Contact

Telephone: +43 1 4277 43217
Moblil: +43 676 9852154

E-mail: chenai.murata@univie.ac.at
Office hours: by arrangementnach

 Profile

Chenai Murata is a post-doctoral assistant at the Institute of African Studies at the University of Vienna. Born in Zimbabwe, Chenai is a transdisciplinary scholar who graduated with an Honours in History from the University of Fort Hare and a PhD in Environmental Science from Rhodes University, both in South Africa. His research interests focus the field of indigenous knowledge system, particularly its two branches of traditional ecological knowledge and customary (communal) land tenure. Basing some of their truth-claims on metaphysical beings  and events that are not empirically observable and logically provable, including supernatural ancestral power, taboos, dream knowledge, sacredness and customary heredity, traditional ecological knowledge and customary land tenure do not only suffer a myriad of misinterpretations and undue criticism in contemporary scholarship, but are also, by and large, relegated to a mere  alternative way of knowing and a subaltern status in an epistemically plural global society dominated by the scientific knowledge system whose roots are in the Western culture. The major practical implication of this is that both the state and private sector often exclude these modes of society-nature relations in the designing and implementation of environmental and land tenure programs. Chenai underpins his research inquiries by the theories of critical realism and historicism. Critical realism´s axiom of epistemic pluralism and admission that all knowledges are fallible, offer a repudiation of mono-epistemism, a colonial legacy which privileges scientific supremacism. And historicism offers a theoretical aperture through which to see the influence of the historical process in the multiple configurations that contemporary social phenomena have assumed.  In pursuing these themes, Chenai wishes to contribute to the growth of an enlightened scholarship that can accelerate the decolonization of African environmental and land administration history.