Some introductory remarks

For the last 40 years, the increasing awareness that life as we know it is coming to an end (the Covid-19 pandemic has only strengthened this feeling) is forcing many to question the economic, political, and philosophical foundations of our societies that have brought us to this dramatic situation. In this context, resorting to other (Indigenous) ways of knowing and of being in the world is seen as an alternative to solve our problems.

Scrambling for answers to question the ruins of the established Cartesian and colonial roots of the disciplines of archaeology and anthropology, ‘object-oriented’ and ‘new animist’ scholars have ‘discovered’ other –more symmetrical– ways of understanding and being in the world and have crafted them for Western audiences, gaining in the process considerable symbolic and academic capital. In an unexpected turn of events, it seems that the ‘Indigenous/subaltern/non-modern’ is helping the ‘modern’ –in this case Western anthropologists and archaeologists– to cope with the destruction of their own world, as if the subaltern can now save scholars from their own theoretical deadlocks (Mendoza Reference Mendoza2018).

Cognitive extraction

The West has gone from imperial socioeconomic extraction since the late 15th century to the inclusion of novel forms of extraction in the late 1980s, such as intellectual appropriation (Ndlovu Reference Ndlovu2014; Rivera Cusicanqui Reference Rivera Cusicanqui1987, Reference Rivera Cusicanqui2010; Simpson and Klein Reference Simpson and Klein2013). Extraction, as a fundamental colonial project, is removing ‘all of the relationships that give whatever is being extracted meaning. Extracting … is stealing—it is taking without consent, without thought, care or even knowledge of the impacts that extraction has on the other living things in that environment’ (Simpson and Klein Reference Simpson and Klein2013). Immersed in a mixture of homogenisation and othering/exoticisation, object-oriented and new animist theories praise the radical ontologies of Indigenous people whilst depoliticising them and/or not properly acknowledging the authors/origins of such worldviews. In doing so, they reiterate the subalternisation of subalterns, in this case Indigenous communities.

Subalternity is a performative act in this sort of archaeological discourses. It is not only a social constraint, but has to be conceived of as having a performative power. As with the idea of sex, our narrative(s) of subalternity has ‘the power to produce –demarcate, circulate, differentiate– the bodies it controls’ (Butler Reference Butler1993, 2). The continuous reiteration of subalternity in ontology-related archaeologies produces and stabilises, consciously or unconsciously, the very effects of subalternity (Butler Reference Butler1993, ix). Subalternity is, in this way, a speech act (Butler Reference Butler1993, xxi).

In fact, scholarly appropriations of Indigenous knowledge are becoming increasingly institutionalised after stripping them of their socioeconomic contexts and political effects (Briggs Reference Briggs2005, 111; Mendoza Reference Mendoza2018, 117; Simpson and Klein Reference Simpson and Klein2013; Smith Reference Smith1999). The inclusion of local voices in academic publications and discourses is recently seen, contrarily to the past, as crucial for development programmes and sustainable approaches to nature (Briggs and Sharp Reference Briggs and Sharp2004; Escobar Reference Escobar2007; Radcliffe Reference Radcliffe, Okamoto and Ishikawa2014), as well as for decolonising archaeology and anthropology (Alberti et al. Reference Alberti, Fowles, Holbraad, Marshall and Witmore2011; Atalay Reference Atalay2012; Descola Reference Descola2005; Gnecco Reference Gnecco2012; Haber Reference Haber2016; Henare et al. Reference Henare, Holbraad, Wastell, Henare, Holbraad and Wastell2007; Ingold Reference Ingold2013).

To be clear, I agree that Indigenous knowledge(s) needs to break into archaeological (and anthropological) discourses to take ‘its own place in history, so that the subaltern is not merely protected by “negative consciousness”’ (Spivak Reference Spivak2005, 478, my emphasis). Instead of doing this, I argue that the introduction of Indigenous knowledge is very often drawn into archaeology in a very limited way, failing to engage with and to articulate a robust critique of unequal power relations and knowledge production in our discipline. This has reinforced Indigenous people as the West’s ‘self-consolidating Other’, in a process that Spivak called the ‘hyperbolic admiration or … pious guilt that today is the mark of a reverse ethnocentrism’ (Spivak Reference Spivak, Nelson and Grossberg1988a, 272).

Reverse ethnocentrism produces the ‘benevolent double bind’ of ‘considering the “native” as object for enthusiastic information-retrieval and thus denying its own “worlding”’ (Spivak Reference Spivak1985, 245). In Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s words, ‘the West can desire, extract and claim ownership of our [Indigenous] ways of knowing, our imagery, the things we create and produce, and then simultaneously reject the people who created and developed those ideas and seek to deny them further opportunities to be creators of their own culture and own nations’ (1999, 1). This is particularly the case of object-oriented archaeologies and new animism, which have strongly entered anthropological and archaeological debates in the last twenty years.

Reverse ethnocentrism and denial of ‘worlding’

The concept of ‘flat ontology’ (DeLanda Reference DeLanda2002; Latour Reference Latour1993), the basis of both new animism and symmetrical archaeology (and generally New Materialisms), invites us to take symmetry seriously, which means to accept a non-hierarchical apriorism in which all things –animals, plants, objects, humans, etc.– interact with each other having the same degree of being-ness (Edgeworth Reference Edgeworth2016; Olsen and Witmore Reference Olsen and Witmore2015; Thomas Reference Thomas2015; Witmore Reference Witmore2014). These theories are grounded to a greater or lesser extent in Indigenous worldviews/stories/epistemologies that have been shared and kept alive by Indigenous peoples for centuries, and in many cases published (see, for instance, Huanacuni Mamani Reference Huanacuni Mamani2010; Little Bear Reference Little Bear and Battiste2000; Ñanculef Huaiquinao Reference Ñanculef Huaiquinao2016; Simpson and Klein Reference Simpson and Klein2013; Smith Reference Smith1999; Yampara Huarachi Reference Yampara Huarachi2011). Now, even if Latour embraces an ethnographic ethic in his insistence that humans are not the main actors in this world, he neither recognises nor cites any Indigenous thinker in his work (Todd Reference Todd2016). A similar critique has been directed towards famous anthropologists such as Viveiros de Castro or Holbraad (Hunt Reference Hunt2014; Mendoza Reference Mendoza2018; Sundberg Reference Sundberg2014; V. Watts Reference Watts2013), to whom archaeologies of the ‘ontological turn’ are indebted to different degrees (Alberti et al. Reference Alberti, Fowles, Holbraad, Marshall and Witmore2011; Domańska Reference Domańska2014; Henare et al. Reference Henare, Holbraad, Wastell, Henare, Holbraad and Wastell2007; C. Watts Reference Watts2013; Wilkinson Reference Wilkinson2017). To be sure, these are the same anthropologists and archaeologists who argue for the existence of multiple and distinctive ontologies, but they barely cite any Indigenous scholar in their work. The subaltern is thus filtered through white intermediaries who act on behalf of her/him (Sundberg Reference Sundberg2014; Todd Reference Todd2016, 7), rendering scholarly representations unproblematic and confirming once again Spivak’s distress: even when the subaltern can speak, (s)he cannot be heard (Spivak Reference Spivak, Guha and Spivak1988b, 308).

Western scholars look at alternate-Indigenous ideas of co-constitutive relations between objects, nature, animals and humans to help them renew the discipline and even the world, but on their terms, they homogenise and generalise Indigenous worldviews which are far more complex than the scholars’ understanding of them and not as symmetrical as claimed to be (Franco Reference Franco2012; Mendoza Reference Mendoza2018). By filtering and misinterpreting local theories/stories, new animists essentialise conceptions building a pan-Indigenous epistemology that does not exist. Viveiros de Castro is a case in point, whose ‘Amerindian perspectivism’ makes uniform Indigenous’ ingenuity and skids ‘into the terrain of reductionism, oversimplification, and overinterpretation’, ignoring the specific historical trajectories of each Indigenous group (Ramos Reference Ramos2012, 483). He also seems to communicate only the ‘perspective’ of men, showing a complete disregard for gender issues (Wainberg Reference Wainberg2021).

Most importantly, anthropologists and archaeologists’ new theoretical frameworks have little concern for actual Indigenous people and their struggles (cf. Braun Reference Braun2019; Jofré Reference Jofré, Haber and Shepherd2015; Paillalef Carinao Reference Paillalef Carinao, Gnecco and Ayala2011; Ramos Reference Ramos1994; Rivera Cusicanqui Reference Rivera Cusicanqui2010; Smith et al. Reference Smith, Copley, Jackson and Apaydin2018). As Chandler and Reid point out, ‘What is at stake is the capacity of indigenous ways of knowing to take alterity —the nonhuman— seriously rather than the anthropologists’ capacity to take indigeneity seriously. If the latter were the case, the focus would not be on the problems of the modern episteme but on the problems facing real indigenous groups in their struggles over rights, representation and resources’ (Chandler and Reid Reference Chandler and Reid2018, 259; see also Mendoza Reference Mendoza2018, 116; Politis Reference Politis2001, 96-101; Rivera Cusicanqui Reference Rivera Cusicanqui2010, 53-76). This is precisely the denial of ‘worlding’ that Spivak talks about. Archaeology as it is widely practiced cannot escape its constitutive relations of dominion over the subaltern subject ‘on the other side of the international division of labour, [who] cannot speak … even if the absurdity of the nonrepresenting intellectual making space for her to speak is achieved’ (Spivak Reference Spivak, Nelson and Grossberg1988a, 289). It is also within this context that we should reflect on the reiterative practices of our discourses that end up engendering yet even more violence towards subalterns.

Speech acts

Calls for archaeologists to ‘unite in a defence of things, a defence of those subaltern members of the collective that have been silenced and ‘othered’ by the imperialist social and humanist discourses’ (Olsen Reference Olsen2003, 100, my emphasis); or statements such as ‘things are not merely enslaved in some wider system of differential meaning, but possess their own capacities and inhabit their own compartments’ (Olsen et al. Reference Olsen, Shanks, Webmoor and Witmore2012, 16, my emphasis; see also Latour Reference Latour1993, 80), should be scrutinised in light of real subaltern and Indigenous struggles.

Beyond doubt, symmetrical archaeology has provocatively challenged and advanced our understanding of objects on their own right (Olsen Reference Olsen2010; Olsen et al. Reference Olsen, Shanks, Webmoor and Witmore2012; Pétursdóttir and Olsen Reference Pétursdóttir and Olsen2018; Webmoor Reference Webmoor2007; Witmore Reference Witmore2014). Yet, referring to neglected things as ‘subaltern’, ‘othered’ and ‘enslaved’ stabilise even further the effects of subalternity. To be sure, when we talk about subaltern communities, we refer to people who have experienced slavery, racism, gender discrimination, dispossession, and/or forced displacement. Many times, these experiences were fatal. Are we really equating those experiences with not paying sufficient attention to the uniqueness of a Neolithic pot?

What is more, associating subalternity with objects whilst ignoring/silencing real subalterns is a disgraceful speech act: it shapes realities that subalternise even more subaltern people and their experiences. Objects are not subalterns. Such identification is not only extremely dehumanising, but it reinforces and supports once again the colonial and expansionist agenda of many countries and ethnic majorities, in the views of whom Indigenous people are terrorists, as in the case of the Mapuche in Chile (Millaleo Reference Millaleo2021; Pairican and Urrutia Reference Pairican and Urrutia2021); ‘wild animals’, as in the case of the Gumuz in Ethiopia (González Ruibal Reference González Ruibal2014, 92); or simply non-existent, as in the case of the Akha, Dara’ang, Hmong, Iu-Mien, Kachin, Karen, Lahu, Lisu, Lua and Shan in Thailand (Morton Reference Morton2017), to name only few examples. Equating objects with people as subalternised Others –being spoken for/vertreten (Spivak Reference Spivak, Guha and Spivak1988b)– by archaeologists has severe ethical slippages, to say the least. Still, for Olsen and Witmore, ‘assessing the world by ethical principles that restrict us to human fraternity, however well-meaning, is disquieting.’ (Olsen and Witmore Reference Olsen and Witmore2015, 192). What is surely disquieting is to conflate human suffering with arguably overlooked objects by using the same utterance and applying the same postcolonial rhetoric, as well as to objectify people and flatten the notion of the social by deleting inequalities and power relations (Pollock et al. Reference Pollock, Bernbeck, Jauß, Greger, von Rüden and Schreiber2014, 156-57). Ontology-related archaeologies also contrast with the efforts of many archaeologists working together with Indigenous communities around the world. The former, aware of their position of privilege, try to build decolonising narratives about the past based on Indigenous perspectives (see, for instance, Atalay Reference Atalay2006; Cipolla et al. Reference Cipolla, Quinn and Levy2019; Colwell Reference Colwell2016; McNiven Reference McNiven2016; Gnecco and Ayala Reference Gnecco and Ayala2011; Smith and Wobst Reference Smith and Wobst2005).

The turn away from humans enacted by ontology-related archaeologists is the product of unaddressed postcolonial demands, which leads archaeologists, consciously or unconsciously, to avoid confronting Indigenous’ critiques of our work and of our power to endlessly represent them and the past –a point rightly made by Severin Fowles (Reference Fowles2016). Things, and the scientific analysis of things, are far less controversial than Indigenous claims –or than studying people for that matter– hence the recent focus on them in both anthropology and archaeology (Fowles Reference Fowles2016; Harris and Cipolla Reference Harris and Cipolla2017, 198-200; Preucel 2020; Reference Preucel2021).

Situated knowledge

Disregarding the social and, especially, the ‘worlding’ that Spivak warns us about also leads us to hide our privileged position in the conception of theory and interpretations. If we are to take Indigenous ontologies seriously (Alberti Reference Alberti2016; Alberti and Marshall Reference Alberti and Marshall2009; Haber Reference Haber2016; Wilkinson Reference Wilkinson2017), we should start by letting their views drive our work rather than citing only Western scholars who have filtered and depoliticised Indigenous thought. There are many Indigenous scholars who publish themselves and do not need academic ventriloquism. Acknowledging how Indigenous ontologies have framed New Materialisms in substantial and different ways is not only ethical, but an Indigenous right: see Art.11 of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People regarding Indigenous intellectual property and the project Intellectual Property Issues in Cultural Heritage (IPinCH) led by George Nicholas. Citational practices are important, as it is situated knowledge(s).

The mobility of theory is a case in point. In a beautifully written prose, Pétursdóttir and Olsen (Reference Pétursdóttir and Olsen2018) state that theories ‘are not natives confined to any particular territory, but nomads in a mixed world, always accommodating themselves to shifting local conditions… Borrowing is an art of keeping theory alive’ (Pétursdóttir and Olsen Reference Pétursdóttir and Olsen2018, 114-15). Yet, theories are always ‘natives’ insofar as they have been created in a context and by a particular person or group of people –who happen to be, most of the times from the West, and particularly British and US-American, although the situation is fortunately changing (Olsen Reference Olsen2012, 18-19). Further, theories’ nomadism often conceals power asymmetries that pervade their adoption –even if transformed– by other locales.

The very act of disregarding the politics of bio- and geopolitical locations, and their effects and affects in the creation and transformation of theories, is a performative practice that normalises power asymmetries and subalternisation (Franco Reference Franco2012; Grosfoguel Reference Grosfoguel2016; Haraway Reference Haraway1988; Rivera Cusicanqui 1987; Reference Rivera Cusicanqui2010, 55-69; Smith Reference Smith1999; Sundberg Reference Sundberg2014). These types of theories that render invisible their loci of enunciation are also incapable of acknowledging the epistemic violence through which (western) archaeologists come to have the theoretical and institutional foundations through which the encounter with the Indigenous Other is initiated and to which it returns (Radcliffe Reference Radcliffe, Okamoto and Ishikawa2014; Smith Reference Smith1999; Todd Reference Todd2016).

Hence, the point of origin of theories does matter and, in most cases, borrowing is not so much ‘an art of keeping theory alive’ as a hegemonic practice in academia, as the (mis)appropriation of Indigenous knowledge demonstrates (Sundberg Reference Sundberg2014; Todd Reference Todd2016; see also Hamilakis Reference Hamilakis2005, 98; Lins Ribeiro Reference Lins Ribeiro2014; Neustupný Reference Neustupný1998; Politis Reference Politis2001). English linguistic imperialism and Anglo-US academia –and high-ranking journals for that matter– have subalternised and silenced many scholars who think and write in other non-privileged languages and from different geopolitical locations. Privilege is here a sort of insularity that cuts off the privileged agent from certain kinds of ‘other’ knowledge(s).