by Mackenzie Berwick
24 July 2023
Introduction
In Decolonizing Anthropology: Moving Further Toward an Anthropology of Liberation, Faye Harrison questions: “Can an authentic anthropology emerge from the critical intellectual traditions and the counter-hegemonic struggles of the Third World peoples?” (Harrison and Association of Black Anthropologists 2010, 1). Inspired by the participatory ethic, anthropologists must pursue the most socially responsible way to enact decolonialism in our community. Perhaps a future incarnation of the ‘study of humankind’ could arise from a reconciliation between Western and non-Western intellectuals (Harrison and Association of Black Anthropologists 2010, 1). Harrison’s question echoes the curiosity lurking in every anthropology classroom, journal, and faculty meeting. Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui explores issues created by the West and non-West binary through the concept of ch’ixi, which may hold, within its framework, a promising path forward. Harrison and Cusicanqui agree that a “decolonized anthropology requires the development of theories based on non-Western precepts and
assumptions” (Harrison and Association of Black Anthropologists 2010, 7). Placing programmatic suggestions from Johannes Fabian, Kwasi Wiredu, and Felwine Sarr into a ch’ixi structure demonstrates the value of leading with subaltern theories, engaging in ch’ixi by making the constitutive elements of this analysis equal through the foregrounding of native thinking.
Throughout its history, anthropology’s inception in the West and selective extraction of knowledge from the “Global South”1 have created dichotomies or hierarchies of knowledge which relegate applied theories originating in non-Western contexts to raw data. This practice essentially determines who is authorized to produce knowledge and who is not. Anthropology’s model of appropriation and expropriation is based on a division of intellectual labor that is “designed to render many of the people who coproduce knowledge as glorified informants” (Williams et al. 2016). The North does not see indigenous intellectuals as professionals capable of research and theoretical work but instead only values them based on their position and proximity to extract knowledge from a community or culture of interest (Cusicanqui 2020, 31). Acknowledging Southern thinkers requires shifting authority and legitimacy away from institutions that utilize subaltern knowledge without advancing or defending the interests of subject communities (Harrison and Association of Black Anthropologists 2010, 7-8). Overturning this political and economic system of academic extraction requires anthropologists to question, “How have we thought and problematized, in the here and now, the colonized present and its overturning?” (Harrison and Association of Black Anthropologists 2010, 49). In taking up a critical analysis of ch’ixi and imposing its guiding elements onto programmatic suggestions, this paper aims to reconstruct the image of anthropology under the guidance of indigenous theory.
Ch’ixi, Coloniality, and Modernity
Since the nineteenth century, liberal and modernizing reforms in Bolivia have given rise to a practice of conditional inclusion, creating a “mitigated and second class” citizenship (Cusicanqui 2020, 50). As a both Bolivian and Aymaran, Cusicanqui critiques the role that academia, specifically anthropology, plays in supporting an image of indigeneity that permits the political indignity faced by natives. By extracting knowledge from indigenous people and gatekeeping the formal production of that knowledge from unrecognized native scientists, philosophers, and anthropologists, academia allows for the empty recognition of an indigenous past while avoiding the acknowledgment of continued coloniality in the present. Cusicanqui responds to the neutralization of subaltern thinkers by applying the concept of ch’ixi to imagine a
future form of anthropology that allows for the temporal coexistence of North and South within a shared conceptualization of modernity.
Aiming to capture the conflicts of the ongoing colonial condition, anthropologist Walter Mignolo writes extensively about the relationship between coloniality and modernity. Mignolo describes coloniality as “the darker side of modernity,” meaning that coloniality constitutes modernity instead of being its product (Mignolo and Walsh 2018, 111). Coloniality perseveres after the conclusion of the discrete temporal period known as colonialism, constituting the formation of modernity in the shadows. In Mignolo’s mind, true decolonialism requires the constitution of new modernity in which decoloniality prompts “changing the terms of the conversation” (Mignolo and Walsh 2018, 129). While Mignolo differentiates between the critical forces of decolonialism and decoloniality, he fails to challenge the singular, simplifying narrative
of history by disputing the temporality of his distinctions. Thus, Mignolo’s theorizing does not fundamentally change power structures by establishing indigenous modernity and recognizing the paradoxes of placing indigenous people in the present timeline. Cusicanqui argues that without dramatically transforming power arrangements in the “palaces of empire,” North American universities continue to create an “isolated academic [treatise]” that bears no
obligation to engage critically or conversationally with its Southern origins (Cusicanqui 2020, 51). She even accuses Mignolo of “building an empire within an empire” by supporting the North’s strategic appropriations of Southern concepts that form a discourse of decolonization and theory that circumvents any decolonizing practice (Cusicanqui 2020, 51-56).
What is Ch’ixi?
Ch’ixi captures the paradoxical reality of a colonial condition by conveying the notion of likeness and opposition cohabitating within the same form (Cusicanqui 2020, 46). While returning to an ‘untouched past’ is impossible, subaltern cultures and the thinkers they mold are excluded from participating in a post-colonial present. Thus, many are trapped in a state still defined by coloniality despite being removed from the period of colonialism. To understand the colonial paradoxes of life and knowledge production in subaltern contexts, ch’ixi offers a reality that is both past and present, one that recognizes the Northern academic knowledge-production system but creates a reciprocal space to take indigenous intellect seriously. Cusicanqui (2020) also refers to ch’ixi as the “logic of the included third,” meaning that the potential inability to differentiate one opposite from its pair in a third form allows diametrically conflicting forms to mix (65). Cusicanqui (2020) deploys many allegories to describe this diffusive concept, including that of the color grey, a “color that is the product of juxtaposition…of contrasting colors: black and white” (65). In reflecting on the contributions from Johannes Fabian, Kwasi Wiredu, and Felwine Sarr, Cusicanqui’s ch’ixi offers the structural potential to visualize an image of anthropology as co-habitable and delicately hybrid.
While Cusicanqui has introduced this concept to the academic world, an authentic practice of hybridity must honor this concept in an applied setting rather than philosophical context alone to recognize its significance in a shared ch’ixi space. In Un Mundo Ch’ixi es Posible,2 Cusicanqui still aligns the Aymara concept with the themes of academia and decolonization but writes more extensively about how ch’ixi can help navigate indigenous experiences of coloniality. Through modernization, native communities face a symbolic extraction performed through unequal exchanges with the Northern world. At this point of influx, Cusicanqui argues that the conflicting subject positions native people hold result from failed ch’ixi, which she labels pä chuyma (Cusicanqui 2018, 49). Pä chuyma means divided soul3 and symbolizes life lived at the intersection of contrary identities that intrinsically oppose each other but are co-constructive. Pä chuyma is apparent in the clash between the role that native people play in Bolivia’s state-sponsored historical narratives of independence and the modern disenfranchisement Aymara people experience. Native people are at once placed in the
center of a nation’s history and simultaneously exist on the margins of that same society in a state of disenfranchisement. In the academic world, external studies of native people are considered valuable, but contributions and observations from those within those communities are not taken seriously. Cusicanqui writes of “the city of the past,” a ch’ixi modernity that once existed but has been destroyed by pä chuyma structures that place native people in a “double bind” (Cusicanqui 2018, 49). Thus, as captured in its title, Cusicanqui deploys this book as an example that an era of ch’ixi lies in the indigenous past, offering hope for the future that Northern academia can find a ch’ixi balance in the future, particularly if guided by subaltern theorizing and instructed programmatically.
Ch’ixi as Coevalness
First, ch’ixi is understood as a specialized treatment of hybridity. Cusicanqui (2020) writes that ch’ixi relies on the assumption that “from the mixture of two different beings a third and completely new one can emerge…with the capacity to merge the features of its ancestors in a harmonic and as yet unknown blend” (66). Crucially, Cusicanqui points out that a form of coexistence between indigenous and colonized worlds has not yet been uncovered because native people and their colonized descendants do not operate on equal footing. However, ch’ixi potentially combines the “Indian world with its direct opposite without ever mixing them” (Cusicanqui 2020, 65). As Fabian concurs, the way anthropologists think of time and its relation to identity must undergo a transformation to allow for the possibility ch’ixi presents. Discussing native people and their forms of intellect as situated in a narrative about ‘original peoples’ denies the “contemporaneity of these populations and excludes them from the struggles of modernity” (Cusicanqui 2020, 53). By placing indigenous people firmly in the past, the native identity is understood to be static and archaic, which neutralizes indigenous demands for recognition and rights in the modern world. Cusicanqui (2020) labels this relegation as a “residual status” (53). Rebuilding the relations between North and South and colonizer and colonized in a way that channels ch’ixi demands that anthropologists dismantle this repressive structure.
Johannes Fabian writes of a similar hope for a temporally pluralistic coexistence with native people using the term “coevalness.” However, Fabian makes programmatic suggestions to improve anthropological fieldwork’s quality, impact, and ethics rather than speaking existentially. One can understand “a failure of coevalness” to be a “persistent and systematic tendency to place the referent(s) of anthropology in a time other than the present of the producer of anthropological discourse” (Fabian 1983, 31). While many anthropologists understand the creation of distance between subject and surveyor as a hallmark of objectivity, Fabian argues that this practice is destructive and problematic in alienating native people from their work and subjecting them to labels that deny contemporary agency. In Time and the Other (1983), Fabian emphasizes that practicing coevalness requires the creation of shared time and, thus, the deconstruction of an objective temporal past.
Through Remembering the Present: Painting and Popular History in Zaire (1996), Fabian and Matulu create a sense of coevalness as they occupy the same creative, written space. By working collaboratively in the present, Fabian builds on that connection and commonality to move fluidly through temporal spaces and explore past histories, bringing them back into the present through a discursive pathway. This book develops a present understanding of the past conferred through a sense of occupation of the same time and presence. In his treatment of indigenous history, Fabian demonstrates how the practice of coevalness allows those who participate in ‘occupying the same time’ to deconstruct their relationship with time itself and expand their mental reference points. This practice creates an opportunity to reconstruct history and relationships throughout its early interactions in a way that is colonial, raw, and unpolished by Western history textbooks and rewritten stories. Within the larger structure of ch’ixi-led anthropology, coevalness practices may free indigenous people from temporal relegation to a static past, proving a promising tool to enact Cusicanqui’s conceptual guide.
Ch’ixi as Bilingualism
Second, ch’ixi means an equal contribution to a third form of being, especially within linguistic and cultural contexts. Cusicanqui (2020) emphasizes that the possibility of cultural, societal reform depends on “the reappropriation of bilingualism as a decolonizing practice – [which] will allow for the creation of a “we” as producers of knowledge and interlocutors who can have discussions as equals” (66). For Cusicanqui, who descends from Aymara and European heritage, the concept of ch’ixi has a personal application as her two languages and cultures merge within her person but remain individually complete and constituted. However, as Felwine Sarr and Olúfemi Táíwò emphasize, English is the predominant language of globalism and the ivory tower of academia. Cusicanqui encourages anthropologists to acknowledge that language is a carrier of culture and a means of communication. As indigenous and Southern scholars come into contact with Northern academia, the languages of the colonizer (Spanish, English, French, German, etc.) become the dominant form in which knowledge is taught, stored, and produced, relegating colonial languages to a status of ‘less than.’ Anthropologists must recognize this linguistic domination as harmful and investigate the ways that colonial languages and the cultures they carry affect their colonized speakers. Within Cusicanqui (2020)’s application, this ‘one-sidedness’ is a failure of ch’ixi in which subaltern participants in academia are denied use of their native tongue. Placing native languages on equal footing to be considered worthy of serving an academic or theoretical purpose builds up indigenous hegemony in opposition to linguistic spaces created by and for the cultural West, creating the potential for a third shared space of communication.
Kwasi Wiredu (1996) writes about the risk of a mental de-Africanization as one’s institutional education frames concepts in English, and “thinking about them in English almost inevitably becomes thinking in English about them” (137). Wiredu writes of the linkage between word-making and world-making, similarly to Cusicanqui, arguing that the value of native understandings of learned concepts through linguistics is foregone when thinking, theorizing, and knowledge-creation are conducted in English. To exemplify the failure of translation and the value of bilingualism, Wiredu (1996) compares the phrase “I am certain” to the Akan phrase “Minim pefee,” which means “I know very clearly” (139). The notion of infallibility the phrase connotated in the English version is resonant of Western culture and opinions about knowledge. At the same time, the failure of translation reveals an opposing cultural relation to knowledge upheld in Akan-speaking culture. The plurality of meanings found within a given phrase serves as an example of ch’ixi and validates the coexistence of both phrases and the respective worldviews they support. Wiredu emphasizes that anthropology must reevaluate its relationship with English and other Western languages. By constructing one as a language of objectivity, the other suffers a binary treatment as it is relegated, both the language and its culture, to the realm of the past and the subjective. Without creating pluricultural and multilinguistic modernity in which all languages are given equal footing, the anthropological future for which Wiredu aspires, one that embodies ch’ixi, remains out of reach.
Ch’ixi as Alternative Modernities
Third, Sarr’s concept of new modernity is captured within the ch’ixi conceptualization of fluid modernity. Cusicanqui (2020) writes that the “metaphor of hybridity suggests that [one] can enter and leave modernity as if it were a stadium, or a theater, instead of a constructive process…of habits, gestures, modes of interaction, and ideas about the world” (67). Ch’ixi presupposes that modernity is a communal constituted structure in which ‘modern’ people act and interact. This fluidity is constituted not only by expanding who is considered part of modernity but also by developing a new concept of time as discussed above. Cusicanqui (2020) also clarifies that by designing modernity as a more inclusive, grassroots theoretical project, a new society can break ground where indigenous people “would expand and adopt their culturally patterned ideas of democratic coexistence” which would welcome new forms of community and mixed identities, or ch’ixi (68). Thus, the process of knowledge exchange could occur on an even plane and create space for pluralism and societal diversity. The way that Cusicanqui uses ch’ixi to imagine a different academic, and thus political, constitution of knowledge production aligns closely with Sarr’s observations on afro-contemporaneity.
In Afrotopia, Felwine Sarr characterizes modernity as a Western-appropriated concept defined by Enlightenment ideals that signify the liberation of individualism from tradition. Thus, as tradition and modernity are understood to be opposed, the colonial conceptualization of Africa as a static temporality unaffected by the progress of history perpetually excludes Africans from participating in Western modernity as modern agents (Sarr 2020b, 14). Sarr (2020b) attributes the imposition of modernity on Africa as “clothing fabricated elsewhere…which [Africans] must bring [themselves] to wear to be in tune with the world” (14). Sarr (2020b) instead advocates for “alternative modernities” in which a “re-narration of the modern” creates space for diversity and decenters itself from the West (17). Thus, the modern African remains suspended between traditions that have since been contaminated by imperialism and a contemporary space in which modernity refuses to acknowledge their participation in the present. Cusicanqui’s ch’ixi offers the potential to merge tradition and modernity, the past and the present, in a way that allows for plurality and challenges the notion that modernization creates uniformity. Modernity understood through ch’ixi produces wholly unexpected and different incarnations “under the variety of different skies where it takes hold” (Sarr 2020b, 17).
Conclusion
While the programmatic suggestions of integrating coevalness, bilingualism, and alternative modernities into anthropology hold the potential to shape the discipline’s future, they also serve as puzzle pieces, illuminating a larger image of the future when placed into the structure of ch’ixi. Individual suggestions drawn from different corners of the anthropological community often conflict and fail to confer a single image of the discipline, meaning that the path forward remains in constant doubt and disagreement. The promise embodied in the deployment of a theory like ch’ixi rests in its diffuseness and tangibility. Through Cusicanqui’s analysis, ch’ixi is in itself a third form that mediates the space between applied theories from the South and lofty philosophy from the North. Ch’ixi is both lived and imagined, making it the
perfect uniting tool to chart a decolonial path.
By foregrounding ch’ixi, anthropologists also affirm its value by engaging in the blending of indigenous and Northern thinking about the response to coloniality demanded by Harrison. By centering subaltern theories in the anthropology community’s response to questions of decolonialism, native thinking is taken more seriously. Therefore, the uniting of differing anthropological theory with the concept of ch’ixi offered in this paper is an act of ch’ixi.4 By placing all concepts on the same plane no matter their origin and offering equal legitimacy to each, one can visualize a ch’ixi-led anthropological practice. With every step towards equality of thought, identity, and language, the goal of a shared North-South anthropological space that embodies ch’ixi comes closer within reach.
- I am using the binary of the “Global North” and “Global South” (or North/South) to represent the have and have-
nots throughout the modern world as determined by colonial conquest and its ongoing consequences. My usage of
this distinction is not a condonement of its simplification. ↩︎ - Translated from “A Ch’ixi World is Possible.” ↩︎
- Translated from “alma dividida.” ↩︎
- Added emphasis is mine. ↩︎
