Suwali Possibilities: Neoliberalism, Knowledge Production, and the Karbi People of Assam, India

• In Event: Neoliberal Effects on Indigenous Education: Community Response and Decolonial Possibility

Abstract

This paper chronicles and ethnographic study with an Indigenous community in Assam, India. It further seeks to examine how Neoliberalism moves beyond borders and manifests transnationally. My goal is to examine a series of questions regarding the relationships between indigenous epistemologies, knowledge production, the application of decolonial methodologies, and the impacts of neobliberalism. I am most interested in situating indigenous epistemologies as a rupture to western paradigms of knowledge production, which often prioritizes western ways of knowing as the benchmark from which all other forms of knowledge are measured. I suggest embodied, spiritual, cultural and other indigenous ways of knowing are legitimate even when they are illegible to Western paradigms of research. I further attempt to locate indigenous epistemologies to examine the possibilities and promises of alternative systems of knowledge. As such, this paper is deeply informed by Linda Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies and countless others who are doing the work of decolonization. The primary question undergirding this research project is: whose knowledge counts? Further, I grapple with how indigenous communities are often the subjects of research, but they are refused access to the intellectual territory of research. A host of scholars have contested the ways in which indigenous communities have been denied access to theory and academic research. As such, I struggle to identify a decolonial method that resuscitates knowledge production and resists the hegemonic order of academic research to truly engage in critical ethnography. In this way, I turn to creative methodologies, to not only index the knowledge of this indigenous community, but to offer the community as a legitimate “academic” source, a resistance to Western knowledge production and a theoretical possibility. It seems to me that a truly decolonial project might not be ethnography at all, this is why decolonial imaginings are so vital: for us to develop new language and ultimately new ways of living.

There are far too many Seuti’s in the world and far too many girls whose lives are defined by their absence of western ways of knowing. But these Suwali are brilliant. I argue that they possess an epistemology of possibility. The epistemology of indigeneous women and girls is sacred but it is often not regarded as valid/important/legitimate/important in the context of traditional schooling. And so I’ve been wrestling with the politics of knowledge production. Is it possible to make space for multiple ways of knowing? Anzaldua describes the borderlands as a place where “the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again…” (Anzaldua, 21) Anzaldua’s metaphor of the borders grating against each other illuminates how ancestral, cultural, embodied and spiritual knowledges grate against the hegemonic order and bleed. But in this work I am attempting to locate possibility. I have a number of questions regarding how to do research with indigenous communities: How do we position indigenous knowledges as foundations from which to build a research paradigm and rather than merely nodding to them? How do we shift the very terms of power? How do we undo the neoliberal agenda?

Author

• Derrika Hunt, University of California - Berkeley