PLS1502 Assignment 2 Semester 2 2023

Statement of the question: Biakolo (2002: 38) identifies how the Western World thought about the non-Caucasian races. Since the fifteenth century, the Western World has come into contact with these non-Caucasian races, and tried to make sense of the people that seemed so foreign to them. Biakolo’s contribution therefore serves two purposes. Firstly, he presents and analyse the descriptions provided by the Western world in order to make sense of the non- Caucasian races. Secondly, he determines whether the answers provided by the Western world are useful to illuminate and understand the African condition. “Cross- cultural cognition” is understood as the question about the meaning and function of knowledge, in this case, across Western and African cultures and the subsequent ideas about the “African condition”. Thesis to be defended Western cross-cultural paradigms provide no key to understanding and knowing the African past and present. Instead, they have served the colonisation of Africa well and continue to ensure the exploitation of Africa. Approach and method Biakolo’s approach is to study specific texts attributed to particular thinkers from the Western world. The author identifies the categories of cognition that each thinker or group of thinkers are associated with. Five categories are identified: savage vs civilised; pre-logical vs logical; perceptual vs conceptual; oral vs written; religious vs scientific. Then the study proceeds to show how and why the specific texts are interconnected, even if they deal with different categories of cognition or knowledge. (a) Savage vs civilised Biakolo submits that before Lévy-Bruhl, the division between savage and civilised was the dominant Western paradigm in understanding the “other”. The African was seen