IN THE WORLD AND ABOUT THE WORLD:
“AMERINDIAN” MODES OF KNOWLEDGE
University of Virginia, Charlottesville, USA
November 28th and 29th, 2005
In seeking merely to stimulate your thoughts toward a general theme for paper presentations, we would very much like for participants, to consider the topic of “Amerindian” knowledge. Our current professional backgrounds vary but our academic training and appreciation for the subject remain relatively similar. From such diverse experiences and comparable intellects we should be able to provide for highly interesting and critical insights into the topic of indigenous modes of knowing: a topic central to the intellectual endeavors since the publication of Reason and Morality.
Contributors to that volume argued persuasively against the existence of a universally valid notion of rationality and in favor of the co-existence of multiple theories about thinking and knowledge. They questioned the very idea of an amoral “truth” and the autonomy of “facts” disarticulated from value -- main tenets in our Western concept of rationality. Instead they proposed that, in non-Western societies, ideas about rationality cannot be extricated from their systems of morality nor, indeed, from the creative aspects of metaphoric thinking. Thus grounded in different ontological and metaphysical assumptions about the world, non-Western theories of knowledge may possibly posit different connections between mind, body, and emotions. By focusing inquiry on native Amazonian peoples’ modes of knowledge, this conference will further elaborate upon, build on, and/or transcend the themes discussed in Reason and Morality.
To this task the suggestive relations between knowledge and power, truth, being, emotion, morality, beauty, even monstrosity could all serve as valuable discursive paths or streams along which we might bring together our ideas. Perhaps a wholly different configuring of subjectivity and its particular articulation with the body delivers societies, polities, economies, and spiritualities for indigenous living to take place. Even in the tangled interface between the local, national, and transnational, between the traditional and the modern, there must be some room given to indigenous ontologies and epistemologies (or at least the taken-for-granted ideas inside of these terms). The tension between modern nation states and indigenous modes of knowledge, as well as the effects of the latter, manifest themselves regularly in Amazonia. Different forms and contents of time and space, hence of identity and property, all challenge each other in the contested terrains of knowledge. As presenters, we have many options open to us on the topic, and not just those driven by the determinants of difference and conflict, but also of similarities and consensus.
Current critical thought would suggest that, in addition, we might want to present not only our own enthralling narratives about Amerindian modes of knowing, but also to include the ways in which we actually come to produce this anthropology about their knowledge. The experiences of the field, of living with people who exist within or come from different traditions of learning, should not be confused with the results of our attempt to make such experiences manifest in the genre of anthropological writing. The more we include how we produce our descriptions and analysis, the more we actually can give credit to the alternative and valid contributive existence of indigenous knowledge. Such a position appears to put heavy emphasis upon the work the human imagination has to perform, upon its tactics for providing convincing statements and, of course, upon its effects in and through the corporeal body which provides for human action and experience. By succumbing to this evocative approach of supplying anthropology with the service of demonstrating the degree to which we, the scholars of a particular fascinating region, make coherent our own ideas, perhaps, by this very means, we might at last begin to make what we do more relevant to a wider community of interested people.