The Life of Winds: Knowing the Namibian Weather from Someplace and from Noplace

Abstract

This article brings the two questions, how and what we know, into a productive dialog to explain the difference between indigenous and scientific environmental knowledge. In the case I explore, scientists and Damara pastoralists (ǂnūkhoen) both relate the arrival of the rains in arid Namibia to the interplay between two winds. However, when it comes to explaining those observations, their accounts could hardly be more different. While Indigenous people understand the arrival of the rains as a play between loving and caring winds, scientists recognize them as a consequence of a shift of the Intertropical Convergence Zone. Building on Heidegger's phenomenology, I explore the relationship between the knower and the known. My main theoretical intervention is to show that Damara people and scientists have distinct ways of encountering the world: from someplace and from noplace. In those encounters, the weather is either enmeshed in forms of use in everyday skilled activity for rural pastoralists, or enframed by technology for scientists. By encountering the weather from someplace and from noplace, the world turns into a different place for each. The engagement with these weather worlds shows how ways of knowing the environment can be multiple, but they are not mutually exclusive. [Indigenous knowledge, weather, phenomenology, ontology, Heidegger].