Normativité sociale et normativité épistémique

Abstract

For some thirty years now, the Aboriginal peoples in Canada (and in many countries where the political institutions were developed by the British), have succeeded in imposing on researchers who work in their communities or with members thereof, protocols of research ethics which in part contradict the conventional ethical and methodological approach. Instead of resisting this interference in the norms, universities, particularly in Canada, have chosen instead to institutionalize this ethic, thus recognizing that the Aboriginal Peoples, as a result of their specific historical experience, should be afforded special treatment. In this article, we suggest that this recognition, over and above what is referred to as the decolonization of science, contributes to the emergence of “auchtonous knowledge” by and for the Aboriginal Peoples and we discuss the dynamics of this process.

Keywords

• aboriginal peoples
• methodology
• epistemology
• traditional knowledge
• decolonisation
• collective rights