Alfred Tora

I once attended a lecture given by a visiting professor from South Africa. She spoke of something that has stayed with me ever since – that knowledge does not only come from the western world. The foundations of psychology, and organizational psychology in particular, were laid in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe. The thought leaders, the heroes, the theorists. Cattel and his measures for personality and intelligence, Munsterberg cross-germinating ideas from Applied Psych into Work Psych, Scott’s tenacity to publish the first books on applying psychology to the business world, Mayo and his Hawthorne Experiments. The theories I’ve come to hold as “truths” usually need to be marked with an Endorsed by the West stamp of approval. The hypocrisy of academia is that it purports to be open-minded while gatekeeping against knowledge that does not expect approval from the “system”.

Take, for example, the ocean expeditions of our Pasifika ancestors or the construction of the pyramids of Egypt and South America. Because the intellectuals of the Civilized World couldn’t fathom the knowledge required to accomplish such feats, they conjured theories of extraterrestrial help or devalued the significance and magnitude of such acts. It did not take away from the fact that this knowledge did exist and that it had its seat in systems we now call indigenous, traditional, or ancient. We’ve all experienced it in one life domain or another, whether we realized it or not. Think about when you’ve gotten a cold as a child. Your mother or grandmother probably poured some hot water in a basin, put some herbal essence in, told to sit by the basin, covered with a blanket, and told to breathe in the steam. Maybe you learn a new concept and relate it to a story that your elders once told you. Maybe it’s genetics that sports scientists can’t explain – think Lomu, The “Tuaminator”, and Polamalu. These traits, lessons, and experiences, come from indigenous knowledge. They aren’t studied in labs or experiments and probably wouldn’t pass a western validity test, but they’ve been proven time and again to hold true in the real world. I believe that if we actually study these systems, alongside more contemporary knowledge bases, we will find similarities in the truths that these systems hold in their nucleus. So when the opportunity arose to collaborate with one of Fiji’s eminent indigenous knowledge keepers, Simione Sevudredre, I immediately took it with both hands.

I approached Simione with the idea of integrating our interests to ascertain whether we could find relationships between the values and lessons of old with theories and observations of the present. He was gracious enough to try out this idea. So here we are! By pulling insights from our respective fields, we will dive into the indigenous knowledge system to discover lessons that can be applied in work psychology. It is our hope that these lessons will prove perceptive and informative for our readers and that they can apply it successfully in their professional lives. We wish to help our readers to thrive in their chosen fields of interest and if our writings can help them along, then our time spent penning these articles would have been well spent. And with that we invite our readers to begin this journey of discovery with us as we push these articles out for the public. 

Vinaka!