Decolonizing Methodologies - Delbello

In her introduction Tuhiwai Smith claims that “in a very real sense research has been an encounter between the West and the Other (8),” I think her work is in the tradition of post-colonialism, more specifically, as she mentions herself, in the approach of Edward Said, in an attempt to eradicate and reevaluate some reified conceptions in social sciences, specifically regarding the notions of the “Other.” In this book she adds a layer of complexity to Said’s Foucauldian-Gramscian analysis, arguing that a certain amount of commodification towards the “Other” happens not only in the mainstream academic positivist tradition within empiricism, which is strongly connected to Western imperialism and colonialism, but also, she says, “from an indigenous perspective Western research is more than just research that is located in a positivist tradition. It is research which brings to bear, on any study of indigenous peoples, a cultural orientation, a set of values, a different conceptualization of such things as time space and subjectivity, different and competing theories of knowledge, highly specialized forms of language, and structures of power (42).” 

I think this passage is crucial to understand her take on epistemology. So her project seems to involve the analysis of the creation of a deep epistemological distance between the West and the East (so deep that it shouldn’t even be called an epistemology, given that it’s a type of investigation already inscribed within what she frames as a Western tradition). This is something that interests me since it lays the foundation to ask questions about the nature of individuals in the society and what and how we know the social world and social phenomena around us.

In her definition of “trading the Other,” for example, she discusses at length about how the commodification of others occurs on different levels of narratives, implicit and explicit, for which the Other becomes an easy and convenient topic to objectify in a discursive production. I think that these are important steps taken to understand the colonized, the Other. Another important discussion is the one on liberalism and the role of individuals in it. Tuhiwai Smith argues that liberalism was contrasted by Marxist theories in the first part of the century, after which it faded away. While this might be true, I don’t think it’s because these two shared a similar teleological view of progress or evolution and what I think was emphasized, on the other hand, was not a real and genuine feminist critique of the status quo but rather a liberal one, which was not completely incompatible with Western capitalism (as Herbert Marcuse once wrote, it was a “tolerant critique”). 

Questions

One thing, although, I would like to ask, is the question Frantz Fanon asks himself in the Wretched of the Earth. How can we move to surpass the notion of the Other if the Other is defined as such always in conjunction and in a dialectical relationship to the colonizer?

Specifically, when she argues that from an indigenous research perspective Western research is more than just positivist research, how can we imagine and organize new types of research that can overcome conceptions derived by biased knowledge?

And related to this, is it possible to talk about a “universalism” of a struggle against western imperialism or do we have to talk about particularities given a certain positionality? How can researchers living and thinking from imperialist countries address those issues?