Indigenous Theory Research Articles

Undisciplining the Museum: Indigenous Relationality as Religion

What does it mean to decolonize or undiscipline the anthropology museum? What happens when the museum is confronted by Indigenous and descendant communities who demand an ethic of care rooted in relational ontologies and epistemologies? This article features Indigenous creativity as it has disrupted ‘business as usual’ in anthropology museums. This is primarily evidenced by Fork Peck Tribes who confronted the University of Montana to enact a long-overdue repatriation. Additional examples from The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard demonstrate diverse expressions of relationality among Indigenous and descendant communities. These interventions are analyzed through Critical Indigenous Theory to specify the ways in which Indigenous religious traditions refuse the narratives and norms of settler colonial knowledge production and undermine the imperial museological practices of preservation. Instead, relationality is prioritized in the caretaking of and connection with more-than-human entities and materials in the museum. This article emphasizes relationality and repatriation as religious acts that challenge assumptions embedded in imperial and settler colonial approaches to history and science. From various social locations and through multiple strategies, we see the active undisciplining of the museum by Indigenous and descendant communities.

Engaging Parents for Improved Schooling Outcomes of Under-8 Pupils: A Teachers’ Qualitative Perception

Purpose. Based on the Asuwada Theory of Sociation, an indigenous theory that stresses the importance of the interactive community cycle, this study aims to understand teachers’ views of children’s schooling in the context of the parents’ engagement pathways. Education policymakers and decision-makers need to understand how outside factors affect children's education as they grow up. This is because education is a continuous, lifelong process largely predictable by activities from when and where children are born. While it is assumed that developing a child's whole personality is the teacher's job, studies have shown that this goal can be challenging to achieve when other aspects of their education are not up to par. However, studies show that parents have not shown much effort, hence this study. Methodology. The study, guided by one research question, adopted the qualitative research design. A semi-structured interview was conducted with twelve (12) seasoned primary school teachers with at least 20 years of teaching experience in the Ibadan Metropolis, Nigeria. Interviews were transcribed and evaluated thematically. Result. Findings revealed teachers’ disposition toward parents’ involvement through crucial thematic areas. We conclude that Child-centered parental networking should be reiterated among parents, making it possible for the children to develop interpersonal competencies, even after school. Conclusion. There are identified areas of engagement that are directly and mutually child-oriented beyond the common narrative of benefiting children alone, through which parents can be involved to improve the schooling interest and socio-emotional development of primary school pupils.

Indigenous Perspectives on Dismantling the Legacies of Settler Colonialism in Rural Sociology☆

AbstractRural Sociology has failed to incorporate Settler‐colonialism and Indigenous theory in studying rural social relations. This presents a serious gap in the discipline's conceptualization of land as the foundation of social reproduction. Indigenous theory provides rich insights about humans' relations among themselves and with the more‐than‐human that inform our understanding of Settler colonialism as a driver of social formation, and human–environmental interactions more generally. This paper, written by four Indigenous environmental social scientists and one Settler rural sociologist, invites the discipline to engage Indigeneity and Settler colonialism in methodologically, theoretically, and ethically appropriate ways.

An Etymological and Controversial Examination of Sun Wukong in <i>Journey to the West</i>

Since the debate between Lu Xun's "indigenous theory" and Hu Shi's "exotic theory" on the origin of the image of Sun Wukong, there has been nearly a hundred years of academic discussion. Scholars from various schools have conducted a large number of beneficial studies and reached well-founded conclusions. However, due to the unique nature of Journey to the West as a work that has been accumulated across generations and carries a distinct historical sediment, the controversy surrounding it has always been at an impasse, with no consensus reached. Based on previous studies, this paper will provide an overview of the mainstream theories within the academic community. It will then conduct etymological and dialectical analysis of the character of Sun Wukong from the perspective of the "indigenous theory", thus demonstrating the high plausibility of the indigenous viewpoint.

Challenges to theory-practice integration of social work education in China: theory learning

ABSTRACT Theory-practice integration is vital in social work education. This study examines China’s social work education system, focusing on challenges and solutions in theory-practice integration. Data from 90 participants (faculty, administrators, and students) across 7 schools in different regions were gathered via focus groups and individual interviews. Challenges include faculty lacking social work training and practice experience, limited teaching materials, systemic higher education constraints, and a lack of indigenous social work theory. Faculty overcome these challenges through dedication, acquiring relevant knowledge, and establishing new practice agencies. University-level recognition of social work’s practice-oriented nature and the development of indigenous theories are crucial.

Untamed tongues, wild affects, and Spanish as a world(ing) languaging

Decolonial and affective turns in language education have brought to light a number of problematic dichotomies including reason/emotion, personal/professional and positive/negative. Yet challenging such dichotomies in language education research is a complex process requiring discussions of both language/linguistics and (often) imperceptible, potentially unnamed affects. This paper seeks to engage with the challenge of rupturing the coloniality of affect and languaging by (re)imagining wild affects as generative responses to Spanish as a world language. Drawing on multimodal critical discourse analysis, this paper also attempts to make use of linguistic research methods to explore such wild affects as Sprachschadenfreude, inundación and trickiness and question why these matter for Spanish as a world language. Inspired by the work of both Gloría Anzaldúa and Silvia Rivera Cusicanquí, this paper also works with borderlands and Indigenous theories to antagonise the coloniality of languaging and affect in order to pluriversalise thinking about Spanish as a world(ing) languaging.

Networking people for goal attainment: Psychosocial processes facilitating resilience of care-leavers in South Africa

This article aims to deepen and theorize our understanding of the psychosocial processes young people who are transitioning out of residential care engage in, specifically networking people for goal attainment. A qualitative approach was used to collect data from 31 South African residential care-leavers who were one to seven years out of care, aged 17–26 years. Using a grounded theory method of data analysis this study aims to fill the gap in theoretically informed studies by constructing indigenous theories to explain the care-leaving journey. This paper presents findings on (1) the need to elicit social connections; (2) honing networking skills in eliciting social connections; and (3) the strength in weak ties. The implications for practice point to the necessity of fostering a sense of community among care-leavers prior to their transition since this would eventually promote the development of youth resilience. Thus, to support young people’s reintegration, social workers and child and youth care providers should cooperatively assist them to cultivate and broaden their networks of social connections and work proactively on building social skills for those purposes.

Dense Temporalities and Displaced Risk: Musing with Stephen About Ankle Monitor Surveillances, Skin Sanding, and Snatcheries

ABSTRACT In this response to Hartman, this issue, I integrate anti-Blackness and Indigenous theories, to ponder the ways risk is projected onto Hartman’s infant niece. The “dense temporalities” of the many objects used to surveil the infant are described, along with the ways Hartman’s lovely meandering associations via autotheory contribute to shifting ontologies and epistemologies. Building on Hartman’s considerations of the varieties of unconscious enigmatic forms his niece is bathed in, I explore the potentials of these transmissions emanating from the dense temporal histories of the surveillance objects themselves and the ways the “human” infant perpetually comes into being only momentarily, co-emergent with these more-than-human objects along with those humans tending to her. The racialized and misogynous histories of some of these objects and their transmitted risks, can only be enigmatic and too-much. Hartman’s use of the term “snatch” is also examined along with its versatility based on its meanings referring to both vaginas, vulvas, and phallic “members.”

From SOFT approach to SWOT analysis, a historical reconstruction

Purpose The purpose of this study is to revisit the conventional wisdom about a key contribution [i.e. strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats (SWOT) analysis] in the field of strategic management. The societal context and the role of academics, consultants and executives is taken into account in the emergence of SWOT analysis during the 1960–1980 period as a pivotal development within the broader context of the satisfactory, opportunities, faults, threats (SOFT) approach. The authors report on both the content and the approach, so that other scholars seeking to invigorate indigenous theories and/or underreported strategy practices will thrive. Design/methodology/approach Applying a historiographic approach, the authors introduce an evidence-based methodology for interpreting historical sources. This methodology incorporates source criticism, triangulation and hermeneutical interpretation, drawing upon insights from robust evidence through three iterative stages. Findings The underreporting of the SOFT approach/SWOT analysis can be attributed to several factors, including strategy tools being integrated into planning frameworks rather than being published as standalone materials; restricted circulation of crucial long-range planning service/theory and practice of planning reports due to copyright limitations; restricted access to the Stanford Research Institute Planning Library in California; and the enduring popularity of SOFT and SWOT variations, driven in part by their memorable acronyms. Originality In the spirit of a renaissance in strategic planning research, the authors unveil novel theoretical and social connections in the emergence of SWOT analysis by combining evidence from both theory and practice and delving into previously unexplored areas. Research implications Caution is advised for scholars who examine the discrete time frame of 1960–1980 through mere bibliometric techniques. This study underscores the risks associated with gathering incomplete and/or inaccurate data, emphasizing the importance of triangulating evidence beyond scholarly databases. The paradigm shift of strategic management research due to the advent of large language models poses new challenges and the risk of conserving and perpetuating academic urban legends, myths and lies if training data is not adequately curated.

Destroying the “Human” for the Survival of the World: A Proposal for a Temporally Dense Psychoanalytic Subject

ABSTRACT Despite the pandemic upending in-person clinical treatments, psychoanalysis struggles to conceptualize a frame that is truly open to a world beyond the singular, human only dyad. This article challenges psychoanalysis to blowup the frame of practice by destroying the very subject of the work – the human. Integrating key concepts from anti-blackness and indigenous theories, the author contends that the category of the human is inherently and irreparably violent; the undergirding onto-epistemological system for the formation of white settler colonial, heteropatriarchal subjectivity and its co-created violences of enslavement, dispossession, genocide, mass extinctions, and ecological destruction. Because psychoanalysis has evolved around this Enlightenment subject that renders certain people “human,” and all others disposable, its frame and focus is designed to uphold, not resist, biopolitical and ecological violence. Thus, psychoanalysis is onto-epistemologically unfit and unable to effectively address social violences and the climate crisis while emanating from this exceptionalist “human.” Integrating anti-blackness and indigenous theories, the author, using examples from clinical work online, proposes a different form of subjectivity, one that is co-emergent with “dense temporalities” of the more-than-human. Only through such a temporally dense, transcorporeal subject can psychoanalysis hope to subvert the world of human destruction.

An exploration of women entrepreneurs “doing context” in family business in the Gulf States

PurposeDrawing on indigenous theory of Ibn Khaldun, the rise and fall of States, this paper explores the agency of women entrepreneurs in family business in Bahrain and the underlying enablers in supporting and facilitating the exercise of this agency. This study attempts to move beyond the Western-centric studies to reflect and bring to light the unique institutional settings of the Gulf States.Design/methodology/approachThe research builds on a rich qualitative single case of a family business based in Bahrain. The single case study methodology was motivated by the potential for generating rich contextual insights. Such an approach is particularly valuable to gain a more holistic and deeper understanding of the contextualized phenomenon and its complexity.FindingsIn this study the authors show how women entrepreneurs take two different paths to enter and become involved in the family business, the barriers they are subjected to and the active role they play in dismantling the challenges to the extent that they become the main mediators between the family business and central institutions in society.Originality/valueBy incorporating indigenous theory with Western family business concepts, the study extends existing understanding of women entrepreneurs in family business by underscoring the agency that women entrepreneurs have in “doing context” and the role that women play in strengthening common cause and destiny within the family and the business by building and drawing on different forms of loyalty.

Not All That Post, Not All That New: The Disruption of Challenging Coloniality

What happens when, as scholars who have habitually been working with posthumanism and the new materialisms, we find ourselves summoned by thinkers who critique the covert coloniality present in these approaches? This work is the result of a year-long project where we set up the task of feeling our way through these critiques, exploring how they change our work and ourselves; and attempting to find a way of relating to the challenge of decoloniality. We use collaborative writing as an approach to delve into our encounters with readings, our own histories, and our ways of relating to the academy and each other. In this work, we start from our differing histories and positionalities—a Chilean woman and a British man; now colleagues and with a history of being a PhD supervisee-supervisor. Then, we grapple with how posthumanism/new materialism has neglected to think about how coloniality is entangled in who the “humans” it speaks to are and how it is further reproducing colonial dynamics of ethnocentric erasure that effectively do not allow it to go beyond the “human.” After considering possibilities of integration, reparation, survival, and refusal, we conclude it is crucial to reflexively acknowledge and work with our concrete positionalities and interests, thereby making our conceptualizations necessarily provincial, limited, and in some ways problematic. Otherwise, we run the risk of engulfing decolonial, postcolonial, anticolonial, and indigenous theories without any fundamental change, thus furthering coloniality.

On Noongar Boodjah: George Vancouver’s Colonial Fictions

This essay reads Captain George Vancouver’s account of his 1791 landing on the southwestern coast of what is now known as Australia through the theorizations and analyses of Indigenous theorists and scholars to expose the colonial fictions that undergird his actions and rhetoric. I then focus on the rhetoric and critical posturing of the settler colonial academy, especially within white-dominated fields like eighteenth-century studies, to consider how its work participates in the processes of Indigenous erasure and points to the need for self-reflexive and reciprocal engagements with Indigenous communities and their knowledges.

Music and Dance Traditions of Africa: Search for Indigenous Theories and Methods in Research

This study investigates the theory and methodology of researching, understanding, and appreciating the music and dance traditions of Africa, emphasizing the need for indigenous perspectives. The discourse examined extensive scholarly works and theories related to African music and dance, focusing on contributions from both African and non-African researchers. It addresses misconceptions held by non-African researchers and highlights the contributions of African scholars in rectifying these views. The study underscores the distinction between “geo-Africa,” which focuses on the distribution and material culture of African ethnicities, and “eco-Africa,” which examines the relationship between human activities and the environment. African scholars argue for the importance of their voices in African cultural studies, as they are better positioned to understand and explain their traditions. The study concludes that African voices have significantly advanced the theory and method in this field, promoting a comprehensive and culturally relevant approach to researching, understanding, and appreciating African music and dance.

"Fuzzy Feet and The Skunk": Connecting Western and Indigenous Theories of Development and Learning Through Story

This article looks at how Indigenous and Western perspectives on learning and development are interwoven and come into dialogue with one another to create supportive and inclusive classrooms for Indigenous (and all) students. We use a storytelling methodology to address this focus and offer a holistic approach to our analysis. Specifically, we provide a fictional story followed by an in-depth analysis to tease out how Indigenous students continue to experience racism and colonialism in schools and what theories of learning and development may offer in addressing these challenges. This article offers insight about how both practising teachers and teacher educators can build upon the wisdom of Indigenous ways of learning and Western educational practices to re-imagine inclusive classrooms that can support Indigenous (and all) learners.

Bindepinde [stout rope] theology and religio-political dialogue in Zimbabwe

The article is motivated by a growing interest to solve local problems by infusing indigenous knowledge systems. It discusses the strained interface between religious and political actors using a local brand of theology, termed bindepinde [stout rope] theology. This theology is based on a local fable told to children, on how a Hare abused Hippopotamus and Elephant using a tethering rope. The folk story is taken as a metaphor in which Hare represents the sly politician abusing the rope to control Hippopotamus and Elephant, representing religious actors. Though Zimbabwe has a special place in this research, the research has shown that politicians act as third forces the world over. Religious entities often act as fodder for the progress of political demagogues, whose egos are legitimised by competing religious ideologies. Many religious bodies inadvertently enable politicians, thinking that they are fulfilling their own mandates. The article proposes negotiated versions of liberation theology and synodality as possible ways of overcoming inadvertent scaffolding of bindepinde theology. It concludes that while it may be difficult to tame the politician, it may be worthwhile to minimise the damage by making him focus more on the common good.Contribution: This article contributes bindepinde brand of theology as an indigenous theory of knowledge in the area of religio-political dialogue. The bindepinde theology has proved applicable to various contexts globally, where it thrives on dualism. Its mitigation lies in Kairos theology.

Returning to totality: Settler colonialism, decolonization, and struggles for freedom

A unifying feature of the most prominent social movements that emerged in the 2010s is their dissatisfaction with explaining injustices on a case-by-case basis. In Canada, movements against settler colonialism express a similar orientation. This elicits a return of totality thinking, which enables one to grasp the connections between what appears as isolated or fragmented moments that in fact constitute and are constituted by a larger whole. Drawing on Marxist and Indigenous theorists, we reconstruct an approach to totality and a conceptualization of settler colonialism as a totality. Through an immanent reading of John Borrows’ approach to decolonization, we justify the importance of this concept for politicizing the persistence of unfree forms of interdependence. Finally, just as individual struggles point toward the totality, totality thinking draws attention to the unity-in-separation of different struggles, enabling a politics of “immanent universalism” as an alternative to both abstract universalism and particularism.

On the Question of Soul Wounding: Secular Debility, Biopolitics, and Canada's Right to Maim

Jasbir Puar has demonstrated that the targeted debilitation of entire racialized populations embodies a contemporary illustration of colonialism’s machine. For Puar, colonizing states exist as biopolitical assemblages of control, the technologies of which instrumentalize a spectrum of debilities and capacities in the service of neoliberal colonialism, which requires maiming populations who are preconditioned for injury to secure sovereign power. This paper stages a conversation with Jasbir Puar to ask what additional insights might be gained about the relationship between colonialism and debility if critical disability scholarship went beyond a Foucauldian biopolitical analysis of the management of life, death, and debility when theorizing colonial violence. This paper thus reads across postcolonial and anti-colonial thought as well as Indigenous theories of trauma to encourage critical disability studies to expand the horizon of its reading practices when engaging these questions. These approaches, I maintain, provide critical insights into sovereign power that biopolitics cannot, including critical attention to non-secular configurations of settler colonial debility that biopolitical theory misses. I aim to show that a locus of Canada’s colonial sovereignty resides in targeted attacks, or “dis-membering,” forms of Indigenous non-secular transcendent self-consciousness—that is, the sanctioned maiming of Indigenous heterogeneous agencies in the service of neocolonial economic designs. In this sense, theories of metaphysics and violence must also be accounted for when attending to debility, colonialism, and sovereign power.

Reading Border through Desire: Queer Indigenous Theory, Nordic Settler Colonialism, and Trans Aesthetics

Abstract This article examines the Swedish fantasy-horror-romance film Gräns (Border, dir. Ali Abbasi, 2018) through queer Indigenous thought and the notion of trans aesthetics, exploring how the film may sensitize its viewers to seeing and feeling with gender variance, queer desire, and the trauma of settler colonialism. Drawing on Eve Tuck's call for desire-based research, the article asks what is at stake in queer, trans, and decolonial readings of films that are not necessarily identifiable as such at the surface level. Border centers on a love story between two gender-fluid trolls who pass as human and whose kin have been subjected to genocide, dislocation, and mutilation, but the film's reception largely misses the connection to the treatment of Indigenous Sámi people and transgender people within Nordic settler states. The article argues that Border's ecstatic depiction of gender-fluid desires, bodies, and sex, alongside its examination of the psychic consequences of settler colonial violence, make it a thus far unique film in the Nordic context — even though this examination happens through the distancing effect of trolls as metaphorical Natives. The main characters embody wrongness in the settler nation-state, in heteronormative society, and ultimately in the delimiting category of the human, but the film imagines rightness in nature as a queer, gender-fluid space where all creatures can just be. Through employing notions of trans aesthetics, the (non)sovereign erotic, refusal, and haunting, the article proposes desire-based readings of cinema that envision ways of feeling and existing beyond humancentric, settler, binary notions of gender and sexuality.

Outside Words

We read differently outside. Discussing works by two experimental poets, a. rawlings and Christine Stewart, this essay draws on geocritical and ecocritical methodologies alongside Indigenous theories that link language, story, and land to consider how an outdoor pedagogical practice attunes readers not only to the spatial dynamics of language, but also to the linguistic dynamics of place. While the colonial, sedentary structures of traditional classrooms shut out the world, immersing us in literary realms as though they were separate from our physical realities, reading outside makes us viscerally aware of how land and language shape one another. Beyond the walls of our classrooms and homes, we can feel our entanglements with the land, its histories, and other species. In the colonial spaces of Canada, which continues to grapple with considerable ecological and social harms, cultivating such awareness matters: while reading outside is not enough to save us from the environmental crises we are facing or assuage colonial grief and guilt, doing so brings us closer to the living edges of language, which is where new forms of attention might nourish a more mutually sustaining relationship between land and words.