect to social relations (morality), knowledge (epistemology), and experience (ontology), variously (1) self-interested political accounts of the Other (Buber 1922; Levinas 1969), (2) analyses of the limits of reason and judgment (Kant 1999, 2000), and (3) tentative acknowledgments of panpsychism as an explanatory principle of reality in physics and neuroscience (Koch 2012; Penrose 1994; Tononi and Koch 2015) all have less explanatory reach than much-older accounts of (1) social relations with nonhuman others (Gathogo 2008; Kimmerer 2012b; Lutomia et al. 2018; Mangena 2016; Mnyaka and Motlhabi 2005; Santiago 2012), (2) contextualizations of reason staged to undertake a broader understanding of knowledge generally (Nāgārjuna 1995, c. 2nd–3rd c. CE), and (3) phenomenological traditions that theoretically and practically ground Consciousness as the ontological basis of reality (Abhinavagupta 2003; Fasching 2021; Śaṅkara 1999, 8th c. CE; Schweizer 2020; Timalsina 2008, c. 950–1020 CE). The point of this comparison is not to adjudicate the functionalist, symbolic, or objective truth of these various accounts, but to highlight the relative shortfall of explanatory force in the former compared to the latter.

Without intending to reify European history into a single moment, one can nonetheless identify a critical turn in disciplinary modernity when a practical need was advanced for fixing phenomena for instrumental use quantitatively and qualitatively, inaugurating an ascendancy of instrumental reason (Dussel 1993; Mignolo 2011; Quijano 2000). This instrumental reason—as scientific knowledge in its most predictive and reliable form, paradigmatically in modern physics—increasingly operates by treating matter as if it were inert and manipulable, even when contemporary physics itself understands matter-energy as a perpetual flux (Cartwright 1999; Hacking 1983).

That this procedure requires the arrest of the movement of matter in order to render phenomena experimentally tractable readily signals its affinity with projects that arrest and fix the movement of human and nonhuman bodies via disciplinary power (in prisons, on plantations and reservations, in asylums, laboratories, and industrial farms) (Foucault 1977). This arrest is equally visible in treatments of individual consciousness that bracket out or deny subjective experience in favor of behaviorist stimulus-response approaches (Skinner 1971) and fixes “indigenous knowledge” as an ahistorical, unchanging object located forever in the past (Barcham 2000; Bello-Bravo 2023; Bendix 2000). This instrumental ascendency also requires the fixing of social relations, less for the sake of society per se and more for the industrialized reproduction of existing inequalities and inequities, a pattern that de Sousa Santos (2015) diagnoses as part of an “abyssal” epistemic ordering that privileges Euro-modern knowledges while rendering others’ invisible or disposable.

Although there is a ready and voluble resistance to “scientific” moments that seek to arrest and make inert the doings of living bodies and the knowings of sentient minds, it is actually the seemingly harmless treatment of the material world itself as fixed and inert that comprises the master-category oppression, since all social relations (doings) and epistemologies (knowings) are always already embedded in that kinetic world (being). To construe the world as inert matter therefore habituates, across domains, an instrumental orientation toward what exists that grounds its misuse. In contrast, broadly deprecated Indigenous and panpsychist views of a reality suffused with Consciousness—articulated in terms of Mother Earth, Gaia, or other nonhuman transcendentals—expose the irrationality of a “scientific” instrumentalization of the moral, epistemological, and ontological orders (de Sousa Santos 2015; Kimmerer 2013; Lovelock 2000).

2.3. Scientific

While much effort in the philosophy and sociology of science has been spent on articulating and defending accounts of scientific knowledge as theory (Hempel 1965; Kuhn 1962; Latour 2005; Popper 1959), decolonial and feminist critics have argued that this privileging of theory is already a colonial and exclusionary move (de Sousa Santos 2015; Harding 1991; Mignolo 2011; Quijano 2000; Smith 1999). Conversely, there are also domains in which the praxis of scientific knowledge is incontestably effective; namely, when adequately specified sets of conditions and procedures are properly followed, this predictably and reliably yields a desired outcome and supports systematic troubleshooting when that outcome does not occur. Critically, the pragmatic successes of these praxes do not depend on the stability, or even the presence, of a theory (de Sousa Santos 2015; Hacking 1983; Smith 1999), though theory often accompanies praxis, based in whatever local epistemic regimes (sciences) prevail.

On this view, the overlap between Indigenous and scientific praxes lies, at least in part, in processes of empirical discovery and trial-and-error that identify sets of conditions and procedures which, when properly followed, yield desired outcomes; in other words, it would be backwards to assume that the autochthonous peoples in the region now called Europe took up empirical practices only after early modern figures like Bacon began codifying a theory. Rather, the more salient difference of knowledge arises on two axes: the desired outcome of a “scientific” praxis and the applicable range of “scientific” theory in general.

With respect to the desired outcomes of a scientific praxis, decolonial and feminist critics have dismantled the notion that scientific knowledge—whether as theory or practice—can be neutral or disinterested (de Sousa Santos 2015; Harding 1991; Mignolo 2011; Quijano 2000; Smith 1999). To insist that scientific knowledge itself is disinterested—and that only its misuse by “bad” or sanctioned practitioners counts as no longer disinterested (Harding 1991; Smith 1999)—is one of the largely unexamined doxa of the current era (Bourdieu 1977; Foucault 1970). Claims of disinterestedness become untenable once the gap between knowing/doing is refused; suddenly, how problems are framed, what counts as evidence, what outcomes are desired, and which applications are authorized to realize those outcomes are shown to be already saturated with interests and power (Foucault 1977; Leps 1992). This is necessarily true of indigenous and scientific knowledge and practice alike. What is at stake, rather, are competing worldviews about what constitutes morally permissible practice (Mangena 2016) and thus how the world should be seen and used—whether as “resources” to be plundered at will, or as “gifts” from an Earth imaged in figures like Mother Nature, Pachamama, and related beings (Bryan-Silva 2022; de Sousa Santos 2015; Kimmerer 2013).

While this raises what outcomes might be desired from a scientific praxis, questions about the applicable range of “scientific” theory show up in the ways that science-popularizing discourse habitually invoke the most predictive and reliable of the non-living sciences (physics above all, but also chemistry and engineering) as the paradigm for science generally (Cole 1983; Fanelli 2010; Miedema 2022). This is simply a polemic to extend the range of scientific knowledge and practice—as the only form of legitimate knowledge—to all domains of experience and existence.

However, precisely what affords a predictable and replicable outcome in scientific practice requires the control of a material substrate, i.e., the researcher’s ability to hold relevant properties constant or to bracket their variability so that experimental results fall within specified tolerances (Hacking 1983); in other words, by treating matter as inert. But even within physics, an alternative and comparable reliability can sometimes be achieved not by strict control of individual systems but by working with tightly insulated ensembles—as in statistical mechanics or quantum theory—where very large numbers of cases exhibit stable statistical regularities. Cartwright (1999) describes these controlled or invariant situations as nomological machines. Paradigmatic for physics and chemistry, nomological machines are unlikely to exist outside of those contexts (Hédoin 2014). In other words, as one moves stepwise away from the strictly controlled, invariant physical domains of physics and chemistry toward biological, open ecological, socioeconomic, and cultural domains, the plausibility of even a rough analogy between those domains and “scientific” knowledge in the sense instantiated by physics and chemistry disappears. Wherever exactly this places the boundary limit on the range of the applicability of scientific practice, it remains closest to the physics/chemistry end of the continuum, no further.

2.4. Inequality

What survives after contesting the hierarchical opposition of indigenous < scientific knowledge involves (1) the power relations of competing (postmodern) narratives that stand in the place of theory, as warrants for explanation and knowing (Mangena 2016; Radhakrishnan 2000) and (2) practices around “what works” shaped by the range of politically interested outcomes desired by more and less empowered actors within a given social setting, as warrants for action and doing (Bello-Bravo et al. 2022b). Thus, the analysis exposes an imbrication of knowing/doing in modernity’s instrumentality that masks “knowing” as disinterested and neutral and casts the immoralities of “doing” (e.g., slavery, imperialism, genocide) as aberrant, not integral.

This leaves that basic residue of questions—registered within decolonial and developmental discourse alike (Khanna 2011; McDowell and Hernández 2010; Savyasaachi and Butler 2014; Smith 1999)—about (1) what “works” for whom, in whose interests, (2) who is empowered to set agendas to define desirable outcomes, and (3) what kinds of outcomes can be deemed desirable at all? This de-marks “indigenous” knowledge as “superstitious doing” and refuses the hegemonic imaginary’s scientistic positioning of all disciplinary theory under a “scientific” umbrella of “true knowledge” (in the sense demonstrated by physics). It opens up to modes of social reproduction that “work” in terms of the prevailing structures of feeling—the episteme, the habitus—and ground a truth of a period’s explanatory frameworks with respect to value and warrants for action.

Without monolithically reifying decolonization itself, the foregoing points to decolonizing the theoretical categories to be used in other domains (Quijano 2007)—not just discursively or metaphorically (Tuck and Yang 2012) but also as concrete actions to end empires past and ongoing (Fanon 1963). It is also not a call to return to some “heritage” locked in non-contemporary time (Barcham 2000)—especially as indigenous knowledge has always updated itself in the present (when not killed off) (Trosper 2007; Waller and Reo 2018; Watson 2001)—or any naïve leaning into a still nineteenth-century faith in technocratic progress (Bello-Bravo and Lutomia 2024). It is, at its most basic, the recognition of a need for intergenerational modes of social reproduction that are “sustainable” in a genuinely just, not just developmental, sense (Bello-Bravo and Lutomia 2022; Mangena 2016).

Equally, without romanticizing the past or attempting to diagnose precisely where or when things went wrong (Diamond 2013; Sahlins 2013), the vast majority of Homo sapiens sapiens’ time on Earth—in the continuities and diversities of its modes of social reproduction—has included taboo as a significant component of its moral structuration, including a recognition of nonhuman Others’ sovereignty (Kimmerer 2012b, 2013). This alone suggests taboo’s generic rationality. Conversely, that the abandonment or loss of that component of social reproduction and its concomitant worldview has co-occurred with anthropogenic mass extinctions and potential ecocide suggests the irrationality of the current era’s episteme (de Sousa Santos 2015; Ferdinand 2021; Wynter 2003).

3. Taboo and Animated Media as Epistemic Modes of Social Reproduction

3.1. Buffalo Killing on Mount Elgon

For the peoples of the Mount Elgon region, a taboo holds out the threat of a wasting disease (and potential loss of one’s cattle or death) for people who kill wild buffalo.

This taboo can be described in rationalist terms. For instance, local people report that wild buffalo will flee areas used for the grazing of local people’s cattle when predators (including wild animals like hyenas and human poachers from the Ugandan side of the mountain) enter the area; in this way, the buffalo’s presence in grazing areas effectively provides an early warning system against cattle losses, such that killing them becomes strategically and socially disadvantageous. This local insight, that wild buffalo can serve as a warning against predators, is consistent with other research on social information used by mammals, birds, and fish to avoid predation (Beauchamp 2008; Gray and Webster 2023; Ward et al. 2011).

Local people also maintain that grass germinated on buffalo dung benefits cattle, through higher milk yields and more frequent calving. While no published scientific studies directly address buffalo dung as manure in the Mount Elgon region, other research supports the plausibility of local claims that grass germinating on buffalo dung could enhance cattle milk yields and calving frequency. For example, work on cattle dung and urine patches in temperate and Andean grasslands shows that dung pats create nutrient “hotspots” with sharply elevated soil mineral nitrogen and increased herbage nitrogen concentration and biomass compared to mineral fertilizer alone (Ngo et al. 2011; Sharma et al. 2022), often persisting for multiple grazing seasons (Ramírez-Sandoval et al. 2022; Saarijärvi and Virkajärvi 2009; Williams and Haynes 1995). On the animal side, extensive nutrition-reproduction research shows that higher quality forage—i.e., higher crude protein, higher digestibility, and improved energy supply—increases dry matter intake, supports higher milk yields, improves body condition, and shortens post-partum anestrus, thereby improving conception rates in both beef and dairy systems (Nigussie 2018; Paterson et al. 2001). Taken together, these findings make it physiologically and agronomically credible that grasses established on buffalo dung patches could improve cows’ energy balance and reproductive performance in ways that people in the Mount Elgon region register empirically as “better milk” and “more frequent calving”.

However, the limited explanatory power of this instrumental (“scientific”) rationality to account for the full range of the taboo—specifically, its role with respect to a wasting disease—cautions against bracketing off the “rational” portion of the taboo above from any presumptively “irrational” portion deemed superstitious. Notwithstanding abundant colonial, postcolonial, and autochthonous discourse that records East African traditions of wasting disease in response to violations of taboo and the possibility of psychosomatic causes (Hobley 1922; Prince and Geissler 2001; Schmidt 2014), the Indigenous notion of disease itself typically encompasses more than the industrialized sense of “germ theory” (with and without supernatural claims) (Boylan 2025; Ojo et al. 2025; Prince and Geissler 2001).

In African indigenous philosophies, the person is often individuated but not atomic (Achebe 1980): one’s identity is formed and sustained through relations with the living community and with the “living-dead” who persist in social memory and ritual interaction (Mbiti 1990; Menkiti 1984; Nwoye 2017; Talabi 2022). Mbiti’s (1990) account of the living-dead and Talabi’s phenomenology of ancestor veneration both emphasize that physical death marks a change in condition rather than an extinction of personhood, since the deceased continue to participate in communal life as agents remembered by the still-living who can bless, discipline, or withdraw protection (Mbiti 1990; Mekoa 2020; Talabi 2022). Menkiti’s (1984) thesis—that personhood is normatively achieved in proportion to one’s participation in communal life—implies that moral failure can reduce or even cancel one’s status as a whole person, not by annihilating the individual but by stripping away socially conferred recognition, names, and honors. Afrocentric psychological work likewise stresses that disturbances are simultaneously biological, psychological, social, and spiritual, and that shame, loss of prestige, and exclusion can be as real a wound to personhood as bodily illness (Nwoye 2017).

Within such a framework, the “wasting” threatened by Mount Elgon taboos can be read as a multi-vector phenomenon: not only physical death instantiated by a germ, but also the slow erosion of one’s standing in communal memory, a withdrawal of social or ancestral protection, the material consequences of being shunned (including the loss of cattle and support), or the onset of psychological or spiritual malaise (Magesa 2014; Mbiti 1990; Nwoye 2017; Patterson 1982). A breach of taboo thus risks not only bodily harm or death but also social harm or death, in which the person continues to exist yet is progressively emptied of honor, protection, and effective agency in the community (Isidienu and Onyekelu 2021; Mekoa 2020; Metz and Gaie 2010).

These insights reframe the mere “rationality” of the buffalo taboo beyond its instrumental roles as predator sentinels or mobile fertilizer units. As nonhuman others, the buffalo participate as actors in a shared moral universe (Kimmerer 2012a), not inert “resources” (Gathogo 2008; Kimmerer 2013; Mangena 2013). As Kimmerer (2012a) notes, while each species has its particular rights and responsibilities, this does not preclude human consumption of other life forms; only that a sense of responsibility toward nonhuman others in terms of kinship is called for (Baynes-Rock 2012; Waller and Reo 2018). Or, as the Chepkitale Indigenous People Development Project (2025) expresses it:

The daily activities and livelihoods of the Ogiek are anchored on three main pillars: ‘cow (Teeta), meat (wildgame), and honey (mweengeet).’ … Wild game has cultural value to the Ogiek. Every clan has a totem in the form of a wild animal or bird. The respect these animals are accorded is symbolic and has a much wider perspective, providing security and preserving the wildlife.

(Chepkitale Indigenous People Development Project 2025)

This illustrates both the broader scope of an indigenous sensibility—where instrumental rationality comprises only a part—around nonhuman others in the world and a temporal evolution of a taboo on killing wild buffalo as culture evolved. Cattle-keeping among non-Maasai people in the Mount Elgon region is temporally recent, over the last century and a half (Cavanagh 2017; Cronk 2004), a shift tied to twentieth-century land alienation, conservation regimes, development schemes, and political unrest (Forest et al. 2025; Ohenjo 2003). While the Chepkitale Bylaws specifically state that “the poaching of wild game is prohibited,” no list of species is provided, except that “elephant should never be killed” and that the extraction of elephant dung (along with other substances) is prohibited (Chepkitale Indigenous People Development Project 2025). It is tempting to see in this paper’s taboo an analogous assimilation of wild buffalo to an older prohibition on elephants, but this remains speculative.

3.2. SAWBO Animations in Mumias, Kenya

The previous section explored a taboo on killing wild buffalo in the Mount Elgon region not only through an explanatorily inadequate “scientific” framework that would deprecate or ignore its threat of a “wasting disease” but also by situating that threat within a wider indigenous ontology of social personhood, disease, and nonhuman sovereignty. In this section, the goal is the opposite: to disclose how a narrowly “scientific” technique for “survival gardening” in Mumias, Kenya was offered not with a pedagogical expectation that it be adopted and replace indigenous knowing and doing but could be adapted to existing practices and made coherent in locally intelligible terms, without requiring a distortion of prevailing life-ways. This further highlights another “countermotion” between the sections: whereas the former aimed to destigmatize indigenous knowledge as superstitious, here, an aim is to destigmatize scientific knowledge as imperializing.

Situated in western Kenya’s historical Wanga kingdom, the town of Mumias—formerly Lureko and the local royalty’s seat of authority—is a long-standing regional center of trade, governance, and ritual life (Narh 2021). In the late twentieth century, this role was rearticulated around Mumias Sugar Company, which grew into Kenya’s largest sugar producer and a dominant local employer before mismanagement, mounting debt, and liberalization of the sugar sector led to its abrupt collapse, from 21,000 cultivated hectares in 2017 to a few hundred in 2021 (Simiyu 2021). This event collapsed local household incomes and pushed former cane farmers into crop diversification, other livelihood strategies, and migration (Ambasa and Calistus 2025; Narh 2021; Simiyu 2021), amounting to a nearly total rupture of locally prevailing life-ways.

There is no intention here to mask, blunt, or decontextualize SAWBO’s positionality as a U.S.-university-based program situated within the context of post-Bretton Woods institutions and post-WWII agreements and agendas around U.S. international aid (Medendorp et al. 2023a). The introduction of educational animations for “survival gardening” at Mumias did not occur in a vacuum or as a one-off, but in a characteristically contemporary mode of international development and humanitarian projects, where interventions are routinely organized through multi-level stakeholder assemblages more often than direct, bilateral transfers (Lutomia 2019; Lutomia et al. 2020). In this case, the combination of circumstances included (1) preexisting trust-relationships built from ongoing collaborations with a Kenyan-led, U.S.-based NGO focused on Kenyan youth, (2) a demonstration farm in Mumias, managed by a local Kenyan farmer, used by Kenyan college students for husbandry and agricultural education, and (3) a SAWBO multinational grant during COVID-19. Thus, the Mumias case becomes a test whether introducing “scientific” knowledge can avoid reproducing the three dimensions of coloniality of power—namely, (1) exploitative relations to land and bodies, (2) epistemic subordination of local knowledges, and (3) an unjust reordering of social power—by its adaptation to locally governed life-ways to support material agency, epistemic autonomy, and just social relations.

Body/Land: SAWBO advocates for solutions that offer the smallest, most effective intervention with the least detrimental, long-term effects (Bello-Bravo 2020, 2025). In terms of bodies and land in Mumias, the “survival gardening” videos were selected by local presenters to augment rather than replace existing agricultural practices. For example, because the specific ecology of Mumias requires less drip irrigation, video presentations focused more on raised-bed planting and the composting needed to make raised-bed planting locally effective. Moreover, although soil depletion due to previous over-cultivation of sugarcane could argue for the use of composting (rather than leaving soil bare or using fertilizers to restore nutrients), the technique is not currently widespread locally.

This opportunity to adapt (not just adopt) a scientifically based practice has several levels of significance and is a designed assumption of SAWBO’s approach. In the clearest previous research example, a two-year follow-up after Mocumbe (2016) introduced north Mozambican farmers to a method for reduced postharvest losses of beans using jerrycans found that 89% of participants were utilizing the technique (Bello-Bravo et al. 2019), with 1 in 3 also modifying at least one of the eight steps of the technique’s scientifically vetted protocol without experiencing any treatment failures (Bello-Bravo et al. 2020). This is precisely what adaptation, not the mere adoption, of a technique looks like. Moreover, 20% of those modifications involved placing chili in the stored beans—as a continuation of an already-existing local practice for guarding stored beans against weevil damage. This assimilation of a new technique into existing practices is not just instrumentally strategic but also meets the broader criterion of a smallest, most-effective intervention that least erases or distorts existing local life-ways. It also exhibits the reformatting of narrowly “scientific” knowledge into a form that operationalizes it within a broader indigenous sensibility (which includes rationality).

Discourse/Subjectivity: Temporarily bracketing out power relations (Foucault 2008) for the sake of discussion, adult education frameworks often stress the necessity of meeting the expectations, motivations, knowledge interests, lived experiences, and values of adult learners (Bangura 2005; Knowles 1980); this is what constructivist educators mean by framing any knowledge to be imparted in (especially minoritized) learners’ culturally and experientially intelligible terms (Anzaldúa 1987; Casavolone 2023; González et al. 2005; Smith 1999; Yosso 2005). In Mumias, the intelligibility, relevance, convenience, and adaptability of any techniques offered by animated survival gardening videos are necessarily subject to local assessment and judgment.

While this discloses that any translation of scientific knowledge implicates an entirely cultural—not just linguistic-only—matrix of doing and knowing (Bello-Bravo et al. 2023), it also points to why linguistic translation itself cannot be understood only in instrumentally strategic terms (Gao 2006; Ortiz et al. 2020). The linguistic monoculture around English not only suggests analogies with the monocultures of industrialized agriculture (Jacques and Jacques 2012) but also a need to embrace a more capacious understanding of (trans-)languaging (García 2020; Maturana and Varela 1987; Otheguy et al. 2015). This is especially necessary when seeking to intervene into the multilingual default of many indigenous scenes, including Africa’s context of ~2000+ living languages and cultures (Bokamba 2014). As such, this requires the inversion of any epistemic subordination of local knowledges; indeed, it calls for a prioritization of the local structures of feeling.

Power/Social Relations: This cultural/linguistic premise built into SAWBO’s use of generic (not localized) animated visual imagery and scientifically grounded (linguistically localized) content voiceovers has achieved knowledge transfer goals with adult participants regardless of their age, gender, educational or technological literacy level, geographic (rural, urban, or peri-urban) location, and local levels of governmental corruption (Bello-Bravo et al. 2018; Maredia et al. 2018; Medendorp et al. 2022; Payumo et al. 2021). Moreover, because SAWBO operates on a “patron-client model more akin to Renaissance artists being commissioned for work by people who [want] media than by an institutionalized, high-level resource dependency on donors” (Bello-Bravo et al. 2025, p. vi), this allows SAWBO animations to be freely and maximally accessible to anyone for educational use (Medendorp et al. 2023b; Ribot and Peluso 2003).

In the present case, the three animated “survival gardening” videos used (depicting techniques for drip irrigation, composting, and raised-bed planting) were not new commissions but had already been translated into commonly used local languages. In principle, the attractiveness of higher yields from raised-bed planting potentially motivates and makes less inconvenient the additional labor and behavioral changes needed to implement an otherwise not locally prevalent use of composting (Bello-Bravo et al. 2022c). However, because the manager of the demonstration farm already uses composting on his own farm, this helps to localize the technique as a potentially nascent local practice. Minimally, the videos frame the practice in more locally legible terms—as less of a rewriting of existing social practices—whether or not farmers decide to take up raised-bed planting at all. Moreover, the staging of “survival gardening” on a demonstration farm also makes any uptake and adaptation of the technique in locally intelligible terms voluntary, not mandatory.

The ultimate aim of presenting this kind of scientific knowledge is empowerment, as “an expansion in people’s ability to make strategic life choices, in a context where this ability was previously denied to them” (Kabeer 1999, p. 437). The essentially unhindered access to SAWBO animations—especially for topics around agriculture, wellbeing, and community as fundamental aspects of life—aims to empower all scales of intervention, from individual change agents, to communities of practice, and larger coalitions. In this way, change agents can exercise their right to access knowledge not only for improving life narrowly (rationally, instrumentally, individually) but also more broadly for all human and nonhuman communities alike.

4. Conclusions

The purpose of this chapter is not merely to dismantle a stigmatizing and delegitimizing hierarchical opposition between indigenous < scientific knowledge, either by equalizing the terms in some culturally relativistic sense or, even less, by demonstrating that the left-hand side is actually “scientific” in the narrow sense understood by the right-hand side. Instead, it (1) discloses the limited range of “scientific” knowledge’s explanatory power (as instrumentally unmatched as it is within those narrow confines), (2) diagnoses why the “scientific” must disciplinarily subject the “indigenous” to inferiorization, and ultimately holds (3) that it can be “rescued” from its habitual imperializing just as its counterpart can be de-marked as “superstition”.

Across both cases, what survives from this genealogy of an indigenous < scientific inequality of knowing and doing are the durable spaces, discourses, and dynamics in which multiple, heterogeneous moral technologies coexist and remain available as alternatives for renewed forms of social reproduction. Juxtaposing an indigenous buffalo taboo and a scientific survival gardening technique not only repeats how the struggle over whose bodies, knowledge, and culture count is iterated through present-day contests over whose modes of life will endure and on what terms, but also, more basically, whether modes of life will endure at all.

The imperative that follows from this is that decolonizing East African genealogies of knowledge and authority also must examine and undo our own “heritage” of marking human and nonhuman Others while underwriting “our” bodies, discourses, and social relations as unmarked. To that end, attending to the plurality of practices by which Othered communities already enact more capacious and sustainable moral judgments, ecological care, and social continuity provides a more adequate vision of social reproduction for the region’s political and epistemic future, and the world’s future as well.