Some Epistemic and Methodological Challenges in the Intercultural Experience
with SIIDAE
Anthropology is a social science that was created to study a part of the world population
that could not be studied by other social sciences. This part of population was called
“primitive” in nineteen century. That is, the people of the colonies of developed
countries.
The reason why these people needed to be studied by a different science was that in the
beginning of the colonialism —sixteen Century— was created something that Walter
Mignolo calls colonial difference. This concept is understood as the mistakes and
excesses marked by hegemonic thinking of each time from the sixteenth century.
Ethnography is the primary method of anthropology and was based on the writing of a
text from a long stay in a “primitive” community. In the nineteen century these peoples
could be studied because they were under the political jurisdiction of a modern state,
which guaranteed access and security of the anthropologist.
In other words, what are behind Anthropology and its methods are colonialism and its
construction of differences. I am a Latinamerican Anthropologist and my education is
based on all this concepts and ideologies.
As an anthropologist, doing a research about intercultural dialogue of knowledge, I
thought that philosophical vision was not enough to face this problem. For that reason I
contacted the director of Intercultural Indigenous System of Learning and Studies
(SIIDAE by its initials in Spanish), Dr. Raymundo Sánchez. SIIDAE gives the
possibility of understand dialogue as a vital phylosophical practice. Its activity is based
on a philosophical and academic view as good life feeders and transformers of the
world.
In a first contact with Dr. Sánchez we talked about my project and the ethnographic
strategy I was going to use to study SIIDAE. Dr. Sánchez told me that they —
SIIDAE— were tired of being an object of study for academics. What they wanted to
question was the status of the academy in the pursuit of knowledge: their starting point
was that "We are all seekers of knowledge." Paradoxically, my project was about the
need for a shift from object to subject of knowledge that should be operated in cultures.
So I realized it would be wrong to insist on the application of ethnographic
methodology. This conversation and the subsequent consequences that resulted were a
real approach to intercultural dialogue of knowledge.
Dr. Sanchez's criticism gave me the challenge of overcoming the subject/object dualism
—an active subject who knows and a passive object that is known— in the research
process. SIIDAE is not an example to study about, but a community that generates
knowledge to live.
The problem I was facing was not easy, has been present in philosophy and social
sciences for a long time. Since the philosophy of liberation of the 70s of the twentieth
century, Enrique Dussel made a critique of Eurocentrism. Dussel argues that all modern
thinking disregards its relation with human daily life, which leads it to set its relations in
terms of a rational subject who knows and a known object. This relationship explains the
fact that Europe don’t admit of real exchange and construction of knowledge between
different cultures.
In this spirit, the Western World has always looked at what is not itself as " 'lack of
being' and 'barbarism', ie as raw nature that needs to be civilized. Thus the elimination
of the alterity —including epistemic alterity— was 'the totalizing logic' that began to
impose itself on indigenous American and African peoples from the sixteenth century,
by both the Spanish conquerors and their Creole descendants.”
In 90s Dussel argued that this situation had arisen in the sixteenth century. In other
words, the first global cultural order comes with Discovery, not with the advent of the
eighteenth century, and Spain was its architect. The Discovery not only provided raw
materials, labor and division of labor, but an epistemological, moral and political
universe.
My intention is to resist the epistemological order of modernity. Understand decolonial
movements like SIIDAE as valid modes of thinking, as subjects and not objects,
confronts us with an ethical and epistemic challenge. This challenge was articulated by
Edward Said in Orientalism: one of the main tasks still pending is “to ask how one can
study other cultures and peoples from a libertarian, or a nonrepressive and nonmanipulative,
perspective. But then one would have to rethink the whole complex problem of knowledge
and power.”
The modern world has developed other ways of relationship between Western thinking
and other ways of knowing. These relationships are aimed at understanding and
dialogue. One of them is Intercultural dialogue, which transforms knowledge and ways
of knowing “others”.
Intercultural dialogue of knowledge from the perspective of Fornet-Betancourt must
transform the representations that build self-perception and perception of the stranger. It
should promote criticism, self-criticism, openness and understanding. Knowledge is not
built then about others or even despite them, but with them. That is, the other goes from
being object to being subject of knowledge.
Then they offered to me a new way to meet and deepen the encounter with SIIDAE, to
follow its pace and its intensity. Carry out a rapprochement with “the others” from an
understanding and assimilation of their vital questions. The challenge I had was to
establish a true dialogue, ready to learn from an honest and horizontal relationship.
There was no field work, but meetings, conversations but no interviews. This
experience falls within the margins of a relationship between people: caring, sensitive,
full of uncertainty, horizontal and with solidarity. This does not absolve me from the
recognition of duality in which I was by virtue of being a researcher. This circumstance
has led me many ethical and vital questions.
When I started writing my work, I saw that I needed to find a way to understand the
experience I had in SIIDAE and incorporate it into my research. I thought the best way
was to use the text I have written about my intercultural experience to focus on
important aspects of intercultural dialogue of knowledge, and not as a case study.