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Guyanese Amerindian epistemology: the gift from a pacifist insurgence
George Mentore
University of Virginia
This article introduces the idea that Amerindian modes of knowledge are intellectual strategies for defeating racism in Guyana. It is suggested that coming to terms with radically different concepts of time and space provides the means for understanding viable alternatives of social being. The current invisibility of, or deleterious prejudice against, indigenous Amerindian renderings of social being serve merely as opportunities lost to a postcolonial state, which might otherwise apply new forms of power and polity and offer these to both the nation and the global community. The familiar use of essentialism or, even, of multivocality, which some indigenous peoples have to implement to combat racism, is not good politics, it is argued. Indeed, providing the means for identifying and sympathetically understanding the different modes of knowing the world is good political action.
Key Words: indigenous knowledge • essentialism • modernity • racism in Guyana • western supremacy
References
- When I use the term `Amerindian', I do so as a category for identifying not individuals, groups or peoples but `persons'. It is a heuristic device formed from identifiable structural relations between individuals and thus cannot be reduced to the latter. Relational, contextual and sociological, the category of person provides multiple social identities for a single individual and can remain a property of collective society long after the individual has departed.
- Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: selected essays (Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 1989).
- Michel Foucault, `Two lectures ' in Henrietta L. Moore and Todd Sanders (eds), Anthropology in Theory: issues in epistemology (London, Blackwell Publishing, 2006), pp. 417—21.
- Paul Gilroy, `After the great white error... the great black mirage', in Donald S. Moore, Jake Kosek and Anand Pandian (eds), Race, Nature and the Politics of Difference (Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2003), p. 73.
- Ibid, p. 75.
- Because of the historical, linguistic, regional and theoretical confusion around the use of the term `creole', I normally make the term `contrapuntal' do the work of conveying the idea of mixture, which the former does in current scholarship on the Antilles. Here, I will pass on my normal insistence but do keep in mind that, as tribute to a little known but provocative article — Karl Riesman, `Contrapuntal conversations in an Antiguan village' in Richard Bauman and Joel Sherzer (eds), Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1974) — I consider what he evokes for speech in Antigua to be a useful analytical device for interpreting Guyanese as well as Antillean identity in general.
- Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: a social critique of the judgement of taste ( Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1984); Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality ( New York, Vintage Books, 1985); Anna Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's history of sexuality and the colonial order of things (Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 1996).
- Within most, if not all, modern western instances of the democratic, `rule of law' and/or `fair play', individuals presumably follow the same rules of conduct, those supposedly emanating from the same moral standards which provide for the order of procedure. If and when they do not, the law will either intervene (with punishment and discipline which follow the rules and morals set in place to uphold order) or it will be ineffective and the pervading lawlessness explained in terms of chaos and madness as well as immorality and irrationality. My point is that this same dilemma occurs for the popular forms of anti-racism today. To avoid the accusation of being labelled insane, irrational or immoral, anti-racists often fight the good fight against their opponents as if they believed wholeheartedly in the truth of racial difference: arguing not against the contingency of fabricated race theories but rather against the insensitive behaviour of those who act negatively towards it.
- Joanna Overing Kaplan, `Review article: Amazonian anthropology ', Journal of Latin American Studies (Vol. 13, no. 1, 1981), p. 151.
- José Gil, Metamorphoses of the Body (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1998), p. 53.
- Claude Lévi-Strauss, Totemism (Middlesex, Penguin Books, 1963); Philippe Descola, `Societies of nature and the nature of society', in Adam Kuper (ed.), Conceptualizing Society ( London, Routledge, 1992); Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, `Cosmological deixis and Amerindian perspectivism', Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (Vol. 4, 1998).
- Pierre Clastres, Society against the State: essays in political anthropology ( New York, Zone Books, 1989), p. 188.
- By `ideology', I deliberately mean belief and faith in ideas rather than critical intellectual inquiry, which could result in a change of belief and a questioning of faith.
- Consider also that much of the intellectual coherence of western economic systems and organised polities crucially relies upon the implementation and cultivation of the concept of autonomous individualism. Even under its own empirical criteria, however, such reasoning ultimately depends upon the enforcement of cultural monologues about a conscious individual subjectivity. Clearly, the grounds for confirming such an entity are insecure and highly disputable because they can only empirically confirm the existence of the unseen self through the materiality of the body. The insistence on this formula, it seems to me, has found a firm site of accountability for the embodied substantive self and, in addition, fixed to the subjective body through the self, an identity that could be devoid of any causal determinant other than its very own corporeality.
- I think this has partially to do with the fact that they participate wholly without any consciousness of an alternative in what they consider to be the `civilised' economics of modernity. In addition, they have not yet lost the immense utility of family relations and the fact that the deemed high value in kinsfolk can be freely accessed and easily attained directly through the body.
- John Bale, Sport, Space and the City (London, Routledge, 1992); Yi-Fu Tuan, Dominance and Affection: the making of pets (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1984).
- John Bale, Landscapes of Modern Sport (Leicester, Leicester University Press, 1994).
- The degree of consciousness of being racially Amerindian can and does vary remarkably, from those for whom the term and its meaning have only scant relevance (through their remote and infrequent expressiveness by state and coastal carriers) to those for whom the very fabric of their daily lives cannot but be woven into a racially essentialised experience of identity. By the very fact of this diversity, however, it is already possible to expose the contested and variant character of the concept although I have not here been interested in such an exposure.
- Alcida Rita Ramos, `Pulp fictions of indigenism' in Donald S. Moore, Jake Kosek and Anand Pandian (eds), Race, Nature and the Politics of Difference (Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2003), p. 379.
- Jean E. Jackson, `Culture, genuine and spurious: the politics of Indianness in the Vaupés, Colombia', in Henrietta L. Moore and Todd Sanders (eds), Anthropology in Theory: issues in epistemology ( London, Blackwell, 2006), p. 582.
- We can find no breaking of the plain of flat surfaces with painted perspective, in other words, no Da Vinci. No grand chromatic scaling of the musical terrain, in other words, no Mozart. No definitive scientific statement about the nature of our species, in other words, no Darwin. No ground-breaking theory about the character of time or, in other words, no Einstein.
Race & Class, Vol. 49, No. 2,
57-70 (2007)
DOI: 10.1177/0306396807082858
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