Places To Think With, Books To Think About: Words, Experience and the Decolonization of Knowledge in...

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I. I

NTRODUCTION

In Bolivia today, indigenous peoples’political struggles are interlaced withissues of knowledge and truth. Indigenouscosmologies and “traditional” systems ofknowledge are not only being politicized inan unprecedented manner; they also makepossible a reading of reality and thenational political process that differs fromand undermines dominant views.

In order to introduce the topic of this

article—Aymara epistemology—I wouldlike to mention a name which is not usuallybrought up in discussions on indigenouspeoples and the decolonization of knowl-edge: the 18

th

-century Swedish botanistCarl Linnaeus. I do so not in order toimpress the reader with rare references, butin order to contrast the modern, colonialepistemology of Linneaus’ scientific reason(see, e.g., Jensen 2009) with a subalternizedindigenous epistemology. In his

SystemaNaturae

(1735), Linneaus recognized the

Anders Burman is a Swedish/Bolivian social anthropologist, holding a PhD from the University of Gothenburg(2009). He is currently a postdoctoral scholar at the Department of Ethnic Studies, University of California atBerkeley. At the end of 2011 he takes up a position as Associate Senior Lecturer at the Department of HumanGeography, Human Ecology Division, at Lund University, Sweden. The author wishes to thank Carlos Yujra,Freddy Acarapi and René Acarapi for their teachings and Ramón Grosfoguel and other participants at the con-ference “Quels universités et universalismes demain en Europe? Un dialogue avec les Ameriques” (“Which Universitiesand Universalism for Europe Tomorrow? A Dialogue with the Americas”) in Paris, June 2010, for their com-ments on an earlier draft of this article.

Places To Think With, Books To Think AboutWords, Experience and the Decolonization of Knowledge

in the Bolivian Andes

Anders Burman

University of California at Berkeley––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––[email protected] • [email protected]

Abstract: Drawing on his anthropological field work in Bolivia in the midst of profound socialand political change, the author examines the attitudes of various interlocutors toward knowl-edge, and in particular the important differences between “hegemonic theories of knowledgeand indigenous epistemologies, between propositional and non-propositional knowledge,between knowledge of the world and knowledge from within the world, or between representa-tionalist and relational ways of knowing.” He stresses that there is “no absolute dividing line,”no “clear-cut dichotomies after almost 500 years of asymmetric and colonial intermingling ofepistemologies and knowledge systems from different traditions.” Relational ways of knowingand indigenous traditions of thought continue to be systematically treated as inferior but theyare still present and are currently making themselves felt at the university.

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ISSN: 1540-5699. © Copyright by Ahead Publishing House (imprint: Okcir Press) and authors. All Rights Reserved.

HUMAN ARCHITECTURE

Journal of the Sociology of Self-

A Publication of OKCIR: The Omar Khayyam Center for Integrative Research in Utopia, Mysticism, and Science (Utopystics)

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status of humankind as a particular specieswithin the animal kingdom. He had prob-lems, however, in coming up with a solidargument for distinguishing human anat-omy from that of apes. The ultimate crite-rion he used to distinguish humans fromapes was the intellectual faculty of reason.Only humans, Linneaus claimed, haverational and systematic means of produc-ing and conveying actual knowledge of theworld and of themselves. Or, as Tim Ingoldsententiously frames the argument: “Thereare no scientists among the animals”(2000:238).

In 2010, a friend of mine, a young maleBolivian Aymara intellectual and indige-nous activist whom I will call Antonio, like-wise traced the distinction betweenhumans and other-than-humans to thesphere of knowledge, but his grounds fordoing so differ radically from those ofLinnaeus. Human knowledge as transmit-ted through language, is pure ‘

siwsawi

,’Antonio claims—i.e., it is talk, opinions,views and judgments of particular individ-uals. As such it is knowledge of a particularkind: it is knowledge concerning the

opin-ions

of other humans and nothing else. It isthereby significantly different from thenon-linguistic, experiential knowledge thatis lived-through and gained

in

,

from,

with

and

within

the world; with and from plants,mountains, lakes, animals, and not least,certain knowledgeable places in the land-scape, so called

wak’as

. This kind of knowl-edge, my friend claims, is ‘

ukamaw

,’ theway things are. While humans may tell lies,other knowledgeable constituent subjectsof the world do not (with the exception of afew animal “tricksters”). While Antonioprobably would agree with Linnaeus thatthere are no scientists among the animals,he also resolutely assures that there are nocharlatans among the plants, no liarsamong the mountains.

Martha Hardman (1986) has shownthat Aymara speakers constantly uselinguistic ‘data-source marking’ (usually

by adding suffixes) in order to indicatewhether they are speaking from personalexperiential knowledge, from knowledgeacquired through language, or from non-personal knowledge. In this article, the twofirst categories will be discussed in somedetail. When Antonio distinguishesbetween the ‘

siwsawi

’ nature of the knowl-edge acquired through human languageand the ‘

ukamaw

’ nature of the personalknowledge acquired through non-linguis-tic interaction with other knowledgeablesubjects in the world, he is, according toHardman, using an Aymara linguistic logicthat is “so pervasive that speakers considerthe matter to be part of the nature of theuniverse” (1986:114). Consequently, thefailure to indicate from what kind ofknowledge one speaks is indeed lookedupon with suspicion: “Those who comeinto the community from outside and stateas personal knowledge facts which theyknow only through language (e.g., thingsthey have read in books) are immediatelycategorized as cads” (Hardman 1986:133).

This way of distinguishing betweendifferent kinds of knowledge according totheir source and supposed reliability hasinteresting implications for the currentprocess of ‘decolonization’ of the Bolivianuniversity and the recent establishment of‘indigenous universities’ as integral partsof the ‘decolonizing’ state politics launchedby the Evo Morales administration since2006. The meaning of ‘decolonization,’though, is far from unambiguous incontemporary Bolivian society. In officialdiscourse the government has proved anotable capacity of semantic and politicalstretching of the concept ‘decolonization.’For instance, it may refer to ‘development,’‘industrialization,’ ‘modernization,’ ‘patri-otism,’ ‘nationalization,’ and ‘economicgrowth,’ but it may also denote a forthrightcritique against, and political measures torespond to, imperialism, capitalism, neolib-eralism, racism, sexism, developmental-ism, ecological depredation, and (in the

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area of knowledge production and educa-tion) eurocentrism and the overestimationof any tradition of thought coming from theNorth and the concomitant inferiorizationof any indigenous tradition of thought (seeBurman 2011:69).

Antonio was born and raised in a ruralAymara community. Currently, though, helives more or less permanently in the city ofEl Alto and he studies political science atthe university in La Paz. While he is farfrom being the only student with Aymaraas mother tongue, the teachers lectureexclusively in Spanish. Although the Span-ish that is spoken in the Bolivian Andes hasbeen influenced in many ways by theAndean languages and that reference-making is an established academic practice,there is usually no explicit ‘data sourcemarking’ going on from behind the lecturedesk. So while the teacher, usually a non-indigenous male (although this is chang-ing), probably thinks he is lecturing on theway things are, Antonio and his fellowAymara students are more dubious. Whenthe teacher speaks of how Karl Marx wrote

Das Kapital

in London, without stating thathe knows this from non-personal knowl-edge gained through human language(e.g., from a book), it appears as though theteacher speaks from personal experientialknowledge, and consequently, as thoughhe had been there in London by the side ofMarx’s writing-desk and experienced forhimself how the work was written. SinceAntonio and his fellow Aymara studentsare well aware of the established claim thatMarx published the first volume of hismagnus opus sometime back in the 1860s,the teacher—due to his failure to perform acorrect ‘data source marking’—appears tobe a talker with overly far-reaching claimsof knowledge. It is not as though Antonioand his friends really think that the teacheris

actually

claiming to have been there inLondon in the 1860s; however, to them, theteacher has a confused way of dealing withdifferent kinds of knowledge since he

disregards the implications of the fact thatwhat he claims to know stems from differ-ent kinds of sources and that differentclaims of knowledge therefore have differ-ent degrees of trustworthiness. Hence,when teacher after teacher makes this kindof seemingly unsubstantiated andconfused claims, Antonio comes to theconclusion that lectures and books are goodenough if you are interested in people’sopinions, ideas and judgments, but they areno more than

siwsawi

—words said, heardand read, not experience lived.

Here I pose a question: if books andlectures are basically about the opinions ofspecific individuals and proper knowledgeis to be gained only in the experiential, non-linguistic, inter-relational dealings withand in the world, is there not a risk that aproject aimed at decolonizing knowledgeand decolonizing the university preciselyby way of books and lectures—i.e., in alogocentric, or as I would suggest, a ‘libro-centric’ project of decolonization—ends upreproducing the colonial epistemologicalasymmetries of knowledge production? Onthe one hand, then, this article scrutinizesthe problems linked to the ‘

siwsawi

’ natureof conventional academic knowledge inrelation to a critical and creative process ofdecolonization; on the other hand, itexplores the ‘

ukamaw

’ nature of experientialknowledge and the prospects for this kindof knowledge to lay the fundaments for adecolonial epistemological transformationof the Bolivian university and the recentlyestablished indigenous universities.Fundamentally, the paper addresses thequestion of what it means to know, whatknowledge is, and what it means to be aknowing and knowledgeable subject in theBolivian Andes today, in a context in whichsubalternized traditions of thought gainnew urgency in new educational and polit-ical dynamics and different visions andclaims of truth coexist, coalesce and collide.

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II. E

PISTEMOLOGY

AND

THE

C

OLONIALITY

OF

K

NOWLEDGE

In his comments to Nurit Bird-David’sarticle “Animism revisited,” EduardoViveiros de Castro (1999:79) argues thatepistemology is a quintessentially modernbusiness and nothing that indigenouspeoples have dedicated any significantintellectual efforts to come to terms with.Theirs has been an issue of ontology,Viveiros de Castro argues, not epistemol-ogy. In as much as epistemology is under-stood to be a detached, decontextualizedand disembedded scholarly discussion onthe nature of knowledge for its own sake,he is certainly right; in this form it hashardly been an issue of great import forindigenous peoples in general. However, asBird-David (1999:87) argues, “modernityhas no monopoly over such questions,” i.e.,questions such as ‘how do we know whatwe know?’ and ‘what is knowledge?’

A man who has articulated questionssuch as these from a perspective that hardlycould be characterized as conventionally‘modern’ is don Carlos Yujra Mamani, anAymara shaman in his late 50s with whomI have maintained a dialogue on theseissues for several years.

1

Being not only ashaman but also an influential and radical

indianista-katarista

activist, don Carlosembodies the current process in Boliviansociety of indigenous activism and statepolitics intertwining with indigenouscosmology and ritual therapeutic knowl-edge (Burman 2010).

2

Don Carlos is notfamiliar with the term ‘epistemology,’ andalthough he is keen on constantly spicinghis heavily Aymara-accented Spanish withnew ‘alien’ terms, I doubt he would haveused it if he was familiar with the term. To

don Carlos, issues that could be character-ized as ‘epistemological’ are significant notfor being topics of a specific, separate sortover which one could pore in a detachedmanner, but for being inseparable withquestions of health, politics, ethics, and lifeitself. Hence, they are important. In theAndes, moreover, due to almost 500 yearsof imposition of ‘strange’ systems ofknowledge—and I refer here to a colonialprocess of what Bolivian Quechua philoso-pher Victor Hugo Quintanilla characterizesas “the negation (…) of the indigenouscultures and the establishment of oneculture, of one world, of one centre”(2009:128, my translation)—epistemologi-cal issues have turned into issues ofurgency, especially so during the lastdecades of massive indigenous mobiliza-tions. When one’s ontology, one’s cosmol-ogy and one’s very existence are denied,epistemological issues gain in importance.For, if one’s knowledge of reality is claimedby powerful and dominant Others to befalse, then one’s way of knowing realitywould be erroneous—one’s way of reveal-ing the nature of the world would bemistaken. Thus, to defend an ontology is todefend an epistemology; one’s way ofknowing is revindicated, reclaimed anddefended and ‘how do we know what weknow?’ becomes a question of political,existential and even cosmological import.Colonialism produces anti-colonial reac-tions: political, cosmological, ontologicaland, by extension, epistemological resis-tance and insurgence. Thus, to actuallyunderstand why epistemology has turned

1

I use the term ‘shaman’ as the generic termfor a great variety of Aymara ritual and ceremo-nial specialists, e.g., the

yatiri

(he/she whoknows), the

qulliri

(curer), the

ch’amakani

(ownerof darkness), the

amawt’a

(wise one).

2

Indianismo

and

katarismo

are ethnopoliticalideologies which imbue the last decades of in-digenous mobilizations and struggles in the Bo-livian Andes. In order to understand the rise ofthe

indianista-katarista

movement in Bolivia, oneought to scrutinize (1) the post-revolutionaryAymara experience of continuing sociopoliticalmarginalization, second-class citizenship anddiscrimination and (2) the collective memory ofcolonial serfdom and indigenous rebellion (cf.Rivera 2003).

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into an issue of import for indigenouspeoples in the Andes we should explorewhat has been labeled ‘the coloniality ofknowledge’ (see, e.g., Lander 2000; Walshet. al. 2002; Mignolo 2005).

To speak of the coloniality of knowl-edge is to recognize that colonial domina-tion has an epistemic dimension and thatepistemic violence is an integral part of thecolonial relations of power that character-ize the world since 1492 (see, e.g., Dussel2008). One outcome of this epistemologicaldisequilibrium is that the knowledge ofdon Carlos, the Aymara shaman and activ-ist introduced above is relentlessly inferior-ized in relation to that of a scientist workingwithin the discursive practices and cosmo-logical assumptions of the dominant North.Academia and the university are, needlessto say, vital components in the machinerythat once established this epistemologicalasymmetry and that currently ensures thatit is reproduced, in the global North as wellas in the global South. Thus, Boaventura deSousa Santos (2008) argues that theNorth—in a process of epistemic colonialimposition and by actively producingepistemic absence where epistemic alterityis detected—diminished and continuouslydiminishes the world’s diversity of experi-ences and knowledge systems, and henceits potentiality for reinventing alternativesto the hegemonic mainstream epistemol-ogy of the North. It has not only been aquestion of imposing a dominant episte-mology upon colonial subalterns in orderto replace ‘local’ systems of knowledge. Anequally integral part of the colonialmachinery of control and power has alsobeen to know the Other (the South) in thehegemonic concepts and within the domi-nant logic of the Self (the North) (Santos2008:30). The practice of anthropology as awhole was once launched with this missionin mind. In other words, and as noted byEdward Said (1978) and many others,knowledge is never innocent; knowledgeproduction is never disconnected from the

mechanisms of power. Just as it may be problematic to speak

of

one

Aymara tradition of thought, it mayalso be problematic to speak of anythingresembling

one

homogenous culture ofknowledge in the sphere we call the North,not only because the North is by no meansgeographically restricted to Europe andNorth America, but also because all humansocieties manifest heterogeneity and inter-nal contradictions. In other words, there isno one homogenous and consistent ‘episte-mology of the North’ or one monolithic‘indigenous epistemology,’ but a multitudeof epistemological currents that overlap,merge and contradict each other. Neverthe-less, an emphasis on the fragmentary andpatchy nature of the world may lead us tooverlook the asymmetric structure ofpower that underpins it. There is, defi-nitely, an epistemological disequilibrium inthe world. Knowledge produced within acertain tradition of thought, i.e., the scien-tific, modern tradition of the North, is heldto be superior. And however heteroge-neous that tradition may arguably be, iden-tifying some of its characteristics is far fromunfeasible.

The epistemology that has been posi-tioned in the world as the hegemonictheory of knowledge is one that claimsdetachment of the known from the knowerand the act of knowing. This epistemologylargely stems from Cartesian metaphysics.In the words of Tim Ingold, it is an episte-mology that supposes the “total disengage-ment of the subject from the world”(2000:169) and one that “introjects a divi-sion between mind and world, or betweenreason and nature, as an ontological apriori” (2000:391). Thus, the knowingsubject is enclosed in itself and peeks out ata world of objects and produces suppos-edly objective knowledge of those objects.The knowing subject is thus able to knowthe world without being part of that worldand he or she is by all accounts able to takea dispassionate view of it and, thus, to

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produce knowledge that is supposed to beuniversal and independent of context. Thishegemonic notion of knowledge produc-tion generates discursive scientific prac-tices and sets up interpretative frames thatmake it difficult to think outside of theseframes; simultaneously, it activelyrepresses anything that actually is articu-lated, thought and envisioned from outsideof these frames.

III. PLACES TO THINK WITH

A year after the rise to power of EvoMorales, the shaman and activist donCarlos was employed on a special intercul-tural health project of the Bolivian HealthMinistry with the task of integrating ‘indig-enous therapeutic knowledge’ into thenational health system. Only a few of hisworkmates understand him, he says. Mostdo not. “They only think with piqi (thehead), that’s why they are fools,” he says.“How can they possibly know anything ifthey haven’t felt it?” he asks rhetorically,pointing to the intimate connection inAymara concepts of knowledge between‘reason’ and ‘feeling.’ In most ethnographicaccounts of Aymara body-and-mindconceptualizations, ‘reason’ and ‘thought’have been related to piqi, i.e., the head,while ‘feeling’ and ‘emotion’ have beenrelated to chuyma. Chuyma is often trans-lated as ‘heart’ since many of the qualitiesand emotions related to it resemble thosethat Spanish-speaking Bolivians say dwellin the heart. However, ‘heart’ in a less meta-phorical sense is called lluqu in Aymara,and a more accurate translation of chuymawould be ‘lungs.’ On some occasionschuyma is spoken of as a specific organ withparticular qualities. On other occasions, themeaning of chuyma is expanded to denotenot only the lungs but the entire thorax,which, as Andrew Orta (1999: 865) hasnoted, is the “somatic seat of personhood.”Nevertheless, as will be discussed more

thoroughly below, there are also occasionswhen chuyma denotes something muchgreater than the thorax and when humansubjectivity is not bounded by the humanskin. As I argue elsewhere (Burman 2010),any clear-cut distinction between thefaculty of reason supposedly located in piqiand the faculty of emotions supposedlylocated in chuyma would distort any under-standing of Aymara epistemology andconceptions of body and mind. One thinksas much with chuyma as with piqi, or evenmore so. When don Carlos speaks of ‘feel-ing’ as the ground for ‘knowing,’ he doesnot speak of anything opposed to thought.According to don Carlos, emotions, justlike thoughts, enter the human bodythrough smells and winds and becomeconsolidated in chuyma. These emotions areexperienced and, accordingly, they giverise to personal experiential knowledge,i.e., ‘ukamaw’ knowledge; knowledge of theway things are. Thus, when I asked donCarlos and Antonio—the young Aymaraintellectual and activist introducedabove—if they think with chuyma or withpiqi, both of them hesitated somewhat, thenthey gave quite forced answers withoutmuch substance. At the end of his answer,don Carlos seemingly got tired of me andasked: “Why do you ask such stupid ques-tions? You should know better after allthese years!” I think most anthropologistshave experienced similar situations; one’squestions rest on premises that are notthose of one’s interlocutor. In this case itwas obviously so that my question restedon a false premise, namely that piqi andchuyma are categorically distinct and thatthey operate in different spheres. Mostfundamentally, though, my question wasbased on the likewise false premise thatthinking and knowing is something goingon inside an autonomous subject. Theentire question was thus predicated uponan initial ontological dualism between twoseparate worlds: the intentional world ofhuman subjects (the knower) and the object

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world of material things (the known). DonCarlos and Antonio claim, though, to live inbut one world; an ever changing worldcharacterized by political contradictionsand social and cultural dynamics whichthey have to know how to deal with andhow to adapt to in their movementsbetween rural and urban contexts, but still,one world. And they claim to be intimatelyconnected to other knowledgeable subjectsin that world.

When don Carlos and Antonio speak inSpanish they often speak of ‘beingconnected’ (‘estar conectado’) to the ajayusuywiris, achachilas and awichas, i.e., theancestral, life-generating and knowledge-able beings of the cosmos and of theAndean landscape. At first I simplyassumed that ‘connection’ meant some sortof relation binding together two or morediscrete entities. However, when I realizedthat they use the terms ‘mayisthapita’ or‘mayachata’ to speak of the same thing inAymara, my understanding of ‘connection’began to change. ‘Mayisthapita’ and‘mayachata’ both suggest ‘being one.’ Beingconnected to the ajayus uywiris, then,implies being one with them. By participat-ing in the same ritual interchange and flowof life, winds, smells, breathing, then,ajayus uywiris and humans become one.This oneness is experienced particularlypowerfully at certain sacred and knowl-edgeable places (wak’as) and at particularmoments (rituals). This oneness, moreover,tells us something essential about Aymaraepistemology: not only do we think withother parts of our bodies than the head, butas knowing subjects, we are not boundedby our skin. Not only do we think with ourchuyma, but when don Carlos answers that“we’re in chuyma right now” to my ques-tion what chuyma actually is, he pointstowards the fact that we, as living sentientand cognizant beings, are part of thechuyma of pacha, i.e., ‘to be in chuyma’ is tobe embraced by the cosmos and becomeone with it together with other living

sentient and cognizant beings, human andother-than-human, and to think and knowwith them. Consequently, to ask as I didwhether one thinks with the head or withthe lungs is not only a proof of ignorance,but a quite irrelevant question.

When Antonio tells me that he thinkswith both his head and his lungs, but alsowith pacha, the cosmos, and with certainwak’a places in the landscape, he overturnswhat hegemonic epistemology has estab-lished as ‘thinking’ and ‘knowing.’ Andfundamentally, he goes far beyond anysubject-object dichotomy. Being one with,and experiencing with and from within,what conventional, dominant epistemol-ogy would label ‘the object of knowledge,’knowledge does not have to take the detourthrough words, and what is more, it is evenmore trustworthy if it does not. As Ingold(2000:99) claims: “the conditions of truth(…) lie not in the correspondence betweenan external reality and its ideal representa-tions, but in the authenticity of the experi-ence itself.” To be one with the subjectmatter of knowledge and to experience theworld from within indeed give rise toauthentic experiences. Only in a represen-tationalist theory of knowledge and anontological dichotomy between mind andnature (a Cartesian epistemology) is thecorrespondence between inside (thought,language) and outside (material world)relevant. What we are dealing with here isdifferent—it is a participatory understand-ing of thought and knowledge. If represen-tationalist logocentrism considers thathuman language ideally provides a directaccess to ‘reality,’ then this would be itsopposite.

What don Carlos and Antonio manifestis an epistemology of engagement (Ingold2000:216) or a relational epistemology(Bird-David 1999) with an ontological start-ing point of oneness. This means that pacha,the cosmos, enters directly into the consti-tution of our subjectivities, “not only as asource of nourishment but also as a source

108 ANDERS BURMAN


of knowledge” (Ingold 2000:57). To theshaman and activist don Carlos, the nour-ishing and the knowledging dimensions ofthe world are intimately interlaced. Windsand smells make us think and feel becausethey enter our bodies through our chuymaand they become part of us; they thinkthrough, with and from within us andmake us experience and sense the world, ina sense, they teach us by becoming onewith us. The same goes for plants, water,minerals and animals. They teach us asthey feed us. They make us live and think,because they enter our bodies and becomepart of our beings, be it for a moment ormore permanently. In the same manner, wethink and experience through, with andfrom within pacha, and especially through,with and from within the wak’as, the sacredand knowledgeable places in the Aymaralandscape. To know the world is to sense itand to be one with it. This is, of course, onlycomprehensible in a cosmos that is itselfsentient, knowing and responsive and inwhich social relations between knowledge-able beings can “override the boundaries ofhumanity as a species” (Ingold 2000: 107).

A discussion of notions such as thesemay easily turn abstract and disembeddedfrom the very context within which theyoriginate. Let me therefore once moreanchor this discussion in a specific Aymaralifeworld.

Wara is a woman of Aymara origin whowas born in the city of La Paz during theBanzer dictatorship in the 1970s. Hergrandparents migrated from the country-side to the peripheral areas of La Paz in the1950s, where they took up low-status occu-pations. Her parents, with experience ofdiscrimination and racism due to theirorigin, thought it would be best not to teachher the Aymara language. Accordingly, likemany urban men and women of her age,Wara does not speak more than a fewwords of her grandparents’ mother tongueand her sense of ‘Aymara identity’ has beenfar from obvious but instead has given rise

to existential queries. When she was study-ing at the university, Wara’s queries weregiven a frame of social and political strug-gle within the indianista-katarista students’movement and colonialism was identifiedas the root cause of her sense of having adenied ‘self’ and dwelling in a deniedworld. To Wara, colonialism presents itselfnot as some imposed ‘other’ but rather as afeeling of loss, of incompleteness and ofphysical mutilation. Showing how meta-phors of colonialism as collective bodilymutilation can be experienced in the indi-vidual body (see, e.g., Burman 2009:121-2),she says: “I have always felt emptiness oras though a part of my body was missing, afoot or an arm somewhere.”

Approaching Aymara shamans andengaging in ritual practice at sacred wak’aplaces has been a way for Wara to deal withthis. When she prepares an offering for theancestral and knowledgeable beings thatconstitute these places, she directs herthoughts and embodies particular move-ments and postures. For every offeringWara prepares, her ritual skills improveand she feels that her own sarawi, i.e., herway of doing things, comes to resemble heridea of the sarawi of the ancestors. Shebegins to experientially approximate‘proper’ Aymara order in the world and inher self. The completeness of the offeringbecomes coextensive with her owncompleteness. Wara says: “During ritualsand in the sacred places I feel complete, andI feel that the ancestors are there among usin the circle, and I feel that nothing is miss-ing now.”

The most well-written and profoundethnographic account of this would not beenough for accomplishment of thiscompleteness. Bodily ritual practice andexperience is required. Ritual practiceinvolves both ‘sarawi’ and ‘amtawi,’ doingand knowing, acting and remembering. Asshe engages in ritual practice at wak’aplaces, Wara feels her body move in accor-dance with the order of the world and that



she imbibes a ‘proper’ system of knowl-edge. By remembering and acting in accor-dance with this knowledge, she becomesre-membered. To Wara, it is a transforma-tive experience of becoming one with pacha,the cosmos, and with her own origin. Whenthe offerings are handed over and burned,Wara senses that “the ancestors recognizeyou.” This recognition is mutual. By leav-ing the city, climbing the mountains,preparing the offerings, and handing themover, Wara recognizes the presence of theachachilas and awichas in the landscape, bethat in stones, rocks, mountains, lakes oranimals, and she reaffirms their status asancestral beings. By accepting her offer-ings, the achachilas and awichas recognizeWara as a person, and most importantly, astheir granddaughter—an Aymara person.Thus, to have actual knowledge of theworld and of the ancestral beings therein, isto have experienced them, to have sharedwith them and to have become one withthem, and thus, to have thought with them.And to have actual knowledge of thenature of one’s existence is to have experi-enced this oneness, or as don Carlos andAntonio calls it: mayisthapita, mayachata. Inthis case, ritual practice establishes theconditions for knowledge to come about; toreveal knowledge as it is present in theworld and to make the participants atten-tive to the world. What we know is insepa-rable from how we know and there is nodistinguishability of the knower and theknown. Knowledge is therefore not of theworld, but happens and grows among itsdifferent knowledgeable constituents andfrom within it.

There is, then, nothing esoteric about‘thinking with places’; it is rather a way toproduce knowledge from beyond Carte-sian dichotomies such as nature-cultureand object-subject and from beyond thehegemony of logocentric and librocentricepistemologies. Experience is certainlycentral to the Aymara epistemology.However, as we shall see now, a certain

kind of words also plays a crucial role inAymara knowledge production.3

IV. MEDICINE WORDS

Qulla means medicine, aru meansword. Qulla arus reside in the chuyma of anytrue shaman. They are words that originatein the lungs, not in the head; they are wordsthat hold the power to cure. In order tounderstand what it means to cure in theAymara context we would have to lookbriefly at Aymara notions of illness (for amore exhaustive account, see Burman2010). The Aymara world is imbued withajayus, conventionally translated as ‘spir-its.’ The ajayu is a prerequisite for the flowof life, a requirement for all varieties ofexistence. Where there is life, there is ajayu.However, the Aymara ajayu is not a Carte-sian ‘ghost in the machine.’ Nor is it a ‘soul’in the sense of a permanent and stablepersonal spiritual core. Ajayus are allaround us. They permeate the landscapeand place, being and existence, body andmind; they make us live, feel and think. Thebeings that are labeled ‘Andean deities’ inconventional ethnography are no more norless than different ajayus supervising andallowing the flow of life through all formsof existence.

However, there are also other ajayus.There are harmful ajayus that make peoplestep out of the flow of life and enter otherflows where there is no reciprocity. Thereare ‘strange’ ajayus that cause disorder,illness and even death. Most illnesses in theAymara world are explained through asystem of therapeutic knowledge in whichthese ‘strange’ ajayus play a crucial role.

3 Moreover, Tristan Platt (1992: 138) andothers have shown that written words in theform of historical documents are perceived tohave power and that they therefore are storedcautiously by indigenous authorities as funda-ments of historical legitimacy and communalland rights. However, these dynamics are be-yond the scope of this article.

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Healthy, friendly and socially integratedpersons are so because of their onenesswith the ajayus uywiris, i.e., the protective,benevolent ancestral beings. By the sametoken, sick, aggressive and antisocialpersons are so because of their onenesswith the strange ajayus. However, thestrange ajayus are not considered to be thor-oughly evil spirits. They are unreliable,though, and since they have the power tocause misfortune in the world, they areoften likened to the white, colonial oppres-sors, the q’aras4; they are exploitative,abusive and ‘strange.’ Moreover, they enterpeople’s bodies, minds and lungs andcause illness and distorted views andunderstandings of the world. Don Carlosexplains it thus: “Strange spirits enter.That’s why they speak badly. Like Sánchezde Lozada5 and [George W.] Bush; thisperson is sick, that’s why he kills people.”This quote reveals an interesting fact that Iexplore elsewhere (Burman 2009 and 2010):Aymara shamans often speak of colonial-ism in terms of an illness (an imposed‘strange’ power causing disorder and adistorted view of the world). Likewise,they speak of decolonization in terms of acure.

There are many different therapeuticpractices to deal with the illnesses causedby ‘strange’ spirits, but the use of qulla arus,medicine words, is central to many of them.Qulla arus are used for guiding people back

into the relational, life-generating fields ofthe cosmos, and for disengaging them fromthe relational fields of ‘strange’ spirits.They are also a way to disclose knowledge.However, the qulla arus are not words fortransmitting knowledge to people, but forguiding people’s attention in a world ofhuman and other-than-human knowledge-able social subjects and to induce people toexperience for themselves the way thingsactually are, i.e., to create ‘ukamaw knowl-edge,’ as Antonio calls it, or to ‘sense theworld’ as don Carlos says. When donCarlos speaks qulla arus to people, nothingis actually passed on. It is more as thoughhe is telling a story in which the attention ofthe listener is guided into the story, a wayof conducting people’s attention alongcertain paths (cf. Ingold 2000:190). Thisway, qulla arus are “instruments of percep-tion” (Ingold 2000:146); they educate one’sattention and make one see into the worldrather than merely look at it. As such, theyare quite different from conventional writ-ten text. Nevertheless, as the followingaccount shows, don Carlos has had a fasci-nation with written words since earlychildhood.

In the early 1960s in the rural Aymaraprovince of Omasuyos, don Carlos was onhis long way home after a whole day atschool. Although he still had problemsunderstanding his monolingual Spanish-speaking teacher, the few terms he hadspent in school had given him some basicwriting and reading skills. And he waskeen on using these skills. All the way to hishome, he wrote the names of animals onstones by the roadside with a piece of chalk.He wrote “cóndor,” “zorro,” “llama” justbecause he liked to see words in writtenform. Once at home, and to his mother’schagrin, he wrote the names of animals,plants and persons on the adobe walls ofthe house. He was severely reprimandedby his mother.

Some 40 years later don Carlos’ itch towrite resulted in a wonderful book (Yujra

4 Q’ara is the Aymara term for Bolivians ofEuropean descent. It literally means ‘peeled’and its usage is often explained by Aymara peo-ple with an anecdote about how the Spaniardscame to what is now Bolivia ‘without anything,no women, no belongings, no land,’ i.e., peeled.The dominant are socially and culturally‘peeled.’

5 Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, “Goni,” wasPresident of Bolivia twice. His first mandate wasfrom 1993 to 1997, and the second was from Jan-uary 2003 to October 2003, when a massive in-digenous uprising forced him to resign and fleeto the US. Sánchez de Lozada is currently beinginvestigated for human rights violations andgenocide on account of the atrocities committedduring his last weeks in power.



2005) entitled Laq´a achachilanakan jach´atayka amuyt´äwinakapa (the Great mother-thoughts of our ancestors). It is a bilingualbook, first written by don Carlos in theAymara language and then translated intoSpanish by some of his friends. In his book,the entire pacha, the Aymara cosmos, isdrawn to our attention. However, to donCarlos, there is no knowledge in books.And this is not in the sense that Plato, forinstance, considered the written word avisible façade for the inner sonic reality ofspoken words (Ingold 2000:247). To donCarlos, the essential distinction is notbetween knowledge conveyed in spokenwords and knowledge conveyed in writtenwords, but between knowledge conveyedin words and knowledge conveyed in theworld. The words written by don Carlos donot primarily represent things, a world orideas. His written words are qulla arus andthey draw our attention to certain featuresin the landscape, such as sacred knowl-edgeable wak’a places, and to certain prac-tices, movements and events and howthese are related to one another and to us. Itis a relational, often non-propositional,knowledge; a knowledge not of but fromwithin the world; an experiential kind ofknowledge that stems from sensing theworld from within.

I once asked don Carlos what willhappen to all his knowledge the day hedies. He looked puzzled, so I reframed myquestion: “Are you worried about nothaving a particular disciple to whom youcan pass on your knowledge?” This time hesmiled and shook his head, then he said:

You still don’t get it, do you? I can’tpass anything on to anyone. Theyhave to sense it for themselves. Ican only point to the places theyshould go…then they will go thereand feel and think. If it’s a goodplace, they will think goodthoughts.

Consequently, don Carlos does notwrite or speak qulla arus in order to trans-mit knowledge. His words are spoken andwritten in order for people to experiencefor themselves the source of his knowledgeand to become one with this source. Thequlla arus, then, do not represent the world;they orient us to sense it for ourselves, andthey do so as written text and spokenwords alike.

In contemporary Bolivian society,though, there is of course no absolutedividing line between hegemonic theoriesof knowledge and indigenous epistemolo-gies, between propositional and non-prop-ositional knowledge, between knowledgeof the world and knowledge from within theworld, or between representationalist andrelational ways of knowing. You do notfind any such clear-cut dichotomies afteralmost 500 years of asymmetric and colo-nial intermingling of epistemologies andknowledge systems from different tradi-tions. Moreover, Aymara people havedeveloped a striking capacity to manageseemingly contradictory logics and prac-tices simultaneously. This does not mean,though, that contemporary Aymara cultureis essentially ‘inclusive’ and ‘open’ to anyexternal influences, as Swiss theologianand philosopher Josef Estermann (2006)argues when he speaks of Aymara spiritu-ality in terms of a smooth reception ofChristian elements into a receptive Aymaracosmology. To argue thus would be tounderestimate the significance of past andpresent colonial power relations. Toacknowledge that hegemonic and indige-nous ways of knowing have intermingledin the Andes in different ways for almost500 years should not lead us to overlook thefact that within the context of the colonialworld-system and the modern state and,not least, its educational institutions rela-tional ways of knowing and indigenoustraditions of thought are systematicallyinferiorized. Nevertheless, these subal-ternized ways of knowing are still there.

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And in the Bolivian Andes, they arecurrently making themselves felt at theuniversity.

V. BOOKS TO THINK ABOUT

Soon after Evo Morales and theMovimiento al Socialismo came to power in2006, ‘decolonization’ was posed as one ofthe overall political visions of the newgovernment. Higher education was fromthe outset identified as a key area for theimplementation, generation and articula-tion of decolonizing politics. This should beunderstood against the background ofindigenous educational claims and initia-tives in South America being increasinglytransferred from the field of basic educa-tion (such as the claims from the 1970s andonwards for an intercultural and bilingualeducation, claims that to a large extent wereaddressed and neutralized by neo-liberalmulticulturalism) to that of higher educa-tion (such as the current demands for thedecolonization of knowledge and theuniversity) (López et. al. 2009:246). InBolivia, one of the most massive mobiliza-tions for creating something ‘proper’ in thefield of higher education was generatedfrom the popular and indigenous demandsfor a university in the city of El Alto in thelate 1990s. This resulted in the UniversidadPública de El Alto (UPEA). One urbanAymara activist who was part of thesemobilizations remembers the process thus:

We’ve created this all by ourselves.El Alto rose to its feet. And I re-member those first months, howwe attended classes seated on ado-be blocks and how our older broth-ers were our lecturers without anypayment whatsoever…

Today UPEA is a very conventionaluniversity in many aspects, but quiteunconventional in others. It is conventional

in the sense that it offers its students thesame standard academic assortment andcurricular contents as most other universi-ties in Bolivia and elsewhere. No rhetoricalstatement of aiming at “recovering theidentities of the indigenous nations” canconceal that. Nor can the inclusion of ashort obligatory series of classes on “theHistory of the Indigenous Nations”6 in alldegree courses. However, UPEA is uncon-ventional in the sense that an overwhelm-ing majority of its students are of Aymaraorigin. It is unconventional in the way indi-anista-katarista ideologies imbue studentorganizations and activities. It is alsounconventional in its internal structuralfunctioning in which any student’s voiceand vote has the same weight as anyteacher’s and in which the social organiza-tions of El Alto have had a saying sinceUPEA was founded in the year 2000. All inall, though, indianista-katarista students ofUPEA usually emphasize the need for aprofound decolonization of their univer-sity.

Before UPEA was founded there wereother Aymara initiatives for a ‘proper’higher education. El Instituto Tecnológico yde Investigación Andino (Inti Andino) inthe province of Gualberto Villarroel wasone such initiative. As part of a NGO withan explicit indianista-katarista agenda, Iworked there as a teacher for two years adecade ago and I remember all the workthat was put into establishing subjects suchas Andean cosmology, Andean philosophy,Andean ecology, indigenous and commu-nitarian rights, and ‘traditional’ Andeanagronomy in the curriculum.

Another university with its roots in theindianista-katarista movement is the Univer-sidad Indígena Tawantinsuyu (UTA) whichwas founded in the small village of Laja inthe late 1990s. While UPEA, as describedabove, is conventional in some aspects and

6 http://www.elalto.galeon.com/up-ea.htm (accessed May 24th 2010).



unconventional in others, UTA is uncon-ventional in most aspects. UTA was theplace that radicalized Antonio, the youngAymara activist and intellectual introducedabove. In elementary school, Antonio didnot question the teachers’ doctrines butaccepted their view of the world as correct.He speaks of how he internalized officialBolivian history, how he pledged allegianceto the flag and how, during his militaryservice, he was taught to defend la patriawith his life. When he returned to his natalrural community after his military service,his mother advised him to get an educa-tion. Not too far from his community wasUTA, headed by Germán Chukiwanka,renowned for having been crowned as Incaduring the peak of the ‘500-years-of-resis-tance-campaign’ in 1992. Antonio decidedto register in the program of indigenousrights. He was not motivated by any ideo-logical conviction but simply by practicalconsiderations and the belief that univer-sity studies would open new horizons andopportunities for him. He did not foreseethe transformative experience that hisuniversity studies would come to be forhim. The teachers spoke powerfully andurged the students to ransack themselvesand their past to find answers instead ofsimply accepting the established colonialtruths. The study environment was one ofconstant, passionate debate and radicalizedthought. Antonio says:

It was as though someone hadpoured a bucket of cold water overme. It occurred to me that I hadbeen living my life with my eyesveiled. There, at the UTA, I under-stood this and came to see theworld the way it actually is, thatthe true knowledge is the knowl-edge of our ancestors.

At UTA, currently located in the city ofEl Alto, the students are offered programssuch as Andean Theology and Philosophy,

Indigenous Rights, Tourism, AymaraLinguistics and History. Though some ofthese programs may seem to be quite‘conventional,’ they all aim at having‘indigenous traditions of thought’ as theirfundamental point of departure, and not assome culturalist topping on a conventionalacademic curriculum. Moreover, not onlyAymara scholars of more or less conven-tional academic backgrounds teach at UTA,activists and shamans are also invited toshare their experiences in the lecture hall.UTA is therefore a quite unconventionaluniversity.

One fundamental reference for anykind of critical indigenous initiative foreducation is the small Aymara village ofWarisata. On August 2, 1931, a uniqueschool was founded there: Escuela-Ayllu deWarisata. The school took as its point ofdeparture the indigenous sociopoliticaland economic realities of the era and wassoon immersed in a severe questioning ofthe colonial character of 20th century Boliv-ian society and aimed at liberating ‘el indio.’After only a few years, though, the schoolwas closed by state authorities and itspremises were used for conventional statetraining of teachers. They became a toolused for assimilating the indigenouspeoples into Bolivian society (see Luykx1999).

Nevertheless, times are changing, andon the 77th anniversary of the founding ofthe Escuela-Ayllu, a state-controlled indige-nous university was founded in Warisataby Bolivia’s first indigenous president, EvoMorales Ayma. La Universidad IndígenaBoliviana Aymara ‘Tupak Katari’ in Wari-sata offers the following academicprograms: Agronomy, Veterinary andZoological Science, Textile Industry, andFood Industry. The indigenous university,it is argued, is one step towards the decolo-nization of higher education. Thus, thecircle is apparently closed and educationseems to have become a tool, not for colo-nial assimilation, but for indigenous eman-

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cipation, just like the Escuela-Ayllu in the1930s.

The following account, though, hints atsome of the tensions and ambiguities thatcharacterize the project of decolonizinghigher education. In September 2009 I wasinvited by two friends of mine—non-indig-enous, middle-class, radical intellectualsfrom the Morales administration—to comewith them for a seminar on ‘decolonizationand education’ at the Institute of Educationin Warisata, just next door to the recentlyestablished indigenous university. So wewent there and were met by a group ofenthusiastic Aymara students. The seminarwent well; my two state official friendsdiscussed the works of critical thinkerssuch as Enrique Dussel, Franz Hinkelam-mert, Paulo Freire and others, and theAymara students listened attentively.While listening to the seminar, I gazedthrough the window towards the west andit struck me that there, on the horizon, justa couple of miles away, stood the excep-tionally powerful ancestral mountainPachjiri. How many times had I notclimbed that mountain with the shamans?How many times had I not met the sunriseup there after entire nights of ritual activityon the mountain? It is an indeed knowl-edgeable place where and with which one,in the words of don Carlos, can ‘think goodthoughts’ and obtain ‘good knowledge.’And there it stood, visible from the windowof the lecture hall where issues such asdecolonization, knowledge and educationwere discussed. Many important booksand many significant writers werementioned, but nowhere in the discussionwas the name of Pachjiri, or any otherwak’a, uttered.

On our way home from Warisata Ipointed to the mountain ridge wherePachjiri stands and I asked my friends ifthey knew that place. They shook theirheads. I then began, right there on the bus,to formulate a series of questions that in theend led me to write this article. If the decol-

onization of knowledge primarily turns outto be a question of ‘critical’ intellectualtheorizing; if it is fundamentally aboutbooks, lectures and words; if indigenousepistemologies are disregarded or simplyignored in the very practice that expresslyaims at doing away with the epistemologi-cal disequilibrium of the present colonialworld-order—is there not a risk that the‘decolonization project’ ends up buttress-ing epistemological asymmetries instead ofundermining and challenging them? Isthere not a risk that the decolonization ofknowledge be converted into a project ofurbane scholars and intellectuals, a projectof Academia, a logocentric, librocentricproject? In other words, where does thisleave don Carlos, Antonio and Wara, thethree Aymara persons that I have intro-duced here, and their knowledge and expe-riences? Where does this leave themountains, the lakes, the trees, the condor,the fox, the fields, the rocks and stones andtheir knowledge and experiences?

Indigenous relational epistemologieshave a long history in what today is theBolivian Andes. Nevertheless, logocentricand librocentric notions of knowledge havea history and a central place when it comesto politically and academically recognizedproduction of knowledge, even in theproduction that in one way or another setsout to question the colonial hegemony inBolivian society. An example of this is 20th

century indianista ideologist Fausto Rein-aga, the man who as early as the 1960s envi-sioned a Universidad India and articulatedthe need for a Revolución India (see Reinaga2001 [1970]). Reinaga’s ideological legacyto the contemporary indianista-kataristamovement is vast. Nevertheless, in hisworks Reinaga is more immersed in aphilosophical critique of European thinkersand texts than in any indigenous traditionof thought. There are some extraordinarypassages in his writings where Reinagamanages to critically reassess Europeanthought from indigenous conceptions, but



these are quite rare. Usually, he criticizesEuropean philosophy through a philosoph-ical practice that is not very remote fromthat which he criticizes. Moreover, Reinagaoften flaunted with the fact that 14,000books were seized from his personal libraryin 1972 by the military dictatorship of HugoBanzer. Books were indeed central to hisindianista project.

Books are equally important to Boliv-ian Vice-president Alvaro García Linerawho is not far behind Reinaga when itcomes to quantity. His personal library issaid to host approximately 10,000 booksand at least before swearing the oath asVice-president he was said to read at leastsix hours a day, Karl Marx being, of course,one of his favorites. Another figure in theBolivian critical inteligentsia is Juan JoséBautista who argues for the need to ‘thinkfor ourselves’ but simultaneously claimsthat “anyone who wants to make a precisecritique of the categorial frame of modern-postmodern thought, just like they cannotdo without Marx, they cannot do withoutHinkelammert if they do not want toappear naïve” (2007:70, my translation).This, I would argue, is a problematic state-ment. And it is so since the “categorialframe of modernity” is currently not onlybeing criticized but transcended by Aymarashamans, activists and thinkers. Thecritique that is articulated by, for instance,don Carlos is grounded in experientialknowledge. He has never heard ofHinkelammert, he is not familiar with thewritings of Marx. Nevertheless, there isnothing naïve in his critique of modernity.But then, his critique is not a “precisecritique of the categorial frame” of moder-nity, but a critique that disobeys and deniesthe authority of any such frame.

In much scholarship dealing withknowledge, indigenous peoples and decol-onization there is a tendency of looking toMarx or Hinkelammert in order to under-stand the colonial and decolonial dynamicsat work not only in Bolivia but elsewhere

too. But to think that one could understandthese dynamics without taking seriouslythe knowledge production and the specificways of knowing of specific places would,to me, be naiveté. However, it is as thoughthe books, the European thinkers and thehegemonic, modern epistemologicalframeworks impede indigenous ways ofknowing that need to be seriously consid-ered.

One fresh breath of air in this context(though oft-ridiculed) is the BolivianMinister of Foreign Affairs, Aymara activistDavíd Choquehuanca, who claims to neverread books, but instead prefers to read, ashe says, ‘the wrinkles in the faces of ourelders.’ He characterizes the elders as‘walking libraries’ and speaks of the lithicremains of pre-colonial Andean societies as‘stone books.’7

Interestingly, both these tendencies, theones embodied most explicitly by Bautistaand Choquehuanca respectively, arepresent at the indigenous universities inBolivia. And both claim to be dealing withthe decolonization of knowledge. At theindigenous universities one can even expe-rience how the ontological and epistemo-logical assumptions differ from one class toanother and even from one moment toanother in one and the same class. Whatwould it mean, then, to decolonize knowl-edge and the university and what does itmean to be an indigenous university?

When I talk about these issues withAntonio he articulates two seeminglycontradictory standpoints. On the onehand, he forcefully emphasizes the impor-tance of ‘thinking for ourselves,’ in theAymara language, in Aymara categoriesand in Aymara ways, i.e., not as autono-mous individual subjects, detached fromthe world but as relational subjects think-ing and producing knowledge from withinand with the world. On the other hand, he

7 See e.g. http://www.wiphala.org/dav-id.htm (accessed May 24th 2010).

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recognizes the importance of being fluentin conventional librocentric ways of think-ing and producing knowledge. The contra-diction is, of course, only apparent. There isnothing strange or contradictory aboutusing the words and academic practices ofthe hegemonic colonial tradition in order tocontest the legitimacy of colonial power. AsI argue elsewhere (Burman 2010), indige-nous peoples have developed skills for re-signifying ‘strange’ colonial concepts andthen use them to defy colonial power. Thechallenge for indigenous universities,teachers and students is to use colonialhegemonic language and thought but with-out entirely embracing the epistemologicaland ontological presuppositions of conven-tional colonial Academia. Because there is arisk “that the world seems to be what Euro-pean (…) categories of thought allow youto say it is” (Mignolo 2005:36).

There is a pervasive notion amongstudents and teachers at different indige-nous Aymara initiatives for higher educa-tion that the ‘indigenous’ in ‘indigenousuniversity’ cannot merely be a question ofindigenous physical presence, in the sensethat teachers and students are of indige-nous origin, because then even UMSA in LaPaz (not to speak of UPEA in El Alto)would qualify as indigenous universitiessince a majority of their students couldarguably be said to be of indigenous origin.There has to be something more than indig-enous presence, they argue. The intellectualproduction and practice at an indigenousuniversity should be contestatario to thesystem; it should be insubordinate, defiant,disobedient. Moreover, it is argued, anindigenous university should work with,teach and produce ‘proper’ knowledge; itshould create knowledge outside of thehegemonic frames of modern rationality; itshould be a place for learning by de-learn-ing and re-learning; and all this shoulddefinitely be reflected in its curriculum.Currently though, there is a massive indig-enous physical presence and there is a lot of

epistemological disobedience going onamong students and also among someteachers, but there is still to a large extent a‘colonial’ curriculum. This is obviously soat the conventional universities, but it isalso to a certain degree so at the indigenousuniversities. The only perceivable excep-tion to this would perhaps be UTA, where‘Andean thought’ has had a more decisiveinfluence in the very generation of theacademic contents. Even at the indigenousuniversity in Warisata, a subject such asCosmovisión Andina, which stems from anindigenous tradition of thought, is stillincluded in an overall curriculum that bearsthe stamp of conventional Academia,though to a lesser extent than, say, UPEA orUMSA. Moreover, although ‘prácticas’ arecarried out by the students, these are morethe applications of knowledge received inthe lecture hall than the fundamental wayof generating knowledge and actuallycoming to know with and within the world.The overall academic practice still centerson books, words and lectures, i.e., the kindof knowledge that Antonio calls siwsawi,opinions and speculations heard, said andread.

Above, I argued that there is always arisk in using hegemonic academiclanguage and theories since they mayimpede us from seeing beyond the episte-mological and ontological presuppositionsof colonial modernity. I also argued that theacademic curriculum is to a certain extentstill conventional even at indigenousuniversities. The solution to this, then,would seem to be to decolonize the curric-ulum by transforming its content so thatindigenous traditions of knowledge andthought could be taught more comprehen-sively in the lecture halls. Nevertheless,and here I identify a second risk, if indige-nous knowledge is integrated into theuniversity it may result that instead ofdecolonizing the university we end upcolonizing indigenous knowledge. Let meexplain what I mean.



When Elisabeth Croll and David Parkin(1992) argue that indigenous peoples, theirenvironment and their knowledge existinseparably ‘within each other,’ they pointto something of fundamental importancefor this discussion. To institutionalizeAymara knowledge within the four colonialwalls of the university would be to decon-textualize it and disembed it from the verycontext and practices in and from withinwhich it is produced and transformed overtime. This in turn would mean separating“culture from place” (Ingold 2000:225)which would be to fundamentally distortthe nature of Aymara epistemology. More-over, any attempt at standardization ofAymara knowledge would be to fix it in aframe that is not its own and to reify andfreeze a cosmology and thus alter itsdynamic quality. Attempts have been made,for example, to compile dictionary-likecharts of ‘traditional’ Aymara knowledge,such as the meaning of dreams (an impor-tant source of knowledge). But suchattempts overlook the fact that Aymaraknowledge is not a standardized set of datathat can be transmitted through written orspoken words. Aymara knowledge isprimarily of an experiential kind. To knowthe meaning of dreams is to have dreamtand then to have experienced certain occur-rences in the world. But it is not as thoughthe words of knowledgeable persons are notimportant. They certainly are. But they areindications, guidance and incitements forexperiencing for oneself; they should not beconsidered knowledge or even tools fortransmitting knowledge. Where does thisleave librocentric Academia? Is it possible tothink with a book in the same way as onecan think with a place, say a mountain?According to don Carlos and Antonio, tothink with a book is like thinking with thespeculations and opinions of others. Youcan certainly use these speculations in youreveryday life. But if those others think colo-nial thoughts, you risk ending up thinkingcolonial thoughts. Mountains do not think

colonial thoughts. Books, then, are better tothink about, than to think with.

VI. CONCLUSION

Boaventura de Sousa Santos hasargued that “one of the failures of moderntheory was to not recognize that the reasonthat criticizes cannot be the same as thereason that thinks, construes and legiti-mizes that which is reprehensible”(2008:28, my translation). I think he is abso-lutely right. A few adjustments in ouracademic curriculums or in our lists ofreferences are not sufficient to bring aboutpolitical, theoretical, epistemological and,in the end, existential and cosmologicalparadigmatic revolts. We would still bereproducing the colonial images and‘truths’ that the hegemonic categories ofthought reduce the world to. To learn tothink in and with other categories is a goodstart, but other categories will not make ourontological pillars shiver. For that tohappen, other experiences are necessary. Inother words, there is no way we are goingto intellectually reason our way out of colo-niality, in any conventional academic sense.There is no way we are going to publish ourway out of modernity. There is no way weare going to read our way out of epistemo-logical hegemony.

Antonio argues that there is anotherpath. A couple of years ago, Antonio says,when he and his mother were on their wayto gather their cows for the night, hismother stopped on the hillside and pickedup a flower and inhaled its fragrance.“Chuym qhanartayitu” she said, “This opensup my heart for the light.” When Antonioremembers this episode a few years later hesays: “A smell can make you see the worldas it is; this is knowledge, this is the knowl-edge of our ancestors.”

I am not taking any romantic anti-intel-lectual stance here. What I am doing is toquestion the unidimensional conception of

118 ANDERS BURMAN


knowledge as reproduced in Academia.Moreover, I question the idea that anabstract, logocentric and librocentricproject of decolonization would be apt totranscend this unidimensionality. It is notmy intention to deny the importance ofbooks and words, but to put them in theirplace, and critically reassess the taken-for-granted epistemological presuppositions ofconventional academic practice.

It is not my aim to criticize the indige-nous universities in Bolivia, rather theopposite; I support them to the fullest.Against the constant attacks of conserva-tive right-wing academics, I certainlydefend the epistemological disobedienceand the critical knowledge productiongoing on at these universities and else-where. Nevertheless, we do not do the socalled ‘process of change’ or the EvoMorales administration any favor byuncritically applauding their every move.Indigenous universities are not some kindof decolonial havens. There is, of course, acolonial epistemological asymmetry evenat these universities. Not to acknowledgethat would be a proof of naiveté. However,it would be a proof of cynicism not toacknowledge the potential of the indige-nous universities for revealing the colonialroots of modern theories of knowledge, forun-learning and re-learning and for theacquisition of skills in the art of questioningengraved colonial truths.

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