Colonizing Knowledges

Colonizing Knowledges

Week 7

Therese Dugan

Citation:

Smith, L. T. (1999). Colonizing Knowledges (Chapter 3). In Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples (pp. 58-77). London & New York: Zed Books.

Reading Response/Main Points:

Smith’s article, “Colonizing Knowledge,” is quite a lot to absorb all at once. The article is an overview of some of the main points of Western Civilization. It begins with historical context about philosophies of the Enlightenment, Colonialism, Manifest Destiny, Imperialism, the Industrial Revolution, and the present day; Smith describes how these philosophies have impacted indigenous populations around the world. This chapter explores how the Western search for truth did not include indigenous people as equals, but as noble savages or something not quite human because they lacked souls.

Many historic philosophies, such as Social Darwinism and religious missionary work, supported the idea that the Westerners were “right” and the indigenous were either not strong, knowledgeable, or of the right character to exist on their own without the need for external “saving” and “help.” However, by eventually colonizing the indigenous people’s lands and driving out the original settlers, much of the original culture and society was lost. Furthermore, research into indigenous cultures was always compared with the “correct,” Western cultural viewpoint; as a result, indigenous cultures were regarded as inferior, other, and odd.

Sadly, many indigenous populations were forced to obey or risk death, since the colonizing cultures typically possessed greater force and more advanced technology. Ultimately, the original settlers had no rights to their own homelands, as the concept of land ownership was not part of many indigenous cultures. To these people, no single person could “own” part of the land; the Earth gave itself to them. The colonizing forces did not share this perspective, and so the First Nations people suffered, gave in, and began to assimilate.

As this process of assimilation proceeded, some native intellectuals found themselves in a bind. They became trapped between two worlds: unaccepted into the new world because of their heritage, and rejected by the old world because of their attempts at assimilation with an imperialist force. The uneducated native people struggle as well, as they try to save enough money to help their children get educated and integrate into the new society. While they entertain dreams of their children fitting into a capitalist society, they are frustrated that Western education does not always focus on ideologies important to indigenous cultures.

As a descendant of European and Native American ancestry, I can relate to this situation, particularly when Smith concludes with sections about what “indigenous” means today. Smith explains that, through all the social and cultural upheavals of the last few centuries, we are not really sure what it means anymore to be a “native.” I really appreciated her description about “Oh, I forgot to come as a native” when she discussed the indigenous intellectual conference in the news. I remember one graduate student adviser in Chicago remarking to me that, because I came from Oklahoma, he expected me to look more Native American. Is there some way for me to be Native American “enough” for this person’s liking?

Similarly, I worked on a documentary about birth defects in Mi'kmaq women, and when my subject died during the film the mother and tribe worried I might not be Mi'kmaq “enough” to share insights into their culture and personal lives. Therefore, I still wonder what is means to be “native enough.” When do we know how authentic we are or where we fit into this world? I think this is the eternal struggle of the native.

Main Points, Key Concepts & Terminology:

1. Enlightenment - a philosophical movement of the eighteenth century that rejected traditional ideas and values, emphasized the notion of human progress, and promoted the use of reason and direct observation in science.

2. Modernity- is a term used to describe the condition of being related to modernism. Since the term "modern" is used to describe a wide range of periods, modernity must be understood in its context, the industrial age of the 19th century, and its role in sociology, which since its beginning in that era examined the leap from pre-industrial to industrial society, sometimes considering events of the 18th century as well. Basically the time period since the Middle Ages (mid 1400s-modern times).

3. Papal Bull/Inter caetera - was a papal bull ( Pope proclaimed proclamation) issued by Pope Alexander VI on May 4, 1493, which granted to Spain (the Crowns of Castile and Aragon) all lands to the "west and south" of a pole-of-pole line 100 leagues west and south of any of the islands of the Azores or the Cape Verde Islands. Thus creating an imaginary line between east and west.

4. Imperialism- the forceful extension of a nation's authority by territorial conquest establishing economic and political domination of other nations. In its second meaning the term describes the imperialistic attitude of superiority, subordination and dominion over foreign peoples.

5. Orientalism- refers to the imitation or depiction of aspects of Eastern cultures in the West by writers, designers and artists. The term has come to acquire negative connotations in some quarters and is interpreted to refer to the study of the East by Westerners shaped by the attitudes of the era of European imperialism in the 18th and 19th centuries. When used in this sense, it often implies essentializing and prejudiced outsider interpretations of Eastern cultures and peoples.

6. Modernism - The term covers many political, cultural and artistic movements rooted in the changes in Western society at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. It is a trend of thought that affirms the power of human beings to create, improve, and reshape their environment, with the aid of scientific knowledge, technology and practical experimentation. It also encouraged the re-examination of every aspect of existence, from commerce to philosophy, with the goal of finding that which was 'holding back' progress, and replacing it with new, progressive and therefore better, ways of reaching the same end. In essence, the modernist movement argued that the new realities of the industrial and mechanized age were permanent and imminent, and that people should adapt their world view to accept that the new equaled the good, the true and the beautiful.

7. Colonialism - forced change in which one culture, society, or nation dominates another.

8. Soul – The idea that westerners held that indigenous peoples might not be real humans because they did not have a soul in the sense that Christian doctrine. According to many religious and philosophical traditions, is the self-aware essence unique to a particular living being. In these traditions the soul is thought to incorporate the inner essence of each living being, and to be the true basis for sapience, rather than the brain or any other material or natural part of the biological organism.

9. Indigenous peoples- Aborigines, aboriginal peoples, native peoples, first peoples, first nations and autochthonous (this last term having a derivation from Greek, meaning "sprung from the earth"). Cultural groups and their continuity or association with a given region, or parts of a region, and who formerly or currently inhabit the region either:
1. before its subsequent colonization or annexation; or
2. alongside other cultural groups during the formation of a nation-state;
3. independently or largely isolated from the influence of the claimed governance by a nation-state,
4. linguistic, cultural and social / organizational characteristics, and in doing so remain differentiated in some degree from the surrounding populations and dominant culture of the nation-state.
5. peoples who are self-identified as indigenous, and/or those recognized as such by other groups.

10. Diffusionist Explanation - The term diffusion implies that an innovation from one place or culture spreads to influence other places and cultures. It is an archaeological theory that says attributes of civilization diffused from the Near East to Europe.

11. Ecological Imperialism - is the idea that the European conquest of the New World was more a matter of the introduced plants, animals, and diseases that accompanied the Europeans than their technology or weaponry.

12. Survival of the Fittest- a nineteenth century concept that the strongest survive. Often called Social Darwinism. Survival of the fittest misrepresents the process of natural selection. The mechanism of natural selection is reproductive fitness, those who produce offspring. Social Darwinism refers to being the most powerful, which is not the mechanism for natural selection. Basically the theory states that competition between all individuals, groups, nations or ideas drives social evolution in human societies. The term is an extension of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, where competition between individual organisms drives biological evolutionary change (speciation) through the survival of the fittest.

13. Miscegenation- Sexual intercourse between individuals of differing racial groups. At various times and places (including the American south and South Africa under apartheid) there have been laws prohibiting both sexual intercourse and marriage between racially mixed couples.

14. Cultural Assimilation- is a process of consistent integration whereby members of an ethno-cultural group (such as immigrants, or minority groups) are "absorbed" into an established, generally larger community. This presumes a loss of many characteristics of the absorbed group.

15. Licentiousness - often used interchangeably with lewdness or lasciviousness, which relate to moral impurity in a sexual context.

16. Benign Neglect - Refers to doing nothing about a problem, in the hope that it will not be serious or will be solved by others.

17. Manifest Destiny- A belief found among the early American colonies that held it to be the destiny of the colonies to stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific and as far south as the Rio Grande river. In the early 19th century this belief was behind the decision to reclaim the territories of Texas , Oregon and California. Bring the country into conflict with England and Mexico. Canadian politicians were concerned that this belief also held that the American state should eventually occupy the territories to the north and much Canadian policy can be seen as an attempt to cut off American territorial and market expansion.

18. Universal Knowledge – global knowledge that is available and not owned by anyone that is until the western scholars laid claim to it

19. Colonial Education- The process of colonization involves one nation or territory taking control of another nation or territory either through the use of force or by acquisition. As a by-product of colonization, the colonizing nation implements its own form of schooling within their colonies which must then be adopted by the colonized people.

20. Civilization - is a human society or culture; specifically, a civilization is usually understood to be any type of culture, society, etc., of a specific place, time, or group. Compared with less complex cultures, members of a civilization are organized into a diverse division of labor and an intricate social hierarchy. The term civilization is often used as a synonym for culture in both popular and academic circles. Every human being participates in a culture, defined as the arts, customs, habits... beliefs, values, behavior and material habits that constitute a people's way of life. Civilizations can be distinguished from other cultures by their high level of social complexity and organization, and by their diverse economic and cultural activities. The term civilization has been defined and understood in a number of ways different from the standard definition. Sometimes it is used synonymously with the broader term culture. Civilization can also refer to society as a whole.
21. Civilized - having a high state of culture and development both social and technological

22. Oedipus Complex- in Freudian psychoanalysis refers to a stage of psychosexual development in childhood where children of both sexes regard their father as an adversary and competitor for the exclusive love of their mother. The name derives from the Greek myth of Oedipus, who unknowingly kills his father, Laius, and marries his mother, Jocasta. Further, for girls Freud came to regard the relationship with the mother as of great importance in understanding her psychosexual development, which affects her entry into the Oedipus complex.

23. Intellectual Racialists- some westerns who define in their writings and work certain cultures and classes of people negatively and believe that there are peoples who are intrinsically superior or inferior to members of other races

24. Primitivism – Belief that nature provides truer and more healthful models than does culture. An example is the myth of the noble savage. The noble savage expresses a concept of humanity as unencumbered by civilization; the normal essence of an unfettered human. Since the concept embodies the idea that without the bounds of civilization, humans are essentially good, the basis for the idea of the "noble savage" lies in the doctrine of the goodness of humans.

25. Academic Freedom - the freedom to conduct research, teach, speak and publish, subject to the norms and standards of scholarly inquiry, without interference or penalty, wherever the search for truth and understanding may lead.

26. Formulas of Domination – examples of discipline Foucault explore when discussing how newly assimilated people must act including exclusion, marginalization, and denial from the colonizers.

27. Producers of Culture- artists, writers, poets, teachers

28. Culturally Homogenous – a culture that has become uniform or the same

29. Post-Colonial Intellectual – Persons whose work explores the literary theory (or critical approach) of post colonialism which deals with literature produced in countries that once were colonies of other countries, especially of the European colonial powers Britain, France, and Spain; in some contexts, it includes countries still in colonial arrangements. It also deals with literature written in colonial countries and by their citizens that has colonized people(s) as its subject matter. Colonized people, especially of the British Empire, attended British universities; their access to education, still unavailable in the colonies, created a new criticism - mostly literary, and especially in novels. deals with cultural identity in colonized societies: the dilemmas of developing a national identity after colonial rule; the ways in which writers articulate and celebrate that identity (often reclaiming it from and maintaining strong connections with the colonizer); the ways in which the knowledge of the colonized (subordinated) people has been generated and used to serve the colonizer’s interests; and the ways in which the colonizer’s literature has justified colonialism via images of the colonized as a perpetually inferior people, society and culture.

30. Post Structural - While post-structuralism is difficult to define or summarize, it can be broadly understood as a body of distinct reactions to structuralism. There are two main reasons for this difficulty. First, it rejects definitions that claim to have discovered absolute truths or facts about the world. Second, very few people have willingly accepted the label post-structuralist; rather, they have been labeled as such by others. Therefore no one has felt compelled to construct a 'manifesto' of post-structuralism.

31. Psychoanalytical Feminist Theory - based on Freud and his psychoanalytic theories. It maintains that gender is not biological but is based on the psycho-sexual development of the individual. Psychoanalytical feminists believe that gender inequality comes from early childhood experiences, which lead men to believe themselves to be masculine, and women to believe themselves feminine. It is further maintained that gender leads to a social system that is dominated by males, which in turn influences the individual psycho-sexual development.

Linkages to other readings:

The section of this article about cultural education and assimilation made me think about the children in the Sarangapani article, and how they were indoctrinated into the educational culture of India. Although many of these students were physically at schools (whereas in the past according to Smith they were not even allowed but considered “ineducatable”), there was still a lot of hostility as a result of the caste system and other cultural influences. These circumstances made it hard for the children to learn, grow, and thrive in a rural school setting because they were forced to accept and regurgitate rhetoric from the textbooks and do things in a preordained way.

Questions for the class:

While Smith explores at length the effect and influence Western thought and the Enlightenment have had on indigenous peoples, how has the East affected or influenced indigenous peoples?

What does this article say about our own cultural history if that history is written from the perspective of Western imperialists? Is the history of the indigenous peoples who were here before the colonization occurred lost forever? What ethical obligation do Western historians have when trying to explain the histories of indigenous, First Nation peoples?

For those in the class who come from multi-ethnic, diverse, minority, and/or first nation backgrounds, what do you think of Smith’s assessment about the “authentic native” in today’s society? For others who are not of multi-ethnic, diverse, minority, and/or first nation backgrounds, what do you think?

As ethnographers, what can we do to explore and define a culture without assimilating it into our own? Is this even possible?