Tradition or Modernity? The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness Among Women Science Educators in Cameroon

Building on an earlier article in which I analyzed the views of women scientists and science educators in Cameroon, West Africa (Woodhouse & Ndongko, 1993), I reflect upon the ways in which these same science educators managed to commit the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, attributed by Alfred North Whitehead to the abstractions of 17th-century physics.On the one hand, the women in our study tried to make their science teaching as concrete as possible by introducing examples from African traditional medicine that were familiar to their students. On the other, they undermined these laudable efforts by consistently diminishing the value of traditional indigenous healing, for they regarded the abstractions of scientific methodology as real in a way that such treatments were not. I argue that this is a prime example of the fallacy.Furthermore, the only way in which these women science educators could imagine that African traditional healers would be accepted by the scientific community was to become professionals by adopting the abstract methodology of science, which falls foul of the fallacy in the first place. Only then could their various traditional treatments be assimilated to the market and developed commercially by multinational corporations. I argue that this overlooks the ways in which such corporations appropriate the cultural and intellectual property of traditional healers in Cameroon and elsewhere. Moreover, their reasoning is based once again on the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, accepting the abstractions of the market as real, while disregarding the value of indigenous knowledge itself.