When a Tool Is a Document

This post is part of a series that examines how colonial knowledge systems in libraries, archives, and museums erase Indigenous, oral, and ecological ways of knowing — and explores how they might be dismantled and reimagined from the perspective of the Global South and the margins. Check all the posts in this section's index.

The Archives We Can't Read

Libraries, archives, and museums have long privileged knowledge that can be written, recorded, or visually fixed. Their infrastructures are built around inscription and stabilization — designed to preserve that which can be stored and retrieved through text, image, or sound.

But there exists a class of knowledge that resists this capture: the one embedded in material practice. These are not inert objects but tools — artifacts designed not only to act, but to think with. They hold hypotheses, encode ecological insight, structure relationships, and transmit intergenerational practice.

In many Indigenous, rural, and local epistemic systems, tools are more than means to an end. A net is not simply for fishing; it's a working model of local taxonomy and hydrodynamics. A trap is behavioral logic in form. A paddle is a kinetic philosophy. These tools are not symbols, but literacies — functional epistemic devices expressed through form, use, and adaptation.

They are archives that live. Their knowledge is enacted, not described. And yet our institutions, grounded in literate epistemologies, lack the frameworks to recognize or preserve them as such. The knowledge they carry remains unread — not because it is obscure, but because we have not learned to read with our hands.

Literate Bias and the Epistemic Frame

Modern librarianship assumes that knowledge can be transcribed, stored, and classified. But this belief is not epistemically neutral. It reflects a specific worldview: that knowledge is stable, universalizable, and best managed through text-based abstraction.

This model privileges semantic fixity over embodied variation. Within it, knowledge becomes that which can be extracted and made legible through standardized vocabularies. But tools resist that logic. They don't describe knowledge — they perform it. Their grammar is procedural, their meaning contingent on skilled use.

As such, they fall outside our metadata schemas. Lacking inscription, they are often cataloged as mere objects — illustrative, not epistemic. The result is not just misclassification. It is an epistemological failure: a blindness to forms of knowing that exceed inscription.

A Basket Is Not Just a Basket

Take the example of a fishing basket, accessioned into a museum collection. It may be described as "woven basket; palm fiber; used for fish capture; Colombia; c.1900." Nothing in this description is false — yet everything that matters is missing.

The spacing of the weave, the selection of fiber, the timing of harvest, the species of fish targeted — each encodes sophisticated ecological knowledge. But none of this fits institutional metadata fields. There is no place for the ethics of seasonal gathering, the role of gendered labor, or the cosmological resonance of the design.

So what enters the archive is not a knowledge system, but a shell. We extract the basket from its world of relations and render it mute. Its knowledge is not lost — but we have built no systems capable of hearing it.

Tools as Grammar, Not Illustration

In dominant academic paradigms, tools are treated as outputs of thought, not sites of thinking themselves. But in many Indigenous, rural, and local systems, tools are arguments in material form. A net, a trap, a paddle — these are epistemic propositions. They encode environmental prediction, mediate ethical relations, and carry theory across generations.

Crucially, they are pedagogical. A child learns not through textual instruction, but by watching her grandmother split reeds, weave patterns, and test resilience. This is learning through material engagement — situated, sensorial, and precise. It is no less rigorous for being embodied.

Yet our institutional infrastructure cannot hold this kind of rigor. Our metadata lacks space for procedural knowledge. A seed sorter may be a taxonomic system; a blowpipe, an ethical proposition. But we have no way to describe them as such. Entire epistemologies remain invisible — not because they are gone, but because we've never learned to name them.

Preservation Is Not Understanding

Preservation is often framed as a technical process: ensuring physical or digital survival. But when the tool is the knowledge, survival of form is insufficient. To preserve a paddle without preserving the movement, the relation, the ritual — is to stabilize the husk and lose the grammar.

A mounted net, no longer in use, becomes epistemically frozen. What we preserve may endure materially, but its meaning vanishes if severed from use. In these cases, preservation becomes a kind of silencing.

True preservation means sustaining practice: enabling the gestures, communities, and contexts that give meaning to the form. It demands recognition of tools as knowledge-bearing agents, not inert residues.

Repair as Continuity

In many Indigenous traditions, repair is not degradation — it is knowledge in motion. To mend a tool is to reaffirm its logic, adapt it to present needs, and extend its teaching life. Each fix encodes new insight: about material shifts, environmental change, or social transformation.

By contrast, institutional preservation treats repair as contamination. Once accessioned, objects are frozen. To intervene is to compromise "authenticity." But this reverses the logic of living knowledge. A tool that cannot be repaired is one that can no longer teach.

When institutions deny the legitimacy of repair, they deny the epistemic systems that rely on it. They conserve the shell while allowing the theory to disappear.

Can a Library Learn to Hold Tools as Documents?

To take tools seriously as epistemic forms requires rethinking our infrastructures. Classification systems, descriptive vocabularies, metadata schemas — all must shift from abstraction to relation, from fixity to practice.

This means developing frameworks that can hold procedural, contingent, and nontextual knowledge. It means building space for annotation, community correction, layered commentary, and performative reenactment.

Above all, it requires epistemic humility: the recognition that categories like "document," "record," or "resource" are not universal. They are products of literate traditions. In other systems, the archive is not a shelf but a gesture. Not a page, but a hand in motion.

Memory Beyond the Page

This is not about representational diversity — adding more "cultural" objects to our collections. It is about epistemic justice: the right of knowledge systems to be preserved on their own terms.

Tools are not curiosities. They are philosophies in form — expressing theories of ecology, seasonality, material ethics, and relational sufficiency. To mistake them for artifacts is to erase the thinking they contain.

Until we learn to read a basket as a text, a trap as a proposition, a paddle as a grammar, we will keep walking past living archives — not because they are gone, but because we have not learned to see.

  This entry mirrors the chronicle "The Grammar of Tools," a narrative reflection on the same theme.