Paper Short Abstract:

This paper revisits and contests some of the decolonial arguments raised in relation to the standing of East European academics vis-à-vis their Western academic counterparts. It focuses on: (1) the presumed hierarchies of knowledge; (2) the standing of scholars who do not participate on Western "economies of credibility"; (3) the notion of the West; and (4) some of the premises of decolonial critique.

Paper Abstract:

After 1989, Eastern European (EE) academe has been increasingly exposed to international academic flows. Western academe that had been viewed as possessing almost magical qualities during the socialist era began to be approached as the paragon of science with scholars being increasingly required to participate on Western “economies of credibility” (Mills & Robinson 2022). Writing in English, publishing papers and books in established publishing houses and journals, preferably high-ranking ones, employing Western theories, or being quoted by foreign scholars, all of this became an ideal for aspiring scholars in EE. However, this placed these scholars in an uneasy situation. By default, they had an unequal starting position vis-à-vis their Western colleagues. Their writings were scorned upon with a touch of condescension for a variety of reasons including English language competence or deemed theoretical and thematic irrelevance, all of which contributed to a feeling of inferiority. Naturally, facing such a situation, EE scholars found an ally in decolonial perspectives that help to explain the inferior standing of EE scholars and offer adequate remedies (Moore 2001, Buchowski 2004, 2012, Hrešanová 2022). Or so a common decolonial narrative goes. My presentation, based on my research in the history of Czech ethnology, revisits some of the decolonial arguments and offers their mild critique. I would like to focus on: (1) the presumed hierarchies of knowledge, (2) the standing of scholars who do not participate on Western economies of credibility, (3) the notion of the West, and (4) some of the premises of decolonial critique.