Lorena Gibson is an anthropologist and musician based in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand. Her research interests include culture and development, social justice, gender relations, music, and hope. Her latest project, East Side Orchestras: Music, Poverty, and Social Change, looks at the long-term social impacts of three charitable organisations that provide free Sistema-inspired music education programmes in urban Wellington. She currently teaches in the Cultural Anthropology Programme at Victoria University of Wellington.

[Editor’s note: this poem was first posted on Anthropod. We thank Lorena Gibson for the new introduction provided here.]

In what ways do seeds, soils, bees, microbes, and rivers matter when Native, Black, brown, queer, and trans human bodies are systematically under assault? Can a decolonizing approach successfully decenter “the human” in this political moment? For whom, when, and how is human exceptionalism a problem that needs to be overcome in the first place?

In my first year teaching feminist science studies courses at UC Santa Cruz, certain literature at the interfaces between anthropology and science studies that might be said to deal with “naturescultures” and “human-nonhuman” relations was received with discomfort by a number of the undergraduate students I encountered in my classes. Some of these students were in tension with being asked to care about what they perceived as beings or things outside their political identities and collectives in a commitment to foreground the violence(s) experienced by Native, Black, brown, queer, and trans human bodies. Others were predisposed against the masculine whiteness and Euro-Atlantic based analytical focus of much science studies, which has been a recurrent critique of dominant science and technology studies (STS) genealogies and scholarship. Still others were suspicious of anything that smelt of the Anthropocene, and its current framings that often uncritically assume a blanket concept of humanity, history, and geologic record. Despite their roles in shaping and being shaped by racist legacies and ongoing coloniality, I found myself at times in the extremely uncomfortable and impossible position of defending the disciplines of anthropology and science studies. One Native American student wrote me to share that her father had taught her never to trust an anthropologist. What if anything had “environmental” anthropology learned from the critical contributions of Indigenous, queer, feminist, and critical race and ethnic studies? Why does much STS continue to be focused on such a limited portion of the world narrated by white voices and perspectives? How might we go about “decolonizing” science studies and its interfaces? Where, when, how, by, and for whom is this a possibility or even desired?

We did not grapple with easy questions. Nor should they be easy.

It is precisely because I share in many aspects of my students’ disconcertment, that I designed undergraduate and graduate courses that place decolonizing perspectives and methodologies, feminist science studies, and anthropology in conversation. I did this not because the presence of decoloniality on the syllabus would remedy the disciplinary limits of either anthropology or STS. Nor was decolonization, as Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang (2012) warn against, meant to be a metaphor for possibly incommensurable social justice struggles that must be understood on their own terms as well as in relation. Decolonizing conceptualizations and practices are always spatially situated and temporally specific. In other words, decolonization as process and goal does not occur at the level of the general or the abstract. My reasons for locating myself at the interfaces of anthropology and science studies also have to do with tensions and ambiguities, and the location and concepts of my ethnographic research in Colombia where discourses of postcoloniality do not have the same kinds of historical and political import.

I am in no way arguing against the fact that postcolonial scholarship and subaltern studies have been influential among political activists and scholars in and of Latin America. However, my research is informed by a genealogy of Latin American critical theory that includes dependency theory, liberation theology, participatory action research, and what Santiago Castro Gómez (2005) has called the “triad modernity/coloniality/decoloniality.” When indigenous, peasant, Afro-descendent, feminist, and popular sectors chant “500 años de colonialismo” [500 years of colonialism] during mobilizations across the region, they are engaged in struggles against specific forms of ongoing coloniality that are conceptualized in ways other than “postcolonial.” This does not necessarily mean that a decolonial paradigm should become a singular explanatory tool to discuss the commitments of diverse popular struggles and radical groups throughout Latin America. As my feminist STS colleague in Colombia, Tania Pérez-Bustos, pointed out this past August at a 4S roundtable organized by Juno Parreñas, Noah Tomarkin, and I on “Decoloniality and Decolonization in and at the interfaces of STS” (publication forthcoming), discourses of decoloniality are trendily appropriated by North American scholars. This occurs at the expense of ignoring, on the one hand, Latin American-based thinkers who do not have the privilege of whiteness, and who do not enunciate from the geopolitical centers of knowledge production. On the other hand, these discourses may be detached from what communities, regional networks, and radical practitioners deem important and/or are abstracted from the processes they have long been up to, but may or may not articulate as such.

While anthropology has classically been concerned with “local” concepts, attitudes, and values, the heterogeneous field of STS has only more recently begun to decenter its Euro-Atlantic-based analytical grammars in limited efforts to “provincialize” itself. I remember attending a science studies retreat when I was a Ph.D. student and being told by a colleague that my work on human-soil relations with rural communities and scientists resembled one of his advisor’s “old” 1980s projects on rocks or dirt. He could not remember exactly which earthy element. His commentary implied that small farmers’ relations with soils in the global South were a thing of the past and not a very charismatic topic. My experience at that retreat and certain ensuing encounters left me deeply troubled about the plurality of STS produced in the United States, and the inadvertent replication of Western modernizing and evolutionary narratives by STS scholars in training. It felt as if science studies projects were being classified according to the same hierarchical logics separating and prioritizing “hard” sciences over their so-called “applied” or “soft” counterparts. I was also left with lingering questions about the consumptive tendencies in academia to function around demands that may or may not be relevant outside these privileged spaces.

Currently in the United States, we are witnessing the dismantling of knowledge production, critical regulatory institutions, and healthcare and environmental infrastructures even before president-elect Trump assumes office. In my opinion, it is vital for more science studies scholars to engage head on with the ways in which science, technology, data, and objectivity are imbricated in state-sanctioned violence, racism, global inequality, and neocolonial orders. Long-standing critiques of the lack of analysis of power relations and geopolitics in STS have to take on a whole new meaning, and more importantly, require transformative research proposals and collective modes of response.

The post election frenzy after a blatantly white supremacist, misogynist, climate change denying, multibillionaire was elected the next president of the United States has rightfully left millions of us frightened, disoriented, and with renewed commitments to mobilization, alliance-building, and resistance. However, intensifying national warnings that state-sanctioned violence and repressive policies will only worsen after January 20^th, seldom acknowledge the death, environmental destruction, and economic devastation wrought by ongoing U.S. imperialism, global militarization, and racist belief of civilizational superiority. Over the last month I have frequently remembered my reaction after watching the collapsing Twin Towers on September 11, 2001 on a television screen. I had been on my way to the International Labor Organization (ILO) office where I was volunteering in Guatemala City. A mail bomb that killed an administrative assistant a week before I began my volunteer position had blown off our office rooftop. The bomb was intended to shut down ILO solidarity for maquiladoras unionizing against the exploitative working conditions in U.S. multinational factories after national unions had been repressed for decades following a 1954 coup covertly carried out by the CIA that deposed a democratically elected progressive government. As I shockingly watched victims perilously trapped and leaping from the burning towers, I naively hoped: This particular violence on domestic soil…this day will compel a broad U.S. civil society movement that demands truth, takes responsibility, and builds international solidarity against our country’s nefarious global imperial presence and military-economic-humanitarian-development empire building. The Bush administration’s war machine, overwhelming public expressions of vengeful patriotism, and heightened Islamophobia devastatingly engaged in the exact opposite.

The beautiful healing act that recently occurred when hundreds of U.S. veterans asked for forgiveness from Native elders at Standing Rock for historical war crimes and ongoing military complicity in settler colonialism was an exceptional moment for domestic processes of restorative justice. There is still so much more to do in and beyond the domestic sphere. Rural North Dakota is itself a global site of action and intervention in the transnational energy business. As I see it, the work of restorative justice must include the violence(s) of the military-industrial-prison complex that perpetuate U.S imperialism, violate sovereignties, and globally extinguish worlds. Anthropology is committed to troubling Western assumptions that enact, to borrow from John Law (2011), a “one-world world.” The plurality of worlds as they emerge in differentially power-saturated practices was no more apparent than when U.S. Veteran Wes Clark asked for forgiveness for taking Native land. Lakota Chief Leonard Dog Crow’s gracious response clarified, “We do not own the land. The land owns us.” Chief Crow repeated the word land while also explaining that land is not only land for Native worlds as Clark may have understood it. This is not unlike the way certain farmers I work with in the Colombian Amazon employ the term soil. Elsewhere I have written about the encounters between these farmers and state and United States Agency for International Development (USAID) agricultural extensionists. When farmers refer to what technicians call “soils”, they are never referring to a stable object that can be managed by humans, but rather an entanglement of life-propagating relations that include microbes, insects, sunlight, selva, decaying leaves, animal feces and urine, human labor, and mística.

 Don Nelso Enriquez shows me how he and his wife, Doña Elva, clean each seed before storing them in their family seed bank to avoid using commercial chemical insecticides. Climatic and agroecological conditions in the Amazon generate particular seed storing and distribution practices among small farmers and indigenous communities. (Mocoa, Putumayo) Foto by author.

I engaged in ethnographic research with soil scientists and bureaucrats across laboratories, state institutions, and environmental campaigns in the capital city of Bogotá, and with small farmers and rural social movements on farms, among selvas, and during popular mobilizations in the Andean-Amazonian foothills of Colombia. The latter is an epicenter of the country’s over fifty year war and its conflation with the U.S.-Colombia “War on Drugs”, including the indiscriminate aerial fumigation of entire ecologies with a concentrated formula of Monsanto’s herbicide, glyphosate. Approximately 75 percent of the over 9 billion dollars of U.S. foreign aid provided since 2000 has been invested in provisioning weapons, equipment, technical assistance, and training for Colombian military and police through contracts with U.S.-based multinationals, such as Monsanto, Sikorsky Aircraft, and Dyncorp International.  It was important to me to study the foreign policy implications of the U.S. military industrial complex in its relations to Colombia in terms of war, trade, development, human rights, science and technology, and agro-ecological impacts.

Farmers in the southwestern frontier department of Putumayo led me to seek out soil scientists in the country’s capital when they shared with me specific soil science, microbiology, and ecology articles. These texts had become partial allies in their efforts to transform extractive-based agricultural practices, and to, what they call, “decolonize their farms.”  Learning with and from both soil scientists and small farmers quickly complicated any conventional anthropological division between “studying up,” in Laura Nader’s now classic sense, to understand the workings of power among experts and institutions, and “studying down” to analyze everyday people’s ability to transform and resist these structures. It was impossible to simply oppose “science” and “nonscience,” or to assume hierarchical dynamics and fixed locations of subjugation and subversive potential. A nice example of this is my colleague Juno Parreñas’s discussion of methods in terms of multispecies ethnography. However, placing scientists’ and farmers’ relations with “soils” in conversation does not lead me to render their divergent and convergent practices equivalent through a conceptual move towards analytical symmetry. Scientific practices, even when they responsibly address Amazonian problems, are considered to be categorically different from the kinds of practices and practitioners that emerge when one lives, dies, and defends a territory under military duress.

For the farmers I met, modern agricultural sciences tend to be deeply embedded in capitalist structures that dispossess rural communities, turning them into consumers rather than producers of food and agrobiodiversity and seed guardians. These sciences run the risk of rearing their colonial heads when they are deemed “knowledge” that parasitically absorbs non-scientifically derived practices and/or renders them obsolete. This occurs when the latter do not or cannot aspire to become standardized models dictated by singularizing market values and competitiveness. Of course, certain modern agricultural technologies have and continue to be incorporated into small farmers’ labor if they exhibit liberatory potential within the relational conditions of Amazonian ecologies. However, asymmetrical engagements that retain the tension between practices remain ethically and strategically important. This is an asymmetry that subverts the universal authority granted to scientific knowledges and their nexus with capitalist accumulation. Science must first demonstrate its alliance-building capacity with relational, more-than-capitalist worlds rather than the inverse, where “local” practices are obliged to demonstrate their equivalence with the modern sciences.

Amazonian farmers taught me that in order to “decolonize their farms” they first had to decolonize dominant techno-scientific, chemically conceived, and market-oriented concepts of and relations with “soils.” They also taught me about working with and in tension across complex practices rather than assuming an either/or or neither/nor political position.

How does all this relate to questions and tensions surrounding decentering “the human” that came up in feminist science studies classrooms in California? The political and intellectual expectations that undergraduate students brought to my courses are informed by their experiences of systematic racial violence and the injustices of settler colonialism; the rigidities of cis-sexist binarism; and the kinds of precarity produced by a neoliberal corporatizing public university in the United States. Feminist, postcolonial, and Indigenous science studies scholars have done important work to reveal how racialized, gendered, and classed forms of global and state power travel through the multidirectional circulations of technoscience, which have always been more intricate than a unidirectional movement from North to South. However, my first year with the privilege of teaching as full-time faculty obliged deep reflection about the glaring absence of women of color – especially non English speaking women – from much STS syllabi. The recent Catalyst volume on the intersections of Black studies and feminist technoscience makes important interventions in this sense. Anthropology has done a better job of taking serious the concepts of our ethnographic interlocutors, co-thinkers, and allies than most science studies scholarship. However, the practice of directly citing and not only using these concepts to produce empirically informed theory continues to be less prevalent.

Students were keyed into the ways even critical conversations at the interfaces of “environmental” anthropology and science studies often fail to ask for whom, when, and how human exceptionalism is a problem that needs to be overcome in the first place. Numerous scholars, journalists, and activists have emphasized that blaming a universal category of humanity for climate change and planetary environmental degradation not only lets capitalism off the hook. It also renders invisible the unevenly experienced burdens and geographically specific planet-changing events produced by colonial occupation, massive dispossession, Trans-Atlantic slavery, and its racist aftermaths. Indigenous and critical race and ethnic scholars, and a range of historically marginalized communities have emphatically emphasized that worlds have been genocidally smothered out and “benevolently” displaced for hundreds if not thousands of years. Furthermore, as Métis scholar Zoe Todd (2015) argues in her chapter “Indigenizing the Anthropocene,” “not all humans are equally invited into the conceptual spaces where these disasters are theorized or response to disaster formulated.”

A parallel argument can be made about the blanket category of “nonhumans” when it comes to stand in for and homogenize diverse secular and non-secular beings, things, matter, and forces that may also share long histories of hierarchical divisions. Drawing upon the interventions of Kim Tallbear (2011), Marisol de la Cadena and Margaret Wiener (2015), among others, worlds are not necessarily (or not only as de la Cadena insists) populated by humans, species, and things. These categories have dominated Latourian inspired versions of Actor Network Theory and multi/interspecies ethnographies at the interfaces between STS and anthropology. Todd (2016) and others point out that a decolonial approach explicitly acknowledges that the nature/culture divide was not a universal phenomena, but rather a specific knowledge tradition and ideological project that never succeeded in eliminating relational world-making practices and modes of existence. Indigenous thinkers/practitioners have been at the forefront of conceptualizing this relationality while only sometimes or minimally being cited by post-humanist, onto-epistemic, and new feminist materialist scholars. Such a reflection does not deny that the latter have made important contributions to rendering relational world-making practices accessible to diverse publics. The same Native American student I mentioned in the opening of the post made this point. At the end of the quarter, she told me that our collective conversations on the political stakes of ontological differences between worlds composed by a relational continuum of life and worlds made through practices that produce a modern divide between “nature” and “culture” provided helpful vocabulary to explain her community’s practices and ethics to Non-Native folks.

In my humble experience, placing situated decolonial approaches in conversation with the interfaces of anthropology and STS has less to do with convincing students that they should think with water; care about the soils upon which they plant their feet; feel anguish over the impending extinction of pollinator bees; or become cognizant that “Nature is the 99%, too.” It has more to do with learning how to teach in tension, responding to and maintaining the generative and challenging tensions, that decentering a historically specific notion and experience of “the human” – one that continues to negate the full humanity of specific peoples and communities – may produce. More than a manifesto, I join the efforts of other scholars and community organizers committed to understanding the ways ecological violence(s), structures producing human oppression, and situated life-making capacities are necessarily entwined rather than mutually exclusive domains of political struggle and intellectual work. Grateful to learn alongside critically engaged students and rural communities cultivating life in the midst of glyphosate-poisoned worlds, I am convinced of the domestic and international alliances that can be drawn upon and woven between “environmental”, anti-racist, and anti-colonial struggles in this political moment.

Kristina Lyons is an assistant professor of Feminist Science Studies and Anthropology, and a faculty affiliate of the Science & Justice Research Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz.  Her work engages with feminist and decolonial science studies, environmental humanities in the global South, socio-ecological justice, and poetic ethnography. She directed a popular education film series, Cultivating un Bien Vivir [Living Well] in the Amazon, which supports the proliferation of farmer-to-farmer agro-life alternatives among rural communities in the Andean-Amazonian foothills of Colombia.

An anarchist archaeology embraces considerations of social inequity as a critique of authoritarian forms of power and as a rubric for enabling egalitarian and equitable relationships.

The term anarchism derives from an– (without) + arkhos (ruler), but a better and more active translation of it is perhaps ‘against domination.’ An anarchist archaeology insists on an archaeology that is committed to dismantling single hierarchical models of the past, and in that sense, its core incorporates tenets of a decolonized, indigenous, and feminist archaeology, contesting hegemonic narratives of the past. It is a theory explicitly about human relationships operating without recourse to coercive forms like authoritarianism, hierarchy, or exploitation of other humans. Some anarchists extend this argument further to non-human relationships with objects, other species, and the environment.

In keeping with these principles, there is no orthodox, overarching, uniform version of anarchism. There are multiple approaches to anarchist theory and practice tied together by common threads, and it is these commonalities that inform our anarchist archaeology. Here we outline principles for an anarchist archaeology that can be applied towards studies of the past, toward archaeologically informed examinations of contemporary societies, and to archaeological practices, including professional ethics. We offer this as both a manifesto and as a living document open to constant contextual review and revision.

Critiquing Power. We recognize that there are many ways to evaluate and interpret topics like value, domination, coercion, authority, and power. Anarchists, and thus anarchist archaeologists, have long recognized that organizational complexity is not produced simply from elite control, but also forms through heterarchies and networked collaborations. Many anarchist archaeologists strive to uncover lost periods of resistance to domination and exploitation of people by a few elites, which can be termed vertical power, or power of some over others. Thus, an anarchist archaeology seeks to examine forms of horizontal power, the power of people working to coordinate consensus, often in opposition or parallel to emerging or extant forms of vertical power.

Recognizing the Arts of Resistance. Anarchist archaeologists recognize that periods of change, as well as periods where change does not seem to be present, do not require connotative evaluations of either good or bad. An anarchist archaeology does not give preferential treatment to any particular arrangement of ‘civilization.’ In practice and in popular culture, periods of heightened inequity are often seen as periods of cultural fluorescence or ‘climax.’ Terms such as ‘collapse,’ ‘decline,’ or ‘dissolution’ are often applied by archaeologists and others to describe periods in time in which hierarchies end. Language about cultural ‘climax’ and ‘decline’ retains Victorian notions of progress, identified with the state, as opposed to a more active notion of societies against the state. Alternative perspectives reveal the complex and sometimes conflicted struggles of humanity against entrenched exertions of power in hierarchical societies. Many of the so-called ‘collapses’ of the past were periods of greater assertions of local autonomy in the face of hegemonic centralizations of power. Such times are often the product of unrecognized acts of revolt, resistance, and resurgences of alternative ways of life. Thus, these periods can be successes for the majority of people in terms of increasing self-determination and independence. Anarchist archaeologists are committed to theorizing and identifying the material manifestation of such cultural transformations.

Embracing Everyday Anarchy. To understand histories of human resistance, resilience, and maintenance of equity or heterarchy, an anarchist archaeology must also be an archaeology of everyday life, not just elites and monuments. We acknowledge that people operate outside structures of power, even when entangled in strong power structures. Contextualizing a quotidian anarchy allows an interrogation of when different sources of power are in operation and when they are silent/silenced or unused. This is where an anarchist archaeology can build upon an existing strength of the discipline, as archaeologies of non-elites and of resistance movements are already prominent fields of knowledge. The interests of an anarchist archaeology lie in the building of coalitions and consensus, so contexts where we can find alignments with people in the field of archaeology and outside are critical to the development of the movement. The archaeology of everyday anarchy is also a good reminder of the ways we can integrate anarchist practices into our own present, with an eye towards the future. One does not have to self-identify as an anarchist to embrace and contribute to everyday anarchy. Simple, self-confessional acts in the classroom, test pit, and elsewhere provide myriad opportunities to deconstruct hierarchies of power that perpetuate harmful stereotypes in the past, present, and future.

Visioning Futures. An anarchist archaeology perceives that vanguardism (i.e., a traditional Marxist revolutionary strategy that attempts to design cultural change with the hope of a pre-determined outcome) often represents an extension of present power structures, either intentionally or otherwise, and rarely succeeds in the long term. Instead, anarchist archaeologists examine material culture across time using prefigurative practices as decolonized visioning. This means that they examine the material record and their discipline with the recognition that people who act within the present in ways that create change towards a desired future, are more likely to implement broadly beneficial change (anarchists call this “making a new society in the shell of the old one”). This practice of visioning the future in the present moment aligns an anarchist archaeology with the commitments of a contemporary archaeology, even if the material under investigation is one of the deep past. An anarchist archaeology recognizes that the past can only be investigated within a deep present rife with conflicts, conversations, and politics. This does not repudiate perspectives of archaeology as a science. Instead, it recognizes how culture interacts with and informs scientific analysis. The shedding of hierarchy from scientific practice opens its predictive potential beyond the traditional realm of archaeology (i.e., the past) towards future places.

Seeking Non-Authoritarian Forms of Organization. An anarchist archaeology attempts to reimagine, redistribute, and decolonize processes and positions of authority within communities, the academy and discipline, and its many publics, while doing research, facilitating student learning, and engaging in heritage management. These reconfigurations, though, can only happen in an inclusive environment, and one imbued with recognition of the perils of layering present perspectives uncritically upon the past. This means that an anarchist archaeology is also an archaeology that is committed to community, encompassing multiple voices, and a deep critical engagement with research. Anarchist archaeologists seek alternatives to the traditional hierarchical modes of knowledge production and management of past places and time, in favor of egalitarian ways of bringing people together to learn, to protect places, and to understand the relevance of the past for the present.

Recognizing the Heterogeneity of Identities. Anarchist archaeologists understand that people live in many different social spaces. More importantly, they encourage people, including archaeologists, to live in and explore many different positions, worlds, and identities. An anarchist archaeology is necessarily intersectional. It understands that people are not products of one simple form of identity (i.e., not essentialist), nor even one very complex form of identity, but they are created, and continually recreated, by the constant intersection, erasure, and addition of these many different aspects of themselves. In fact, it is this very act of recognizing each other’s multivalent identities/positions/standpoints that offers a powerful method for building equity between individuals, groups, cultures, and other cultural constructs.

Exposing Multiple Scales from the Bottom Up. An anarchist archaeology works at many different scales. This means that it works at global, regional, community, and personal levels. Most importantly, an anarchist archaeology recognizes both the roles of assemblages as encompassing individual people, places, materials, and animals, as well as larger collections of those social influences. It is cognizant of the agency of social participants to author how and where they are situated within the scales of the social environment. This contextual, feminist, decolonized, and non-human/humanism integrates with anarchist archaeologies, anchoring it to place. This means that research, interpretation, and advocacy often focus on individuals or localities, and then expand to encompass a more global scale. The grassroots scale of people and lived places provide the critical building blocks for a re-imagining of higher systemic-level changes. This is the space where the scales of archaeological analysis—from the sherd, to the place where it was found, to the regional context—help us to build connections between many scales of order that allow us give voice to the past and present.

Recognizing Agency in Change and Stability. An anarchist archaeology is agentive. Anarchist archaeologists understand that if placed in equitable systems, all humans/nonhumans have the ability and capacity to enact change. Most archaeologists recognize that the power of our discipline derives from its understanding of human capacity for shaping the environment, the material world, and spiritual realms through action. Combined, these agents allow archaeologists to add people, instead of only objects, back into the past (and the present). Recognizing that all people are important means that an anarchist archaeology is an archaeology of social relations that uses how people interact to understand the archaeological record. An anarchist archaeology focuses especially on those people who are least likely to have contributed to dominant narratives from the past.

Valuing the Heritage of State and Non-State Societies. An anarchist archaeology contests conservation and preservation of heritage by questioning why and how some sites and regions are chosen to be protected while others are not. Anarchist archaeologists understand that preserving sites and communities that only represent states, or what are usually perceived as the precursors for states (i.e. vertical hierarchies with elites) means that we create a past that sees state and state-like societies as models of success. Societies that are not states, often intentionally preventing the emergence of hierarchy as they evolve, become implicit examples of failure. An anarchist archaeology is asking that we start to change our understanding of what success looks like, and that this theoretical shift is accompanied by action in how we understand whose heritage is deemed significant. This is where an anarchist archaeology can powerfully parallel and support an indigenous archaeology. These biased decisions on what heritage is valued also decrease our historical imagination. Removing or limiting the archaeological, historical, and cultural presence of horizontally organized societies through preservation decisions can have dramatic impacts on the ability of future societies to envisage and enact alternatives to present hierarchies.

No Paradigms––A Multitude of Views and Voices. Anarchist archaeology acknowledges that a multiplicity of viewpoints exist, and rejects the false dichotomy that all who promote these ideas must self-identify as an anarchist or archaeologist. Labels limit people’s ability to find utility in anarchist theory. For instance, people do not need to call themselves anarchists to promote anarchist ideas and ideals in the same way that people do not need to call themselves archaeologists to promote the use of material culture as a social science and a historical method. This standpoint allows us to be theoretically promiscuous and claim that it is scientifically fruitful to consider alternate theories and methods from the normal paradigm, thus engaging in epistemological anarchism.

A Heterarchy of Authorities. As anarchist archaeologists, we do not recognize ourselves as one community. Instead, we recognize ourselves belonging to, and claiming, many connected communities. We support the idea that decentralizing our knowledge and authority does not deny any expertise we may have. We recognize that while we have the skills of our craft and expertise concerning material culture and knowledge about the past, it is an expertise that derives from a certain perspective that is without sole authority. Our knowledge should be open and our expertise should be available so that we do not create a situation in which archaeologists (or historians) alone obtain authority over the past, especially as concerns the heritage of descendant peoples. Further, we recognize that many kinds of expertise exist outside of our discipline, and indeed outside of the realm of ‘academic’ knowledge. An anarchist archaeology is about respecting the many kinds of experts that can speak to the past and the present.

Decentering the Human––Recognizing Relationships with Non-Human Entities. An anarchist archaeology understands and encourages us to examine how non-human agents may create social change. Thus, place, space, the environment, material objects, and the supernatural can all be agents of change. Moreover, the patterns of human behavior may be structured by their relationships with non-human entities, as geontologies, whether it is perceived agents within the landscape, climate, plants, animals, or spirits. We acknowledge that since people in past cultures often saw themselves as equal to or lesser than non-human entities, decentering the human may help us understand how past peoples arranged themselves. Such a stance also helps us to reimagine our own subject positions in relation to the environment, to places, to plants, animals, and spirits.

An Archaeology of Action. Anarchist archaeologists recognize that even though our research can often tackle incredibly difficult and sensitive topics, that archaeological research should be pleasant and joyful. Simultaneously, archaeology should be conducted and reported with respect. While our subject matter can be fraught with violence, we look at finding ways to study these topics that are not themselves violent. Following the many successful acts of resistance that use humor to contest violence, such as marchers protesting injustice armed with puppets, we also think that presentations of difficult topics can be broken up with artistic, poetic, or revolutionary interventions. But most of all, we see an anarchist archaeology as a call to action, and we invite those who are interested to join us. Do research. Write an essay. Compose an epic poem. Contribute song lyrics. Offer a painting or photograph. Do something big, or do something small. Do something different. Write a classic. Do what feels right. Do it for archaeology’s potential to help us build a better world. Make it grand. Make it humble. Make it brilliant.

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Simply, we offer an anarchist archaeology as an alternate way to think about the past and to consider our methods and practices in the present. An anarchist approach reminds us to consider relations of power and to question whether those relationships are authoritarian or coercive, whether in past societies we study, among archaeologists as teams in practice, among archaeologists and descendant communities concerning heritage, or in the relationships between archaeology and contemporary nation-states. The vast bulk of societies in the past were anarchic societies, organizing their lives without centralized authorities. This is one primary reason that an anarchist archaeology can be of use for understanding the principles and dynamics of societies without government. Moreover, sustained critique of power can help us better recognize the forms of resistance within centralized societies. Finally, anarchist principles can help us better attain more egalitarian and democratic practices among archaeologists and others with interests in the past. This approach can also engage archaeology to invigorate the historical imagination and present alternatives to contemporary top-down oriented political and economic structures of authority. In short, an anarchist archaeology can help us to expand the realm of the possible, both in relation to our interpretations of the traces of past lives, and in terms of our understandings of what is possible in the future.

The Black Trowel Collective: We come to anarchism and archaeology from many backgrounds, and for varied reasons. Most of this document comes from a conversation started at the Amerind Foundation in April 2016 (made possible by a grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation), where we began to put the ‘sherds’ of an anarchist archaeology into a coherent framework. Since then, many of us have continued to work together on this and other projects relating to anarchist archaeology, and our circle has widened as the project evolves. We invite you to join us, or to keep up with the work we are doing at http://www.anarchaeology.org/site-forum/.

I was born on a land declared an ‘Excluded Area’: a previously colonized region. A geographic landmass formerly carved out of Assam: lodged between Myanmar to its east, Manipur to its south, bounded by the plains of Assam to the west and snow clad mountains of the sub-Himalayan region of Arunachal Pradesh to the north. Now tagged for tourism purposes as ‘The Land of Festivals,’ it is the very same homeland where Naga ancestors were once branded ‘wild’, ‘savage’, ‘primitive’ ‘uncivilized’ ‘barbaric’ and ‘head hunters’ by the colonial powers. This colonial stereotype of the Nagas continues and is reiterated in the neighboring states and Mainland India. A case in point is Manpreet Singh’s article The Soul Hunters of Central Asia (2006) published in Christianity Today that describes the Naga homeland as “once notorious worldwide for its savagery”,  now “the most Baptist state in the world.”

Abraham Lotha (2007), a noted Naga anthropologist, maintains that British colonialism in the Naga Hills is a story of double domination: political and scientific. This is evident in the production of mass ethnographic  materials,  topographical survey reports  and  monographs  that aided  colonial administration  in  their  attempt  to  control  the colonized. The museum collections that began in the early 19^th century conveyed a certain awareness of the Nagas to the rest of India and the West by putting them in ethnographic  museums, on geographical/ethnographic maps, and in weighty books (Schäffler 2006b: 292, cited in Stockhausen 2008: 64). For a visiting European, the Naga Hills were a ‘museum-piece’ and the objects (both archaeological and ethnographic) were collected from the colonies and displayed  in  the  West as a way to authenticate the primitive stages  of human development. The region was perceived as a cultural backwater. This part of India, that was once a portion of the Hill District of Assam, later came to be recognized, after much political unrest, as the 16^th State of India called ‘Nagaland’ on 1^st of December, 1963.

Although I was born in a small suburban town in eastern Nagaland, I grew up experiencing a typical Naga life. As a teen, I learnt how to swing a dao (a local iron machete), how to sharpen the blade most effectively, and how to shoot a target with a gun. I slashed and burnt thick forest for cultivation, learnt the traditional skill of fire-making, carried loads of paddy on my shoulder after a bumper harvest, built traditional houses with my peers, laid fishing traps and other traditional means of fishing, read animal tracks and hunted, roamed the deep forests foraging and gathering for wild berries, fruits, and edible vegetables. Not only were these moments a part of my leisure time but I took great pride in what I learned for it was a part of my heritage. Inculcating such traditional values was not only key to one’s survival but was also considered gender assigned roles for a Naga man. Little did I realize that it was these early experiences that drew me close to anthropology, a discipline that would allow me to study about myself and our Naga culture.

My fascination for archaeology developed while I was a graduate student of Anthropology in Kohima Science College. On one occasion, one of my professors, now a senior anthropologist, shared his experience as a member of the excavation team (1992) to Chungliyimti. At that time, we were told that Chungliyimti was a ‘Neolithic’ site, with great potential for understanding the beginnings of agriculture in the region. My involvement in archaeology developed, coupled with a strong yearning to visit this ancestral village that held historical ties with the clan with which I identified. I realized then that archaeology could contribute to the rich cultural heritage of our Naga pre-colonial past; a subject that was different from what I studied in the Political and Economic History classes in my high school. Archaeology provided me not only a career, but also an understanding of a deeper sense of identity as a Naga.

According to legend, our great ancestor Yimsenpirong of the Jamir clan was known to have spotted the first fresh water during early Chungliyimti times.  Oral tradition recounts Chungliyimti as the once ancestral village of the Aos, few sections of the Changs, Phoms and Sangtams. These were communities that were labeled as ‘tribes’ in colonial accounts. An Ao origin myth also informs of the emergence of progenitors of the Aos from six stones or Longtrok (Long-stone; trok-six) after which they founded Chungliyimti.   The site remained deserted for few centuries until it was re-occupied by some members from Chare and Tonger village (Northern Sangtam Naga) and Longsa village (Ao Naga). Today, the residents of Chungliyimti who partly occupy the ancient site are the descent communities of these later occupants (Figures 1 & 2) and continue to trace their historical link to this ancestral site.

Figure 1: Location map of Chungliyimti

Figure 2: A partial view of Chungliyimti presently occupied

Because of the special provision laid out in Article 371 (A) of the Indian Constitution, traditional land rights and ownership are still closely linked to the local communities. Hence, no Act of Parliament may apply directly to the State of Nagaland unless such Acts are passed in the Legislative Assembly of Nagaland. It is here that the host of legislation of the ASI remains to come into effect in Nagaland. Realizing this situation, my first visit to the site on October 2006 was mainly to acquire permission from the village authorities. Besides academic concerns, to me, this initial journey to Chungliyimti and Longtrok was considered a pilgrimage to the land of my ancestors.

This visit helped me reformulate methodologies that would best work for this research. Guided by previous works of Vikuosa Nienu (1974) and T.C.Sharma, I embarked on investigating this site further, fundamentally for few reasons: i) the lack of stratigraphic and historical context of the site and other site details ii) adopt alternative methodologies involving local community participation in archaeological research programs, iii) the historical ties that my clan shares with this particular site.

Preliminary excavations began in January 2007 with a research grant from the University Grants Commission, New Delhi. Further excavation continued in subsequent years with the involvement of the Anthropological Society of Nagaland and the Directorate of Art & Culture, Government of Nagaland. Pottery bearing carved paddle and cord-mark designs, wheel made kaolin potteries, a few ground stone tools, iron tools, carnelian and glass beads, spindle whorls etc. were the main materials retrieved. Charred remains of both wild (Oryza sp (cf. nivara); Oryza sp. (cf. rufipogon) and cultivated rice (Oryza sativa), and millet (Setaria sp.) native to the region were reported together with introduced cereals such as wheat (Triticum aestivum) and barley (Hordeum vulgare). Eight radiometric dates obtained assigned the site within cal. AD 980-1647 AD (see Pokharia et al. 2013; Jamir et al. 2014).

Community engagement and archaeology practice
My effort to undertake a community-based archaeology at Chungliyimti stemmed from our past experiences with local communities at few Naga ancestral sites. With the aim of incorporating a more community-inclusive research and ascertain the level of mutual trust, several meetings were called with members of the village council to discuss ideas of the research program. With previous years of the site excavation, the community by now had removed all doubts that we were simply antique collectors, a remnant of the colonial past known in the region. Transparency of process increased the levels of trust among us, as did a collective social memory we shared with this ancestral site. The significance of the research and how the work aims to contribute to understanding the pre-colonial history of the region, corroborating both the ethno-historical accounts of the site and archaeology, the adaptive behavioral pattern within a sub-tropical monsoon environment were some of the key issues highlighted by the team. Community concerns such as measures to protect the excavated area and develop the site for tourism were other active engagements of the meeting. The mutual trust and respect further aided conversations on the myths of origin underlying Longtrok or ‘six-stones’ found standing at Chungliyimti. In trying to encourage multivocality and plurality, we were able to gain multiple perspectives of the past. To a large extent, the origin myth of Longtrok has been a subject of much debate to local scholars, centering on the politics of ‘who owns the past’? While the Ao Chongli ascribes the six stones to the three male patriarch of the Pongen, Longkumer and Jamir clan and their three sisters, the Ao Mongsen identifies the standing stones to six male ancestors (see Aier and Jamir 2009). Historical narratives linking the origin of the clan is also shared by the resident of Chungliyimti who too ascribes the monuments in commemoration of six major clans. What is interesting in the Northern Sangtam oral narrative is the description of the six clans which appears to revolve around the story of a ‘stone’. Few other important sites within 2-3 km radius of Chungliyimti were identified with the help of the community (Figure 3).

Figure 3: Identifying the locality where Yimsenpirong of the Jamir clan, led by a bulbul bird first spotted fresh water

Residents were also forthcoming to share details on their knowledge of edible wild plants, medicinal plants and their frequent hunting grounds which contributed significantly whilst mapping site catchment resources. Because the community had a better understanding of the site’s landscape gained from their seasonal cultivation around the site, their accounts aided in identifying artifact-rich clusters, and the extent of site disturbances in cultivated plots (Figure 4).

Figure 4: An ArcGIS generated Digital Elevation Model of Chungliyimti showing the prominent localities identified as a result of community engagement

Given the time constraints at our disposal, these important details of the site enabled us to effectively plan our digs. Another important initiative is the community’s engagement in experimental archaeology. A traditional hut was set up in one of the trenches following a good understanding of the house plans exposed during excavation (Figure 5) (see Jamir 2014).

Figure 5: View of a traditional hut within one of the excavated trenches, built with the effort of the community following the plan of one of the excavated residential site.

Often after a conference paper or publication, my Mainland colleagues ask how I dub the site. Perhaps to them, the site must conform to mainstream archaeological trajectories–Neolithic, a Bronze Age, Chalcolithic or an Iron Age site or it is utterly nonsense archaeology! In spite of K. Paddayya’s call for Multiple Approaches to the Study of India’s Early Past (2014), it seems that we continue to be obsessed with Universal tags and labels. Besides the problematic of such categories, I am doubtful whether coining Anglophone terms like ‘Neolithic’, ‘Bronze Age’ and ‘Iron Age’ is even applicable to the Naga Hills and its pre-colonial history. I have come to realize that mainstream archaeology is ethnocentric, particular and colonizing in a manner that prevents connecting with an Indigenous present. By creating period boundaries and assuming that Indigenous pasts look like normative presents (see Wobst 2005: 17-24). Rather, I would recommend overriding the technological trajectory cocoon and instead, identify these sites as ‘ancestral sites’ where our clan histories and stories of migrations are still relevant in the lives of descent communities today. Such a label deems fit considering the present descent groups (including my clan history) who relate our own ancestral past to this site, a site where Indigenous views such as the oral tradition, the meanings assigned to particular features of the landscape (toponym), and folk songs have played significant role in the interpretation of Chungliyimti.  Like any other research, the present one is not without its problems. However, as pointed out by Shoocongdej (2009; also see Rizvi 2006, 2008; Selvakumar 2006), there is no single way of practicing community archaeology and is bound to inherently differ depending on the historical and cultural context of the community under study. It is, therefore, the collaborative practice of involving indigenous and other worldviews into archaeology that signals a positive process of decolonization of the discipline (Atalay 2007).

References
Aier, A. and T. Jamir. 2009. Re-interpreting the Myth of Longterok, Indian Folklife 33 (July): 5-9.

Atalay, S.  2007.  Global  Application  of  Indigenous  Archaeology:  Community  Based  Participatory Research  in  Turkey,  Archaeologies:  Journal  of  World  Archaeological  Congress  3  (3):  249-270.  DOI: 10.1007/s11759-007-9026-8.

Jamir, T. 2014. Ancestral Sites, Local Communities and Archaeology in Nagaland: A Community Archaeology Approach at Chungliyimti, in 50 Years After Daojali-Hading: Emerging perspectives in the Archaeology of Northeast India (Essays in Honour of T. C. Sharma) (Tiatoshi Jamir and Manjil Hazarika Eds.), pp. 473-487. New Delhi: Research India Press.

Jamir,  T. et al. 2014.  Archaeology  of  Naga  Ancestral Sites: Recent  Archaeological  Investigations  at  Chungliyimti  and  Adjoining  sites  (Vol-1).  Department  of  Art  and  Culture,  Government  of  Nagaland.  Dimapur:  Heritage  Publishing House.

Lotha, A. 2007. History of Naga Anthropology (1832-1947). Dimapur: Chumpo Museum.

Nienu, V.1974. Recent Prehistoric Discoveries in Nagaland-a survey, Highlanders II (1): 5-7.

Paddayya, K. 2014. Multiple Approaches to the Study of India’s Early Past. New Delhi: Aryan Books International.

Pokharia, A. et al. 2013. Late First millennium BC to Second Millennium A.D. Agriculture in Nagaland: A Reconstruction based on Archaeobotanical Evidence, Current Science 104 (10), 25 May:1341-1353.

Rizvi,U.Z. 2006. Accounting for Multiple Desires: Decolonizing Methodologies, Archaeology and the Public Interest, India Review 5(3-4):394-416.  DOI: 10.1080/ 1473 64 80600939223.

Rizvi, U.Z.2008. Decolonizing Methodologies as Strategies of Practice: Operationalizing the Postcolonial Critique in the Archaeology of Rajasthan, in Archaeology and the postcolonial critique (Mathew Liebmann and Uzma Z. Rizvi Eds.), pp.109-127.UK: Altamira Press.

Selvakumar, V. 2006. Public Archaeology in India: Perspectives from Kerala, India Review 5 (3-4): 417-446. DOI: 10.1080/14736480600939256.

Shoocongdej, R. 2009. Public archaeology in Thailand, New Perspectives in Global Public Archaeology (K.Okamura and A.Matsuda Eds.),pp.95-111.New York: Springer.DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4614-0341-8_8.

Singh, M. 2006. The soul hunters of Central Asia, Christianity Today [Online] available at http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2006/february/38.51.html.

Stockhausen, A. 2008. Creating Naga: Identity between Colonial Construction, Political Calculation, and Religious Instrumentalisation, in Naga Identities: Changing Local Cultures in the North East of India (Michael Oppitz et al. Eds.), pp. 57-79. Ethnographic Museum of Zürich University: Snoeck Publishers.

Wobst, M.H. 2005. Power to the (indigenous) past and present! Or: The theory and method behind archaeological theory and method, in Indigenous Archaeologies: Decolonizing Theory and Practice (Claire Smith and H. Martin Wobst Eds.), pp. 17-32. London and New York: Routledge.

Biography
Tiatoshi Jamir is an Associate Professor in the Department of History and Archaeology, Nagaland University, Kohima Campus, Nagaland, India, where he teaches prehistory and ethnoarchaeology. His broad professional interest also extends to the field of ethnomusicology and is front man of the folk-jazz band Blue Print. He is lead editor and author of the books 50 Years After Daojali-Hading: Emerging Perspectives in the Archaeology of Northeast India and Archaeology of Naga Ancestral Sites (Vol-1 & 2). He currently directs a research program on the Archaeology of Mimi Caves on the Naga Ophiolite belt adjoining Myanmar in collaboration with the Department of Art and Culture, Government of Nagaland. He is Vice-Chairman of the Anthropological Society of Nagaland, and is a member of the Indian Society for Prehistoric and Quaternary Studies, Indian Archaeological Society, and Society of South Asian Archaeology. Follow Tiatoshi on facebook and academia.edu.

…

did i see that right?
my skull is in a cardboard box
in that basement?
my bones are under
an orange tarp from canadian tire,
cracked.
rattling plastic in the wind.
 
my grave is desecrated
my skull is in that white lady’s basement
my bones are under that orange tarp from canadian tire
cracked
rattling plastic in the wind like a rake on the sidewalk.
 
my body is tired
from carrying
the weight
of this zhaganashi’s house.
 
ah nokomis
this shouldn’t have happened.
your relatives took such good care.
the mound so clearly marked.
ah nokomis
how did this happen?
what have you come to tell us?
why are you here?
 
aahhhhh my zhaganashi
welcome to kina gchi nishnaabe-ogaming
enjoy your visit.
but like my elder says
please don’t stay too long.*

              —Leanne Simpson [1]

Beloved, she my daughter. She mine. See. She come back to me of her own free will and I don’t have to explain a thing.  —Toni Morrison [2]

We knew we would be confronting a constructed division between our communities and profession before we even got here. We already had questions to critique that construction, to deconstruct the idea of the university as a place of enlightenment. And as the years go by, as we return to our ancestral homelands to conduct research, those questions become stronger and also more difficult to parse. Today we feel even more compelled to refuse certain colonial practices of our discipline, but the “why” spirals deeper and deeper. How deep do we want to go? What do we give and take in the descent? What do we lose?

Before going too far, we recognize that the university has given us much – in the way of opportunity; in providing conditions for our own self-interrogation. But we have also lost a piece of ourselves by submitting to epistemic indoctrinations. A piece of us was taken when a beloved colleague dismissed our Indigenous relatives as lacking a practical political approach from across the conference table. A knot was tied when our cousins’ struggles for land, or for control over their own image that has been high jacked by corporate racism, was ignored as facile identity politics. What is that feeling of being reduced to a cultural object? Or the pressures of being individually professionalized? What is the guilt we feel when we desperately want recognition but we also want to ‘turn away’? Or the feeling of ease when we are related to as white in North America or Haiti, either because of phenotype or class assumptions, and the simultaneous disgust precisely because it is so easy to ignore or because we just want to belong? How to deal with these feelings when they should not matter anyway, for many of our cousins would benefit from the privilege that we have mischaracterized as a ‘struggle’? Our bodies are twisted into different kinds of shapes by a complex machinery, all with their own associated pains and kinds of debts. We experience different kinds of winks and nods, are expected to agree with different assumptions, all of which operates beyond anything that might resemble intention or conscious thought. The constant expectations of complicity are absurd. Some days we would rather not be civil at all when another student feels perfectly fine expressing their desire to dig up our cousins’ bones because it’s cool. Because it will advance “our” knowledge… rational debate seems like a deep and dark trap that we are constantly falling into. We knew we were getting ourselves into something deep, but we couldn’t have imagined that it would feel like this.

In all of this pain and anger, however, there is also possibility. Rather than fearing the colonial application of schooling we all share, we have the opportunity to more precisely interrogate it and, hopefully, decolonize it. To do so requires the energy and strength of our ancestors who have fought before us. With intention and gratitude, we search for those ancestors that have been left out, whose stories have been pushed to the bottoms of musty boxes, forgotten, stolen, or buried. “there will always be a little bush; under the cement is the earth.” [3]

…

In our ancestral excavations, we have come to be suspicious of one of the colonial, epistemic foundations that that has been said to found anthropology: The Gift. An analysis of The Gift has come to stand in for a much larger critique of decolonization for us. By focusing our historical understanding of The Gift through analytics of settler colonialism and a critical understanding of the Black Atlantic, we have come to see the Gift as something quite different altogether.

Most of us could probably paraphrase the main lessons from Mauss’ famous text. The gift must be given, received, and returned; the gift is (a) total (prestation).[4] Undoubtedly, these have been useful mantras for thinking the magical connecting tissues of society. And we love thinking with the gift and teaching (assisting) it in our intro classes. It really is fun! And enlightening! But we also see a more sinister magic at work in the way the Gift itself has traveled through academic discourse. This is the hardest magic of all to understand because it dwells on a different plane; a plane in which we also dwell, where our relentless belief in analytical objectivity from our other(ed) objects is just that, a belief, but one that has wielded enormous power. A moment of pause is necessary to recognize this power that makes things taken, from people who have refused, seem as things given. Just look at the new forms of clear cutting that are wreaking havoc in the Amazon forest, where knowledge and wisdom are extracted as a means to fixing our apocalyptic and anthropocenic times. It bears pointing out that if Mauss was right about one thing, it was that gifts that go unreturned result in chaos and violence. Surely theft dressed up as a gift leads to similar outcomes. Just as nations continue to send their false words of reconciliation and apology through leaky pipelines, the white magic of possession flows deep in the stolen gifts of our disciplinary power. Where will we find our heavy Standing Rocks and what exactly will we smash, and create, with them?

This is where things start falling apart. Our discontents have been misunderstood for too long; we begin to realize that our intellectual theories of linear models of civilization and progress are convenient covers, nay, sublimation, of other desires created and hardened through 500 years worth of genocidal pressure. Desires we have not been able to reach, but whose attempt at retrieval gives new meaning and experience to sublime disintegration. Sun Ra once said that “knowledge is laughable when attributed to a human being.”[5] We don’t disagree.

But we have had teachers on this subject for a long time, those who show humility in the face of creation. And so we return to listen and learn.

I ask, too, that when I am laid in a box
I am not made to look the sufferer
                 —Louis Riel [6]

That was the last sun that shone on Black-hawk. His heart is dead, and no longer beats quick in his bosom.—He is now a prisoner to the white men; they will do with him as they wish. But he can stand torture, and is not afraid of death. He is no coward. Black-hawk is an Indian.
…
Farewell, my nation! Black-hawk tried to save you, and avenge your wrongs. He drank the blood of some of the whites. He has been taken prisoner, and his plans are stopped. He can do no more. He is near his end. His sun is setting, and he will rise no more. Farewell to Black-hawk. 
—Black-hawk [7]

…

If the Gift has given us pause, we gratefully accept that its pondering on the magical have also helped us imagine with our Indigenous cousins and ancestral kindred. Within these new formations, The Gift opens itself to new understandings of the enslavement, colonization, and genocidal thievery of life and land that founded it. A grace we wish to emulate.

A Gift: something that is given. The Gift: something that has been taken. A Gift: something that can be taken back.

…

Those that reject their ancestors will be rejected by their offspring. —African Proverb

The raid was executed exactly to plan. Every team infiltrated the towers unnoticed. They emptied the vaults. They fled below. Not a single trace was left behind. It would be days before the people above even knew what happened.

In the undercommons, the raiders surveyed the recollected.[8] Piles of computer hard drives, photographs, records, books, labeled vials of dried up blood: “Cree,” “Seminole,” “Taino,” “Yoruba”, non-white Others…

The ancestral fire pit was already ablaze, flames thirsty with anticipation…

The raiders surrounded the fire in circular formation, offerings in hand, tongues ready for recitation.

We have lived before.
We will live again.
We will be silk,

Stone,
Mind,

Star.

We will be scattered,
Gathered,

Molded,

Probed.

We will live

And we will serve life…
—Octavia Butler [9]

In that moment, as every other, the raiders invoked the beloved that preceded them and they envisioned those to come. They recited the names of the recollected, the names of ancestors past.

Every hard drive, photograph, record, book, and vial was tossed into the swallowing fire. The flames intensified. Hissing and swirling, now raging spells. The fire incinerated every artefact’s abduction and perceived possession by the people above.

In warfare, there is a military strategy called ‘scorched earth.’ It is when you destroy everything that might be useful to the enemy as you move through or pull out of their territory.  —Nnedi Okorafor [10] 

The burning and recitations lasted all night. At dawn, as the fire calmed, the raiders looked at the withering orange embers, the rising smoke and ash, not as remains, but as releasings. The ancestors rejoiced. The raiders humbly bowed. The burning was no victory; just one small act of countertheft. There had been many acts before this, and there would be many more to come.

Countertheft is always unfinished.

∞

References

*nishnaabemowin: Nokomis is grandmother, zhaganashi is a white person, kina gchi nishnaabe-ogaming is a Mississauga nishnaabeg name for homeland.

[1] Leanne Simpson, Islands of Decolonial Love (Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2013).

[2] Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Knopf, 1987).

[3] Marvin Francis, City Treaty: A Long Poem, 2nd ed. (Winnipeg: Turnstone Press, 2002).

[4] Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, translated by W. D. Halls (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1990).

[5] Sun Ra, Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise, 35 mm, directed by Robert Mugge (Pottstown: MVD Visual, 1980), film.

[6] Louis Riel, as conjured by Gregory Scofield, Louis: The Heretic Poems, (Gibsons: Nightwood Editions, 2011).

[7] Black-Hawk’s farewell speech at Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, in Samuel G. Drake, Biography and History of the Indians of North America, 11^th ed. (Boston, 1841).

[8] Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013).

[9] Octavia Butler, Parable of the Talents (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1998).

[10] Nnedi Okorafor, The Book of Phoenix (New York: DAW, 2015).

What happens to our praxis once we start from a place of acknowledging difference in our persons, our histories, our bodies, and our aesthetics? This text starts from a standpoint of curiosity, consideration, and mindfulness as we explore how, who and what we are, inform structures we create. The moment and place of knowing requires a certain slowness to enter into our thoughts, movements, and research, allowing for nuance and precision, for care and humility, and for an aesthetic of difference to incubate our praxis. Once we allow our work to breathe, to reflect, to sense difference, it transforms structures around it or structures created through it.^[1] The act of research becomes praxis through which critical awareness of one’s own condition and the condition of others comes into high relief. One aspect of this praxis includes bodies co-producing the work. There are intricate processes that situate us between theory and practice as praxis, which must begin to take into account the many ways in which we are identified, the modes of address, our different bodies, and varied epistemologies.

Intersectionality allows us to occupy that praxis and standpoint critically.^[2] It takes into account systems of oppression within the world that hold marginalized people in place (often at an inferior position) in multiple ways. It is not a new idea to acknowledge that our vectors of identity (race, class, ethnicity/gender/body, et cetera) inform how we experience and consider the world, but what is significant in intersectionality is that that place holding happens in different ways at different times and for different reasons. On the flip side, it also means that privilege manifests itself in similarly multifaceted forms. If, due to your body experience, you have never had to question how the world looks at your race/class/ethnicity/gender/body, or if that has never impacted the way the world identifies your research or work, you should know that that is a privileged experience. And that privilege or lack thereof, informs you and your praxis.

Learning Oneself and Others: Intersectional Praxis

The paradox of ‘defining’ something like identity, of course, is that it is not static. Even for someone who is thoughtful and self-reflexive, the ways in which one approaches oneself and others, changes with time and experience. Our ability to understand ourselves in relation to everything else is predicated upon the ability to understand and contextualize the real, tangible, sensory aspect of moving through the world as compared to conceptual, abstract notions of thinking of our bodies in the world. It is important to understand that recognizing systems of power and one’s place in them is a tool that can be utilized. These systems have an impact on our bodies and identities and continue to affect our work. This is the methodology of intersectionality as it relates to praxis. Whereas intersectionality can be defined by levels of access to privilege, a research-based model of intersectionality recognizes that in moving between the lateral and hierarchical modes of being, one must be cognizant and thoughtful about how in each context there may be differences to take into account. And it allows for care to be an intrinsic part of the recognition of difference. All practitioners must first place themselves outside of the system that maintains their work in place. In order to re-conceptualize any practice, the first moments of recognition have to do with recognizing oneself as radically other, not of this system, not of the normalized way of being. That conceptual shift allows one to consider praxis as particular to one’s embodied standpoint, – there is no way for me/you/us to step outside of my/your/our body/bodies to create anything. We may develop tools for all of us to use, methods, codes, programs to help us practice – but what gets coded or institutionalized, what gets marked as knowledge, for what type of normative body, all that should be questioned. If the body that is creating systems of knowledge employs intersectional praxis – the episteme itself knows the diversity of possible bodies it must account for rather than just assuming one norm.

A simple example might be to consider my own childhood: as a person of South Asian heritage, I was often confounded while dealing with crayons that did not have any color to represent my skin tone. I was told by teachers to color in bodies as ‘peach’ because that was the norm in the 1970s, in the United States. But my body was not peach. The disjuncture, cognitive dissonance, and alienation between what I experienced as body and what I represented was unaccounted for: the tools (i.e. crayons) and the representation could not align unless I let go of wanting to see myself represented in that image. I had to make myself into something I was not, and it very quickly became clear to me that I was not the ‘norm’ in the world of crayons. This happens even as I work in archaeology. The normative person in the past is often a body that looks and acts like a contemporary normative body – often not one that looks/feels/could be imagined as mine: normative, and yet othered through time. It is important for us to think through how we might make sense of the many different ways we might imagine past bodies, or othered bodies, or any body that is not a normative privileged body.

Thinking through an intersectional approach to the formation of knowledge then requires some time, some care, and some criticality. Such an approach allows one to look not only at the praxis, but at the pathways and research material to create something: whether that is writing a course syllabus or a book, or reconstructing a history. In effect, such an approach allows for an epistemic critique in the service of decolonization.

[excerpt]

Intersectionality as Decolonizing Research: Integrating Care

Self-recognition, knowledge, and reclamation are at the heart of how one might methodologically approach intersectionality in praxis, and this is really where care is paramount. In our contemporary moment, we have lost the ability to take time out to think, to write, to draw, to wonder, to let our curiosity dictate a research pattern. More and more we are propelled into a system that requires all labor to produce at breakneck speed, suggesting that somehow the survival-of-the-fittest model of labor capitalism is achieved with a lack of all human needs: food, sleep, air, love, et cetera. The late capitalist model has alienated the human body to such a degree that we no longer are allowed to be human to be considered successful.

One of the ways I consider intersectionality to be useful is because it forces the hand of alienation to move. It actually removes the clutches of that form of control over self and control over body and labor. In some measure that is precisely what we want, but it is a privileged position. I have been so disciplined into my subjectivity as an academic, that even when I have slowed down and allowed for care, I have produced an enormous amount of material. Perhaps even because of it: I have produced more work because I am happier working. In some sense, even though I am trying to contest and resist this system, I am actually fulfilling the goal of the late capitalist, neoliberal academic systems agenda.

The reclaiming of a self that is mired in a late capitalist lifestyle is one that requires thoughtfulness, a sense of self-care, and a commitment to time as something to give, not to spend. A radical change in praxis does not always mean a dramatic and drastic change. Sometimes the self-awareness may result in a small material or spatial shift, but it is enough to create a mindful balance: the dramatic quality of the change may be intangible but palpable. In all of my experience, however, the mode of resistance has only ever worked through collaboration, finding allies and solidarity with others. It is through different kinds of practices and alignments that one can contest some of the conditions within which we are working. This can maintain one’s livelihood and sense of self. And so through alliances and creating kin with others (human/nonhuman), we maintain and protect ourselves. And ultimately, that care for and with others is also self-care. Once we recognize ourselves, we begin to recognize our positions, and how our positions may be at the expense of others, be those others human or nonhuman. Once we recognize that we are placed in various systems in ways to keep us moving in place, we stop and then slowly realign our ways of experience, our praxis experiences radical change, one in which we might recognize decolonization as care.

[excerpt]

These are excerpts from a chapter of the same title that is in press for the volume Slow Reader: A Resource for Design Thinking and Practice, edited by Carolyn Stauss and Paula Pais. A Slow Research Lab Collaboration with Valiz. Amsterdam, Valiz Publishers.

This excerpt has been published with the approval of the editors of the volume and the Slow Research Lab.

^[1] I am borrowing the concepts of transformation from Paulo Freire’s 1970, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Continuum International Publishing Group.

^[2] Intersectionality, as I am using it, was first introduced in Kimberle Crenshaw’s 1989, Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics. The University of Chicago Legal Forum. For more on race and architecture see Lesley Naa Norle Lokko’s volume, White Papers Black Marks: Architecture, Race, Culture. University of Minnesota Press (2000).

I have an ambivalent relationship to Anthropology. And an even more ambivalent relationship to the idea of decolonizing it.

I work in Canada. I am from Treaty Six Territory in central Alberta, from a city that bears the nehiyawewin (Plains Cree, Y Dialect) name amiskwaciwâskahikan. I am Métis on my dad’s side of my family, with roots that stretch back to Métis communities throughout present-day Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. I offer this introduction so that you can place who I am, who I am related to, and which territories I am bound to through movement, stories and time. I do so in order to ensure that readers and interlocutors can locate my knowledge in its own complex relationality to the places that I and my ancestors come from and moved through. I also provide this information to foreground the focus of my piece, which is a meditation on the visceral decolonization of the academy – and anthropology—here in Canada.

I had planned to write a post about the challenges of bringing Black and Indigenous scholarship into the classroom and into our published work in Canada, a country convinced of its moral standing and human rights excellence, yet which is regularly and wilfully blind to its vexing colonial violence. But a young nehiyaw (Cree) man, twenty-two year old Colten Boushie from the Red Pheasant First Nation, was shot and killed on a prairie farm in Saskatchewan last week after he and his friends sought help for a flat tire. And everything I think about this weekend as I write this post keeps coming back to this horrific death, and the inter-related realities of Black and Indigenous death at the hands of police and settlers, and the erasure of Black and Indigenous scholarship here in the lands within which we teach anthropology across Canada (and across the border in the United States). And I keep thinking about the logics and structures of academia as ‘white public space’ (Brodkin et al 2011) which produce narratives that normalize and even obscure the life and death of racialized peoples in favour of an undeniably white canon that resuscitates and re-animates white bodies into our classrooms ad nauseum (as Sara Ahmed so succinctly describes here).

I keep thinking: Canada isn’t exempt. Canada isn’t innocent. Scholarship being produced here cannot ignore these realities. The academy here, like the academy elsewhere, is entwined with the political and social orders which create and normalize white supremacist and colonial logics here and abroad.

In other words: we have a lot of work to do.

The visceral public response to Colten’s death has unleashed a torrent of racist, settler-colonial rage which seeks to dehumanize Indigenous lives. And this is no different from the responses so-called ‘polite’ Canadians present in response to the work of Black Lives Matter Toronto, and to the efforts of other communities to address white supremacy here. For all of the rhetoric about Canada being a place for Americans to flee in the event of a Trump presidency, the border does not undo the logics of dispossession and white supremacy. If anything, it just shifts how and where the narrative is expressed.

Colten Boushie’s violent death joins a heartbreaking series of settler colonial/institutional violence here in Canada in 2016. Two weeks ago, the Ottawa police beat Abdirahman Abdi so severely that he died from his injuries. In July, when Black Lives Matter Toronto intervened in the intensely white public space of Toronto Pride, ‘nice white Canadians’ voiced their rage towards the protestors, angry at the ‘inconvenience’ of the protest.

So what does this have to do with decolonizing anthropology? Well, I’d argue that it has everything to do with anthropology, and the fervent need to decolonize anthropology in Canada. Canada, despite its global reputation, is every bit as fraught and colonized as its southern neighbour. The logics of white supremacy and settler colonialism which animate American realities are also present here. Here in Canada, we have a deep responsibility to pay attention to and acknowledge the realities through which our American colleagues are working. We must pay attention to the work that Black, Indigenous and other racialized scholars are doing across territories still reeling from colonial realities.

Put bluntly: if we want to decolonize anthropology in Canada, those of us invested in it need to foster the conditions that make Indigenous scholars and other marginalized scholars to want to be affiliated with it.

And this stretches directly from the classroom to our research to our conferences. As my colleague Aaron Mills frequently reminds me, there is no space outside of our reciprocal relationality to the peoples who make up the territories we inhabit here in Canada. There is no divide between being a scholar and being a citizen. So what happens within our classrooms and our conference halls and within our journals is intimately linked to the things happening within the lands and territories we live and work in.

I don’t think that I have a grand answer to the question of how to, or even whether we can or should, decolonize anthropology in Canada. But, I can offer anecdotes from my efforts to teach anthropology in a decolonial way here in unceded and unsurrendered Algonguin territories in Ottawa, in the hopes that my story may be useful to others working within, alongside and outside the discipline.

The greatest gift in my life right now is the ability and the opportunity to teach. I am thankful to work at a university that places strong emphasis on the role of teaching in our development as scholars and as professors. I am thankful to work with diverse, dynamic, bright and brilliant students. I was nervous about starting my first faculty position last year, precisely because I did not know what to expect in the classroom. Growing up in Alberta, I was used to racist remarks about Indigenous peoples, immigrants and minorities being given a pass in University lectures. I also navigated complex instances of white supremacy and neo-colonial attitudes within British academe. As a white-coded Métis woman, I frequently hear and see what so-called ‘good white people’ really think about Indigenous issues, as I hear the things they say when they think no racialized people are within earshot. So, while I do not experience racism directly, I have witnessed the ways that my racialized family and friends are treated here, and I’ve seen the ugliness that manifests in Canada when white supremacy is challenged. With all of this in mind, I was primed for my courses on Indigenous issues in Canada to be controversial. So, I spent much of the summer before the term began preparing to address racism within the classroom. In order to prepare, I revisited material from my time as a global education assistant at the University of Alberta, and I read the blogs of brilliant colleagues. I prepared to navigate a classroom where white fragility was front and centre.

I was taken by absolute surprise when the students in my first course brought a completely different set of skills and discourses into the classroom. On my very first day of teaching last fall, my first day of teaching as a faculty member, I presented an example of a recent Indigenous issue in Canada. I looked out at the bright eyes of the 30 or so students in the room and I asked them: “what do you think this an example of?”.

I was expecting some tentative, general answers.

To my surprise, a white student raised their hand, and firmly stated: “White supremacy.”

I paused. I turned around, chalk in hand, and wrote their answer on the board, hiding my face from the class because inside, I was in (pleasant) shock. After years of working in the United Kingdom where the gentlest mention of colonialism, or—God forbid—white supremacy, was more likely than not to garner snorts and sighs and stern talkings-to from passive-aggressive white Brits, I was bowled over by my student’s answer. I wasn’t in Britain anymore, that’s for sure.

I was giddy.

This is by no means the norm—I also dealt with anti-Indigenous and anti-Black sentiments in my first year as a prof (sometimes directed at me for ‘ruining anthropology’ by focusing intently on decolonization and Indigenous issues in North America in anthropology courses, as one anonymous student commented). But, the students I taught in that first course were an amazing counterpoint to all of my prior experience. And I am grateful to have worked alongside them in my first year of teaching.

Students bring their stories into the classroom, which shifts and challenges the top-down narrative I was exposed to in pedagogical spaces from my undergrad years. In that first course last fall, students from South Africa and Somalia made brilliant and tangible links between violent colonial realities in Canada and other nations around the globe. Our collective discourse on the logics of colonialism, and the complexity and reach of it, are deeply enriched by the dynamic experiences and scholarship students bring into the classroom. I see the work of decolonizing anthropology in Canada as a collective and communal effort, one which requires us to dismantle the hierarchies which privilege the voices of professors over students, anthropologists over so-called laypersons. It also requires that we tend to the political realities of the places where we are employed.

Anthropology in Canada, therefore, cannot step outside of its entanglement with the colonial logics of the Canadian nation-state. Anthropology departments cannot ignore that they are situated in unceded Indigenous territories. And we, as anthropologists working in Canada, cannot avoid the ongoing struggles of Black, Indigenous and other racialized communities here. Even if our research takes place outside of Canada, we are deeply enmeshed in the relational realities of this place, and the complex and even violent ways that Canada and Canadian society writ large asserts itself. (And Canadian anthropologist Maximillian Forte raises a further provocative point—Canadian anthropology itself can in some ways be considered an outpost of American academic imperialism).

I can discuss provocative and complex topics in my courses because I am surrounded by so many amazing decolonial scholars in Canada who push and challenge and reshape the systems we are embedded within. I am indebted to the work of colleagues and mentors and academic leaders like Eve Tuck, Sarah Hunt, Rinaldo Walcott, Malinda Smith, Jennifer Adese, Vanessa Watts (and so many others!) whose work queries and challenges the epistemic and literal violence of institutions here in Canada. I am also indebted to my colleagues at my current University for being supportive, engaged and encouraging. I know that I am fortunate to do what I do.

But even with the hopefulness I feel as I look out into the classroom and see the bright and brilliant faces of my students, I can’t pretend that we aren’t facing an uphill battle as we try to build an academy that is attentive to, and accountable towards, the very people most deeply impacted by the entangled realities of white supremacy, heteropatriarchy and colonialism here.

In the media coverage of Colten’s death (I’m urged by well-meaning white settlers on Twitter to say death, rather than murder, so that I am not sued), in the few positive media portrayals available, journalists note that Colten was planning to head to college. He, like many young people killed by state or colonial violence before him, was on the threshold of his formal engagement with the academy. Colten Boushie’s kokum (grandmother) Verna Denny talked of how smart her grandson was, and his plans to pursue post-secondary education. Often, the lives of these young people are cut short just before they enter the threshold of the institutions we work in, institutions which are scattered across stolen land in Canada and the United States. They are the students we will never have the honour, the gift, of working with. Of learning from. Building stories with. Shifting paradigms with.

In one of the first pieces in this series on Decolonizing Anthropology, Faye Harrison discusses the participatory ethic which she mobilizes in her work. I like to think that bringing this participatory ethic into the classroom is key to efforts to decolonize the discipline (and the academy) here in Canada. Harrison notes:

“I think there is a possibility to ground what we do, to situate the inquiry we do in the real world of people and to decenter ourselves enough so that we can absorb and speak with rather than for whomever– the people, the cultural situation, or whatever. So I think the participatory ethic is how we can find out the most socially responsible way, the most democratizing, decolonial way to enact it; it means people are more than variables on a survey. It’s based on an intensive commitment of time.”

To me, the participatory ethic Harrison describes immediately invokes the stories which we share inside and outside the classroom. And I think of the stories that we will never hear from those killed by state violence. I think of Colten Boushie’s stories. I think of the stories of Mike Brown and Tamir Rice and Korryn Gaines and Trayvon Martin and Sandra Bland and Philando Castile and Alton Sterling and Eric Garner and Abdirahman Abdi and Sammy Yatim and Andrew Loku and and… I think of the stories of the 1200 Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women in Canada. So many stories. Their stories, like the countless stories of every person murdered by colonial white supremacist violence, matter. Their stories are cut short. Viscerally. Our job, as anthropologists and as teachers, is to create the conditions such that these young and old and every-age people can join us in the conversations we have. Can teach us in our classrooms. Can change the very landscape of the discipline with the brilliant things they carry in their hearts and minds and souls.

Our job, as I see it, is to tend to the relationships and stories that animate the territories we live in, work in, and dream within. Our job is to birth not only decolonized disciplines, but to lovingly and firmly foster the conditions of a decolonized ethos in all that we do. Our job is to build community. And, from reading the other posts in this series, I am reassured that this community exists. I hope that I can contribute to it in a meaningful way.

Post-script: this project led by Eve Tuck presents what I see as a hopeful example of decolonizing work, and the participatory ethic that Faye Harrison describes, here in Canada. Tuck and her students have created a podcast entitled ‘the Henceforward’, which “considers relationships between Indigenous Peoples and Black Peoples on Turtle Island. We reconsider the past and reimagine the future, in the Henceforward”. You can listen to the podcast and subscribe to future posts here.

Bio: Zoe Todd is a Michif/Red River Métis scholar from Treaty Six territory in Alberta, Canada. She is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Carleton University. Her work examines Indigeneity, art, architecture, decolonization and healing in urban contexts. She also studies human-animal relations, colonialism and environmental change in northern Canada.

“Modernity will never again, up to the present, ask existentially or philosophically for the right to dominate the periphery. Rather, the right to domination will be imposed as the nature of things and will underpin all modern philosophy.” (emphasis in original; Dussel, 2014: 32-33)

To divorce anthropology from the overall project of modernity would be disingenuous. Anthropology is an integral part of the arsenal that effected the us/them hierarchical dichotomy, the negative repercussions of which continue to haunt the geo-politics of our time. There is thus no question as to the need to decolonise the discipline. The question remains whether it is at all possible to decolonise the discipline, which some argue is more mired in coloniality than not. Exceptionalising anthropology as the unique colonising force in the human sciences misses the point. The sight of the colonising project of the human sciences, and the sciences in general, should not be lost even as we count the tally of the destruction that anthropology singularly wrought.  To be sure, we, in Africa who purport an Africanist, decolonial outlook, are viscerally aware of this destruction. We, who were trained in the discipline learnt, along the way, to come to it with gaping wounds, understanding fully well our untenable position as participants in a discipline that continues to cause so much pain, mainly because of its inability to engage in deep introspection. Our perhaps unrealistic hope is that we are awakened from the complicit role that we inevitably play by standing by its prescripts.

The many turns that the discipline boasts of in a quest to rid itself of its unpalatable legacy further deepen the damage. While the godfathers of the discipline strain to sell yet another turn to account for the existence of the discipline, they (thankfully) remain outside the fold of those we regard as our ancestors! For, “[h]enceforth, the colonized know that they have an advantage over [the colonizers]. They know that their temporary, [sic] “masters” are lying. Therefore, that their masters are weak.” (Cesaire, 1955[1972]). Calls led by students that started in South Africa to decolonise the University are a resounding signal that the colonial matrix of power in which the University apparatus is an integral part can no longer afford to exist as the nature of things (Dussel, 2014: 32-33). Instead, moving away from the reformist, incrementalist, dumbing down principles which are the mainstay of the neo-liberal regime, they are calling for the very fundamentals of the university to fall, in effect declaring that modernity has to account for its right to dominate. “…from the depths of slavery, [they] set themselves up as judges” (of a dying civilisation) (Cesaire 1955 [1972]. They are no longer satisfied with settling for the question: what is colonialism. They ask: what fundamentally is colonialism? (ibid) and show the liberating potency of asking the right questions.

In my decoloinal sojourns I was introduced to the concept; “to anthropologise” which, as you might agree, sounds ominous. I thought hard about what it actually meant for the work that I do, bearing in mind all the time the truism that the colonising potential of anthropology is always in spite of the best intentions of the individual. While personally, we could be of either good or bad faith, this is entirely irrelevant to the objective social implications of the work we do as watchdogs of colonialism (Cesaire: 1955[1972]: 12). I make a distinction between colonialism and coloniality (Grosfoguel, 2007, Maldonado-Torres, 2007, Mignolo, 2007). I argue that the “scientific mill” is the conduit that keeps coloniality alive. It is a strategic lever of power that needs to be unmasked.

Imperial designs: Anthropology is highly embroiled in evolutionary thinking. It is the only science whose explicit and original raison d’tre is to study the Other: “…it is now glaringly evident that contempt for (and perhaps fear of) people of colour is implicit in the 19^th century anthropology’s interpretation and even construction of anthropological facts” (Jaggar, 1989: 156). This is done through tools, concepts and theories that systematically distance the self from the Other, which together constitute “anthropologising” anthropological subjects-made-objects.  Anthropology, is not only involved in responding to the questions: who are you (you being Europe’s Other) and who are you in relation to me (me being a European), it has been instrumental in producing the savage and proving his inferiority. For instance, the notion of fieldwork which while having evolved from its crude historical characterisation of “the farther, the more objective” remains hard to redeem; a) “doing fieldwork” inevitably naturalises the field; it paints it as “out there” waiting to be apprehended and thus presented as ethnography, b) reifies community and cements the idea of the local as independent from the global, c) lends itself to in situ understandings that preclude meaningful historical conversations. The muting process is evident in taking those studied at face value as if the ethnographic encounter is not mediated by events and histories not captured in conversation with them. What do these conversations disallow and thus distort? The ethnographic episode cannot be an encounter between strangers, it must, by force of history, be a meeting of people who know each other well. The detail is inextricably linked to the entanglements of history. Taking my cue from Pierre (2006), I argue that the use of culture in anthropology is an easy substitute for race; the purported cultural differences are easily racial differences.

Polittricking: Reflexivity, however much it is exercised, is yet another obfuscating mechanism; an easy option that hides more than it reveals. It issues from the mechanism of hiding the locus of enunciation, while highlighting the enunciated. It does not reveal the situatedness of anthropology in the geo-politics of knowledge. By emphasizing the body-politics of the individual ethnographer while totally underplaying the complicity of the human sciences as a scientific mill that wields and underpins colonial power, reflexivity is a political tool. Declaring one’s own positionality does not address the historical fundamentals of the discipline. Decolonial thinking uncovers this politricking; playing political tricks while purporting an apolitical stance. Fundamentally, the humanities are a machinery deployed to muster the belief in white superiority. Their radical re-configuration, or better yet, their demise will have the effect: “…When a superior race ceases to believe itself a chosen race, it actually ceases to be a chosen race.” Anthropology underpins the abyssal line (de Sousa Santos, 2007) that bolsters the modern divide as the nature of things. By filtering other ways of knowing and being through Western prisms, one is inevitably engaged in the politics of facilitating life and causing death all at the same time.

Studied ignorance: The foremost, celebrated thinkers in the discipline, to date, underplay these politics. Instead, they teach disciplinarity and according to this logic, politics should not permeate anthropological thinking. I cannot believe that they actually believe this! I rather believe that they are engaging in studied ignorance: yet another of the ploys of preserving the status quo. The sinister role of disciplinarity is to keep us mastering parts of “the thing”, while the thing itself remains elusive (see Nyamjoh’s Blinded by Sight thesis, 2012). Whose interests are served by owning the vicissitudes that come with ‘epistemologies of equilibrium’ (Ndovu- Gatsheni, 2013)? What happens when boundaries of discipline are transcended? This is an important step in decolonisng knowledge. There is really no glory in discipline. “…Such people are treated by dominant organisations of knowledge especially those falling under the human and social sciences, as problems instead of people who face problems. Their problem status is a function of the pre-supposedly legitimacy of the systems.” (Gordon, 2014: 83)

Engaging in epistemic disobedience (Mignolo, 2011: 122) against disciplined thinking helps us piece together that “problem people” and their problem status are a function of the system. So, when W.E. Du Bois asked; “What does it mean to be a problem?”, he was not engaging in disciplined thinking. He was not engaged with an aspect of the thing but was calling out the thing itself. That was a decolonial way of knowing against a colonial way of being. It was combative epistemology against what Maldonado-Torres (2008) characterises as a paradigm of war intent on misrecognition and misrepresentation. It transcended the confines of speaking without making speech (Gordon, 2014), it was an act of calling out all the mechanisms, ploys and trickery that rendered the majority of the world’s people damned, an attempt to speak authentically (Mafeje, 1996) against a system that systematically purports that “there can be no others” (Mignolo (2012, p. 59).

Strategic blindness: I argue that African Aids is the most contemporary othering exercise at a large scale. It almost single-handedly achieved the following feats: it facilitated a strategic blindness to the human suffering that is a direct result of a disembowelment and devouring of a people by another – almost succeeding in convincing us of the existence of African sexuality whose distance from “modern sexualities” is deep, infinite and natural. African AIDS almost convinced the West of its own superiority while obscuring its complicity in bringing about this scourge. It resurrected fantastical ideas about the savage, exotic, debased. It naturalised the distance between object and subject; was fodder for the “obscurers, all the inventors of subterfuges, the charlatans and tricksters, the dealers in gobbledygook.” (Cesaire 1955[1972] ibid: 12).

Maldonado-Torres (2008) argues that to be modern is to essentially question the humanity of an Other. African Aids is the rule rather than the exception. The rational, omniscient and omnipresent imperial man against the non-thinking and therefore non-existent African (body). Fassin (2007) asks what is a just society? It is one that remembers. Perhaps then the work that we do will cease to be “deeply embedded in the multiple layers of imperial and colonial practices’” – sounding like swear words to those about whom we speak and write (Smith, 1992: 2-3). The many turns in anthropology ignore their own decadence by always producing the same narrative, proffering hateful solutions to problems that it is complicit in creating (Ceasaire, 1955[1972]). Malkki (cited in Fassin 2007) asserts that ‘anthropological culturalism’, which by essentialising difference, produces “subtly dehistoricizing, dehumanizing effects.” In this vein, Fassin (2007: XII) argues that “objectification increases the social capacity to inflict pain upon the other and to render the other’s pain inadmissible to public discourse.”

Today, more than ever, humanity needs more unbelievers than believers. If we agree that the idea of the Western university is fundamentally and fatally problematic, what more of disciplines? What more of the discipline of anthropology?

Bio:

Nokuthula Hlabangane was raised in the dusty streets of Soweto by spirited women whose never-die spirit haunts her work. She is an unbeliever on note who eschews easy positioning and easy victories. Her greatest strength is not believing and her greatest weakness is that, through her many forays in search of truth, she has come to know too much. She happens to teach at the University of South Africa.

References

de Sousa Santos, B. 2007. ‘Beyond abyssal thinking: from global lines to ecologies of knowledge’. In Review 30(1):1-33.

Dussel, E. 2014. ‘Anti-Cartesian meditations: On the origin of the philosophical anti-discourse of modernity’. In JCRT 13(1): 1-53

Fassin, D. 2007 When bodies remember: Experiences and politics of AIDS in South Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Gordon, R.G (2014). ‘Disciplinary decadence and the decolonisation of knowledge’. In Africa Development 39(1): 81-92.

Grosfoguel, R. 2007. ‘The epistemic decolonial turn: Beyond political economy paradigms’. In Cultural Studies 21(2): 211-223.

Grosfoguel, R. 2008. Transmodernity, border thinking and global coloniality. Decolonizing political economy and postcolonial studies. Available at: www.eurozine.com/articles/2008-07-04-grosfoguel-en.html (accessed on 05/09/2013).

Grosfoguel, R. 2012. ‘Decolonizing Western Uni-versalisms, Decolonial Pluri-versalism from Aime Cesaire to the Zapatistas’. In Transmodernity Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of of the Luso-Hispanic World 13: 1-17.

Grosfoguel, R. 2013. ‘The Structure of Knowledge in Westernized Universities’. In Human Archicture: Journal of the Sociology of Sociology of Self-knowledge, XI, 1: 73-90.

Jaggar, A. 1989. ‘Love and knowledge: Emotion in feminist epistemology. In Gender/Body/Knowledge – Feminist reconstructions of being and knowing, A.M. Jaggar and S. R. Bordo (eds). Rutgers: The State University.

Mafeje, A. 1996. Anthropology and independent Africans: suicide or end of an era? Dakar: CODESRIA Monograph Series 4/96.

Maldonado-Torres, N. 2007. ‘On the coloniality of Being’. In Cultural Studies 21(2): 240-270.

Maldonado-Torres, N. 2008. Against war: views from the underside of modernity. Durham: Duke University Press.

Mignolo, W. 2007. ‘Delinking’.  In Cultural Studies, 21(2): 449-514.

Mignolo, W. 2011. The darker side of Western modernity: global futures/decolonial options. Durham: Duke University Press.

Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S.J. 2013. ‘Why decoloniality in the 21^st century?’. In The Thinker for thought leaders. Volume 48.

Nyamjoh, F.B. 2012. ‘Blinded by sight: Divining the future of Anthropology in Africa’. In Africa Spectrum 47(2-3): 63-92.

Pierre, J. 2006. ‘Anthropology and the Race of/for Afric. In The Study of Africa Vol 1: Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Encounters, Paul. T. Zeleza (ed.). Dakar. CODESRIA.

Smith, TL. 1999. Decolonizing methodologies: Research indigenous peoples. London and New York: University of Otago Press.

As a non-native learner and speaker of Amharic, English, and Swahili, I have taken several journeys between these languages and my mother tongue, Tigrinya. Considering geopolitical domination and subordination, the passages between Amharic and Tigrinya or Swahili and Tigrinya are fewer than between English and Tigrinya. However, all crossings have similar purposes: to improve my comprehension, speaking, reading, and writing skills of these languages. In writing this post, I have taken a journey that merges Tigrinya and English in the service of two critical questions: 1) what role would a journey between two languages play in the process of thinking and writing about decolonizing archaeology?  2) What would the traveler feel and experience?

This journey took a few days to begin answering these two questions, but the first two days make the foundation of this and any future journeys.

Day one: On a notebook using a mechanical pencil I wrote the title “ናጽነት ናይ ስነጥንቲ መጽናእቲ” in ትግርኛ (Tigrinya), a Semitic language spoken by around 7 million people from the central region of Eritrea and from the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia. The literal translation of the title in English is: “liberating the study of ancient times”.  Then I switched into English, and typed on the computer the tittle: “decolonizing archaeology”.

I continued in English. I wrote:

I am invited to write about decolonizing archaeology. I can write something; I have lived experience of becoming an African archaeologist. But my body feels stiff, and my mind refuses to think anything about archaeology. My inner voice is interrogating me: why should I write about something that is not even going to help most ordinary African people?  Why should I write about decolonizing archaeology when the entire process of archaeology continues to be colonial?  And why should I write about decolonizing archaeology in a lingua franca that still exhibits imperialism?  For whom do I write it anyway? As my inner voice interrogates me, I feel numbed and frustrated. I also feel fear of judgement by my colleagues and probably jeopardizing my career. I feel lack of energy because I feel the systemic trap. I feel worthless. I have no source of income. If I can’t afford my basic daily needs, why should I care about archaeology?  My passion for African Archaeology and my doctoral degree in Anthropology could mean nothing if I cannot earn a living from them.

I couldn’t take the negativity. I stopped there!

Then I switched to Tigrinya mode. I stared the notebook and constantly placed the pencil hoping to write something. After about 45 minutes of silence, I decided to write whatever came to my mind.  I only wrote these few sentences:

ብቋንቋ ትግርኛ ብዛዕባ ሓርነትን ናጽነትን ናይ ስነጥንቲ ክጽሕፍ ኢለ ክሓስብ ከለኩ ኩቱር ፍርሒ ወይ ድማ ዘይብዓት ይስምዓኒ። ምክንያቱ ብትግርኛ ንሰድራቤተየን ንቤተሰበይን ንምሓዙተይን እንተ ዘይኮይኑ ንሓፋሽ ወይ ድማ ንናይ መንግስቲ ቤትጽሕፈት ብ ውሕድ እየ ተጠቂመሉ ዝፈልጥ። ኣብ ሑቡራት ኣመሪካ ንትምሕርቲ ኢለ ካብ ዝመጽእ እሞ እንትርፎ እቶም ትግርኛ ዝዛረቡ ምሓዙተይ ኣብ ዝተፈላለያ ሃገራት ዘሎው ክማኡውን ን ኣብ ኤርትራ ዘሎው ስድራቤተይ እንተዘይ ኮይኑ ብእንግሊዝ እየ ዝዛረብ ኔረ። ኣብዘን ክልተ ዖመት ግን ናይ ቀረባ ቤተሰብ ናብ ኣመሪካ ስለዝመጻኡ ምብዛሕታኡ ጊዜ ብ ትግርንኛ ይዛረብ ኣለኩ።

When I imagine writing in Tigrinya about freedom and independence of the study of ancient times, I feel a strong fear and inadequacy. Because other than communicating with my family, relatives, and friends, I rarely used Tigrinya for public purposes and governmental offices. After I came to the United States, I have used English in daily activities, except whenever I talked to my family in Eritrea and with my Tigrinya speaking friends in different countries. However, in the last two years, since my close relatives came to the United States, most of the time I have been speaking in Tigrinya.

In the few hour’s solitary journey, writing in Tigrinya and English exposed my troubled relationship with and dissatisfaction of archaeology, and my inadequacy and fear of communicating to the Tigrinya speaking communities. Basically, I feel an outsider to archaeology, an outsider to English, and an outsider to Tigrinya. An outsider to archaeology because I know archaeology rarely has relevance to the community I belong. An outsider to English because I am exhausted by the time I spend learning the language and constantly visiting dictionaries, thesaurus, and grammar books and websites. Surprisingly, I do enjoy the learning process and never gave up. But the energy I spend in the process pains me a lot. Despite all the years I spend mastering the language, I am still an outsider looking up to native and privileged English speakers for guidance, and I strongly feel both intellectual discrimination and linguistic dependency. I feel a stranger in my native Tigrinya culture because I am not familiar with its systems of thought of and writing about ancient times, and I was never taught about it in formal education. This experience discloses my intra ethno-linguistic and intellectual alienation.

Another intrinsic observation I noticed in this self-evaluative process is that the language selected for writing dictates the writer’s imagined audience. My imagined audience as I write in English are archaeologists, museum and antiquities professionals, funding organizations, governments, universities, and anyone who speaks English (an ambiguous global public). As I write in Tigrinya, I first imagined a specific region and a specific group of people. It includes families, villages, regions, national institutions, universities, practitioners, students, and binational audiences. In the process, I tolerate contemporary political and regional differences and focus on cultural, linguistic, and historical similarities.

Day Two: With these insights, on the second day, I came to terms with my inner voice. I wrote one paragraph in English and three paragraphs in Tigrinya. In the English paragraph, I argue that decolonizing archaeology in African countries should “start with national institutions responsible for understanding and guiding archaeological activities.” My writing highlights how post-colonial national institutions inherited archaeology without questioning its relevance and how the concept of seniority in African cultures serves as means of upholding these colonial legacies. It also notes the post-colonial transformation of these national institutions where Africans work as personnel of these institutions, and foreigners still hold the power of the knowledge and language that guides these institutions. In general, the paragraph presents a structural analysis of decolonizing archaeology in African countries to a specific group who are knowledgeable of archaeology by highlighting power, intellectual, and linguistic dependency.

In the three paragraphs of journey in Tigrinya, I started by asking questions.  The first paragraph covers the meaning of ስነጥንቲ (about ancient times), reasons for studying ስነጥንቲ, and how to know about ስነጥንቲ. It is only after I made attempts to answer these ontological and epistemological questions of ስነጥንቲ, I moved to writing my personal narrative of how I learned about my country’s history, my ethnic group history, my parent’s place of origin, and the history of their village and its region. The second paragraph emphasizes the domination of foreign systems of thought and knowledge production of ancient history in Eritrea and neighboring countries, whereas past and contemporary local and regional systems of thought and knowledge of ancient history are yet to be written. The third paragraph captures training provided to educate Africans (Tigrinya speakers) about ስነጥንቲ in higher education and how they became part of the Western intellectual communities. Consequently, ስነጥንቲ local professionals take the responsibilities to educate their communities about ስነጥንቲ rather than to learn from their communities. Given these reasons, I (as a member of the community) argue that the study of ancient history in Eritrea and neighboring countries needs liberation. I also beg and plead these countries’ scholars of ስነጥንቲ to focus on local, national, and regional relevance.

As an active learner, I got in touch with the Tigrinya script and literature. Using this website (http://www.lexilogos.com/keyboard/tigrinya.htm), I restudied the Tigrinya alphabet and punctuation rules and learned how to type in Tigrinya using the Tigrinya Keyboard. To do so, I studied the coordination between English and Tigrinya alphabets. It was a very interactive and fulfilling experience. I regained my reading, writing, and typing skills in Tigrinya. In the process, I have appreciated the technological and software developments and their contributions in the process of decolonizing and transforming knowledge production and power.

In this personal journey, I identified intellectual, linguistic, and cultural identity dislocation and flexibility, and how to reclaim native cultural, linguistic, and intellectual belongingness. In my case, it means how to regain and relocate my belongingness in the Tigrinya culture and how to gain respect, dignity, and confidence in the journey of global academic and professional culture. The journey reveals more about how a thinking and writing journey between two languages serves as a decolonizing and relocating process.  Decolonizing and transformation are intertwined and interlinked processes that require collaboration, including linguistic. In the beginning, writing in Tigrinya takes a lot of time and is meticulous, but once the task is over it is rewarding and makes the writer relevant and worthy. It is a healing and calming process for the pain and hopelessness I feel when writing only in English. It becomes hope rather than despair.

Acknowledgements: I am grateful to Uzma Z. Rizvi for her support and for bringing the topic to my attention. I would also like to thank M. Dores Cruz.

Bio:

Asmeret Ghebreigziabiher Mehari has a doctorate in anthropology from the University of Florida. In 2001 graduated with a B.A. in archaeology from the University of Asmara, Eritrea. Between 2000 and 2002, she participated in and supervised several archaeological surveys and excavations in the Greater Asmara area in Eritrea, as part of her national service at the National Museum of Eritrea. She has published her research in several academic venues including a co-authored chapter in an edited volume, Community Archaeology and Heritage in Africa: Decolonizing practice, by Peter R. Schmidt and Innocent Pikirayi.

For about a decade I have been teaching a graduate seminar in anthropology at Columbia University called “Decolonizing Methodology” which takes Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s groundbreaking book Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples as its starting point and also draws on other key texts focused on research methodologies specifically (Denzin et. al. 2008; Kovach 2010). In the course we tend to start with Smith’s work and then use her careful analysis to guide us in taking apart the various traditional methodologies that anthropologists tend to rely on in their research and the various theoretical frames that are of-the-moment within the field. This means that the course moves back and forth between “decolonizing methodology” and “decolonizing theory”.

I started teaching the course after my colleague and friend Jamon Halvaksz pointed out that in my first book I failed to engage enough work by scholars from Papua New Guinea, (PNG) where I have worked since 1997, and the broader Pacific region. Halvaksz’s critique helped me to see the colonial nature of my own anthropological practice in terms of the theoretical texts I drew on to make my arguments and produce new knowledge. From that, I also began thinking about how to teach “methods” in a way that fit with Smith’s work and my own experience of doing ethnographic research with communities in PNG that forced me, from the first day of my research, to think about the politics of asking questions, white privilege, the historic role of anthropology in the mis-representation of Papua New Guineans, and what happens when a scholar learns something that she can never write about. Since my research has always focused on engagements between Papua New Guineans and others (scientists, business people, missionaries, tourists) my colleagues and friends from PNG have always pushed me to think carefully about what these outsiders (myself included) take from PNG, give back to PNG, and how they produce PNG through their rhetoric and practice.

I am a white middle class straight cis-gendered woman from a very poor working class background who is the descendant of settlers who illegally and immorally stole land owned by people of the Coosa Chiefdom who is a full tenured professor at a university that is located on land owned by Lenape people. The students tend to be first and second year Ph.D. students (and a few MA students) who come from a range of departments, with the fields of anthropology, urban planning, history, and sociology almost always represented[i]. In the course, in terms of methods, we always focus on ‘participant observation,’ ‘interviews,’ ‘mapping’, ‘oral history’, and various visual projects like ‘filmmaking’ and ‘photography’ since these are generally the methods that the students in the course imagine that they will use during their doctorial field research. In terms of “theory” over the years we have take on “the production of space,” “ontology”, and “bare life”, among others. In the methods part of the course we tend to take a traditional text describing how to do a method and a traditional ethnographic text written from evidence gathered with that method and ‘read’ them through Smith’s arguments about the kinds of colonial artifacts (dispossession, occlusion, erasure, violence) that are smuggled into traditional social-science epistemic practices. Through this process we get to what should really be the beginning, but rarely is with students who are expected to “have a project” when they apply to Ph.D. programs, where the students start to ask themselves about, in Kim TallBear’s phrasing, “the ethics of accountability in research (whose lives, lands, and bodies are inquired into and what do they get out of it?)” (TallBear 2014:1) and how the methods that they have been imagining may not allow them to approach accountability in ways that they find ethical. The students thus begin to think about the binary that has underpinned most of their research-thinking to date. Again, following TallBear, they begin to see, “the binary between researcher and researched—between knowing inquirer and who or what are considered to be the resources or grounds for knowledge production” (TallBear 2014:1) and they begin to understand that truly decolonial work tries to do away with this binary in various ways.

In the theory part of the course we take the most canonical text for any given social-scientific body of thought, read it, and then read it through texts about the same topic written by non-Euro-American-Australian scholars. For example for “space” we might read Henri Lefebvre’s The production of Space (Lefebvre 1991) paired with work by Okusitino Mãhina, a Tongan philosopher of time-space articulations (Mãhina 1992, 1993, 2002, 2010). In the best of worlds what happens next is a similar self-awaking where the students realize that most of the conceptual frames they are using to think with about their proposed projects come not from in situ relations, conversations, ontological propositions, epistemic processes, or exchanges about what needs to be known and what can’t be known, but rather from their own intellectual genealogy and what texts, arguments, and faculty compelled them during their course work or even their undergraduate training.

We then work together, as a group, in pairs, and with multiple meeting between me and each of the students, to re-think their projects, the ethics of accountability involved in them, and how they will proceed in crafting literature reviews that expand their field of epistemic possibilities. It is a great deal of pedagogical labor on my part and a great deal of intellectual labor on their part. Perhaps more importantly however, it involves a fairly serious commitment to letting go on the part of the students and a willingness to craft a new project idea for their preliminary research (remember that most of the students are first and second year students so they have some time before they actually have to do their dissertation research), that puts the ethics of engagement front and center, and allows for a methodology to emerge in co-production with the communities with which they wish to work.

I’ve also taught a version of this course twice in Papua New Guinea. There, I taught the course on a volunteer basis through The Papua New Guinea Institute for Biological Research (PNG IBR) an NGO that I co-founded in the early 2000s with colleagues from PNG and the United States. One of our founding principals is the proposition that the conservation of biological diversity in PNG can only be achieved if Papua New Guineans have full sovereignty over that biological diversity and that that sovereignty has been slowly stripped away by outsiders conducting research and conservation in the country. In PNG the course was made up of people working as researchers for both governmental and non-governmental organizations, people working as researchers for various extractive industries, people working for national cultural institutions, and faculty from various national universities. There we took the specific methodologies that we have all seen used in an endless barrage of social research components of assessments and used Smith’s work to help us re-craft them in ways that make sense for research with communities in PNG.

Image: Author with participants of the decolonizing methodology course in PNG (2015).

Teaching the course in the contexts of the US and PNG is always quite different. At Columbia the course is about the individual students, their projects, and the project of moving them through the graduate system so that they emerge as scholars who, for the most part, will become university professors. In PNG the course feels more like a shared project. One in which we are all committed to the same goal (decolonizing epistemic practice as it connects to PNG) and where we are able to connect with non scholars who are equally interested in epistemic practice. For example, in one version of the course the students presented their final projects to a group of elders from the communities surrounding the town where we met. These elders were indigenous, expatriate, and other and the students and I all learned from their critiques of our work.

I think of all of this teaching as a collective, on-going, project where my scholarly practice, I hope, becomes less colonial every time I teach the course. I’ve outlined the course here not because I think it is perfect or even that everyone should teach it, but rather because I think it has helped me and my students to do better, more decolonial anthropology.

REFERENCES:

Denzin, Norman K., Yvonna S. Lincoln and Linda Tuhiwai Smith 2008. Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies. Sage Books.

Kovach, Margaret. 2010. Indigenous Methodologies: Characteristics, Conversations and Contexts. University of Toronto Press.

Lefebvre, Henri 1991. The production of space. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.

Mãhina, ‘Okusitino 1992. The Tongan Traditional Tala-e-fonua: A Vernacular Ecology-centered Historico-Cultural Concept. Unpublished PhD Thesis. ANU, Canberra.

Mãhina, Okusitino,  1993 The poetics of Tongan traditional history, tala–fonua: An ecology-centred concept of culture and history. Journal of Pacific History 28:109–21.

Mãhina, Okusitino, 2002 Atamai, fakakaukau and vale: Mind, thinking and mental illness in Tonga. Pac-Health-Dialog 9 (2): 303–08.

Mãhina, ‘Okusitino. 2010. Ta, Va, and Moana: Temporality, Spatiality, and Indigeneity.

Smith, Linda Tuhiwai 2012. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. New York, NY: Zed Books.

TallBear, Kim. 2014. “Standing With and Speaking as Faith: A Feminist-Indigenous Approach to Inquiry [Research note].” Journal of Research Practice, 10(2), 2014.

NOTES:

[i] For example in a recent year I had twelve students, three of whom identified as Asian-American, one as Chinese (but from Singapore), one as African-American, one as Indian, one as Native American, with the remaining five identifying as white but with one being German and one being Dutch. The previous year there were sixteen students with one identifying as African American, two as Latino, four as white, two as Asian-American, one as Palestinian, one as Native American, one as Peruvian, one as Columbian, one as Pakistani, one as Chinese, and one as Brazilian.

BIO:

Paige West is Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University. Her broad scholarly interest is the relationship between societies and their environments.  Since the mid 1990s she has worked with indigenous people in Papua New Guinea. She is the author of three books and the editor of five more.Dr. West is the founder of the journal Environment and Society, the chair of the Ecology and Culture University Seminar at Columbia University, a fellow (and past chair) of the Association of Social Anthropology in Oceania, and is the past president of the Anthropology and Environment Society of the American Anthropological Association. In addition to her academic work, Dr. West is the co-founder, and a board member, of the PNG Institute of Biological Research, a small NGO dedicated to building academic opportunities for research in Papua New Guinea by Papua New Guineans. Dr. West is also the co-founder of the Roviana Solwara Skul, a school in Papua New Guinea dedicated to teaching at the nexus of indigenous knowledge and western scientific knowledge. Her website: https://paige-west.com/, you can also follow her on Twitter: @PaigeWestNYC

Detroit moves quickly; issues of scale and pace in a city of this size pose major challenge to contemporary archaeological practice. I’m not sure what a decolonizing archaeology should look like here, but it’s happening nonetheless. It is grassroots. It connects with communities. It shares the skills we have as social scientists with people, places, and collections. The goals are simple – to tell stories that matter, to empower memory, to increase participation, and, hopefully, to spur action against destructive forces of erasure and exclusion. We don’t have the luxury of time and protracted theoretical deliberation on our side; this work is done in a climate of rapid late capitalist development and privatization, where most of places we encounter are at the mercy of irreversible decay from ruination or demolition by developers.

In the short space of the past century, capitalism conquered Detroit. Lumber barons, Henry Ford’s $5 day, and Motown attracted wealth, migrants, and notoriety to the city. When businesses were done winning they left behind a “traumascape” of blight and conflict (Tumarkin 2010). Right now the city is experiencing a process of reckoning with its emergent post-disaster status through various public, private, and grassroots efforts. A palpable tension exists between neoliberal developers (who are arguably re-colonizing parts of the city) and Detroiters (including a Detroit diaspora). An undergirding battle wages over which stories will be told about the city – its histories of industrial success and innovation on the one hand, or the accounts of inequality, violent racism, and epic systemic failures on the other. In this post I briefly reflect upon the ways in which contemporary urban archaeology is attempting to work both within and against the frameworks of late capitalist development, and I provide a few examples from our work at Wayne State University that link these efforts to the themes of participatory action, unlearning, return, and reclaiming that fall under the umbrella of decolonized practice.

Figure 1.  The Imagination Station in the Corktown neighborhood of Detroit, 2012 (Photo: K. Ryzewski).

Detroit is a city of 139 sq miles – within its boundaries, the cities of New York, Boston and San Francisco can comfortably fit with room to spare. Physically, there exists an expansive blighted landscape within the city limits, which reached epic proportions in the wake of the recent mortgage crisis [upwards of 80,000 abandoned properties].  Socially, there is a stark socio-economic divide between Detroit and the surrounding metro area. Today the city’s population is just shy of 700,000, and it is 82% African American. But a significant Detroit diaspora population of about 3.5 million people live in the Metro suburbs. Many in this population self-identify as Detroiters – a large proportion were born and raised in the city, or their parents were.  What this means, to borrow from the anthropological literature on transnational migration, is that there exists a multiplicity of belongings associated with Detroit, playing out on different levels of engagement that are concurrently “here” and “there” (Bell 2016, Levitt and Waters 2002, and others).

In the current climate of revitalization there are at least a half-dozen well-funded and highly visible development and planning initiatives that are envisioning what a future Detroit might look like (Detroit Future City, Data Driven Detroit, 7.2 SQ MI).  A recurring issue with some of these blueprinting projects is that they are built on cliché sketches of the city as gritty, vacant, a blank slate – a premise that effectively ignores the past and present of the city in its many guises.  Some initiatives have also met with pushback from local residents. As my colleagues Andrew Newman and Sara Safransky (2014) observe, Detroit Future City is poised to perpetuate many of the inequalities that have for so long fueled the city’s underlying socio-economic and racial conflicts. Currently, two billionaires, Mike Ilitch and Dan Gilbert are almost singlehandedly implementing ideas from these blueprints by transforming huge swaths of the downtown neighborhoods in aggressive – and privatized – rebuilding campaigns. Archaeologists have not been included in any of these planning conversations.

Figure 2. The last of the historic district standing in the shadow of the massive Ilitch hockey and entertainment district development, 2016 (the house on the right is now asking almost $4 million)  (Photo: K. Ryzewski).

The response that my colleagues and I have designed to the situation of Detroit today has been to create a program of grassroots archaeology that is structured and guided by local partnerships with stakeholder groups within and beyond the city limits. Some of these are slow multi-year affairs, others just take a weekend. All involve Detroiters, multiple academic fields, and much more than standard archaeological methods.

Here’s a quick summary of a few of these projects:

Ethnic Layers of Detroit is a digital storytelling project (funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities). This project works with a two-dozen member advisory board drawn from local non-profits, institutions, and community organizations to produce – in collaboration with students and residents – short two-to-three minute digital stories about places in Detroit that are linked to layered ethnic histories.  In doing so it foregrounds the existence of the subjects and objects of our studies in the contemporary moment.

We will have 25 stories completed by the end of 2016, and many more student and community stories to add to that repertoire. The recordings preserve some elements of the physical landscape and its absences in ways that cannot and should not survive intact in the future city visions. They also invite either place-based experiences or distant engagements with the featured sites through what Hennessy et al. (2013) have called “digital return”. Examples of our ELD project stories include the Brewster-Douglass homes (the first African American federal housing project in the country), the former Chinatown neighborhood, and an empty house lot where Victor Herman, a Jewish American autoworker who wound up imprisoned in a Soviet-era Siberian Gulag, once lived.

Figure 3. The Brewster-Douglass homes in 2012, two years before they were demolished (Photo: K. Ryzewski).

One of the most fruitful collaborations has been between our Wayne State archaeologists and the Detroit Sound Conservancy. Together, over the past year, we have mapped, excavated, and generated various media about two former places associated with Detroit’s music-making history. One of these sites was at the Blue Bird Inn jazz club – a prominent African American venue that was once home to musicians like Miles Davis and Cannonball Adderley. Lorin Brace, Wayne State alum and current PhD student at the University of Maryland, recently completed his Master’s Essay on the archaeology of the club. The archaeology of the Blue Bird Inn, a derelict building, probably won’t lead to any sort of site-specific restoration, but it is generating widespread interest in accounting for the city’s rich musical heritage in visions of future exhibits, city tours, and other plans.

There are several other initiatives, (e.g., Unearthing Detroit, Speakeasy Project, Roosevelt Park), but one final one for now is arguably the most important for the promoting the relevance of archaeology to Detroit – this is the Time Jumpers program – an educational module geared towards elementary school students and customized to the archaeology of the region. We began the program 2014 by hosting the sessions in local schools (15+ sessions so far), but as word spread we’ve expanded into statewide science festivals, the National Parks Service’s “Parks for the People” agenda, and the White House’s “Every Kid in a Park” program.

What do these grassroots initiatives have to do with decolonizing archaeology in Detroit?

Detroit is a city where place-based strategies for growth are neglecting people-based realities of the past, present and future. Archaeology tempers this in some measure by bringing places and people together.

What these archaeological projects do is allow for what I’m calling a “Return to Detroit”, they are people and place-centered re-visions of the city’s past in the present (I borrow the notion of return from Hirsch and Miller 2011). They foster memories that tie and bind to place and people, but also propel the city towards a future that includes them. This notion of embraces different aesthetic modes – photography, music, cultural engagement, activism, and the ways in which they are mobilized to activate memory and reframe experiences with transformed places – in this case, providing, to quote Samuel Collins,  “an anthropology for rather than of the future” (2008:125).

Bibliography

Bell, J., 2016. Migrants: keeping a foot in both worlds or losing the ground beneath them? Transnationalism and integration as experienced in the everyday lives of Polish migrants in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Social Identities, 22(1), pp.80-94.

Collins, S.G., 2008. All tomorrow’s cultures: Anthropological engagements with the future. Berghahn Books.

Hennessy, K., Lyons, N., Loring, S., Arnold, C., Joe, M., Elias, A. and Pokiak, J., 2013. The Inuvialuit Living History Project: digital return as the forging of relationships between institutions, people, and data. Museum Anthropology Review, 7(1-2), pp.44-73.

Hirsch, M. and Miller, N.K. eds., 2011. Rites of return: diaspora poetics and the politics of memory. Columbia University Press.

Levitt, P. and Waters, M.C. eds., 2002. The changing face of home: The transnational lives of the second generation. Russell Sage Foundation.

Newman, A. and Safransky, S., 2014. Remapping the Motor City and the Politics of Austerity. Anthropology Now, 6(3), pp.17-28.

Tumarkin, M.M., 2005. Traumascapes: The power and fate of places transformed by tragedy. Melbourne Univ. Publishing.

BIO

Krysta Ryzewski is a historical archaeologist and an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Wayne State University in Detroit, where she co-leads the Anthropology of the City initiative. Her research explores the consequences of disruptive social and environmental pressures on past landscapes, communities and material culture production. She currently conducts major research projects that focus on these relationships in urban North America (Detroit) and in the Caribbean (Montserrat). She also has a background in the materials science subfield of engineering. http://clas.wayne.edu/krysta-ryzewski

The massacre in Orlando was just two days before we sat together around a seminar table in an idyllic New England college town. A massacre of forty-nine people out dancing, celebrating life in a gay nightclub called Pulse. They were mostly young, queer, and Latinx. Gone. Already stories had turned to focus on the killer’s motivations. Was this primarily homophobic homegrown terrorism or the machinations of the Islamic State? We were meeting at Wesleyan University in Connecticut to discuss the creation of the Public Anthropology Institute (PAI) and contemplate ways to use our scholarly knowledge of cultural difference for greater service globally. Given the disheartening public debate in this moment reminiscent of Dickens’ best and worst of times, we were convinced that this work is necessary in the face of such violence and hate.

For too long anthropologists have retreated into the minutia of arcane disciplinary debate even when our knowledge can make a difference. It can be intellectually stimulating and important to turn inward, but conversations among ourselves cannot be the only ones we have. We also need to create work with a larger impact and a longer reach. As scholars who have studied across the global south and thought deeply about geopolitics, poverty, social and economic inequality, racism, homophobia, sexism and climate change, we believe it is time to reconnect with the obligation to produce knowledge that makes the world a better place. As the stakes get higher, anthropological perspectives can make critical, unexpected connections and offer direction beyond the logic of dominant assumptions.

The litany of ills threatening to unravel the fabric of contemporary social life is well known. For example, climate change promises the inexorable spread of disease and super-resistant bacteria, yet many public officials deny its incontrovertible presence. Climate scientists predict drastic coastal and river flooding that will result in major social dislocations. Social and economic relations in the world are deteriorating, with deepening disparities in power, wealth, health, life expectancy and both the ability and inclination to exercise violence. Fears and anxieties over our uncertain futures are producing conflicting and contradictory responses in both progressive and conservative movements world-wide. In the United States, #BlackLivesMatter seeks redress from the injustices of state-sanctioned violence by disrupting narratives and practices that normalize law-and-order profiling of Black and racially Othered youth and young adults of all genders. Simultaneously, there is a palpable uptick in collective expressions of overtly racist, misogynist and xenophobic speech and behavior. In response to a refugee crisis and increased immigration, similar toxic trends are spreading across Europe. Brexit won. Questions concerning definitions of citizenship abound. Each day brings reminders of the global presence of prejudice and terrorism, both homegrown and external. On these concerns and so many more, our insights have both explanatory and enrichment value.

The Public Anthropology Institute at Wesleyan University is being established to prepare more anthropologists to engage multiple audiences on urgent contemporary problems. PAI will hold its inaugural four-day summer institute in June 2017, with faculty members from different universities who each practice some form of public anthropology. Participants will be exposed to techniques for accessible and compelling storytelling. They will be guided in the craft of writing for different kinds of outlets, including op-eds, mainstream media, social media and blogs. Although writing will be the main emphasis, the institute will also address other key media and platforms, including filmmaking, spoken word and dramatic performance. Because risk, vulnerability and ethical challenges are endemic to all public scholarship, ongoing attention to these topics will be woven into the institute’s training approach.

There exists a long tradition of anthropologists who have made their work relevant and accessible to a broader public, but we are also mindful of professional criticisms of this work. Censorious, half-envious tags such as “popularizer” were once high on the dread list for anthropologists who shared their ideas more widely. Now we are somewhat freer to honor the better-self impulse that leads to exchanging knowledge that truly matters.  Still, joining the fray can feel like an exercise in vulnerability, especially when one can lob scornful critiques of the monolithic “media” and its coverage of vital events from the safety of the sidelines. We think the risk is well worth it. With the possession of new crafting tools and up-to-date, substantive information about how media platforms work, anthropologists certainly can and should do better.

We believe in the power of storytelling. Now, more than ever, we need voices that disrupt stereotypes, reductive forms of analysis and fear to see what lies beyond our old, worn out stories about differences that divide us. The cultivation of reoriented voices is necessary to communicate our ways of being in the world and to respond with urgency to the “now.” Hence, we view this project as essential to the decolonization of anthropology. By supporting anthropologists in their efforts to differently distribute and convey our insights, we aim to face our publics and extend the yearning for a politically committed scholarship towards social justice, which is at the core of the volume Decolonizing Anthropology.

The worst of times call for the best responses. We hope to do our part in training scholars to meet the public challenge of engaging in the ongoing debates of these times as we advance our collective awareness and pedagogies. This is anthropology for the 21st century: rich, rigorous and responsive.

The Public Anthropology Institute was convened by Gina Athena Ulysse and facilitated by Melissa Rosario at Wesleyan University. Faye V. Harrison, Carole McGranahan, Paul Stoller, Melissa Rosario, Gina Athena Ulysse and Maria Vesperi are the founding faculty members, and Matilda Ostow is the PAI Program Student Assistant.

For inquiries about the Public Anthropology Institute, please contact Gina Athena Ulysse (gulysse@wesleyan.edu) and/or Melissa Rosario (melissa.rosario@gmail.com).

As young anthropology students in the 90s we heard Dr. Faye Harrison call: decolonizing anthropology is about “working to free the study of human kind from the prevailing forces of global inequality, and dehumanization…” As professionals, one way that we—anthropologist Dr. Jennifer Esperanza and design anthropologist Dr. Elizabeth (Dori) Tunstall—have chosen to decolonize anthropology is to critically (re)examine the North American introductory anthropology textbook.

As Dr. Joyce Hammond and team discussed in their analysis of 47 introductory anthropology textbooks published between 2001 and 2007, the images chosen for the covers are largely comprised of people of color, specifically non-Western and/or Indigenous people. Our examination of textbook covers in subsequent years shows little change, which means that textbook images continue to infer that to study culture is to study a non-“white, middle class, capitalist-based” Other (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Group of covers resulting from Google Search “anthropology textbooks”

This poses an alarming predicament for the decolonization of our discipline. As universities and colleges increasingly call for general education curricula to include a diversity requirement, cultural anthropology courses are often the first to fulfill this role. But what does it mean when students’ first understandings of our discipline are from assigned textbooks that overwhelmingly showcase non-Western, Indigenous peoples engaged in “traditional” actions (e.g. dance, shopping in open-air markets, etc.)?

Diversity, by definition, means that our communities are constituted by a wide array of ethnic, social and political identities. We must be more forceful in asserting that diversity also includes those groups who have become so normalized in public discourse that their practices, communities and traditions have been rendered “invisible:” namely, white, middle-class, cisgender, North Americans and Europeans.

Decolonizing our pedagogy, therefore, requires drawing attention to the fact that culture can also be found in practices as “mundane” as shopping at a suburban grocery store in North America. The exponential growth of the practice of anthropology in industry, which studies these very places, demonstrates this shift.

Our (Jennifer’s in particular) experiences from teaching introductory courses reveal an even more complex scenario. In addition to white students, our diverse student bodies include underrepresented minority students, international students, first/second/subsequent generation Americans, and students of mixed race heritage who are interested in learning what anthropology entails and what it has to teach us about societies, both familiar and unfamiliar.

Yet anthropology’s textbook covers continue to evoke a world in which these students’ cultural heritages are viewed as bound within isolated, and ahistorical contexts. When historicity is evoked on a cover, it is often to showcase a supposed irony of juxtapositions between traditional and modern ways (i.e. an African or Asian woman in brightly colored textiles talking on a cell phone). In what ways can we, like the contributors to this series, more accurately portray a world in which the lived realities of colonialism, diaspora and globalization have created a complex contemporary world order?

The use of “exotic Others” on textbook covers also poses challenges for anthropology’s increasingly diverse professoriate. These images underscore the continuously fraught and uneasy relationship we (faculty of color) have with a discipline that arose under colonial auspices. Such images undermine our efforts to de-exoticize anthropology and its subject matter. How can a faculty member of color authoritatively assert that anthropology is not the study of the exotic other when the veritable billboards of the discipline are so visibly showcasing otherwise?

To decolonize anthropology is to acknowledge our discipline has relied far too long on marketing textbooks that have relied upon an assumption of the white gaze upon the bodies of physical and cultural Others. Coming from design anthropology as decolonizing methodology, we (Dori in particular) move beyond descriptions of the problem to provide concrete solutions to the main textbook vendors.

We propose seven visual strategies (Figures A through G) to address the concerns raised above. They explore the extent to which:

1. The process of image selection is curated or participatory,
2. The image content consists of portraiture or environments, and
3. The image style is realist or abstract.

Traditionally, an internal designer or design team associated with the vendor curated the cover of the anthropology textbook, selecting a single image. This was due to the costs of mass print publication. With the emergence of print-on-demand, textbook companies can now take advantage of more participatory processes and provide a range of covers for one textbook.

Participatory strategies could include asking communities who have been the objects of the anthropological gaze to submit their own ranges of images (Figure A), or having instructors upload an individualized cover, within provided technical and aesthetic guidelines, for their on-demand textbook (Figure B). By customizing the cover, instructors can set up introductory conversations depending on the needs of their particular students. These participatory strategies directly address the critique of the lack of self-determination implicit in the current textbook covers and provide opportunities for communities and instructors to self-define the images of the field.

Figure A. Scenario for Participatory Self-Portraiture Cover Series Provided by Indigenous Artists. Illustration by Dori Tunstall.

Figure B. Scenario for Participatory DIY Covers Provided by Anthropology Instructors. Illustration by Dori Tunstall.

The dominance of the portraiture of non-Western, Indigenous women and children on the cover of anthropology publications has been subject to the harshest critique inside anthropology and arts fields. Changes in anthropological practices—since the processes of decolonization and the rapid expansion of applied anthropology—open opportunities to challenge the subjects of the anthropological gaze.

One strategy, which we used to great critical effect in the first part of our campaign, reverses the gaze by making explicit white, middle-class North Americaness an equally valid image of anthropology (Figure C). Dr. Hammond’s research demonstrated that students selected a mosaic of images as the most effective visual strategy for creating dialogue about the wide range of subjects in anthropology (Figure D).

Figure C. Original and Reversed Gaze Anthropology: What Does it Mean to Be Human? textbook cover example by Julie Hill.

Figure D. Original and Curated Mosaic of Images The Essence of Anthropology textbook cover example by Dori Tunstall.

The bias toward documentary realism in the anthropological gaze has been well addressed by visual scholars. It ignores the extent to which the textbook cover is designed with layouts, filters, cropping, and other aesthetic techniques that nudge the viewer into finding the book compelling. Acceptance of the artifice of the cover design opens up strategies of visual abstraction (Figure E), which one sees in the Anthropology 13th edition by Ember, Ember, and Peregine textbook.

Figure E. Original and Curated Art Abstraction Anthropology 13th Edition textbook cover example by Dori Tunstall.

Other abstract visual strategies include non-photographic illustrations (Figure F) or a conceptually providing a self-reflective mylar panel where viewers see themselves and the world around them (Figure G). Time Magazine’s 2006 “Time Person of the Year is You” cover provides an example of this approach.

Figure F. Original and Non-Photographic Abstract Illustration Anthropology: Appreciating Human Diversity textbook cover example by Dori Tunstall.

Figure G. Original and Self-Portraiture with Literal Reflective Mylar Panel Window on Humanity textbook cover example by Dori Tunstall.

We will hold a workshop with textbook vendors at the 2016 American Anthropological Association Meetings. By helping them select an appropriate decolonizing visual strategy, we intend to genuinely transform the way students are introduced to the field.

Bios

Elizabeth (Dori) Tunstall is a professional design anthropologist and public intellectual. She organizes the Cultures-Based Innovation Initiative. She created the first postgraduate design anthropology program in a faculty of design at Swinburne University in Melbourne and was a columnist for The Conversation AU. She has taught design anthropology at University of Illinois at Chicago and lectured globally. Bridging academia and industry, Dori has worked as a strategist for Sapient Corporation and Arc Worldwide. She holds a PhD and MA in Anthropology from Stanford University and BA in Anthropology from Bryn Mawr College. You can follow her on Twitter @Dori_Danthro.

Jennifer Santos Esperanza is an associate professor and chair of anthropology at Beloit College. She holds a BA in Anthropology and Linguistics from USC and an MA and PhD in Anthropology from UCLA. She conducted her dissertation fieldwork in Bali, Indonesia, where she examined the mass production of imitation “ethnic art” for the global export market and has published her findings in the journals Material Culture Review and Research in Economic Anthropology. She is currently conducting research on refugee resettlement in the Wisconsin/Illinois area.

“The master’s tools,” Audre Lorde (1984) famously said, “will never dismantle the master’s house.” Her statement was a provocation to Western feminists to question their own racism and homophobia, to examine the “terror and loathing of any difference that lives” inside each of us. “What does it mean,” she asked, “when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy? It means that only the most narrow parameters of change are possible and allowable.”

Zodwa Radebe expresses a similar sentiment, using similar language, in her recent Savage Minds post, in which she dismisses the possibility of decolonizing anthropology. Radebe states that “it is absurd to think that anthropology can be used as a tool to decolonise because it was used to colonise.”

All of which raises the question: What are these “tools”? What can they be used to make, or to unmake? And by whom?

To back up even further, what does it mean to decolonize anthropology? It means, as Lorde suggests, that we scrutinize our insides, what lies at the very core of ourselves as individuals and as a discipline, and bring it out into the light of day. Yes, anthropology was a tool of colonialism, and anthropologists have struggled with the burden of that fact ever since. But have we really had the courage to examine the enduring coloniality of our practice?

Anthropology, like other disciplines within the academy, was forged in the crucible of Western modernity. As a Eurocentered project of rationality and colonial domination, modernity, Quijano (2010) observes, established the European as the only possible “subject,” the only one capable of knowing; all others, being inferior by nature to the European, could only be the “object” of his (sic) knowledge. The modern anthropological project – part of a much larger project of modern science – entailed rendering all that was different and other to the European knowable to the West. Thus the core relation in ethnographic fieldwork was one of knowing subject to knowable object. As Quijano (2010: 28) notes, this relation “blocked, therefore, every relation of communication, of interchange of knowledge and of modes of producing knowledge between the cultures, since the paradigm implies that between ‘subject’ and ‘object’ there can be but a relation of externality.” Ironically, it also contributes to a sort of intellectual blindness, an arrogance that comes from being the observer, the one who acquires knowledge and therefore knows.

From this beginning emerged the “tools” of anthropology, the instruments anthropology uses to produce knowledge of its objects. These include the familiar apparatuses of ethnographic inquiry, including such basic and apparently neutral instruments as participant observation and informal interviewing. These are the tools we use for knowing. With them, we crack open the oysters of other people’s lives and harvest the rich goo within. We bring it back to our university, the factory wherein we deploy further tools – what we call “theory” – to process raw materials from abroad and render them suitable for Western consumption.

So, contra Radebe, I don’t think it at all absurd to imagine a decolonized anthropology. Decolonizing means to excavate the colonial logics that underlie our perspectives and continuing practices. It means searching for new ways of thinking and doing that disrupt the subject/object dualism on which our discipline was founded, and that transform the methodology that traditionally accompanies that orientation. I don’t think this means burying anthropology. It means repurposing our disciplinary tools towards the liberation of the oppressed and marginalized, along the lines that Faye Harrison has suggested, in this blog and elsewhere, even if that repurposing requires us to set aside a “purely” academic agenda.

The goal of my research with undocumented immigrants in New Jersey was not to decolonize anthropology. Like any anthropologist, I had framed an intellectual project that I set out to investigate. My aim was to understand the situation confronting undocumented workers in a context of securitized immigration and, more specifically, the kinds of bodily harms that they encounter on the job. I approached the research from an activist standpoint, and hoped that my project could contribute to local struggles against workplace abuse. Toward that end, I worked closely with a local workers center/immigrant-rights advocacy organization, through which I gained access to the community and contributed my efforts as a volunteer. There, I met two women – I’ll call them L. and M. – both of them undocumented, both activists for immigrants’ rights. I hired them to be my “research assistants,” and taught them the methods of ethnographic research. Their role, I believed at the outset, was to help me to collect data by interviewing members of the local community about the experience of working under a regime of securitized immigration.

But L. and M. were not content simply to collect data. While respectful of my academic goals, their principal concern was advancing their struggle against marginalization and abuse – to tear down, if you will, the “master’s house” of North American capitalism, which is underwritten by the labor of undocumented workers even as it consumes their bodies and denies them their legal rights. M. herself had experienced a devastating work accident for which she had never received compensation, and was deeply committed to this fight. Unaware of anthropology’s colonial past, unconcerned with its lingering coloniality, L. and M. immediately recognized the tools of ethnography as instruments for their own self discovery and the mobilization of others. They began to explore its possibilities.

This was not “participatory” or “collaborative” research as it is usually understood. Even as they worked on my project, writing fieldnotes and recording interviews for later analysis, L. and M. embarked on their own project of resistance and education. They used the information they gained from informal conversations and semi-structured interviews as a resource to make more forceful arguments in defense of immigrant workers’ rights. They turned every fieldwork encounter into a pedagogical moment, explaining to their interviewees what they had learned about the physical abuses undocumented workers suffer on the job, helping them to feel less alone in their pain. They taught their informants that, contrary to expectations, injured workers without papers in fact have recourse under U.S. law to demand redress from exploitative employers, and they offered them resources to pursue a course of action. They used the contacts they made through fieldwork to recruit members to their organization, and to rally people for marches, meetings, and bake sales. From their experience came theory – L. and M., I learned, had their own ideas about what causes work accidents, and about what it means to be undocumented in the U.S. These ideas continued to take shape as the research unfolded.

This evolution of the project, and of L. and M.’s role in it, was not something I had planned or anticipated. I considered myself an activist and my work an example of “activist anthropology.” But L. and M. transcended the anthropological project entirely. They didn’t need “anthropology” per se – theirs was not a disciplinary project, its goals were anything but academic. Instead, they deployed the instruments of ethnography to advance a cause of social justice. Their theories and methods, together with my own, are the subjects of a book we are now co-authoring, under the working title Decolonizing Anthropology with Undocumented Americans.

So, with all due respect, I disagree with Audre Lorde – I think the master’s tools can be used to dismantle the master’s house. It’s just a question of who is doing the dismantling, and what they are erecting in its place. L. and M. taught me that anthropology – despite its roots in the Western project of colonial modernity/rationality and its history of collaboration with exploitative instruments of state and capital – can nevertheless provide the tools of liberation for marginalized communities.

As professional anthropologists, we can contribute only if we are willing to subordinate our own goals to those of our friends and co-conspirators in the field, to make our disciplinary tools available to them for their own projects of transformation. We must also open ourselves to their methods and theories about their own experiences, both to better understand the world and to engage it for the benefit of all. This can teach us humility, helping us to learn not just about others but, as Jones and Jenkins (2008) suggest, to learn from others. This mutuality is key to the decolonizing approach. It can relieve us of our habitual arrogance as the ones who know, broadening what Lorde called the “parameters of change” and taking steps toward undoing our inherited coloniality.

References Cited

Jones, Alison, with Kuni Jenkins. 2008. Rethinking Collaboration: Working the Indigene-Colonizer Hyphen. In Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies, eds. Norman K. Denzin, Yvonna S. Lincoln, and Linda Tuhiwai Smith, pp. 471-486. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Lorde, Audre. 1984 [2007]. The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House. In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, pp. 110-114. Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press.

Quijano, Aníbal. 2010. Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality. In Globalization and the Decolonial Option, eds. Walter D. Mignolo and Arturo Escobar, pp. 22-32. London and New York: Routledge.

Daniel M. Goldstein is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Rutgers University. He is the author of three monographs: The Spectacular City: Violence and Performance in Urban Bolivia (Duke University Press, 2004); Outlawed: Between Security and Rights in a Bolivian City (Duke, 2012); and Owners of the Sidewalk: Security and Survival in the Informal City (Duke, 2016). He is the co-editor (with Enrique D. Arias) of the collection Violent Democracies in Latin America. A political and legal anthropologist, Prof. Goldstein specializes in the anthropology of security; his current research examines undocumented workers’ vulnerabilities and responses in a context of securitized migration in the United States.

Over the past two decades, non-White and non-Western scholars have posed serious challenges to the politics of knowledge production in anthropology and the academy more widely. In the wake of critiques of Orientalism, the articulation of indigenous methodologies, and the exploration of indigenous epistemologies, not to mention critiques of whiteness and white privilege, we might assume a new, more inclusive time in anthropology has begun. But has it? Drawing on my experience as a scholar trained in anthropology, as well as a decade of experience as a member and four years as board member including one as chair of an international anthropological scholarly organization, in this essay I explore the continuing dynamics of marginalization of indigenous Pacific scholars in and through the claiming of scholarship and scholarly organizations and anthropology itself as white public space.

My time at University of Hawaiʽi-Mānoa has taught me many things about being a Pacific academic trained in anthropology, living, working, and researching in our linked communities. In particular, it has reinforced to me the importance of positionality and the way it shapes our research process and writing. In my work with Samoan communities, I have noted that non-Samoan researchers who work with Samoan communities are not bound by cultural protocols of respect, acknowledgement of hierarchy, and gendered expectations that I had struggled with throughout my graduate research, and remain part of my work as a researcher. They are not bound by community expectations and eventual opinion not only shaping how the work would be communicated to the public, but also in expectations of service to the wider community from one’s position within the university. As I wrote about in our earlier volume on Indigenous Research in/of Oceania (2010), this “weight” of expectation can be particularly fraught for our junior scholars, but remains unacknowledged labor not captured in CVs, contract reviews, or tenure dossiers. Some colleagues are unencumbered by expectations for care work, community work, and service work that are part of the reality for racialized minority and indigenous scholars. In addition to this care and service work, the legitimacy of minority and indigenous scholars’ research is often questioned because it does not fit neatly within canonized frameworks, or is suspect because it does not sustain the fiction of objectivity. All of these are serious structural problems in academia. This is not to say that we should be unencumbered, but rather all researchers in our communities should feel encumbered and act accordingly.

Although debates about reflexivity and epistemology have raised the question of decolonial practice, there is resistance maintained within the structure of the discipline itself, including in and through professional organizations. In the one I have been closely involved with for about a decade now, the most exciting conversations are ones in which the question of decolonizing anthropology/academia serves as an implicit or explicit framework. There are a number of scholars whose work reflects this, but there are also issues that emerge in part from the difficulty of this challenge. In particular, conversations about shoring up ethnographic authority are troublesome. When those arise, for example, in the guise of fending off questions about “who studies whom” in the Pacific, they seem not to be part of a genuine desire to grapple with the question of power dynamics in existing patterns of who is able to study others, why, and to what effect, but rather to deflect a question that at its heart is about privilege and power relations in the production of knowledge, and the maintenance of ethnographic authority. The unwillingness to prepare to engage questions of decolonial practice, including about who studies whom in a thoughtful manner strikes at the central dividing issue I see in the subfield of Pacific anthropology, and that unwillingness at this moment must be named as white academic privilege.

These examples are exemplary of what I have observed and experienced as a racialized native Pacific scholar, trained in anthropology and working in the Pacific.

While the structure and fabric of the discipline is mired in a history of whiteness and coloniality, the presence of racialized minority and indigenous scholars has had the potential to transform the discipline in the direction of decolonization, but this transformation has not yet materialized because they are still seen as marginal guests. This strikes me as part of the continuing disconnect in anthropology, and particularly in our subfield where the challenge of indigenous knowledge, and control over knowledge production is strong – anthropology not only was built on studying the native, and in that study claiming expert status that requires the subject to remain subjected, it is part of the wider world of academia that remains a site of systemic white privilege and advantage (board of regents, donors, administrators, faculty, curriculum, norms, values, etc.).

Part of the task of decolonizing academia and anthropology is recognizing that it is not just incumbent on the scholars who bring “difference” to campus to adjust and assimilate to the current campus culture and climate; rather there has to be a deep recognition that as institutions universities and professional organizations have been built in ways that favor white, middle class and elite scholarship, often to the detriment of the communities that make that scholarship possible. Only then can we reckon with how that shapes our preoccupations, research questions, epistemological approaches, and analysis.

Responding from the Margins

When I was applying to graduate programs, I found myself agonizing about the pull to anthropology because of Margaret Mead’s deep, lasting, and problematic legacy in Samoa. Her specter continues to haunt the discipline nearly a century after her most famous published text (1928), and it haunts the anthropological enterprise in Samoa. Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s work was a major intervention for me, describing in explicit detail the problematic legacy I struggled with instinctively while reclaiming the research enterprise for and by Pacific peoples. With distance from my initial shocking introduction to Mead’s text as a first year undergraduate, one of the more curious things to me has been the longevity and durability of Mead-Freeman debate. The debate interests me for what it reveals about the reach for ethnographic authority and Truth, each scholar staking out their position on the turf of Samoan sociality. As writer Albert Wendt has said, there are three sides to the debate – Mead’s, Freeman’s, and the Samoan side. The anthropological interest in the Samoan side is primarily whether it confirms Mead’s or Freeman’s view, but what if it doesn’t concede to those terms of the debate? What if the Samoan side wasn’t a side in the debate at all, but examined a different problematic altogether? One that emerges from and is centered in local concerns about Samoan society and history, the architecture of our present, and possibilities for our future?

The most satisfying contribution to this discussion has not come from anthropology, but rather through fiction.

The new novel Free Love by acclaimed Samoan author Sia Figiel responds brilliantly to the anthropological debates, but does so on its own terms. In Free Love, the character Mr. Viliamu teaches about science and inquiry in a way that makes it clear that Samoans were always more than “native informants.” The development of his relationship with Inosia takes us on a journey that weaves through the cosmos, Samoan epistemologies and histories, Christian dignity and guilt, and family honor in an unflinching examination of the legacy of the anthropological and colonial gaze on Samoan society. In a particularly powerful scene with Mr. Viliamu in New Zealand, we see clearly the violence of the debate enacted on and through his character, highlighting how the traffic in those anthropological ideas have shaped views of Samoan people in a settler society. But author Sia Figiel moves beyond that tragic moment and takes us to a different setting where love is freely given, without social trappings or approbation, without the double consciousness that Mead and Christianity gave us. The book is an opening to engaging our culture and history on its own terms, and not through the debate about sexuality, adolescence, and violence filtered through lenses of civilization, primitivity, and religion. It enacts a different kind of refusal of recognition, denying the enduring anthropological framing and the rewards that come with engaging the debate on its own terms.

So, what would a decolonial anthropology look like? I’m not sure yet, but it would start with the basic questions of what the potential work contributes to the communities on which it is based, and would proceed assuming people from those communities are part of the conversation in a meaningful way. It would refuse the hierarchy in which those communities are always empirical “native informants” in service to theory and analysis that comes from and takes place elsewhere. It would provincialize academic traditions and engage indigenous epistemologies seriously, on par and in conversation with ways of knowing that come from elsewhere. Many trained anthropologists have fled the discipline for ethnic studies, because it provides space to take grounded, ethical stances and to grapple seriously with critical issues like racial and ethnic inequality in a way that produces both stellar scholarship and community activism. While there is great variation within ethnic studies as a discipline, at University of Hawai῾i, the rearticulation of the department’s vision and focus on Oceanic ethnic studies reflects the faculty’s work with local communities as well as scholarship that links issues in the continental U.S. with local, regional, and global ones (many are trained anthropologists). I don’t know that anthropology necessarily has to look more like ethnic studies (or Pacific studies) to decolonize in this part of the world, but it can’t afford to continue to concede the critical work of engaging and addressing power relations in intellectual production, institutional structure, how research agendas are shaped, and most importantly, in issues that directly impact the communities with whom its scholars work. If it does it will be worse than antiquated, it will be irrelevant.

Lisa Uperesa is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies and Sociology at University of Hawai῾i-Mānoa, where she teaches classes on race and ethnicity, immigration, sport, and social issues in Polynesia.   She holds a PhD in anthropology and will be joining the faculty of Pacific Studies at the University of Auckland later this year. Her publications include a co-edited special issue of The Contemporary Pacific featuring new work on global sport in the Pacific and book chapters on U.S. empire, migration, and the rise of American football in Samoa. She is completing a book manuscript tentatively titled Fabled Futures and Gridiron Dreams: Migration, Mobilities, and Football in American Samoa.