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Contribution short abstract:

Colonial Anthropology has led to a reductionist view of indigenous people as people with no agency. This gets further complicated in post-colonial states like India having a predominantly caste society, which carries forward this view in policy-making. This paper argues for decolonising this view.

Contribution long abstract:

Most anthropological research methodologies are rooted in colonial pedagogies and are based on western pragmatism, in which researchers study the ‘Other’; the subject that cannot reply or contribute to the research. This problematic method has led to a reductionist view of indigenous people all over the world, positing them as backward, savages and barbaric to name just a few. This further becomes problematic when post-colonial states like India, blindly carry forward colonial anthropological constructs in policymaking thereby leading to further socio-economic-psychological exclusion of the indigenous people. In this paper, I propose the praxis of various decolonial-based, community-integrated, and indigenous methods such as ‘Participatory Learning Action’ or ‘Collaborative Ethnography’ to reject the reductionist approach of one method and place more emphasis on empirical evidence to decolonise knowledge produced in the context of various research activities. This work will ultimately diverge from epistemological research of western and colonial space of knowledge, and scientific gaze. It will initiate a view to see the world through the lens of the Global South, such as Latin America, Africa, and Asia, combining ideas from indigenous areas and marginalised institutions to challenge the generalisation of hegemonic assumptions that undermine other kinds of knowledge (Schulz, 2017 & Tuhin Smith, 2014). The paradigm shift, borrowing from Kuhn (1962), is possible when humanities and social science scholars around the world consider not only adopting local norms of working with, by, and for Indigenous/Native communities within research programs but more importantly make them co-creators and the main stakeholders of epistemic creation.