“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.

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