Monstrous Anthropology

Abstract

The following article attempts to track the points where the imaginings of indigeneity emerged from their colonial context in the form of discursive practices or concepts. The argument is that the origins of these imaginings are located in our shared history of colonisation at the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth century. The main aim of this article is to problematise Western aesthetic discourse and briefly show how contemporary Indigenous art problematises this discourse. This article shows that the mechanism used to assemble these imaginings was configured by an aesthetic of ugliness, particularly of the monstrous. This depiction, constituted by historical processes, established the first discursive rules of the formation of the European conceptualisation of ‘indigeneity’: 1) terror, horror and tragedy, 2) capturing and enslavement, 3) similarity and anthropocentrism, and 4) conquest. These discursive formation processes provide part of the blueprint of the Western imaginings of indigeneity.