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
Native anthropology and Native historiography
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