Tuesday, August 22, 2017

Anthropology and the Paradox of Decolonization

           Linda Tuwihai Smith’s decolonizing methodologies of research for indigenous communities provide a framework with which to analyze Waskar Ari’s historical Earth Politics, Kirsch’s Reverse Anthropology, and Bacigalupo’s Thunder Shaman. Smith’s recognition of research’s ties to colonial expansion and imperialism, plus engaging with indigenous ways of knowing, challenges scholars to consider their positionality and relationship with their subjects. The works of Ari, Kirsch, and Bacigalupo exemplify the need for a decolonizing approach that can contribute to indigenous movements, and while each author contributes to that vision, the paradoxical nature of decolonized academic research persists. Issues such as liberalism as the framework for making claims, particularly for environmental struggles, may not be reconcilable with the goals of decolonization. This indicates that decolonization is a constant struggle that may never be achieved by any academic discipline, but can shape research in needed ways for building alternatives. Decolonization in an academic context should be seen as a constant struggle in which the racial, gendered, and class origins of research shape methodology but the act of decolonizing a field remain a constant orientation of anthropology.
            Ari’s Earth Politics, a history of the Alcaldes Mayores Particulares movement in 20th century Bolivia through a study of four male leaders, written by an indigenous scholar, is a good place to start. Ari endeavored to demonstrate how Aymara and Quechua-speaking Bolivians developed an independent politics combining land rights, spirituality, and ethnic preservation. The AMP drew from colonial-era laws and land titles to defend their communal lands, make claims, and resist assimilationist policies from the liberal state or the labor movement to de-Indianize their communities. Ari’s study contributes to decolonial research by conceptualizing a mode of thought or analysis for AMP leaders that possesses its own rational basis. Furthermore, the subjects of Ari’s analysis, drew on colonial-era legislation to assert their political movement, as legitimating an Indian republic. According to Smith, coloniality, or imperialism, is a lived experience and Earth Politics verifies it in the context of Aymara and Quechua-speaking Bolivia, specifying it as caste society in which internal colonialism operates (Ari, 11). He also carries out what Smith called for by incorporating indigenous ways of knowing into the text. AMP leaders, such as Toribio Miranda, conceived of land rights, Aymara religiosity, and colonial-era laws through Aymara ideas, for example, sumaqamaña (Ari, 84). Ari’s sources also include indigenous ways of knowing since he utilized memoirs and testimonies by historical actors, allowing their memories of AMP activism shape his narrative.
The notion of a simple binary of Indian versus non-Indian breaks down due to Ari’s inclusion of gender as a category of analysis, another important aspect of research Smith identified in the intersections of race and gender (Smith, 46). Gender shapes perceptions of “Indianness,” particularly dress, which meant men could sometimes shift between cholo and Indian categories. The very fluidity of Aymara and Quechua identities, as well as cholo working-class, also challenges simplistic binaries or notions of authenticity (Ari, 145). The religious and political components of earth politics in this context similarly defy essentialist explanation. Catholicism, the labor struggle among farm workers, struggles against urban segregation, and resistance to state projects of mestizaje or “de-Indianizing” all speak to a heterogeneous body of thought encapsulated by the AMP. Unfortunately, the question of where to go persists with Ari’s decolonizing history. His work illustrates that detailed historical studies of indigenous populations, Andean or otherwise, can be done. But in so doing, male historical actors are still privileged, though gender as a factor in the structure of the AMP, plus its activism against sexism from the state, is included.
            A similar decolonizing approach by Bacigalupo’s Thunder Shaman attempts to address history and indigenous epistemologies among the Mapuche. Bacigalupo, who like Ari, accounts for her own positionality in relation to her subject, a shaman named Francisca, developed a close relationship with Francisca over several years of research in Millali, Chile. Her shared hybrid identity with Rosa, for instance, created a point of contact while destabilizing essentialist assumptions (Bacigalupo, 22). Likewise, she approached the book as a bible co-produced by Francisca, for future Mapuche. A thunder shaman, or machi, possesses a form of historical consciousness that perceives time differently, opting for multitemporality, shaping history through dreams, trance, and spirits (Bacigalupo, 70). Thus, shamanic or machi historical consciousness and epistemology differs from positivistic Western narratives of history. Bacigalupa’s shaman is a practitioner of a form of cosmopolitics which combines social, political, and ecological factors (Bacigalupo, 164).
Furthermore, the history produced by shamans, often relying on memory, also challenges official or state documents and legal discourse to exceed, subvert and avoid the state archive, while drawing on indigenous grafismo and inscriptions (Bacigalupo, 132). Bacigalupo identifies a form of perspectivism and new ontologies in shamanic histories, since the machi are associated with collective ancestors and historical individuals, such as Rosa who lived in the “before time” period in the late 19th century. Mapuche views of capitalism and sorcery and their history as subjugated peoples by the state also contains a counter-narrative that alludes to the settlers as the barbarians (Bacigalupo, 59). These aforementioned aspects of Bacigalupo’s writing indicate a noble endeavor to include indigenous ways of being, systems of knowledge, and contribute to Mapuche social movements by elucidating one approach Mapuche have to history..
            Despite writing Thunder Shaman as a bible of Francisca’s work, Bacigalupo does not fully explore the question of shamanic historical consciousness in the contemporary struggles of the Mapuche over environmental and land concerns. Therefore, while writing from the lens of shamanic historical consciousness, which she argues does not follow a wingka historical narrative, she does not apply her research to contemporary issues, such as timber companies, except for distinguishing Francisca’s approach to timber companies as rejecting the frame liberalism requires of indigeneity (Bacigalupa, 165). For Smith, this would be a weakness in Bacigalupo’s ethnographic research, for not applying the results of research to contemporary conflicts with timber companies. Nonetheless, Mapuche shamanic historical consciousness undoubtedly shapes Mapuche activism and relations with the state today, and by producing a bible of Francisca recognizes the necessity for decolonizing research to contribute something that includes the subject’s testimony, acknowledges the author’s position in relation to the community while including indigenous ways of knowing. In this sense, Thunder Shaman fulfills some of the goals of decolonizing methodologies.
            Stuart Kirsch’s Reverse Anthropology, explores Yonggom indigenous analysis in Papua New Guinea. The act of positioning his work as a reversal of anthropology by foregrounding Yonggom modes of thinking constitutes a decolonizing project, or at least the promise of it. He also identifies this as aligning ethnography with social movements (Kirsch, 3). Kirsch focuses on social relations and unrequited reciprocity through Yonggom ritual, magic, myth, and relations with the Ok Tedi mine. He begins the study by subverting stereotypes of Melanesia as a land with history, showing how the region’s exchange networks with the rest of the world predate colonialism, although the focus on birds of paradise trade networks still privileges the West. However, in that relationship, Kirsch identifies the importance of Melanesian trade and colonialism for the rise of conservation (Kirsch, 36). Consequently, a more robust history of Papua New Guinea is still needed for decolonizing research that explores the region’s connections to Southeast Asia and Australia before European contact.
After establishing that Papua New Guinea was and remains connected to the broader world and shaped, through birds of paradise feather trade and colonialism, the rise of conservation movements, Kirsch endeavors to locate Yonggom and Muyu ritual, magic, and analysis of contemporary problems through the lens of reverse anthropology. For Kirsch, the Melanesian definition of social relations, which incorporates non-humans as beings with agency, is built around reciprocity. Their mode of thought shapes relations with their environmental. Komon komon hunting magic, for example, works as persuasion that acknowledge interagentivity. Yonggom practices of totemism and perspectivism, according to Kirsch, are defined through social relations as well (Kirsch, 75).
The community’s relationship with the mining corporation, which has irrevocably damaged the environment, becomes the focus of Kirsch’s argument of ethnography aligning with the movements of indigenous communities, applying research and indigenous epistemologies for ways of rethinking or finding solutions to conflicts like mining corporations and environmental impact. For the Yonggom, the corporation is responsible for not just pollution of the river, but a larger set of problems related to unrequited reciprocity with the community and environment. This constitutes corporate sorcery (Kirsch, 120). Corporate science ignores social relations, not seeing the hybrid combination of social relations and things (Kirsch, 129). The loss of a finger, for example, provides grounds for claim making and demands for compensation (Kirsch, 122). With this approach, Reverse Anthropology, though somewhat romanticized, commits ethnographic research to decolonizing projects and indigenous political movements. The damage of the mining operation and the corporate scientific studies that see resolution only in terms of monetary compensation, which ignores social relations among various beings, can become a generative moment for legal and environmental struggles that seek to subvert naturalism. In that respect, indigenous analysis, as used by Kirsch, can take on decolonizing results and methodology.
In summation, Smith’s call for decolonizing methodologies for research on indigenous peoples remains relevant. Researchers must confront the power dynamics and origin of research in colonialism, incorporate indigenous ways of thinking, avoid essentialism, promote indigenous researchers, and contribute their research to something beyond producing or reproducing knowledge. Bacigalupo, Kirsch, and Ari accomplish this to varying degrees, but it is not clear one can ever fully decolonize a field or area of study. Decolonization should be understood as a process that does not end with promoting indigenous research and using indigenous epistemologies, but one in which power dynamics of research are fully accounted for to challenge power. Decolonizing a discipline, in short, requires constant evaluation of the discipline’s methodology, history, conclusions, and is best as an ideal for research.
Bibliography
Bacigalupo, Ana M. Thunder Shaman: Making History with Mapuche Spirits in Chile and Patagonia, 2016.

Kirsch, Stuart. Reverse Anthropology: Indigenous Analysis of Social and Environmental Relations in New Guinea. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2006.

Smith, Linda T. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books, 1999.


Ari, Chachaki W. Earth Politics: Religion, Decolonization, and Bolivia's Indigenous Intellectuals, 2014.

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