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.

“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