I am a journalist… I think. I have been a desk guy most of my professional life (14+ years). In this time, I have commissioned and published hundreds of pieces, from news reports to investigative features, from explainers to commentary. However, I myself am more of an essayist — and even then an essayist of big ideas rather than ground realities. For a recent piece I wrote about David Attenborough — which discussed fortress conservation and violence against Indigenous peoples, even though I have never been in the ‘field’ the way an ecologist or a reporter has — I received an unexpectedly large volume of positive feedback. Thus far, I have written pieces of this nature because I have had something to say, not necessarily because someone could have benefited from reading it. But if I had to think about that beforehand, how would I go about it? As I was pondering this, I started to have some ideas about how the two kinds of journalistic reports on my mind — those written based on people’s experiences and those written at the level of ideas — do and do not relate to each other. (In this sense, this post is a spiritual cousin to this one.)
Ground-level knowledge is strongly tacit. It resists generalisation, but more importantly, it is not supposed to be generalisable. It arises from specific people in specific places simultaneously living through, shaping, and responding to specific experiences. It cannot be easily abstracted either because any abstraction would betray the essence of what makes ground-level knowledge true. On the other hand, discursive or analytical knowledge is in part based on how ideas circulate among people and how people synthesise paradigms and sustain them. For an example from my Attenborough piece, such knowledge would be how a specific concept like the “pristine” wilderness becomes an ideological instrument across research institutions as well as news-media audiences. In fact, my piece does not claim to know what it feels like to be evicted from an ecosystem one’s community depends on — but it does claim to understand how a particular way to narrate a story (or set of ideas) about forests has served particular political interests. And unlike ground-level knowledge, this variety is very easy to translate: the barrier to moving it from a newspaper to a policy seminar, say, without also distorting it is very low. In fact, translatability may be the raison d’être of analytical knowledge — and certainly what distinguishes it.
This said, the two kinds of knowledge also depend on each other. The first dependence, from the ground to the analysis, is more well-known: for example, while it may be easy to dismiss one community’s grievance as a special pleading of sorts, the essayist’s work can name the paradigm to which the grievance belongs and give the community’s experiences the political traction that allows them to transcend their geography. Conversely, analytical knowledge that is not grounded in specific material realities can mistake the map for the territory, even implicitly. This is part of what I think Attenborough has done, creating a lush yet sterile story about what is really a messy reality.
The dependency from analytical to ground-level knowledge on the other hand takes three forms: the more obvious policy — since analytical frames influence what institutions do — and the less obvious conceptuality and power relations. For instance, when my piece names and circulates the concept called “land-grabbing”, the term can become a new resource for actors closer to the ground to wield — both to understand where their experiences are located within a larger paradigm and to make claims to which institutions are forced to respond. In this sense, the making of analytical knowledge is more than just to describe something. In fact, even the label “Indigenous peoples” is applied to a particular category of people, together with certain rights, because anthropologists, legal scholars, and political theorists constituted it first through analysis. The third kind of dependence is Foucauldian in that analytical discourse constitutes power relations. For a specific example, how a journalism of ecology treats a community — as a steward rather than as an encroacher, say — will influence how policy ‘sees’ the community as well as how the community must ‘see’ itself in order to be visible to the (e.g. democratic) institutions that govern it. In other words, the language comes first and the bureaucratic practice follows, and analytical knowledge influences the language.
Now, my audience for the piece was not Indigenous communities themselves and I am not accountable foremost to the forest communities. Claiming otherwise would be presumptuous and in fact dishonest. I am accountable instead to the integrity of my claims, and to the researchers, activists, etc. on the ground whose work I am drawing on (even implicitly) for my synthesis. I am essentially answerable to the voice in my head saying, “Okay, but in this particular district, P is a better abstraction than Q for XYZ reasons”, and now I can be mindful of precisely what depends on it.
Featured image credit: Gowtham AGM/Unsplash.