The Colonial Politics of Truth

Notes on Western Science’s role in the displacement of indigenous knowledge systems

*this was written as a reflection in response to Linda Smith’s work Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples and Kris Manjapra’s work Colonialism in Global Perspective

Manjapra and Smith urge us to consider how the objectification of indigenous peoples and their ecosystems underpins the colonial project which is inextricable from the epistemological approach of Western science that seeks a totalizing, universal truth contingent upon neat classifications of life forms. In a direct challenge of Western Hegemonic tradition, Manjapra and Smith demonstrate that Western Science is not a “truth” but a “regime of truth.” A highly political project, Western Science is predicated on a notions of objectivity and universality which intentionally invisibilize the cultural positionality of the western scientific observer. Rather than Western Science presenting itself transparently as a cultural knowledge system, the project of Western Hegemony transforms it into the only valid way of knowing the world, completely dessimating and invalidating indigenous knowledge systems in the process. By asserting that the Western scientific observer is objective, the political project of Western Science establishes the empirical superiority of whiteness and white knowledge systems. Such a claim, embedded into the project of western science, naturalizes racial hierarchization that codes the Western individual as rational and objective and the indigenous individual as a voiceless object to be studied, prodded, controlled, and brutally, violently harvested in the pursuit of “knowledge.” 

The supremacy of the West is predicated upon the naturalization of their cultural view of reality as supreme, objective. Therefore, an important component of decolonization is in denaturalizing the project of Western Science, questioning its authority and its delegitimization of indigenous systems of knowledge. One colonial fixture of Western Science’s epistemology is its narrative of discovery embedded with the Linnean taxonomic tradition. To this day, “scientists still emblazon their names on taxonomies of newly discovered forms of life” (Manjapra 189). Manjapra heavily critiques this narrative of ‘discovery’ which implies that the flora and fauna existing in indigenous peoples’ ecosystems had never been known because there was no credible scientific observer, no credible rational human to know them. 

“European scientists did not ‘discover’ new plants and animals at all. Rather, they translated plant and animal life from native systems into what they viewed as the general and universal system of ‘Man’” (Manjapra 190). 

‘Translation’ becomes an essential linguistic intervention by Manjapra, as it speaks of Western Science as a cultural production, as a translation of what already exists rather than as an ultimate, “discovered” truth. Translation restores what the word discovery invisibilizes, which is the legitimacy of indigenous knowledge systems that had already developed a language with the ecosystem long before the arrival of Western scientists.

Linda Smith points to how the exclusion of indigenous knowledge systems colonized the ideological terrain in tandem with the material. Smith uses the example of land and claims, 

 “the forced imposition of individualized title, through taking land away for ‘acts of rebellion’, and through redefining land as ‘waste land’ or ‘empty land’ and then taking it away” (Smith 68). 

The Western conceptualization of land as private property displaced indigenous ways of relating to land as a collective resource which human beings have a reciprocal, intimate relationship with. This displacement was ideological as much as it was material. Through the reconfiguration of land as private property Western governments imposed a new regime of spatio-temporal awareness that obliterated native claims to the land and delegitimized native spatio-temporal conceptions of land, displacing indigenous peoples physically and psychically.

The readings of Smith and Manjapra enable us to understand the ideological underpinnings of the colonial project. What we are left with from these texts is an uneasy sense that there is much that we are unable to see in the afterlife of colonialism where the worldview of modernity has been taught to us as the only way to come to know the world. Modernity and its knowledge practices is a cultural form built on the grounds of racial hierarchy and the brutalization of life. These forms are embedded into the epistemology of institutions, not simply the knowledge they produce. As Manjapra points out the project of Western Science asserts the positional superiority of Western scientists that are empowered by the project of white supremacy and western hegemony with a unique authority “to speak in the name of “Man,” and to articulate a system of relation in which they stood at the center'' (Manjapra 190). Such positional superiority seeps into every pore of intellectual production. As Linda Smith points out, the indigenous reader must constantly reorient while reading to understand that such words as “‘we’ ‘us’ ‘our’ ‘I’” (Smith 35) exclude them. Manjapra and Smith’s interrogation of academia center around the theme of totalizing singular capital T truth as a technology of ideological supremacy and domination. This prompts the question: does the decolonization of knowledge production necessitate plurality? What if truth is not a singular entity that is out there and can be obtained objectively, rather truth only exists as a multiplicity of situated vantage points? 

Both Linda Smith and Tharoor help us understand how in their academic productions of history Westerners framed themselves as the telos of civilization. In these narratives, cultures were assessed on a linear scale that fortified racial hierarchization. Such racial hierarchization allowed colonizers to supplant a moral narrative onto the project of colonization. Westerners, as the only ones who had achieved civilization, had a moral obligation to impose their cultural forms upon cultures falling behind on the evolutionary scale. Depending upon what lense we use to gaze upon the world, there are certain realities we are able to see, and others that are concealed from view. How does “the idea that history can be told in one coherent narrative” (Smith 31) undermine our ability to know the world in spatio-temporal plurality? Furthermore, how would Smith and Manjapra diverge from the traditional forms of ‘neutral’ academic language, and why is this divergence important in subverting the project of Western Hegemony?

After reading Smith and Manjapra, one is left with an uneasy feeling. Having been raised in cultural institutions created and invested in the project of White Supremacy, can I trust what I’ve been taught to see? How has such a cultural system led to an impoverished worldview, one invested in projects of dehumanization and the brutalization of life? What counter hegemonies must I consume to heal my own perception?

References

Smith, Linda. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, Zed Books, 2012.

Manjapra, Kris. Colonialism in Global Perspective, Cambridge University Press, 2020.

Tharoor, Shashi. Inglorious Empire: What the British did to India, Scribe, 2018.