Indigenous Ways of Doing: Synthesizing the Literature on Ethno-Engineering

Abstract

­This paper synthesizes the literature on indigenous ways of doing, what we call ethno-engineering. Indigenous societies have faced countless years of oppression at the hands of Western colonization and assimilation. Western literature on indigenous knowledge is expansive, yet a deliberate focal point on ethno-engineering in indigenous literature is missing. In this paper, we have collected literature on indigenous knowledge and synthesized articles specifically on ethno-engineering, setting the papers in contrast to Western-engineering praxis. Our literature review methods proceeded in two phases. During the first phase we accumulated relevant sources (N=87), compiled these in a database, and coded these with a 10-item coding framework. In the second phase, we sampled literature from the initial database (N=31) and coded these items more extensively using an inductively developed coding scheme. Our intent was to contribute to a starting conversation on indigenous engineering bringing it to forefront of social justice/engineering discourse.