Tag: Colombia

Native anthropology and Native historiography

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Alongside with political under-representation, denied social rights, and sometimes deprivation from their lands, indigenous in Latin America have often been excluded from the academic sphere. To overcome this lack, some scholars have recently advocated for a Native anthropology and historiography. 
Native anthropology
Native anthropology would develop “a set of theories based on non-Western precepts and assumptions in the same sense that modern anthropology is based on has supported Western beliefs and values” [1]. Indeed, most ethnographic works are written by academics who use a particular frame and a Western conceptualization of indigeneity. Indigenous theorizing then results from a combination of the appropriation of academic anthropology and indigenous patterns of narration. 
On this matter, one issue is translation. Translating the Colombian Constitution of 1991 from Spanish into Nasa Yuwe, the language spoken by the Nasa people in Colombia, is a way to liberate the Spanish version from its original limitations. Nevertheless, it is no more the translation than the process itself that is important here: translating the Constitution needed the collaboration of a team gathering authorities of Mosoco indigenous community, bilingual teachers, indigenous and national linguists, and professionals from the national society. This collaborative work leads to autoethnography, which Rappaport and Ramos define as “[the appropriation of] external concepts within an indigenous political matrix with the aim of introducing new strategies for cultural survival.”[2] The dialogue between indigenous activists and academics takes the form of interculturalism, as opposed to multiculturalism, which promotes a simple tolerance of ethnic minorities, instead of integrating them in the national discourse. 
Native historiography and the example of the Nasa
Joanne Rappaport gives a formidable overview of Nasa history — a community in the Colombian Andes — from the point of view of Nasa historians. Native history has been ignored for many years because it was not considered academic by Western or Western-oriented scholars; Rappaport highlights its legitimacy and offers to read it as a tool to understand political events in a different way. Rather than truth, she emphasizes the presence of a particular point of view when historians write history. In other words, history is a subjective construct.[3]
Conveying the work of three Nasa historians — Don Juan Tama y Calambás, Manuel Quintín Lame, and Julio Niquinás — Rappaport highltights the incorporative character of native histories.[4] Nasa historians’ goals were not to deconstruct the history they were taught, but to incorporate their own stories to it. In other words, creating a new native history meant to create a mix of interpretations, that did not exclude each other. 
Considering the telling of history as a series of choices allows Rappaport to consider history in terms of power. When the Spaniards conquered what is now Colombia, one of the way to take control over the Nasa was to deprive them from their own history.[5] This situation lasted for centuries, before indigenous activists like Juan Tama started to access the academic sphere and began to write indigenous history in their own terms. Nevertheless, rather than a complete rejection of Western historical methods, Tama’s, Lame’s, and Niquiná’s works are a syncretism between Western historiography and Nasa storytelling. This methodology falls into what Rappaport and Ramos call “autoethnography” and allows indigenous historians to talk about the past without separating it from the present. In The Politics of Memory, Rappaport successfully highlights the work of indigenous historians/storytellers, and guarantees them posterity. Citing the work of Juan Tama, Quintín Lame, and Julio Niquinás, she contextualizes the voices of indigenous people that continuously rose up since the Spanish colonization. Rappaport’s work falls into a recent consideration of indigenous perspectives on history, and especially the way indigenous communities conceptualize history. 
Native Americans have been excluded from academic dialogue for years, but their discourse is now brought into it. Native historians, scholars, anthropologists, are now blurring the Western line between past and present, the line between the actual and the mythical.Their work not only acknowledges the interest of Native history and methods, it empowers our own understanding of history by adding — but not replacing — another perspective to it.
[1] Ramos Pacho, Abelardo and Rappaport, Joanne. “Collaboration and Historical Writing: Challenges for the Indigenous-Academic Dialogue”, in Mallon, Florencia, ed. Decolonizing Native Histories: Collaboration, Knowledge, and Language in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012, 122.
[2] Ramos Pacho and Rappaport, 126.
[3] Rappaport, Joanne. The Politics of Memory: Native Historical Interpretation in the Colombian Andes. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998, 13.
[4] Rappaport, 168.
[5] Rappaport, 1.
https://muse.jhu.edu/chapter/515055

Decolonizing History: Past, Present, Power

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Historiography is the study of history itself. It is a systematic study of what history is, how people have “done” history, and what role history plays in social systems. In other words, historiography is looking at the forces that determine how history has been told, what is told, and who gets to tell it. So, why is it important to think about historiography? How does it relate to decolonizing history? To Indigenous rights?
When we study history itself, we see its relationship to power and politics. History is a dynamic and subjective system by which communities remember the past and relate it to the present; history can serve to either enforce or dismantle systemic inequality. This is because, as scholar Joanne Rappaport writes, “Knowledge of the past is a fundamental component of land disputes, political agreements and arguments over inheritance. It is also central to efforts at strengthening a communal identity’ [1]. Here, Rappaport points out the inherently political aspect of history that is often made invisible. Many people tend to think of history as a fixed and objective account of the past that, because of these qualities, exists outside of socio political structures.
However, material and immaterial concerns are inextricable from history both in its production and its effects. What I mean is that material resources — such as money and access to formal education — impact who gets to be part of history telling processes. Similarly, immaterial concerns — like societal attitudes — play a role in who is included in telling history. This is the production side of things. In terms of history’s effects, materially, how history is told may impact the way that land and resource disputes are settled; immaterially, how we understand the past has an effect on forming identities and ideologies.
What does this all have to do with colonialism and decolonization? When we think of colonialism, we often think specifically of the political rule of one community over another. Colonialism, in this view, is a political and economic structure that terminates with the material “liberation” of the subaltern. However, when we consider the intimate social and ideological legacies of colonialism — how it fundamentally disrupts native conceptions of gender, of ethnicity, of history — we see coloniality as an ongoing problem.
One colonial legacy is the disruption and erasure of native-storytelling in favor of European tellings of history. When history is colonized in this way, it often throws a veil over the systemic violence that Indigenous people have faced. It also deprives Indigenous communities of the power to tell history in a way that accurately reflects their identities, experiences, and values.  
However, history can be transformed from a colonial legacy into a tool of resistance. Knowledge of the past can be “indispensable in the maintenance of autonomy in the face of European domination” [2]. When Indigenous people have the space to tell their own history, it can become an important means of forming and strengthening identities, making claims to land, and unlearning the European histories which often diminish Indigenous experience. What might this look like in practice? How might Indigenous knowledge systems differ from European ones?
For the Nasa (also called the Paez) people in Colombia, history is “difficult to locate […] in time and space” [3]. Nasa storytelling is non-linear, it includes mythic elements, and is episodic. This is not out of an inability to tell history in a European mode — “It is not that indigenous peoples have no sense of the flow of time, nor that they are unable to distinguish fact from fiction, […], but that fictive and fantastic images may help them to reflect more fully upon the real” [4].
This all might demonstrate why historiography and decolonizing history are so important when it comes to indigenous rights. If we do not study how history has been made, we cannot understand how history has been used to perpetuate inequality — or how it can be used to challenge that inequality.
Notes
[1] Rappaport, Joanne, The Politics of Memory: Native Historical Interpretation in the Colombian Andes. (Chapel Hill: Duke University Press, 1998), 11-12.
[2] Rappaport, Joanne. The Politics of Memory, 11-12.
[3] Rappaport, Joanne. The Politics of Memory, 11.
[4] Rappaport, Joanne. The Politics of Memory, 18.
Works Cited
Rappaport, Joanne. The Politics of Memory: Native Historical Interpretation in the Colombian Andes. Chapel Hill: Duke University Press, 1998.