Arquivo da tag: Pós-colonialismo

Achille Mbembe : “Ignorance too, is a form of power” (Chilperic )

Original article

Achille Mbembe

He talks and talks, you are on the verge of falling asleep, until suddenly, out of the blue, a word or a concept slaps you in the face. You listen again. He adds another violent metaphor to his argument and there you are, disarmed by a truth he just unveiled. I presume part of Cameroonian historian and philosopher Achille Mbembe’s brilliance stems from his ability to coin ideas that were as yet framed. Not that they didn’t exist before, but they were lacking the proper notes to be heard. For instance, his book De la Postcolonie, published in 2000, contributed to a massive rise of interest in post-colonial studies by revealing how colonial forms of domination continue to operate on and within the African continent. His Critique de la raison nègre, published in 2013, shed light on the function of the “Black” figure in the construction of Western identity. He later developed the concept of necropolitics, widely used today in academia, to illustrate the production of superfluous and unwanted populations. More recently, he introduced the notion of brutalism, which describes capitalism’s constant process of extraction and waste production. A process that generates growth: walls, clean streets, prescribed drugs, cars, banks – and trash. A trash made of human and non-human residues that we bury, send abroad, or incarcerate. Combustion, islands of plastic, or “migrants” who have no value in our economic system are examples of this exponential “trashisation” of the world. This side effect of brutalism is also defined by Mbembe as the tendential universalization of the Black condition: “The way we used to treat exclusively black people, is now extended to people with a different skin color,” he told me recently. ” The black person is by definition the one who can be humiliated, whose dignity is not recognized, whose rights can be violated with impunity, including his right to breath. He or she therefore represents the accomplished figure of the superfluous person. And nowadays, the number of superfluous people is constantly growing.” 
What annoys me with Achille Mbembe is the way he managed to pollute the innocence of my Western privileges. I was so much better off before,  flying for no reason around the world, while popping stimulants and tranquilizers to cope with my jet-lag. I’d see bankers as virtuous men I’d be desperate to marry and was secretly irritated by all these foreigners trying to flood our trash-free countries and schools. I’d worry for the future of my children and how all this precarity and danger might contaminate the clean side-walks of their own adulthood. I knew without “knowing” that racism and destruction of the environment are the two sides of the same coin, that we cannot fight one without fighting the other; that if we hadn’t and weren’t continuously destroying the African soil, it’s inhabitants for sure wouldn’t try to flee, that my privileges are not merely a question of luck, but the result of a continuous exploitation in which I am, whether I like it or not, complicit. All this I knew without being too disturbed by it. I hat found a comfortable way to exclude my responsibility from these tragedies that occur most of the time in remote parts of the world, far away from my home view in Switzerland. I guess no one enjoys to be reminded that under their innocence lies a pile of shit which has been produced not by “the other” but by one’s own self. Long story short: I sometimes wish I hadn’t come across Achille Mbembe’s slaps of truth. For, as he remarks in his last book, Brutalism, “Ignorance too, is a form of power.”                       

We met end of the summer 2020. I was in Bretagne, France;  he waiting for winter to end in his house in Johannesburg.


You refuse to be defined as a post-colonial thinker, how come? 

I have nothing against postcolonial or decolonial theory, but I am neither a postcolonial, nor a decolonial theorist. My story has been one of constant motion. I was born in Cameroun, I spent my twenties in Paris, my early and mid-thirties in New York, Philadelphia and Washington. I later moved to Dakar, Senegal and I’m now in Johannesburg, South Africa. Likewise, I was trained as an historian, then I studied political science. At the same time, I read a lot of philosophy and anthropology, immersed myself in literature, in psychoanalysis. As we speak, I am familiarizing myself with life sciences, climate and earth sciences, astrobiology. This perpetual crossing of borders is what characterizes my life and my work. 

So how should one define you? 

I’d rather define myself as a penseur de la traversée. One for whom critique is a form of care, healing and reparation. The idea of a common world, how to bring it into being, how to compose it, how to repair it and how to share it – this has ultimately been my main concern. 

© Stephanie Fuessenich/laif für die FAZ

In your last book, Brutalism (Editions La Decouverte, 2020) you plead for a politics of the en-commun (in-common) as a means to re-enchant the world and re-infuse solidarity among the elements which constitute and belong to this one world we all share together. Does your concept of the en-commun have any affinities with communist ideas? 

No, it has nothing to do with communism as a political ideology. It is related to my preoccupation with life futures, and as I have just said, with theories of care, healing and reparation, the reality of historical harms and debates on planetary habitability. Ultimately Eurocentrism has fostered colonialism, racism and white supremacy. Postcolonialism has been preoccupied with difference, identity and otherness. As a result of my deep interest in ancient African systems of thought, I am intrigued by the motifs of commonality and multiplicity, by the entanglement of all human and non-human forms of life and the community of substance they form. This commonality, I should add, must be constantly composed and recomposed. It must be pieced together, through endless struggles, and very often, defeats and new beginnings. 

Isn’t difference the basis of identity? 

During the 19th and 20th centuries, we have not stopped talking about difference and identity. About self and the Other. About who is like us and who is not. About who belongs and who doesn’t. As the seas keep rising, as the Earth keeps burning and radiation levels keep increasing and we are less and less shielded against the plasma flow from the sun and surrounded by viruses, this is a discourse we can now ill afford. 

Does this imply hierarchies should be more horizontal? 

By definition, all hierarchies should be exposed to contestation. I am in favor of radical equality. Formal equality is meaningless as long as certain bodies, almost always the same, remain trapped in the jaws of premature death. Once equality is secured, we need to work on the best mechanisms of representation. But those who represent us can never be taken to be hierarchically superior to us. Instead they are called upon to perform a service for the care of all. Representation can only be the result of consent and for such consent to be granted, those who represent us must be accountable. Nobody should make decisions on behalf of those who haven’t mandated him or her. The great difficulty these days and for the years to come is that decisions are increasingly made by technological devices. They are determined by algorithmic artefacts which have not been mandated, except possibly by their manufactures. 

Do you have a mission? 

I wouldn’t want to make things uglier than they already are. I’m here on earth like everyone else for a limited timeframe. A tiny particle in a universe governed by ungraspable forces. My goal is therefore to remain as open as possible to what is still to come. To welcome and embrace the manifold resonances of the forces of the universe. On my last day, at the dusk of my life, I want to be able to say that I have smelled the infinite flesh of the world and that I have fully breathed its breath. 

Writing is your medium. How did this practice come to you? 

I used to be shy. It was easier for me to write than to speak in public or even in a group. When I was 12, I was part of a poetry club at my boarding school. In parallel I kept a personal diary in which I would relate my daily experiences. But it was only when I turned 18 or 19 that I started writing, that is, speaking in public. 

What does writing mean to you? 

It enables me to find my own center. One could almost say “I write therefore I am.” It’s a space of inner peace, though it can also at times be one of self-division. Whatever the case, what I write is mine and can never be taken away from me. 

Do you have any writing routines? 

In order to write, I need silence. I need to be left alone for long hours, if not days. Silence for me is a prelude to a state of psychic condensation. When I was younger, I’d mostly write in the pitch dark, after midnight. Writing after midnight, I could reconnect with Africa’s deepest pulsations, its tragedies as well as its metamorphic potential, the promise it represents for the world. That is how I wrote On the Postcolony, in the midst of Congolese sounds and rhythms.

How do you reach this bubble of isolation and silence while living with your spouse, children and dog? 

My wife is a writer of her own account. The dog is a very unobtrusive companion. It also happens that I can be talking to you now without really being present. Being physically present doesn’t prevent my mind from being totally elsewhere. 

Where does your writing start? 

Most of the time in my head. Sometimes from what I see, what I hear, what I read. It can start in the shower, when I am cooking or while I lie on the bed waiting to fall asleep. I can spend long months without writing anything. Things first need to boil. I need to find myself in a position where I can no longer bracket the interpellation addressed to me by reality, an event or an encounter. 

Do you take notes? 

Not really, or not all the time. I may have notebooks, but I keep misplacing them and hardly ever return to them in any structured way. My writing generally begins with a word, a concept, a sound, a landscape or an event which suddenly resonates in me. I do have a very lively mental scape. As a result, writing is like translating an image into words. In fact my books are full of images of the mind, non-visual images. But I never know in advance where these images will lead me to or whether at the end of the process I will be able to adequately translate them into words without losing their allure. It’s a rather intuitive process. That’s also why I write my introductions at the end, as I’ll only be able to tell you what the book is about once it’s written, when all the images have been curated. 

Do you spend lots of time rewriting your sentences? 

I’m extremely attentive to each word, each phrase, the way it’s formulated, its rhythm and musicality, the punctuation. For a text to be powerful, that is to heal, it must viscerally speak to both the reader’s reason and senses. It must therefore be methodically composed, arranged, and curated. Once it’s done with the appropriate amount of care, I no longer go back to it. I actually never reread my books. 

Why ? 
Because I’m always afraid to realize that the translation of images into words could have been done differently, and that now it’s too late. It’s already published and now belongs somewhat to the public. I have a rather strange understanding of writing. Writing is like a trial with too many judges If one doesn’t wish to be condemned, one shouldn’t write. Because once you’ve written and published something, that’s it.. The door is locked and the key is taken away. Writing is like pronouncing a sentence on oneself.

Student in Paris in the 1980

You spend a significant amount of your time playing and watching soccer. What is it that you enjoy so much in this sport? 

It’s all about contingency and creation, creating in the midst of contingency. It’s about a certain relationship between a body in motion and a mind in a state of alert. That’s what fascinates me the most about football, the way in which 22 people attempt to inhabit a space they keep configuring and reconfiguring, erecting and erasing, and the explosions of primal joy when one’s team scores, or the primal screams when one’s team loses. And indeed, if I could go back in time, I would unquestionably pursue a professional soccer career. I’d retire in my early thirties and then do something else. 

If you were a philanthropic billionaire, in which cause would you invest? 

I’ve always considered money as a means to hinder one’s freedom. 


I don’t want to be the slave of anything or of anybody. Not even the slave of my own passions. 

Doesn’t money enable a certain freedom too? 

If I had billions, I’d go back to Cameroun and revive my father’s farm. That’s where I spent part of my youth. I’d go back and turn this farm into a cooperative, into a laboratory for new ways of producing and living. The farm would become a living alternative of how to use local resources to live a clean life, starting with air, water, plants, food and so on. The farm would also be a vibrant place for artistic innovation. It would offer writing residencies for authors eager to commune with the vast expanses of our universe. 

If you could reincarnate, choose an era, country, profession, legend, what or whom would you choose? 

I’d come back as Ibn Khaldun, an Arab intellectual who is often presented as one of the very first sociologists. He visited the empire of Mali in the 14th century. I would be curious to discover this era. To be a sort of intellectual who travels the world, discovering Africa before the Triangular trade and sounding out what we could have become. 

How Academia uses poverty, oppression, and pain for intelectual masturbation (RaceBaitR)

By Clelia O. Rodríguez

Published by RaceBaitR



I am not granted the same humanity as a white scholar or as someone who acts like one. The performance of those granted this humanity who claim to be creating space for people of color needs to be challenged. They promote Affirmative action, for instance, in laughable ways. During hiring practices, we’re demanded to specify if we’re “aliens” or not. Does a white person experience the nasty bitterness that comes when POC sees that word? Or the other derogatory terminology I am forced to endure while continuing in the race to become America’s Next Top Academic? And these same white colleagues who do not know these experiences graciously line up to present at conferences about decolonizing methodology to show their allyship with POC.

The effects of networking are another one of the ways decolonizing in this field of Humanities shows itself to be a farce. As far as I understand history, Christopher Columbus was really great at networking. He tangled people like me in chains, making us believe that it was all in the name of knitting a web to connect us all under the spell of kumbaya.

Academic spaces are not precisely adorned by safety, nor are they where freedom of speech is truly welcome. Not all of us have the luxury to speak freely without getting penalized by being called radicals, too emotional, angry or even not scholarly enough. In true decolonization work, one burns down bridges at the risk of not getting hired. Stating that we are in the field of decolonizing studies is not enough. It is no surprise that even those engaged in decolonizing methods replicate and polish the master’s tools, because we are implicated in colonialism in this corporatized environment.

I want to know what it is you little kids are doing here—that is to say, Why have you traveled to our Mapuche land? What have you come for? To ask us questions? To make us into an object of study? I want to you go home and I want you to address these concerns that I have carried in my heart for a long time.

Such was the response of Mapuche leader Ñana Raquel to a group of Human Rights students from the United States visiting the Curarrehue, Araucanía Region, Chile in April 2015. Her anger motivated me to reflect upon how to re-think, question, undo, and re-read perspectives of how I am experiencing the Humanities and how I am politicizing my ongoing shifts in my rhyzomatic system. Do we do that when we engage in research? Ñana Raquel’s questions, righteous anger, and reaction forced me to reconsider multiple perspectives on what really defines a territory, something my grandfather carefully taught me when I learned how to read ants and bees.

As politicized thinkers, we must reflect on these experiences if we are to engage in bigger discussions about solidarity, resistance and territories in the Humanities. How do we engage in work as scholars in the service of northern canons, and, in so doing, can we really admit what took us there? Many of us, operating in homogeneous academic spaces (with some hints of liberal tendencies), conform when that question is bluntly asked.

As someone who was herself observed and studied under the microscopes by ‘gringos’ in the 1980s, when pedagogues came to ask us what life was like in a war zone in El Salvador, Raquel’s questions especially resonate with me. Both of us have been dispossessed and situated in North American canons that serve particular research agendas. In this sense, we share similar experiences of being ‘read’ according to certain historical criteria.

Raquel’s voice was impassioned. On that day, we had congregated in the Ruka of Riholi. Facing center and in a circle, we were paying attention to the silence of the elders. Raquel taught us a priceless lesson.  After questioning the processes used to realize research projects in Nepal and Jordan, Raquel’s passionate demand introduced a final punch. She showed us that while we may have the outward face of political consciousness, we continued to use an academic discipline to study ‘exotic’ behaviors and, in so doing, were in fact undermining, denigrating and denying lessons of what constitutes cultural exchange from their perspective.

From these interactions in the field emerge questions that go to the heart of the matter: How do we deal with issues of social compromise in the Humanities? In unlearning? In many cases, academic circles resemble circuses rather than centres of higher learning, wherein a culture of competition based on external pressures to do well motivates the relationship between teacher and student.

One of the tragic consequences of a traditional system of higher education is working with colleagues who claim to have expertise on the topic of social activism, but who have never experienced any form of intervention. I am referring here to those academics who have made careers out of the pain of others by consuming knowledge obtained in marginalized communities. This same practice of “speaking about which you know little (or nothing)” is transmitted, whether acknowledged or not, to the students who we, as teachers and mentors, are preparing to undertake research studies about decolonizing.

Linda Smith speaks about the disdain she has for the word “research,” seeing it as one of the dirtiest words in the English language. I couldn’t agree more with her. When we sit down each semester to write a guide to “unlearning’,” or rather a syllabus, we must reflect upon how we can include content that will help to transmit a pre-defined discipline in the Humanities with current social realities. How can we create a space where a student can freely speak his/her mind without fear of receiving a bad grade?

Today, anything and everything is allowed if a postcolonial/decolonizing seal of approval accompanies it, even if it is devoid of any political urgency. These tendencies appear to be ornamental at best, and we must challenge the basis of those attempts. We can’t keep criticizing the neoliberal system while continuing to retain superficial visions of solidarity without striving for a more in-depth understanding. These are acts for which we pat ourselves on the back, but in the end just open up space for future consumers of prestige.

The corridors of the hallways in the institution where I currently work embodies this faux-solidarity in posters about conferences, colloquiums, and trips in the Global South or about the Global South that cost an arm and a leg. As long as you have money to pay for your airfare, hotel, meals and transportation, you too could add two lines in the CV and speak about the new social movement and their radical strategies to dismantle the system. You too can participate in academic dialogues about poverty and labor rights as you pass by an undocumented cleaner who will make your bed while you go to the main conference room to talk about her struggles.

We must do a better job at unpacking the intellectual masturbation we get out of poverty, horror, oppression, and pain–the essentials that stimulate us to have the orgasm. The “release” comes in the forms of discussions, proposing questions, writing grant proposals, etc. Then we move onto other forms of entertainment. Neoliberalism has turned everything into a product or experience. We must scrutinize the logic of power that is behind our syllabi, and our research work. We must listen to the silences, that which is not written, and pay attention to the internal dynamics of communities and how we label their experiences if we are truly committed to the work of decolonizing.

clelia rodriguezClelia O. Rodríguez is an educator, born and raised in El Salvador, Central America. She graduated from York University with a Specialized Honours BA, specializing in Spanish Literature. She earned her MA and PhD from The University of Toronto. Professor Rodríguez has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in Spanish language, literature and culture at the University of Toronto, Washington College, the University of Ghana and the University of Michigan, most recently. She was also a Human Rights Traveling Professor in the United States, Nepal, Jordan, and Chile as part of the International Honors Program (IHP) for the School of International Training (SIT). She taught Comparative Issues in Human Rights and Fieldwork Ethics and Comparative Research Methods. She is interested in decolonozing approaches to teaching and engaging in critical pedagogy methodologies in the classroom.

Decolonizing Anthropology (Savage Minds)

April 19, 2016

Decolonizing Anthropology is a new series on Savage Minds edited by Carole McGranahan and Uzma Z. Rizvi. Welcome.

Just about 25 years ago Faye Harrison poignantly asked if “an authentic anthropology can emerge from the critical intellectual traditions and counter-hegemonic struggles of Third World peoples? Can a genuine study of humankind arise from dialogues, debates, and reconciliation amongst various non-Western and Western intellectuals — both those with formal credentials and those with other socially meaningful and appreciated qualifications?” (1991:1). In launching this series, we acknowledge the key role that Black anthropologists have played in thinking through how and why to decolonize anthropology, from the 1987 Association of Black Anthropologists’ roundtable at the AAAs that preceded the 1991 volume on Decolonizing Anthropology edited by Faye Harrison, to the World Anthropologies Network, to Jafari Sinclaire Allen and Ryan Cecil Jobson’s essay out this very month in Current Anthropology on “The Decolonizing Generation: (Race and) Theory in Anthropology since the Eighties.”

Decolonizing Anthropology HarrisonThese questions continue to haunt anthropology and all those striving to bring some resolution to these issues. It has become increasingly important to also recognize the ways in which those questions have changed, and how the separation between Western and NonWestern is less about locality and geography, but rather an epistemic question related to the colonial histories of anthropology. Decolonization then has multiple facets to its approach: it is philosophical, methodological, and praxis-oriented, particularly within the fields of anthropology. Here at Savage Minds, we have decided to take these questions on again in a different public, and work through a series of dialogues, debates and possibly even reconciliation. 

We feel it imperative to decolonize anthropology; not doing so reiterates hierarchies of control and oppressive systems of knowledge production. But what does that really mean and what does it look like? What might it mean to decolonize anthropology? Various subfields of anthropology have been contending with this issue in different ways. For example, within archaeological literature, decolonization emerged as political necessity developed through an engagement with the postcolonial critique. Being inspired by Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s influential work on decolonizing methodologies (among others) resulted in the development of indigenous archaeology. Most archaeologists would argue that anthropological archaeology continues to exist within neocolonial, neoliberal, and late capitalist frameworks, and thus these critiques and methodologies need to be constantly revised utilizing interdisciplinary projects that locate decolonization across academia (including decolonizing epistemologies, aesthetics, pedagogy, etc).

decolonize-stickersCalls for decolonization have now emerged as mainstream politics in the academy: an era when academics across disciplines are calling for historical, financial, and intellectual accountability for not only the work we do, but also for the academic institutions in which we study, teach, and learn. We contend, therefore, that decolonizing anthropology (at a minimum) has now grown to a project beyond its initial impetus in treating non-anthropologist intellectuals as just that: intellectuals rather than local interlocutors. In its development across the discipline, in both archaeology and cultural anthropology, for example, decolonizing anthropology is a project about rethinking epistemology, methodology, community, and political commitments.

Epistemology. Decolonizing anthropology means rethinking epistemology. Anthropologists have long acknowledged the development of our field with a colonial impulse, and how the construction of knowledge reiterate systems of control. It is important to continue working through epistemic concerns to realign how our discipline might undiscipline itself and realign how it evaluates what research is considered important. Decolonizing epistemology destabilizes the canon. It is not enough to only add certain voices into our anthro-core classes; a decolonizing movement focused on epistemology provides rigor to the multiplicity and plurality of voices. Deeply linked to the ways in which knowledge is produced and constructed, is our pedagogy and the methodologies by which we practice.

Pedagogy. If we are to realign our discipline, it becomes imperative for us to reconsider how decolonization might impact our pedagogy. This is not a new concept in the academy: decolonizing pedagogy is a subfield within the field of education. As mediators/translators/facilitators of knowledge, it is our responsibility to consider how anthropological conversations about race and difference might be supported and developed in the classroom through a decolonized pedagogical practices. A decolonized pedagogy should be listed within as best practices in our guides to teaching and learning. Pedagogy also includes what one teaches as well as how. What forms the anthropological “canon” of works that one must know? Part of the decolonizing of the discipline is to reassess whose scholarship we mark as important via inclusion on course syllabi. The rediscovery of Zora Neale Hurston’s scholarship by anthropologists is the most obvious example; who else are we–or should we–be learning from and thinking with anew today?

Methodology. Decolonizing anthropology means rethinking methodology, Our history is full of taking information from communities without enough consideration of the impact of this form of anthropological research. This does not only mean filling out our IRB forms, but also thinking carefully about power. Institutionally, our bodies are disciplined to hold and claim certain statuses as anthropologists. How does tending to such manifestations of power redirect our relationships in the field, our research questions, the ways we teach, and the way we work with communities?

Community. Decolonizing anthropology means rethinking community. Rethinking who the communities are within which we do our research. Rethinking the way we stretch and build our community of conversation to open beyond the academy, and learning how to extend our deep anthropological practice of listening with our ears and with our hands, and cultivating a spirit of reciprocity for a new era. And at the heart of today’s decolonial project, rethinking who our community of anthropologists is, and rethinking strategies of recruitment and retention for an anthropology that reflects and includes the communities whose stories, beliefs, and practices have long been those which comprised our discipline.

Political Commitment. Decolonizing anthropology means rethinking our political commitments. It also means to acknowledge that we are not the first to have them. Anthropology has long been a discipline with a political edge to its scholarship for some of its practitioners. However, as decades turn into centuries, what was once politically edgy looks embarrassingly not so, conventional or racist or both. We believe that a decolonized anthropology involves research that advances our understanding of the human world in a way that moves us forward.

All of this involves communication. As editors, our goals for this series are both personal and professional. Our first collaboration was an India Review special issue on Public Anthropology (2006), edited by Carole McGranahan, with Uzma Z. Rizvi as a contributor to the issue. Carole recently revisited her introduction to that volume in a keynote lecture for the annual American University’s Public Anthropology conference in 2014. In a talk on “Tibet, Ferguson, Gaza: On Political Crisis and Anthropological Responsibility,” she reflected on political changes in the discipline over the last decade, including our need to not only address anthropology’s colonial past, but also our imperial present. This is the sort of thinking we began together in 2006. Uzma’s article entitled “Accounting for Multiple Desires: Decolonizing Methodologies, Archaeology and the Public Interest” was based on her PhD research (2000-2003) in Rajasthan, India. The project was designed as a community based-participatory action research project that was explicitly linked to decolonizing archaeology in India. Both of us have had a long standing engagement with this literature and consider this contemporary moment to be significant within the praxis of our discipline, which is why we are thrilled to launch this series!

We have invited anthropologists writing and thinking about decolonizing the discipline to contribute essays to this series. Essays will be posted roughly every two weeks, and if any readers would like to submit an essay for consideration, please send us an email at decolonizinganthropology[at]

Our series schedule of contributors is as follows:

April 25–Faye Harrison, in conversation with Carole McGranahan, Kaifa Roland, and Bianca Williams

May 9–Melissa Rosario

May 23–Zodwa Radebe

June 6–Lisa Uperesa

June 20–Public Anthropology Institute (Gina Athena Ulysse, with Faye Harrison, Carole McGranahan, Melissa Rosario, Paul Stoller, and Maria Vesperi)

July 4–Krysta Ryzewski

August 1–Asmeret Mehari

August 8–Nokuthula Hlabangane

August 15–Zoe Todd

August 29–Didier Sylvain and Les Sabiston

September 12–Claudia Serrato

September 26–Gina Athena Ulysse

October 10–Paige West

November 7–Kristina Lyons

November 14–Marisol de la Cadena

An Indigenous Feminist’s take on the Ontological Turn: ‘ontology’ is just another word for colonialism (Urbane Adventurer: Amiskwacî)

Personal paradigm shifts have a way of sneaking up on you. It started, innocently enough, with a trip to Edinburgh to see the great Latour discuss his latest work in February 2013. I was giddy with excitement: a talk by the Great Latour. Live and in colour! In his talk, on that February night, he discussed the climate as sentient. Funny, I thought, this sounds an awful lot like the little bit of Inuit cosmological thought I have been taught by Inuit friends. I waited, through the whole talk, to hear the Great Latour credit Indigenous thinkers for their millennia of engagement with sentient environments, with cosmologies that enmesh people into complex relationships between themselves and all relations. 

It never came. He did not mention Inuit. Or Anishinaabe. Or Nehiyawak. Or any Indigenous thinkers at all. In fact, he spent a great deal of time interlocuting with a Scottish thinker, long dead. And with Gaia.

I left the hall early, before the questions were finished. I was unimpressed. Again, I thought with a sinking feeling in my chest, it appeared that the so-called Ontological Turn was spinning itself on the backs of non-european thinkers. And, again, the ones we credited for these incredible insights into the ‘more-than-human’, and sentience and agency, were not the people who built and maintain the knowledge systems that european and north american anthropologists and philosophers have been studying for well over a hundred years, and predicating their current ‘aha’ ontological moment upon. No, here we were celebrating and worshipping a european thinker for ‘discovering’ what many an Indigenous thinker around the world could have told you for millennia. The climate is sentient!

So, again, I was just another inconvenient Indigenous body in a room full of people excited to hear a white guy talk around Indigenous thought without giving Indigenous people credit. Doesn’t this feel familiar, I thought.

As an Indigenous woman, I have tried, over the last few years, to find thinkers who engage with Indigenous thought respectfully. Who give full credit to Indigenous laws, stories and epistemologies. Who quote and cite Indigenous people rather than anthropologists who studied them 80 years ago. This is not always easy. I am so grateful to scholars like David Anderson, Julie Cruikshank and Ann Fienup-Riordan, among others, for giving me hope amidst the despair I’ve felt as the ‘Ontological Turn’ gains steam on both sides of the Atlantic. I am so grateful, too, for the Indigenous thinkers who wrestle with the academy, who have positioned themselves to speak back to Empire despite all of the polite/hidden racism, heteropatriarchy, and let’s face it–white supremacy–of the University.

The euro-western academy is colonial. It elevates people who talk about Indigenous people above people who speak with Indigenous people as equals, or who ARE Indigenous. (Just do a body count of the number of Indigenous scholars relative to non-Indigenous scholars in the euro academy, and you’ll see that over here there are far more people talking about Indigenous issues than Indigenous people talking about those issues themselves). As scholars of the euro-western tradition, we have a whole host of non-Indigenous thinkers we turn to, in knee-jerk fashion, when we want to discuss the ‘more-than-human’ or sentient environments, or experiential learning. There are many reasons for this. I think euro scholars would benefit from reading more about Critical Race theory, intersectionality, and studying the mounting number of rebukes against the privilege of european philosophy and thought and how this silences non-white voices within and outside the academy. This philosopher, Eugene Sun Park, wrote a scathing critique of the reticence of philosophy departments in the USA to consider non-european thought as ‘credible’. I would say many of the problems he identifies in euro-western philosophy are the same problems I have experienced in european anthropology, despite efforts to decolonise and re-direct the field during the ‘reflexive turn’ of the 1970s-onwards.

As an Indigenous feminist, I think it’s time we take the Ontological Turn, and the european academy more broadly, head on. To accomplish this, I want to direct you to Indigenous thinkers who have been writing about Indigenous legal theory, human-animal relations and multiple epistemologies/ontologies for decades. Consider the links at the end of this post as a ‘cite this, not that’ cheat-sheet for people who feel dissatisfied with the current euro (and white, and quite often, male) centric discourse taking place in our disciplines, departments, conferences and journals.

My experience, as a Métis woman from the prairies of Canada currently working in the UK, is of course limited to the little bit that I know. I can only direct you to the thinkers that I have met or listened to in person, whose writing and speaking I have fallen in love with, who have shifted paradigms for me as an Indigenous person navigating the hostile halls of the academy. I cannot, nor would I try, to speak for Indigenous thinkers in other parts of the world. But I guarantee that there are myriad voices in every continent being ignored in favour of the ‘GREAT WHITE HOPES’ we currently turn to when we discuss ontological matters (I speak here, of course, of ontology as an anthropologist, so hold your horses, philosophers, if you feel my analysis of ‘the ontological’ is weak. We can discuss THAT whole pickle another day).

So why does this all matter? Why am I so fired up at the realisation that (some) european thinkers are exploiting Indigenous thought, seemingly with no remorse? Well, it’s this little matter of colonialism, see. Whereas the european academy tends to discuss the ‘post-colonial’, in Canada I assure you that we are firmly still experiencing the colonial (see Pinkoski 2008 for a cogent discussion of this issue in Anthropology). In 2009, our Prime-Minister, Stephen Harper, famously claimed that Canada has ‘no history of colonialism’. And yet, we struggle with the fact that Indigenous women experience much higher rates of violence than non-Indigenous women (1200 Indigenous women have been murdered or gone missing in the last forty years alone, prompting cries from the UN and other bodies for our government to address this horrific reality). Canada’s first Prime-Minister, proud Scotsman John A. MacDonald (I refuse to apply the ‘Sir’), famously attempted to ‘kill the Indian in the Child’ with his residential schools. Canada is only now coming around to the realisation that through things like residential schools, and the deeply racist—and still legislated!–Indian Act, that it, as a nation, was built on genocide and dispossession. Given our strong British roots in Canada, you can imagine that it’s All Very Uncomfortable and creates a lot of hand-wringing and cognitive dissonance for those who have lived blissfully unaware of these violences. But ask any Indigenous person, and you will hear that nobody from an Indigenous Nation has ever laboured under the fantasy that Canada is post-colonial. Or benevolent. Nor would we pretend that the British Empire saddled us with solely happy, beautiful, loving legacies. For all its excessive politeness, the British colonial moment rent and tore apart sovereign Indigenous nations and peoples in what is now Canada, and though the sun has set on Queen Victoria’s Empire, British institutions (including the academy) still benefit from that colonial moment. We are enmeshed, across the Atlantic, in ongoing colonial legacies. And in order to dismantle those legacies, we must face our complicity head on.

Similarly, with the wave of the post-colonial wand, many european thinkers seem to have absolved themselves of any implication in ongoing colonial realities throughout the globe. And yet, each one of us is embedded in systems that uphold the exploitation and dispossession of Indigenous peoples. The academy plays a role in shaping the narratives that erase ongoing colonial violence. My experience in Britain has been incredibly eye-opening: as far as the majority of Brits are concerned, their responsibility for, and implication in, colonialism in North America ended with the War of Independence (in America) or the repatriation of the Canadian constitution (1982).

Is it so simple, though? To draw such arbitrary lines through intergenerational suffering and colonial trauma, to absolve the european academy and the european mind of any guilt in the genocide of Indigenous people (if and when european and north american actors are willing to admit it’s a genocide)? And then to turn around and use Indigenous cosmologies and knowledge systems in a so-called new intellectual ‘turn’, all the while ignoring the contemporary realities of Indigenous peoples vis-à-vis colonial nation-states, or the many Indigenous thinkers who are themselves writing about these issues? And is it intellectually or ethically responsible or honest to pretend that european bodies do not still oppress Indigenous ones throughout the world?

Zygmunt Bauman (1989) takes sociology to task for its role in narrating the Holocaust, and its role in erasing our collective guilt in the possibility for a future Holocaust to emerge. He argues that by framing the Holocaust as either a a) one-off atrocity never to be repeated (“a failure of modernity”) (5) or b) an inevitable outcome of modernity, sociology enables humanity to ignore its ongoing complicity in the conditions that created the horrors of the Holocaust. The rhetoric of the post-colonial is similarly complacent: it absolves the present generation of thinkers, politicians, lawyers, and policy wonks for their duty to acknowledge what came before, and, in keeping with Bauman’s insights, the possibility it could happen again — that within all societies lurk the ‘two faces’ of humanity that can either facilitate or quash systemic and calculated human suffering and exploitation. But the reality is, as Bauman asserts, that humanity is responsible. For all of these atrocities. And humanity must be willing to face itself, to acknowledge its role in these horrors, in order to ensure we never tread the path of such destruction again. 

I take Bauman’s words to heart, and ask my non-Indigenous peers to consider their roles in the ongoing colonial oppression of Indigenous peoples. The colonial moment has not passed. The conditions that fostered it have not suddenly disappeared. We talk of neo-colonialism, neo-Imperialism, but it is as if these are far away things (these days these accusations are often mounted with terse suspicion against the BRIC countries, as though the members of the G8 have not already colonized the globe through neo-liberal economic and political policies). The reality is that we are just an invasion or economic policy away from re-colonizing at any moment. So it is so important to think, deeply, about how the Ontological Turn–with its breathless ‘realisations’ that animals, the climate, water, ‘atmospheres’ and non-human presences like ancestors and spirits are sentient and possess agency, that ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, ‘human’ and ‘animal’ may not be so separate after all—is itself perpetuating the exploitation of Indigenous peoples. To paraphrase a colleague I deeply admire, Caleb Behn: first they came for the land, the water, the wood, the furs, bodies, the gold. Now, they come armed with consent forms and feeble promises of collaboration and take our laws, our stories, our philosophies. If they bother to pretend to care enough to do even that much—many simply ignore Indigenous people, laws, epistemologies altogether and re-invent the more-than-human without so much as a polite nod towards Indigenous bodies/Nations.

A point I am making in my dissertation, informed by the work of Indigenous legal theorists like John Borrows, Kahente Horn-Miller, Tracey Lindberg, and Val Napoleon, is that Indigenous thought is not just about social relations and philosophical anecdotes, as many an ethnography would suggest. These scholars have already shown that Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies represents legal orders, legal orders through which Indigenous peoples throughout the world are fighting for self-determination, sovereignty. The dispossession wrought by centuries of stop-start chaotic colonial invasion and imposition of european laws and languages is ongoing. It did not end with repatriation of constitutions or independence from colonial rule. Europe is still implicated in what it wrought through centuries of colonial exploitation. Whether it likes it or not.

My point here is that Indigenous peoples, throughout the world, are fighting for recognition. Fighting to assert their laws, philosophies and stories on their own terms. And when anthropologists and other assembled social scientists sashay in and start cherry-picking parts of Indigenous thought that appeal to them without engaging directly in (or unambiguously acknowledging) the political situation, agency and relationality of both Indigenous people and scholars, we immediately become complicit in colonial violence. When we cite european thinkers who discuss the ‘more-than-human’ but do not discuss their Indigenous contemporaries who are writing on the exact same topics, we perpetuate the white supremacy of the academy.

So, for every time you want to cite a Great Thinker who is on the public speaking circuit these days, consider digging around for others who are discussing the same topics in other ways. Decolonising the academy, both in europe and north america, means that we must consider our own prejudices, our own biases. Systems like peer-review and the subtle violence of european academies tend to privilege certain voices and silence others. Consider why, as of 2011, there were no black philosophy profs in all of the UK. Consider why it’s okay to discuss sentient climates in an Edinburgh lecture hall without a nod to Indigenous epistemologies and not have a single person openly question that. And then, familiarise yourself with the Indigenous thinkers (and more!) I am linking below and broaden the spectrum of who you cite, who you reaffirm as ‘knowledgeable’.


Zoe Todd (Métis) is a PhD Candidate in Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. She researches human-fish relations in the community of Paulatuuq in the Inuvialuit Settlement Region, Northwest Territories, Canada. She is a 2011 Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholar.

Eduardo Galeano Disavows His Book ‘The Open Veins’ (New York Times)



Hugo Chávez, president of Venezuela, handing President Obama a copy of Eduardo Galeano’s “The Open Veins of Latin America” in 2009. CreditMatthew Cavanaugh/European Pressphoto Agency






















Descolonização do pensamento (Ciência Hoje)

Em entrevista à CH, o antropólogo brasileiro Cláudio Pinheiro analisa a dominação cultural da Europa e dos Estados Unidos sobre os países menos desenvolvidos, como o Brasil, e aponta mudanças que podem levar a uma produção de ideias e conhecimentos multipolarizada.

Por: Henrique Kugler, Ciência Hoje/ RJ

Publicado em 20/03/2014 | Atualizado em 20/03/2014

Descolonização do pensamento

‘Table bay’, tela de Samuel Scott datada de 1730. Na esteira da colonização, países menos desenvolvidos, entre eles o Brasil, importam padrões culturais e estruturas políticas e intelectuais da Europa e dos Estados Unidos.

Sejamos honestos: nós, brasileiros, tornamo-nos praticantes passivos de alguma espécie de mimetismo pós-colonial. Imitamos padrões europeus e estadunidenses em quase tudo – desde detalhes aparentemente banais, como vestimentas que usamos ou músicas que ouvimos; até estruturas políticas ou intelectuais reproduzidas a partir de matrizes do Norte. E a academia não foge à regra. Os autores que lemos, afinal, são quase sempre os clássicos do Velho Mundo.

Nos ventos do século 21, porém, as periferias geopolíticas pedem um mundo multipolarizado – e, cada vez mais, esse movimento configura a nova realidade global. Ainda perdura, no entanto, a clivagem do cenário internacional em dicotomias datadas que reforçam a segregação do mundo em dois hemisférios simbólicos.

Sobre esse instigante tema, Ciência Hoje ouviu o historiador e antropólogo Cláudio Pinheiro, diretor da Sephis, agência holandesa dedicada à formação de quadros intelectuais de países do Sul, agora sediada no Fórum de Ciência e Cultura da Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. Pinheiro denuncia o colonialismo tardio do qual apenas começamos a nos libertar. E, dono de um papo tão pertinente quanto sofisticado, aposta suas fichas nos países austrais como promissores espaços de enunciação política, cultural e intelectual.

É correto afirmar que no Brasil, como em muitos países em desenvolvimento, ainda somos intelectualmente colonizados?

Essa colonização intelectual e acadêmica que vivemos não é uma conversa nova. Sua denúncia sistemática vem dos anos 1960. Mas, agora, a ideia está sendo desenvolvida com muito mais substância e continuidade. Dois anos atrás, veio ao Brasil uma das grandes intelectuais que debate a ideia de Sul: a antropóloga australiana Raewyn Connell. Sabe o que ela disse? “No evento acadêmico do qual participei aqui, as bancas de livros vendiam o mesmo que eu encontraria em um evento acadêmico na Austrália: Pierre Bourdieu, Jürgen Habermas, enfim, os autores clássicos europeus. Mas eu gostaria de ler, na verdade, autores clássicos brasileiros! E também os africanos, os indianos…”

Se o debate já tem quatro décadas, por que essa colonização permanece?

As agendas de pensamento estão muito profundamente ancoradas em conjuntos de teorias, temas, categorias de análise e agendas de financiamento à produção científica que se referem a uma experiência histórica particular, que é a do Atlântico Norte – tanto europeia, quanto norte-americana. É nessas experiências que nós, da periferia, acabamos baseando nosso discurso intelectual sociológico, antropológico, político e historiográfico.

Um dos grandes autores a denunciar isso, nos anos 1990, foi o indiano Dipesh Chakrabarty, da Universidade de Chicago. Ele escreveu um livro, em 2000, chamado Provincializando a Europa [Provincializing Europe, editado pela Princeton University Press, sem tradução para o português]. O argumento básico está no título: a Europa é uma paróquia. Só que essa paróquia se mundializou, a partir de um longo processo histórico associado ao colonialismo. E passamos a acreditar que nela estaria alguma espécie de grande verdade.

Conhecemos mais detalhes sobre a queda da Bastilha do que sobre grandes revoluções africanas

Pense em um estudante de ensino médio. O que ele estuda em história? História europeia. Estudos sobre África entraram para o nosso currículo apenas recentemente, em 2003, por uma medida governamental. Certo: o estudante sabe então sobre Europa e África. O que falta? Falta tudo. Conhecemos mais detalhes sobre a queda da Bastilha do que sobre grandes revoluções africanas. Estas passam completamente ao largo de nosso conhecimento. Como estudar história mundial sem estudar a história da África? Como entender o impacto que teve a diáspora de africanos nas Américas e na própria África? Como isso interferiu, por gerações e séculos, na capacidade africana de recuperar sua economia? Nossa própria forma de datação do tempo é marcada pela experiência europeia. Compreendemos o mundo em termos de história antiga, medieval, moderna e contemporânea. E é nesse trem que nos localizamos: o Brasil passa a existir no mundo a partir da história moderna – durante a expansão europeia.

Com a emergência de novas forças geopolíticas, a exemplo dos BRICs (Brasil, Rússia, Índia, China e África do Sul), essas ‘categorias de análise’ podem ser remodeladas?

Não obstante países como os BRICs sejam mais e mais importantes no cenário político internacional, continuam não sendo donos do próprio arcabouço que define a maneira pela qual se conhece o conhecimento: a forma de datar o tempo, a forma de classificar sociedades, as categorias de compreensão do mundo. Exemplo: se falamos em ‘família’, um aluno do ensino médio pensa em pai, mãe, avós, tios, filhos, netos. Em muitas sociedades é assim. Mas em muitas outras, não. Para povos nativos brasileiros ou sociedades asiáticas, por exemplo, a noção de família engloba relações mais amplas, que podem incluir até animais.

O conceito ocidental baseado na experiência europeia não dá conta de toda a realidade

O conceito ocidental baseado na experiência europeia não dá conta de toda a realidade. Acontece que os demais modelos são invisibilizados por outros que nos fazem compreender o mundo de forma engessada. Isso vale não só para a ideia de família como também de Estado, política, democracia. Para alguns autores, não é o dinheiro que faz uma sociedade ser classificada como “periférica”. Mas sim o não domínio sobre as categorias que organizam o pensamento, a política e a sociedade.

Essa imitação subalterna é muito perceptível na academia…

Quase todo aluno de graduação no Brasil (desde enfermagem a agronomia, passando pela engenharia) estuda ciências sociais como disciplina obrigatória. Em muitos casos isso envolve a leitura dos ‘clássicos’: Karl Marx [1818-1883], Max Weber [1864-1920], Émile Durkheim [1858-1917]. Eles são interessantíssimos, não há dúvida. Mas parece uma igreja com seus santos principais. Cadê os santos da periferia? Que autores pensaram as sociedades que hoje são periféricas? É um desafio contemporâneo incluir outros clássicos no ensino e no debate. Muito se perde diante do fato de que as estruturas para conhecer o ‘outro’ estão marcadas pela experiência de uma província, de uma paróquia específica, que é a Europa. É preciso universalizar o vocabulário de categorias de análise de modo que o mundo seja mais polifônico.

Você leu apenas o início da entrevista publicada na CH 312. Clique no ícone a seguir para baixar a versão integral. PDF aberto (gif)