Methodology

The Living Knowledge Framework: Empirical Protocols

Living Knowledge is a theoretical framework for understanding how Indigenous and other communities maintain adaptive, embodied, and relational systems of knowing in the face of rigid, technocratic and static governance frameworks. It helps us ensure knowledge transmitted for millennia through oral histories, preserving Indigenous relational ontology, adaptations and negotiations to maintain human-nature kinship.

We apply this framework throughout our expeditions, and it is currently being applied in ongoing academic research to address a key paradox in integrating and adapting Indigenous and local knowledge systems into modern biodiversity frameworks: how do you ensure preservation and documentation of living knowledge systems without the pressure to fossilise knowledge into static, archived forms, to retain epistemological sovereignty?

This approach emerges from our decade-long ethnographic encounters with Indigenous communities such as the Khasi, Garo and other communities in Bangladesh, India and Nepal. It addresses the question: How do we archive living knowledge without fossilising it in archives?

Our Approach

Four Pillars of the Living Knowledge Framework

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02
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04
Embodied Transmissions
Relational Adaptations
Collectively validated
Plural

Knowledge transmitted through bodies, myths, stories and relations.

Knowledge evolves in response to changing ecological and social contexts. It is inseparable from the relationships and places that generate it. The capacity to remain true to relational principles while adapting to new constraints.

Legitimacy comes from shared experience, ritual, memory, and community witness. No external validation, textual authority, legal frameworks necessary.

Multiple valid ways of knowing can coexist, negotiated through lived encounters. Multiple knowledge and reality can coexist without subordinating one another.