I am not an anthropologist and am not attempting to write as an expert on indigenous cultures or cosmologies. I would like to state that I do not believe that non-indigenous people cannot address indigenous spirituality, or research or make art about it. Rather, I think that an utterance from any place can contribute to the processes of collective healing and learning from each other, and thus, I assume that the place from which my utterance (as any place) comes involves its own blind spots.
Antonio Pichilla, in conversation with the author, 2020.
Sandra Monterroso, “Del arte político a la opción Decolonial en el arte Contemporáneo Guatemalteco,” Iberoamericana social →.
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History: Unearning Imperialism (Verso, 2019), 64.
Some examples are Fred Wilson’s Rooms with a View: The struggle between culture, content and the context of art (Longwood Arts Projects, 1987), and the exhibitions We The People (Artists Space, 1987) and Art/Artifact (The Center for African Art, 1988). See Olga Fenández, “The Uncertain of Display: Exhibition In-Between Ethnography and Modernism,” in The Ruined Archive, eds. Iain Chambers, Giulia Grechi and Mark Nash (Mela Books, 2014), 145–162.
See Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, Cultura com aspas (Cosac Naify, 2010).
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (Routledge, 1994).
As Mayan anthropologist Aura Cumes points out, this meant that they neglected historical, local, indigenous struggles and the epistemologies beyond their national discourses of mestizaje that devaluate the indigenous difference. So, translation has always been a process that they addressed within Western frames and without questioning its epistemological frames.
She also references Donna Haraway, remarking that “Haraway’s Situated Knowledges (1988) also contributes a valuable discussion of how the localized knowledges … provide a space where the dominant boundaries of this heteropatriarchy can be imploded. However, Haraway resists essentialist notions of the earth as mother or matter and chooses instead to utilize products of localized knowledges (i.e. Coyote or the Trickster) as a process of boundary implosion.” Vanessa Watts, “Indigenous Place-Thought and Agency amongst Humans and Non-humans (First Woman and Sky Woman go on a European Tour!),” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 2, no. 1 (2013), 28.
See José Carvalho, Juliana Flórez, and Máncel Martínez, “Encuentro de Saberes, hacia una Universidad pluriepistémica,” in Saeres nómadas: Derivas del pensiamento proprio, eds. Nina Cabrá and Camila Aschner (Bogotá: Universidad Central-Iesco, 2016).
Javier Payeras, “After Tún,” 20 Bienal de Arte Paiz, exh. cat. (Bienal de Arte Paiz, 2012, 66.
From the artwork’s caption, which references the tent or Cupixawa he constructed →.
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This installation was called Em Busca do Sagrado Gibóia Nixi Pae, (In the search of sacred Gibóia Nixi Pae, 2014) and was installed at the macro exhibition “Histórias Mestizas” at the Tomie Otake Contemporary Art Institute. The artist had his first contact with this Huni Kuin community in 2013.
“The Huni Kuins’ translated words spoke to the urgency and responsibility we have to the natural world. Neto, whose presence evoked the cult leader of the mission in the 2015 film Embrace of the Serpent, rambled between art speak, capitalist patter and hobby ethnography.” Ryan Rice, “Trouble Me Venice: An Indigenous Curator’s View of the Biennale,” Canadian Art Magazine, May 30, 2017 →.
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Slavoj Žižek, “Multiculturalism, or the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism,” New Left Review 225 (September–October 1997): 28-51.
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For one example, Indigenous activist Ailton Krenak painted a column of the Modernist Niemayer building as an act of cultural anthropophagy intervening in Western frames.
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Manuela Carneiro da Cunha and Marisol de la Cadena show how the sense of culture for indigenous people is very different from the Western sense. Da Cunha speaks about “culture” (with quotations marks) to indicate that the term is not translated by some Indigenous people in their languages. The authors use the Portuguese term instead of attempting to translate it, to maintain the Western meaning and to be able to inhabit this hegemonic frame in which they survive. This “culture” is related to International Platforms (like Biennales) that would allow them to create international networks, visibility, funding, and tools for their survival and the survival of the planet facing the ecological crisis. For example, Marisol de la Cadena writes about how the Quechua people in Peru have to negotiate these different senses of culture-nature, politics-spirituality-respect in conjunction with literate modern politics in order to maintain a conversation with Western frames.
Marisol de la Cadena, “Política indígena: un análisis más allá de ‘la política,’” WAN journal, no. 4 (January 2009).
See Carvalho, Flórez, and Martínez, “Encuentro de Saberes, hacia una Universidad pluriepistémica.”
Primera cumbre de mujeres indígenas de América, México, Fundación Rigoberta Menchú, 2003. A cosmology has been defined by Mexican anthropologist Alicia Barabas as a sum of collective discourses of a sacred nature that possess an important emotional and normative knowledge. See Alicia Barabas, “Cosmovisiones, mitologías y rituales de los pueblos indígenas,” in Cosmovisión mesoamericana, eds. A. Gámez and A. López (El Colegio de México, Fondo de cultura económica (FCE)-Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, 2015).
See Carvalho, Flórez, and Martínez, “Encuentro de Saberes, hacia una Universidad pluriepistémica.”
As Michel de Certeau writes: “Theoretical questioning … does not forget, cannot forget that in addition to the relationships of these scientific discourses to one another, there is also their common relation with what they have taken care to exclude from their field in order to constitute it.” Michel De Certeau, The practice of everyday life (University of California Press, 1988), 61.
Bonaventura de Sousa Santos, Descolonizar el Saber, Reinventar el Poder (Ediciones Trilce-Extensión Universitaria, 2010), 22.
Sarah Hunt, “Ontologies of Indigeneity: The Politics of Embodying a Concept,” Cultural Geographies 21, no. 1 (2014): 5.
The three terms as enunciated by Da Silva: “(a) separability, that is, the view that all that can be known about the things of the world is what is gathered by the forms (space and time) of the intuition and the categories of the Understanding (quantity, quality, relation, modality—everything else about them remains inaccessible and irrelevant to knowledge); and consequently, (b) determinacy, the view that knowledge results from the Understanding’s ability to produce formal constructs, which it can use to determine (i.e. decide) the true nature of the sense impressions gathered by the forms of intuition; and finally (c) sequentiality, which describes Spirit as movement in time, a process of self-development, and describes History as the trajectory of Spirit.” Denise Ferreira da Silva, “On Difference without Separability,” in Incerteza Viva: 32ª Biennial of São Paulo, eds. Jochen Voz and Julia Rebouças, exh. cat. (MAMBO, 2017), 57–65.
Denise Ferreira Da Silva, “On Difference without Separability.” In his seminal work, The Location of Culture in 1994, Bhabha speaks of the indeterminacy of the colonial encounter. He describes how the Hegelian tools of separability and determinacy cannot truly “fix” anything during a colonial encounter with the colonized. It’s for this reason that Bhabha dedicated so much time to thinking about the compulsive use of stereotypes in the colonial context, which act to dismiss the colonized through by fixing their identities into discreet categories. See Bhabha, “The Other Question: The Stereotype and Colonial Discourse,” in The Location of Culture (Routledge, 1994).
Watts, “Indigenous Place-Thought and Agency amongst Humans and Non-humans (First Woman and Sky Woman go on a European Tour!),” 210.
Enrique Dussel, “Eurocentrism and Modernity,” boundary 2 20, no. 3 (Autumn, 1993): 65–76.
Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (University of Michigan Press, 2010), 189. Azoulay’s proposal of reparation is to cease the “movement that fuels the world of (transcendental) art and its insatiable quest to discover what is not yet known, discovered, named, shown, or created, in the form of the new, the extravagant, and the spectacular.” Azoulay, Potential History: Unearning Imperialism, 154.
Nuto Chavajay, in conversation with the author, 2015.
As Glissant wrote: “Opacities must be preserved; an appetite for opportune obscurity in translation must be created; and falsely convenient vehicular sabirs must be relentlessly refuted. The framework is not made of transparency; and it is not enough to assert one's right at linguistic difference or, conversely, to interlexicality, to be sure of realizing them.” Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 120.
Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Renovar la teoría crítica y reinventar la emancipación social (CLACSO, 2006), 39. In the original: “Yo estoy buscando una epistemología adecuada para entender al FSM, una globalización alternativa, los conocimientos que se juntan, y no estoy pensando solamente en traducción entre diferentes culturas, sino por ejemplo entre poesía y ciencia.”
I wish to add that poetry is present in art, but also in philosophy. Furthermore, when I address “Western culture” in this text I refer mainly to Western academia’s “ways of knowing” that are linked with Modernity—still latent today in its “cultures of rigor” and their permeation into everyday life. Nevertheless, I am aware that within academia and Western Philosophy there are important attempts to challenge this (mono)culture of rigor and demands for transparency, often undertaken with the help of poetry. See Sousa Santos, Descolonizar el Saber, Reinventar el Poder (Trilce-Extensión Universitaria, 2010), 22.
As noted to me by Antonio Pichilla, humans are also wrappers that contain the unknown and the opaque. Pichilla, in conversation with the author, 2020.
This has been an important problematic faced by psychotherapists working in post-war Guatemala. They realized that healing, for example, was not a private experience, as thought in Western culture, but rather a collective one. For example, the word that the Kumool Asociation of Ixil and k’iche women use for “trauma,” Txitzi’n, literally meaning “deep pain,” is the same word used to refer to an internal mystic experience in which healing takes place.
María José Pérez Sián, “Nos-otras. Ancestras descoloniales,” in Miradas en torno al problema colonial: pensamiento anti-colonial y feminismos descoloniales en los sures globales, ed. Karina Ochoa Muñoz (Akal, Inter Pares, 2019), 139.
In the original: “Específicamente, se refiere a procesos de dar y paralelamente adquirir vida, transformarse en vida o transformar la vida, hacer vida y formar colectividad” Ajb’ee Jiménez and Héctor Aj Xol Ch’ok, Winaq: Fundamentos del pensamiento maya (Iximulew, 2011), 41.
Carlos Lenkersdorf called winaquisation this intersubjectivity that happens where tojolabal sentences such as “I speak” are not unidirectional but bidirectional and require a response to be complete: “I spoke and you responded.” Bidirectional sentences involve two subjects and not a passive object of the action or passive indirect complement, in grammatical terms. The sentence includes a plurality of subjects with different functions in a unique action/verb in horizontal positions (coordinated and not subordinated) to express the event of communication between two subjects. Having several subjects means there are no indirect or direct objects and no passive positions, as both parties share the authorship of the action. Carlos Lenkersdorf, Filosofar en clave tojolabal (Pórrua, 2005), 113–117.
Pichilla has also worked with stones bearing candle marks that suggest that they had been previously used in Mayan ceremonies in which the artist had participated. The marks are the trails of ceremonies. Glifos of Kukulkan (2011) seeks to show these marks as a kind of spiritual writing.
Jiménez and Aj Xol Ch’ok, Winaq: Fundamentos del pensamiento maya, 44.
Jiménez and Aj Xol Ch’ok, Winaq: Fundamentos del pensamiento maya, 43.
Watts, “Indigenous Place-Thought and Agency amongst Humans and Non-humans (First Woman and Sky Woman go on a European Tour!),” 210. For example, national colonial policies in Canada have resulted in a disembodied sacredness in which ceremonies are dislocated from original places, dismissing the importance of the relationships with the place.
According to Calel, B'atz is a nawal, a person with magical powers that can transform into the shape of an animal.
This is precisely the argument made by Javier Payeras about a new generation of indigenous artists from Guatemala such as Nuto Chavajay, Fernando and Ángel Poyon, Manuel Chavajay, Sandra Monterroso, Edgar Calel, Antonio Pichilla, and others that don´t have their gazes in a subordinating position as Tún's was in the past. See Javier Payeras, “After Tún,” 20 Bienal de Arte Paiz, exh. cat. (Bienal de Arte Paiz, 2012, 66.
Antonio Pichilla, in conversation with the author, 2015.
Jiménez and Aj Xol Ch’ok explore the foundations of Amerindian cosmologies to vindicate their philosophical status. They reach similar conclusions with regards to ways of knowing to those expressed by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro in his writing on “Amerindian perspectivism.” But it seems to me that he was more interested with defending his discipline, anthropology, rather than in the Indigenous thinkers he references or in questioning the colonial structures of Western knowledge. Eduardo Viveiros De Castro, Metáfísicas Caníbales (Katz, 2010).
Most of these artists think in their original languages, and in the process of making their artwork public have to negotiate how to interpret their epistemologies in the Spanish language. In my case I am taking a two further steps, into English, and then, into academic language. Antonio Pichilla and Manuel Chavajay, in conversation with the author, 2015.
Two authors interested in untranslatability, Franco Moretti and Barbara Cassin (2004-2005), have proposed that mistranslations are centrally characteristic to a global world. They opted for collaborative laboratories of translation and academic displacement in order to experience untranslatability as a symptom of the limits of our cartographies. See also Emily Apter, “Untranslatables: A World System,” New Literary History 39, no. 3. (Summer 2008): 581-598.
Marisol De la Cadena and Mario Blaser, “Introduction,” WAN journal, no. 4 (January 2009).
Marisol de la Cadena speaks about two epistemological frames for politics in Peru, where indigenous people have vernacular politics that are invisibilized by modern literate politics. When both coexist, indigenous people are forced to renounce their own understanding of politics as the framework for political conversations in favor of the Western one; when the indigenous epistemoligical framework (and its understanding of politics) begins to be included is where she locates the beginning of “the political.” See Marisol de la Cadena, “Política indígena: un análisis más allá de ‘la política.’”
I am grateful to the many people who looked at this text while it was being written, and who talked with about the ideas included here: Pablo Lafuente, Joan Pujolar, Edgar Calel, Olga Fernández, Hannah Yohalem, Nathaniel Robin Mann, Vincent Meessen, Mariana da Silva, and the amazing editorial work by Elvia Wilk. I want to especially thank Antonio Pichilla, without whose help this text could never have been published. Finally, I would like to dedicate this text to Diego who, like many others, has been alone in the hospital struggling against Covid-19 as I finished this version of the essay.