“Indigenous Knowledge and the Politics of Classification” examines the way Indigenous knowledge has been named, organised and mobilised within development, environmental conservation and academic discourse. Arun Agrawal’s central concern is that the category “Indigenous knowledge” is never neutral: it is produced through acts of classification that decide what counts as knowledge, who owns it, how it circulates, and how it becomes useful to institutions. The article is valuable because it refuses a romantic separation between Western knowledge and Indigenous knowledge, while also refusing the colonial assumption that Indigenous practices are merely local, traditional or pre-scientific. Agrawal shows that classification itself is political: to preserve, extract, compensate, translate or institutionalise knowledge is already to transform it. The text therefore complicates easy celebrations of Indigenous knowledge in environmental policy. It asks whether recognition can become another mode of appropriation, and whether knowledge can be protected without freezing it into an administrative object. Its importance lies in showing that epistemic justice depends not only on valuing different knowledges, but on questioning the systems that classify them.
