‘Being in Being’: Contesting the Ontopolitics of Indigeneity

Abstract

This article critiques the shift towards valorizing indigeneity in western thought and contemporary practice. This shift in approach to indigenous ways of knowing and being, historically derided under conditions of colonialism, is a reflection of the "ontological turn" in anthropology. Rather than seeing indigenous peoples as having an inferior or different understanding of the world to a modernist one, the ontological turn suggests that their importance lies in the fact that they constitute different worlds and "world" in a performatively different way. The radical promise this view holds is that a different world already exists in potentia, the access to which is a question of ontology-of being differently: 'being in being' rather than thinking, acting and world-making as if we were transcendent or "possessive" modern subjects. We argue that the ontopolitical arguments for the superiority of indigenous ways of being should not be seen as radical or emancipatory resistances to modernist or colonial epistemological and ontological legacies but rather as a new form of neoliberal governmentality, cynically manipulating critical, postcolonial and ecological sensibilities for its own ends. Thus, rather than "provincializing" dominant western hegemonic practices, such discourses of indigeneity extend them, instituting new forms of governing through calls for adaptation and resilience.

Exploring attitudes towards the archaeological past: Two case studies from majority Muslim communities in the Nile valley

“…This notion not only ignores nonarchaeological forms of knowledge of the past and of cultural strategies of making sense of it, some of which I have shortly discussed in the previous paragraph; at least implicitly, it also carries forward colonial discourses of Western hegemony and superiority. As Chandler and Reid (2018: 263) have argued in their deconstruction of the concept of the “indigenous”: however defined, as long as it is constructed in opposition to Western normativity, it runs the risk “to valorize disempowering conceptions of subjectivity.”…”

Nalangkulurru, the Spirit Beings, and the Black‐Nosed Python: Ontological Self‐Determination and Yanyuwa Law in Northern Australia's Gulf Country

“…There is merit in continued engagement with the relationships between Western ontologies and Indigenous ontologies, particularly in an era of sustained decolonial critique and collaborative research efforts that call for the prioritizing of Indigenous voice. We, like Chandler and Reid (2018, 252), “see the transformation of approaches to indigeneity as a symptom of the crisis of the modernist episteme.” The timing and need for such change is the wider intellectual field of debate into which we project the following discussion, namely, a decolonial critique of Western philosophy and the epistemic violence of manipulating postcolonial, decolonial, and ecological sensibilities (see also Bessire and Bond 2014; Blaser 2012; Chandler and Reid 2018; Pedersen 2012; Todd 2016).…”

Kié az antropocén?

“…A "Nyugat" és a "mások" e szemlélet szerinti értelmezése magában hordozza azt a célkitűzést is, hogy az antropológus feladata nemcsak a mi és a mások, hanem a természettudományos és társadalomtudományos szemléletek közötti közvetítés is (Ingold 1993). Röviden, a címke, miszerint létezik egyfajta nyugati/európai/tudományos szemlélet és világkép (illetve egy vagy több vele szembeállítható más), nyilvánvaló módon leegyszerűsít, és heurisztikus céllal elhatárol egy sereg olyan gyakorlatot, amely a modernizmus ismeretelméletének sajátja, és amely az antropológiai megismerést és a tudományos gondolkodást jelentős mértékben meghatározta (Chandler és Reid 2018).…”