The Neglected Legacy and Harms of Epistemic Colonising: Linguicism, Epistemic Exploitation, and Ontic Burnout

Abstract

Abstract This paper sets out to accomplish two goals. First, drawing on the Irish perspective, it reconceptualises one of the enduring legacy-based harms of epistemic colonisation, in this case, ‘linguicism’, in terms of ‘hermeneutical injustice’. Second, it argues that otherwise well-meaning attempts to combat epistemic colonisation through the inclusion of marginalised testimony can, in certain circumstances, lead to cases of ‘epistemic exploitation’, which, in turn, can result in ‘ontic burnout’. Both linguicism and epistemic exploitation, this paper theorises, have the potential to bring about ontic burnout. Here is the plan: to set the scene, section I briefly surveys some key arguments supporting the call for Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) to engage in epistemic decolonising, focusing on the importance of striking a balance between two extremes: (i) abandoning all forms of Eurocentric/colonial knowledge through the elimination of inherited thinking and conceptual schemes which result from colonisation, in particular, those which remain in our thinking “owing to inertia rather than to our own reflective choices”; (ii) the other – pursuing a more positive project where we seek to, “exploit as much as is judicious the resources of indigenous conceptual schemes”. From here, it moves to consider harms associated with a subset of ‘epistemicide’, that is, ‘linguicism’ – a phenomenon where the language and culture of the coloniser become part of the ‘civilising project’ and, in more extreme cases of linguicide, forcibly replaces indigenous languages. Section II then explores the subtleties of harmful by-products deriving from ‘inclusion’, namely that which scholars refer to as ‘epistemic exploitation’. Situations where marginalised scholars are finally ‘at the table but still on the menu’ arise when privileged persons, compel marginalised knowers to educate them [and others] about the nature of their oppression. Habitual requests to turn themselves inside out for emancipatory principles give rise to a phenomenon known as ontic burnout – “a form of dissociative explanatory fatigue culminating in oppressed persons engaging in a conscious or unconscious decoupling from their socially constructed identity, from the burdens and injustices associated with being a member of a certain social kind”. This harm is, I argue, rarely discussed in the literature and worthy of further analysis.