Becoming Indigenous: the ‘speculative turn’ in anthropology and the (re)colonisation of indigeneity

Abstract

The indigenous have become central to contemporary critical and governmental imaginaries as the West tries to cope with planetary crises imbricated in the legacies of modernity and settler-colonialism. As such, indigenous methods and practices are increasingly constructed as offering futural possibilities for 'becoming' rather than belonging to the archives of an underdeveloped past. Central to this transformation has been the speculative or ontological turn in anthropological discourse, which we argue has opened up new possibilities for a Western and colonial appropriation of indigeneity. This turn is the subject of this article and is critically engaged with to pursue a number of avenues which problematise this form of 'ontopolitical anthropology'. The reduction of indigenous lives to the speculative 'other' of Western modernity inherently tends to reify or 'exoticise' indigenous thought and practices or, as we state, to 'ontologize indigeneity'. This, we argue, is particularly problematic in the context where critical imaginaries of precarious 'life in the ruins' tend to affirm contemporary governmental approaches rather than challenge them. Ironically, rather than opening up alternative possibilities, these approaches reduce the reality of indigenous struggles and sufferings to a mere foil for the speculative imaginaries of a privileged white Eurocentric academic elite.

Decolonising the Discourse on Resilience

“…It is important to clarify from the outset that my critique of resilience explicitly makes the case for an inter/transdisciplinary approach marrying insights from anthropological and historical studies with those from political and development studies that take a longue durée perspective. Resilience discourse has been the object of significant scholarly attention and debates (Blaser and De la Cadena 2018;Bourbeau and Ryan 2018;Chandler and Reid 2020;Humbert and Joseph 2019;Juncos and Joseph 2020). Many of these debates in the critical scholarship centre on multiple logics of resilience (Bourbeau and Ryan 2018;Chandler and Reid 2020;Humbert and Joseph 2019).…”

“…Resilience discourse has been the object of significant scholarly attention and debates (Blaser and De la Cadena 2018;Bourbeau and Ryan 2018;Chandler and Reid 2020;Humbert and Joseph 2019;Juncos and Joseph 2020). Many of these debates in the critical scholarship centre on multiple logics of resilience (Bourbeau and Ryan 2018;Chandler and Reid 2020;Humbert and Joseph 2019). Resilience discourse relies on ideas of self-organisation and, in particular, adaptation, transformation, and survival in the face of extreme adverse conditions (Chandler 2020;Rogers 2015).…”

“…A number of critical scholars now recognise that the age of resilience is marked by a new framework for the legitimisation and further extension of the contemporary neoliberal logic of adaptation (Bourbeau and Ryan 2018;Chandler and Reid 2020;Joseph 2018). Chandler (2020) points out that the problem with the pervasive Western, Eurocentric approaches to the development of the concept of resilience is that key to these approaches is being responsive to complex feedback loop effects.…”

Engaging cultural humility diffractively

“…13 With a materialist turn, the clinical encounter is approached as a "fluid multiplicity," a "liveliness" of discursive and material life and forces. 14 Culturally humble knowing, as we explore below, invites an interaction with the multiplicity of agents and their agentic capacities populating the clinical encounter, and to be attentive to how health phenomena emerge, assemble, and become meaningful or not. In other words, learning and knowledge generation about health phenomena is as much an ontological encounteran attentiveness to the becomingness of cultural meaning and matteras it is an epistemological one.…”

“…This approach suggests “a certain fixity” to facts and “linear causality” between facts and the objects of the clinical encounter 13 . With a materialist turn, the clinical encounter is approached as a “fluid multiplicity,” a “liveliness” of discursive and material life and forces 14 . Culturally humble knowing, as we explore below, invites an interaction with the multiplicity of agents and their agentic capacities populating the clinical encounter, and to be attentive to how health phenomena emerge, assemble, and become meaningful or not.…”