Paper short abstract:

Bringing together personal accounts on teaching decolonial approaches from within German academia with an overview on recent decolonial movements in other settings this paper invites to discuss possibilities and complicities for a decolonial anthropology and classroom in the German context.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will give an overview of some of the existing critical pedagogies that have been already formed within theories and methods of decolonial scholarship and movements. It will take a closer look at the demands and the inherent identity politics as the challenges that arise from a decolonial agenda of Anthropology in regard to teaching and doing research. While decolonising has to be understood as a process that has to be communal and enacted one of the main problems in realizing this process is the institutional backlash that many of the decolonial scholars and movements experience.

In German academia decolonial perspectives are slowly increasing and the discussion on colonial epistemologies, in the development of the sciences as well as the colonial heritage of museums and restitution is increasingly discussed. The implications of identity politics, racism in the academy and what decolonizing actually means in regard to the responsibility of the researchers and students are on the other hand in the beginning stages.

Bringing together personal accounts on teaching decolonial approaches from within German academia with an overview on recent decolonial movements and approaches in other settings this paper invites to discuss possibilities and complicities for a decolonial anthropology and classroom in the German context.

Paper short abstract:

This paper asks how far the 'decolonizing the museum' approach can be applied in studying Naga collections in European museums and critically engage with ethnographic objects in their historical contexts, ranging from imperial, colonial and postcolonial eras to contemporary reimagining.

Paper long abstract:

This paper asks how far the 'decolonizing the museum' approach can be applied in studying Naga collections in European museums and critically engage with ethnographic objects in their historical contexts, ranging from imperial, colonial and postcolonial eras to contemporary reimagining.

During the colonial period, between1921-1935, six detailed monographs were published on the Naga peoples of present North East India. by British officers cum amateur anthropologists using the guidelines in 'Notes and Queries' prepared by the RAI. In addition many artefacts were collected from different Naga communities for western ethnographic museums, especially in the UK and elsewhere in Europe at the turn of the 20th Century, just before much material cultural heritage was destroyed during religious revivals and the actions of British and Indian security forces, first to annex the region and later to suppress the nationalist movement. Over the past four generations, most Naga have converted to Christianity. Now, however, many cloths and accessories from the so called 'heathen past' and colonial period have become part of a treasured cultural history for the Naga. The paper will explore the re-engagement with Naga of north-eastern India from whom objects in the Oxford Pitt Rivers Museum (and other museums in Europe), were sourced during the colonial period and the effects of such engagement, including sharing with the people, Naga anthropology students and colleagues the digital images of the objects. The paper will also dwell on how best to approach the early history of collecting and teaching of anthropology in ethnographic museums.

Paper short abstract:

Using examples from my research as a kaupapa Maori researcher I highlight how research practices have been re-shaped and re-imagined using historical-trauma theory as a design framework. I propose new ways of being and collaborating as BIPOC and settler anthropologists.

Paper long abstract:

Decolonising mandates making space for indigenous knowledges and priorities to flourish and weakening the many manifestations of colonialism. Indigenous scholars have identified historical trauma theory (HTT) as a significant framework for understanding and managing the impact of colonisation (Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart, Lily George). HTT defines the unique ways that intergenerational trauma and intergenerational privilege interact in interpersonal relationships and structural arrangements, and posits practical frameworks for addressing these cumulative processes. In this paper, I reflect on examples from my research as a kaupapa Maori researcher in Aotearoa that highlight how research practices have been re-shaped, and re-imagined using historical-trauma theory as a design framework. I propose sites where this framework might be most impactful, including conceptualisation of success, mentoring and leadership, as well as knowledge production activities. I unpack the opportunities and challenges in each. In doing so, I reveal practical implications for making, and maintaining, spaces that go beyond harm reduction and towards healing in the classroom and in communities, and propose new ways of being and collaborating as BIPOC and settler anthropologists.

Paper short abstract:

Working off the experience of decolonising student movements, this paper argues that to produce anthropologists who are able to enact decolonial practice and knowledge production in the field we need to bring the sensitivity and complexity of our methodologies from the field into the classroom.

Paper long abstract:

Working off their experience in the decolonising student movements at their respective universities, the authors of this paper argue that for many anthropologists, especially those researching race, racism and neo-colonial power, the field has rendered itself more critical, transformative and pedagogical than the 'classroom' - pointing to anthropology's shortcomings in addressing these issues and leaving many practitioners ill-equipped or unprepared for this encounter. In recognising that research, praxis and pedagogy are never insular, this paper seeks to explore the ways in which classroom practice produces and enframes 'the anthropologist', critiquing the underlying assumption of homogeneity within the monoculturally performed (Icaza and Vasquez), white (Todd, Shanklin) classroom often imbued with epistemologies of ignorance (Sullivan and Tuana). In critiquing the (re)production of knowledge producers in the classroom we question why we do not bring the same sensitivity and complexity of methodologies to the classroom as we do to the field. We suggest that by rooting ourselves in our own positionality and complicity (Ahmed), 'taking our students seriously' and recognising that we all enter the classroom with divergent 'hinterlands' (Candea) we allow the classroom to generate a wider complexity of anthropological knowledge. At the same time we put into practice precisely the types of knowledges which would assist the anthropologist to be present in the field in more decolonial ways, knowledges that need not only to be learned cognitively but need to be enacted and practiced in order to become known, thereby creating anthropologists who are better equipped to enact a decolonial framework.

Paper short abstract:

This paper turns the classroom into an object of ethnographic analysis by discussing the complexities of teaching Research Methods to postgraduate students in a South African University. It compares different students' experiences of and ways of applying 'decolonialism' in theory and in practice.

Paper long abstract:

This papers consists of an autoethnographic account about teaching Research Methods to postgraduate students in a South African University. The paper traces contemporary experiences of Higher Education by analysing the expectations, understandings and frustrations of Honours students embarking on their first research projects, to ways of encouraging 'deep ontological engagement' with PhD students working on systems of belief and Indigenous Knowledge in sub-Saharan Africa. Within the wider context of student (and faculty) calls for 'decolonisation' of curricula in South Africa, this paper examines what 'decolonization' might look like for Research Methods, as a compulsory postgraduate course, and how processes of producing knowledge translate into student experiences as they conduct fieldwork and write ethnography. I argue that 'decolonization' remains such a nebulous term (for students and lecturers alike) that it has become 'up for grabs'. The potentialities for anthropology in the region are significant, but so, it would appear from the evidence to be presented, is the possibility of the term being employed in very different ways once it has left the classroom, enters the research arena then emerges as ethnography in written text. What does it mean for different students in this context to write a 'decolonial' ethnography of their research projects? How ought we supervise this intellectual matrix for the mutual benefit of students, interlocutors, lecturers and the discipline of anthropology more widely? Based on recent personal experience of writing and teaching a research methods syllabus and supervising postgraduate students, I try to unpack these and other questions.

Paper short abstract:

In order to decolonise anthropology other ways of being/knowing need to be allowed to affect the discipline's entire orthopraxy: pedagogy being essential. After a failed attempt to do this within a university context, I now propose for discussion an independent Transition Anthropology College.

Paper long abstract:

In recent years indigenous scholars, anthropologists and educational theorists have increasingly critiqued the divide between non-western, indigenous or traditional knowledge and 'western academic knowledge' as a form of 'epistemological ethnocentrism' (Reagan 2004) or 'epistemic colonialism' (Viveiros de Castro et al 2012). Boaventura De Sousa (2014, 2018) has outlined how social injustice is underpinned by epistemological injustice, and that the end of empire can only become a reality with the end of the cognitive empire. As the 'decolonize the university' movement has gained such widespread support we can say that this is a watershed moment in understanding how to decolonise the very fabric of the university. Arguing for a collaborative anthropology, I have written that in order to decolonise anthropology other ways of knowing and being need to be allowed to affect the discipline's entire orthopraxy (Gatt 2018). How anthropology is taught is essential in this.

However, UK anthropology departments are facing a near-intolerable period: budget cuts, crushing workloads, Kafkaesque audit culture... This is the least likely moment for anthropologists to experiment changing their pedagogies in any meaningful way. Having failed to decolonise my pedagogical practice within a university context I have turned to designing an independent Transition Anthropology College (TAC), both of which I will present for discussion.

What the decolonising movement tends to gloss, however, is that even within the heart of the metropole, not all knowledges are hegemonic. TAC therefore incorporates ways of knowing that have been subjugated within colonial centres of power as well as settler colonial contexts.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on postcolonial theory,this paper examines the politics of location of the South Asian anthropologist in 'native' and 'white' classrooms, in the discipline and in the field. It asks if decolonising, in an asymmetrical world,can go beyond identity politics that reifies non-Western cultures

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on postcolonial scholars such as Dipesh Chakrabarty and Gayatri Spivak, this paper interrogates the possibilities and challenges of 'provincialising Anthropology'. Provincialising anthropology would involve interrogating the genealogy of the discipline and white Eurocentrism both in research praxis and pedagogy. But, in keeping with Chakrabarty and Spivak, it also opens the space for critiquing any simplistic 'going back' to a precolonial mode of thinking or ontological alterity. Such critique emerges from the violent, right-wing politics of postcolonial nation-states insisting on an ethnic, religious and moral superiority of the (in the Indian context, upper-caste, Hindu) 'native' situated in a reimagining of the precolonial, pristine past. What does a decolonising impetus look like in this scenario where the reading public might threaten critical thinking and where 'commoning anthropology' is not an a priori good? What does the critique of Eurocentrism mean in this context when liberalism, individual freedom and democracy come increasingly under threat by not only the state but a majoritarian public, members of whom might be our respondents? I will further address these questions in light of my own experiences of teaching, as an Indian anthropologist, in India and New Zealand and doing research among Westerners in India.

Paper short abstract:

I reflect on the moments of anxiety I had around becoming another anthropologist in and of Papua New Guinea and evaluate the extent to which decolonial research methods can be effectively applied there and what these might look like based on diverse reflections from people in PNG.

Paper long abstract:

Going straight into a PhD in social anthropology with no prior experience of Melanesian ethnography, I had an instinctive reaction that Papua New Guinea must be 'crawling' with anthropologists. These feelings of discomfort between the discipline and its extractive theorising about Papua New Guinea in particular, never left me. However other literatures outside of anthropology helped me delve deeper into these feelings of discomfort and piece together a more critical perspective on the politics of knowledge production within anthropology. Drawing on critical race theory, intersectionality and indigenous perspectives that I read alongside writing my PhD thesis, I reflect on the dilemmas of producing a 'Melanesianist' ethnography. Based on the work of Linda Tuhi-Wai Smith and the writings of afro-pessimist theorists work on anti-blackness, I question the epistemological groundings of Melanesian anthropology. After reflecting upon my own research process and that of other anthropologists with my interlocutors in Papua New Guinea, I share some of the diverse reflections on anthropology from both 'the field' of people working with researchers in PNG and people from PNG working as researchers. Finally I consider the difficulties of using decolonial research methods in Papua New Guinea as a western researcher and evaluate what I could have done differently in my own research, and thus what I can pass on as lessons learned to others in the classroom.