Indigenous Knowledges and Sites of Indigenous Memory

Abstract

Indigenous Knowledges and Sites of Indigenous Memory ARTURO ARIAS UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, MERCED Introduction This special issue of Transmodernity emphasizes Indigenous knowledges that may be represented in literary texts, or else be manifestations present in “multi-dimensional sites of indigenous knowledges,” to use Michelle Wibbelsman’s phrase in her article on this same issue, as webs of signification in the symbolic production of heterodox cultural forms in the United States, Canada, and in Latin America. Literatures and other representational forms explain beliefs, relationships of kinship, relations with nature, and ways of living within contexts of flux, paradox, or tension, articulating their perspectives, while also reconciling opposing forces disaggregating their communities. Their claims are rooted in a sophisticated worldview anchored in complex ontological and epistemological articulations, oftentimes grounded in turn on a comprehensive elucidation of cosmologies. In short, Indigenous peoples’ worldviews deviate from those that have been hegemonic in the West. Noted Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro has stated that “the classic distinction between nature and culture cannot be used to describe domains internal to non-Western cosmologies” (45). In the last of the same series of lectures published in Cosmological Perspectivism in Amazonia and Elsewhere (2012), Viveiros de Castro defined what he labels Amerindian knowledge, primarily Amazonian, as “multinaturalism” (as opposed to Western uni-naturalism). He adds that this “is perspectivism as cosmic politics” (73). Perhaps the latter phrase could also be a metaphor of sorts to explain the rhetorical codes of many Latin American Indigenous intellectuals addressing local knowledges. Just as the cosmological outlooks of the West and Abya Yala—the name that Indigenous peoples give to the Latin American continent as will be explained later on in this same introduction—are mutually incompatible, oftentimes so is the rhetoric of their respective cultural productions. Yet this should not be interpreted as an assertion that Abya Yala’s Indigenous intellectuals lack the rigor of Western- centered academic knowledges. They are what Hale, Stephen, Rappaport, Perry, Hernandez Castillo and others label Otros saberes, and Colombian scholar Arturo Escobar has named “knowledges otherwise.”