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

This paper synthesizes the literature on indigenous ways of doing or what we call ethno-engineering. Western literature on indigenous knowledge is expansive, yet a deliberate focal point and explicit conceptualizations on ethno-engineering in indigenous literature are slim. In this paper, we have collected scholarly literature on indigenous knowledge and synthesized articles specifically on ethnoengineering. We have exemplified this literature with several published case studies in order to contrast indigenous-engineering with Western-engineering. Our literature review methods proceeded in two phases. During the first phase we accumulated relevant sources (N=89), compiled these in a database, and coded them with an eight-item framework. In the second phase, we sampled literature from the initial database (N=32) and coded these items more extensively using an inductively developed coding scheme. In addition, this paper includes four case studies highlighting indigenous engineering practices and associated principles. Our intent was to contribute to a starting conversation on indigenous engineering, bringing it to the forefront of social justice engineering discourse.