Special Issue Introduction (2011)

Special Issue Introduction Les Field (bio) and Joanne Rappaport (bio) Collaborative research methods have a long history in Latin America, one that is particularly oriented toward explicit, specific, and wide-ranging projects aimed at the decolonization of knowledge. In pursuit of that end, the various Latin American authors whose work is showcased in this special issue of Collaborative Anthropologies develop and deploy collaborative research methods, epistemologies, and ontologies that to some degree resemble those of North American scholars and, to an important degree, break new ground in refashioning collaborative research as a decolonizing methodology. In order to comprehend what they are doing, we must begin with a consideration of the notions of colonialism, coloniality, and colonial difference. Coloniality, a concept recently developed by postcolonial scholar Walter Mignolo (2002: 61), drawing on the work of Aníbal Quijano (1997, 2000) and Enrique Dussel (1994, 1995, 1996, 1998, 1999), can be understood as the entire ensemble of conditions created by colonialism, itself the aggregate phenomenon of the consolidation of colonial regimes over the past five hundred years. In those areas of the world that experienced colonial regimes in the wake of European conquest, coloniality is an outcome that is coterminous with the nature of modernity: coloniality creates sharply perceptible divergences between modernities in those countries that were the colonizing powers and modernities in colonized areas of the world. Mignolo calls this "colonial difference" and argues that it has structured and shaped the creation, understanding, interpretation, and representation of knowledge about modernity worldwide (2002: 61-62). In a planetary geography shaped [End Page 3] by colonialism, in which coloniality is pervasive, Mignolo discerns a "geopolitics of knowledge" that is always already unequal, because it is the outcome of colonialism and the condition of coloniality. Mignolo observes that just as the geopolitics of knowledge is the outcome of colonialism and coloniality, projects aimed at the decolonization of knowledge are also enmeshed in large-scale processes of political, economic, and social change. For example, he cites dependency theory's central role in defining national policies in Latin America in the aftermath of World War II up until the late 1970s and the corollary impact of dependency theory on the decolonization of knowledge during and following those decades (2002: 63-65). While each of the authors in this issue elaborates a particular concept of decolonization, drawing upon different literatures, they all acknowledge a common intellectual genealogy that ultimately goes back, at least in part, to the work of Colombian sociologist Orlando Fals Borda. In 1970 Fals Borda published an important volume titled Ciencia propia y colonialismo intelectual (Our Science and Intellectual Colonialism), which echoes a widespread and ongoing critique of the colonizing countries' monopoly control over the production of scientific knowledge among Asian, African, and Latin American scholars, and which ultimately inspired the methodology of participatory action research. The scenario Fals Borda lays out is simple: Western expansion takes place not only in the economic and political spheres but in the educational and intellectual arenas as well. The task of Latin American intellectuals, then, is to reframe theory and methodology so that they emanate from the colonial world, converting social research into a tool for liberation. In 1971, together with other politically committed Colombian scholars, Fals Borda made concrete proposals toward such ends in Causa popular, ciencia popular (Popular Cause, Popular Science), published by La Rosca de Investigación y Acción Social (Circle of Social Research and Action), a network of Colombian social scientists and journalists advocating activist research alongside popular movements (Bonilla et al. 1971). La Rosca proposed inserting themselves as researcher-activists into local and regional struggles, in order to establish research priorities in conjunction with local activists. Their collaborative work would focus on the identification of local cultural, social, and political forms that could prove useful in supporting organizations with whom La Rosca worked closely in indigenous regions of southwestern [End Page 4] highland Colombia and among peasants of Colombia's Atlantic coast. In other words, Fals Borda and his associates developed a critique of the Eurocentric geopolitics of knowledge that would lead to its decolonization through an alliance of scholars and grassroots activists. Since the 1970s, Latin American scholars writing both...