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Review of The Good University

At a talk on southern theory in the Postcolonial Institute, Raewyn Connell invoked the imaginary ideal of the ‘smoke-filled Oxford pub’. This image seemed to epitomise what I once aspired to as an undergraduate at the University of Melbourne. Here, learned gentlemen would draw on their classical knowledge in the exchange of rhetorical contributions to a theme, augmented by puffs of the pipe and glasses of claret. 

Her recent book The Good University considers the evolution of the corporate model that has largely replaced the mortarboard with the business suit. The new ideal is a smart suited man or woman who can invoke the unlimited horizons that inspire capital, including new technologies and global markets. 

It would be tempting to feel nostalgic for the old distinction between “town and gown”. Connell’s book instead offers a plurality of models: “No single knowledge formation exhausts the human possibilities of knowing.” This includes the Visva-Bharati “world university” established in India, the Al-Azhar established in Cairo during the Fatimid dynasty, or recent models such as the Slow Professor movement in Canada.

Connell’s writing is clear and succinct, but it would have been good to see her purview extended to include less formal communities of independent scholars. Eastern models of the scholar offer an embodied understanding of learning that includes taste as well as knowledge. The generation of postgraduates that have been produced by the expansion of the university beckons some form of community that can be sustained outside formal structures. Some mention could be made of the tools that we have today for collaboration that can enable shared learning without the infrastructure that brings corporate interests. 

Raewyn Connell has been exemplary herself in sharing this knowledge through her blog on academic practices such as giving conference papers. 

We might hope for companion books that offer alternatives to the corporatised institutions – the Good Hospital or even the Good Office. 

The Good University is published by Zed Books.

The call from South symposium – Slow down!

The Epistemologies of the South symposium was held at Sydney University on 14 April. It received an extraordinary response.  Some of the sessions were standing room only.

The event was convened by Raewyn Connell and Fran Collyerto bring  together of scholars in the social sciences interested in the status of knowledge production in the South.  The morning included brief presentations from Maggie Walter, Vera Mackie, Helen Gardner, Devleena Ghosh and myself. We also heard from those involved in the Arenas of Knowledge project (João Maia, Robert Morrell, Vanessa Watson, Patrick Brownlee and Beck Pearse), a collaboration between Brazil, South Africa and Australia to map social science publishing in the South.

The rest of the day involved group sessions and plenaries where experiences of working in the South were shared. “Speaking bitter thoughts” was encouraged as a way of understanding the experience of working in the university environment, particularly for indigenous peoples (this reflected the People’s Tribunal in Melbourne).

There were many interesting discussions about the knowledge terrain of the South. The universal nature of English in scholarly publishing was seen by many as inevitable, but it was felt that there should be more allowance for the difficulty faced by second-language speakers and for concepts that were not easily translated. The economic challenge for poorer Southern countries of subscribing to scholarly journals was also mentioned. While there are Open Source alternatives for publication, the unpaid labour in maintaining these needs recognition as part of academic work.

More generally, there was broad discussion about the overall framework of knowledge production. The accepted capitalist model of knowledge accumulation through data extraction and publication output was questioned. This seemed to leave little time to reflect on what is learnt. It also does not accommodate indigenous practices, which focus more on the reproduction of knowledge as a form of stewardship. Reflecting the work of Unaisi Nabobo Baba on silence, there was discussion about the importance of listening as a scholarly modality. Overall, there was a feeling that knowledge in a  southern context should involve a quality of slowness that engages with the social relations at play.

Raewyn Connell felt the event had fulfilled its aims:

I was very pleased at the way the national symposium brought together different generations of scholars, and people working in different traditions of knowledge and thought.  Good discussions went on right through the day, and I’m hopeful that many links have been made that will energise this major re-thinking of social knowledge.

Critically, the symposium resolved to establish a mailing list so that the participants can organise future events that will continue these conversations. It will be interesting to see how these conversations develop. The academic machine offers a ready-made system for accumulating knowledge in professional journals. How might an archive of southern knowledge be designed?

Henry Lawson, Mary Gilmore, William Lane and “the little Utopias” – by Esteban Bedoya

In the last two months we have been to  two outstanding performances  dealing with the story of the Australian colonists  who settled in Paraguay at the end of the nineteenth century. In  November 2015  we attended the premiere of an opera composed and directed by Michael Sollis and staged by the Griffyn Ensemble. In February of this year we saw All My Love, a play by  Anne Brooksbank  dramatising the  close friendship between two icons of Australian literature, Mary Gilmore and Henry Lawson. This relationship was never to be consummated  because Gilmore set her mind and heart on pursuing her own personal Utopia by joining the  band of Australians, led by William Lane, who two years earlier, in 1893,  had travelled to Paraguay to establish two socialist  colonies and begin a new life.

Lane and his followers arrived  in a far-away country that had  recently endured  the bloodiest  conflict on South American soil: The War of the Triple Alliance, pitting Paraguay against Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay (1864-70). Paraguay had been considered  the country with the most promising future in the region, boasting  a passenger railway, ship building for international trade, the first iron foundry in the Southern Cone and an extensive telegraph network.  To support this infrastructure, hundreds of European engineers, architects and technicians had been recruited, which contributed to the development of an education  system and a program of urban modernization. Consequently, Paraguay was in the process of becoming the most modern and self-reliant country in South America.

Tragically, Paraguay became the victim of a bloodbath of epic proportions. Why? Historical documentation suggests that the principal reasons were its legitimate claims to independence and its pretensions to develop its own model of social and economic development. Statements by top political and military leaders involved in the war against Paraguay confirm their genocidal intent:

How much time, how many men, how many lives and how many resources are needed to end the war, to turn the Paraguayan population into smoke and dust, to kill even the fetuses in the wombs of the women?

The war in Paraguay concluded for the simple reason that we killed all Paraguayans over the age of ten.

It is a sad memory, but it provides the historical context for the arrival of the hardy Australians who reached Paraguay. William Lane and his comrades found a country in ruins where the surviving women and their children were incapable of raising a smile. But Paraguay needed to be repopulated so the Australians received a warm welcome. Lane, Cameron, Cadogan, Kennedy, Gilmore, Wood and the others were the founders of the colonies of New Australia and Cosme, which in due course bequeathed thousands of descendants —Australian and Paraguayan— as well as a rich cultural legacy that belongs to both of our nations.

The expedition that set sail on The Royal Tar on 17 July 1893 from Sydney Harbour provides a solid basis for writing the history of Paraguay-Australian bilateral relations. In the words of the historian Marisa González Oleaga, “They have left us a heritage of dignity and pride. Nobody will ever again recreate the experience of New Australia, but people will always envisage the possibility of new worlds beyond the horizon.” Many years have elapsed since that heroic enterprise, but Utopian ideals continue to inspire men and women throughout the world striving to reach the Light on the Hill.

First shipload of Australian immigrants left Sydney on the Royal Tar in 1893

 

Today, humanity is facing grave humanitarian crises. Limited resources frustrate endeavours to ameliorate the fate of people in embattled regions. We may draw inspiration from the pilgrims who sailed in The Royal Tar, risking their lives in a quest of a “little Utopia” in a distant land. It is significant that two works about this extraordinary adventure should be staged in Australia at the same time. The message conveyed by Gilmore, Lane and Lawson continues to resonate in the works of talented contemporary Australian artists and writers who remember the idealism and courage of their forebears. And by some mysterious telepathy, the saga of these intrepid settlers has also inspired an Argentinian movie director, Cristian Pauls, to tell their story. In collaboration with Paraguayan partners, the movie is currently in production on the other side of the Pacific.

This efflorescence of interest in the shared history of Australia and Paraguay is not mere coincidence. It is an urgent reminder that we should both work together to keep alive our historical memory. Our artists, poets and writers are telling us that it is our joint responsibility.

Esteban Bedoya is Chargé d’Affaires of Paraguay, Canberra.

People’s Tribunal book launch

You are invited to celebrate the launch of a new publication from the Aboriginal Humanities Project in association with Discipline

The People’s Tribunal: An Inquiry into the ‘Business Improvement Program’ at The University of Melbourne

 The book will be launched by Helen Johnson 

on Thursday 18 February from 6 to 8 pm at West Space, Level 1, 225 Bourke Street,
Melbourne, Vic, 3000

Roze a Wail’: Whales, Whaling and Dreaming

Roze a Wail’: Whales, Whaling and Dreaming
29-30 September 2016
Australian Indigenous Studies
The University of Melbourne
The conference is grounded in Indigenous peoples’ connection with whales through ritual, song and story; and post-contact, their involvement in the whaling industry and the impact of whaling on their lives and culture. The conference encourages diverse contexts for discussion; for example, historical, sociological, cultural, literary, philosophical, scientific, artistic, ecological and economic perspectives.
As well as papers that present Indigenous stories of whales and whaling, we are also interested in representations of Indigenous peoples and practices in literature, film and visual art. Key texts in this area might include Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and the novel and film of Witi Ihimaera’s The Whale Rider.
We especially welcome contributions that combine analysis with the experiential narratives of whales and nature-based lifestyles.
Expressions of interest should be sent to the Secretary, ‘Roze a Wail’ conference at <rozeawail@gmail.com>. A formal call for papers will be made in early 2016.
We thank Kim Scott for his permission to use ‘Roze a Wail’ (quoted from the opening pages of That Deadman Dance) as our conference title.

A South American perspective on the ‘rise’ of China

Is it possible to explain the phenomenon of China in South America with the North American concept of “rise”?

In the context of plural international dynamics, the idea of “rise” can be replaced by the notion of “presence”, as a point of departure to elaborate explanations about China according to the South American context. Both rise and presence would be complementary dynamics carried out into what Amitav Acharya has called “a multiplex world”

It is not surprising realists and idealists have come to see ‘the rise of China’ as the most important international phenomenon addressed by the International Relations theory (IRT). This issue has been so far addressed as a concern from the North, being the axis of two intertwined debates: the end of the American world hegemony and the power race between the United States and China.

The phenomenon of China certainly leads to uncertainty in analysing strategic contexts or project national foreign policies. Peter Katzenstein has addressed this concern: “[c]hange can lead to a degree of individual and collective insecurity and a politics of threat and fear that elicits a political and intellectual response –simplification through the creation of misleading binaries. Conditions of uncertainty and change and the search for stability are thus politically closely linked”. (Katzenstein, 2012, p. 3)

In this sense, the most important intellectual response to the phenomenon of China given by North American IRT has been the binary use of the concept of rise and whether China will be a peaceful or un-peaceful world power. However, to what extent does this search for stability satisfies South American necessities related to particular changes produced by the presence of China in the region? Does the concept of “rise” addressed by IRT’s leading paradigms explain the relation between China and South American states?

What does it mean “rise” for the IRT?

The IRT has generally assumed the idea that “rise” means a race for international power. From this point of view, China would be only the last modern case of a tragic list in which other great powers have risen and fallen during the last four centuries. The concept implies a competition between powerful states –mostly Western ones- whose rivalry has global scope because it implies the possibility of military conflicts between them.

Paul Kennedy’s book “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers” (Kennedy, 1988) was an important contribution to the understanding of “rise”, not because it was an original and assertive approach, but because it was a best seller that deeply addressed the concept at the end of the eighties, having considerable influence in the West and also on southern scholars who were up to date in Western intellectual trends during the post-Cold War years (Anthony Giddens, 1989).

Kennedy’s notion of “rise” involved the realist principle of international competence in Europe during the post-Renaissance period. According to him, “the warlike rivalries among its various kingdoms and city-states stimulated a constant search for military improvements, which interacted fruitfully with the newer technological and commercial advances that were also being thrown up in this competitive, entrepreneurial environment” (Kennedy, 1988, p. xvi). In this context, a little few years after Kennedy’s book, Kenneth Waltz described the emergence of the new structure in international politics after the Cold War as follows: “The behaviour of states, the patterns of their interactions, and the outcomes their interactions produced had been repeated again and again through the centuries despite profound changes in the internal composition of states […] States have continued to compete in economic, military, and other ways” (Waltz, 1993, p. 45).

It is worthwhile noticing that the IRT did not deeply address China as emerging power at the end of the Cold War and during the nineties. Instead, at that time the first concern was whether US had to face the return of European 19th century patterns of balance of power. Nevertheless, when the issue gained importance during the next decade, the main theoretical output provided by those previous debates consisted in realising that the interaction between US and China could lead a struggle for international power. Since then, the main theoretical dilemma has been whether China will be or not a peaceful emerging power, which is expressed in two leading theoretical approaches.

The first approach argues that China cannot rise peacefully, because powerful states are rarely satisfied with the distribution of power. Following the Waltz’s neorealist theory, John Mearsheimer argues that states want power because they have to protect themselves from each other, so despite knowing that powerful states control offensive military capabilities, it is impossible to know other states’ intentions (Mearsheimer, 2003). In this sense, states use their power to survive, ignoring culture, identity or types of regimes; while the first goal of using power is to pursue regional hegemony, the second one is to ensure that no rival great power controls another region (Mearsheimer, 2003, pp. 140-145).

The second approach argues that China will rise peacefully, because it “has powerful incentives to work with and integrate into the existing order”, which is centralised in US (Ikenberry, 2011, p. 249). This thesis has been proposed by John Ikenberry, who states that China will not proceed to rupture the international order because its capitalist economy depends on the international trade ruled by liberal institutions; moreover, China has engaged with the most important international organizations created by the American liberal order, such as the United Nations and the World Trade Organization. From this point of view, Ikenberry explains that if this argument was correct, the global system would retain political characteristics of a one-hub global system even as the distribution of material capabilities shifts in favour to China (Ikenberry, 2011).

Is “rise” the only way to explain China as international phenomenon?

In order to assess the theoretical meaning of rise to the case of China, what needs to be particularly emphasized is the fact that the Chinese phenomenon does not only mean a competition for global power, but also a new and unknown international actor. From this point of view, the relation between China and South America entails diverse dynamics which would reinforce a multiplex world instead of a sort of international monolith. The idea of “multiplex world” was proposed by Amitav Acharya. According to this author, it is “a world of diversity and complexity, a decentred architecture of order management, featuring old and new powers, with greater role for regional governance” (Acharya, 2014, p. 8); in the particular case of China, even if it “never becomes the leader power of the world, its rise would still fuel a desire and need for legitimizing and exporting its own values and institutions for domestic and international governance drawn from China’s own history and culture” (Acharya, 2014, p. 46).

In the context of the existence of diverse international dynamics, the idea of “rise” could be replaced by the notion of “presence” as a point of departure to elaborate explanations about China according to the South American context. From this point of view, both rise and presence would be complementary dynamics carried out in this multiplex world. There are some important reasons to argue this conceptual change.

First, rather than being a comprehensive approach to explain world powers’ behaviour, structural realist theory reflects an ethnocentric explanation about the US foreign policy towards Latin America since the Monroe Doctrine. Mearsheimer argues, for example, “[i]f China continues its striking economic growth over the next few decades; it is likely to act in accordance with the logic of offensive realism, which is to say it will attempt to imitate the United States” (Mearsheimer, 2003). The fact of assuming similar behaviours would entail serious risks for East Asian countries, particularly in terms of suffering future Chinese interventions. In this sense, some Asian states could be under Chinese threat in the future as Chile and Venezuela were threatened by Washington during the governments of Salvador Allende and Hugo Chavez, because if countries had a kind of anti-Chinese hegemony president, China’s intelligence agencies would promote a coup d’état.

Furthermore, although Mearsheimer’s theory could be correct in the future, China’s behaviour deeply differs from US today. For example, China does not have military alliances with states from South America, while the United States, in contrast, has military allies such as Japan, South Korea and Philippines. China does not carry out military exercises across the South Pacific either, while the United States recently accomplished the provocative Freedom of Navigation Operation (FONOP), at the South China Sea, increasing diplomatic tensions with China because of the “innocent passage” of the USS Lassen within China’s twelve nautical miles at the Subi Reef (Krejsa, 2015).

Second, the engagement between South America and China experienced since the 2000s coincided with the declining of US influence on South America under George W. Bush’s government. Such a decline was caused by several factors such as: (1) the failure of the Consensus of Washington’s policies in countries like Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela and Argentina, which in turn resulted in the rise of anti-neoliberal governments; (2) the general rejection against US invasion to Iraq in 2003; (3) and the rise of Brazil’s international influence under the presidency of Inacio Lula Da Silva.

The decline of US influence in South America in relation to China is because the latter neither recommends nor obligates other countries to follow universal values. So despite the existence of a China’s Policy to Latin America, there are flexible approaches to deploy Chinese foreign interests across the region. Thus, for example, China carries out strong free trade relations with Chile, while with Argentina accomplishes technological projects on atomic technologies. With Peru there are important investments on mining exploitation, and with Bolivia, China launched the first Bolivian Satellite (Chinese Government, 2008). The US policy towards the region in the past, in contrast, had been characterised by the promotion and imposition of “American” values and the establishment of regional institutional frameworks, such as the Organization of American States (OAS), the Consensus of Washington and the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA).

Third, it is necessary to explore the possibility of finding out southern inter-subjectivities and southern agencies as expressions of a multiplex world. In this sense, it is undeniable that Ikenberry’s approach seems inclusive in terms of describing the international order as a system where every country participates in it, independently of power, geography, ethnicity, or political system; however, the same approach oversimplifies the multiplex logics of international relations around the world, entailing the risk of omitting the study of non-Western processes or South-South relations. It also excludes any possibility of studying whether some non-Western institutions, norms or behaviours can nest in this order. For example, the principle of non-intervention coined by South American countries, after decades of Washington interventions across the region, did not reinforce a one-hub system when countries rejected the Bush administration’s plan to invade Iraq in 2003. The  Washington Consensus was also rejected by several South American countries after serious institutional crisis at the beginning of the last decade. Bolivia, Venezuela, Argentina and Ecuador experienced deep crisis after the neo-liberalization of their economies during the eighties and nineties, which in turn explained the emergence of anti-neoliberal governments. From this point of view, and given the China’s experience dealing with Western powers since the Wars of Opium, it would be likely to find more similar understandings about the principle of non-intervention between South America and China, than between these both and US.

Fourth, the emergence of China as international phenomenon must lead to realise its own particularities that are not necessarily understood according to the binary approaches provided by neo-realism and neo-liberalism. For example, in the case of realist paradigm the concepts of competence and anarchy could not have been theoretically legitimated without the European experience of disintegration in several nation-states since the Peace of Westphalia. The European disintegration and anarchy deeply differ from China’s experience, which legitimates unity and harmony as key concepts. Martin Jacques has pointed out this difference in his thesis about civilizational state: “Instead of seeing China through the prism of a conventional nation-state, we should think of it as a continental system containing many semi-autonomous provinces with distinctive political, economic and social systems” (Jacques, 2009, p. 203).

Conclusions

For South American countries, the rise of a new world superpower does not mean a radical change, because they have always been under the hegemony of external superpowers, such as Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States. The presence of China in South America, in contrast, implies an unprecedented experience of interacting with a non-Western power whose culture, identity, values and history deeply differ from the other Western powers.

The presence of China in South America reinforces dynamics for a more diverse world, rather than a homogeneous American-led liberal hegemonic order or a system where world powers are competing for surviving. Thus, the assumption of multiple dynamics related to China is a point of departure to explain this phenomenon according to the South American context.

Both rise and presence are elements of what Amitav Acharya has defined as a multiplex world. The complementarity of these concepts can ameliorate the state of uncertainty given by the fact that this the first time in our modern era that a non-Western state—which is also a civilizational state—is becoming a global international actor. In sum, this phenomenon entails a broad range of dynamics flowing in several directions, for example: from north to south, south to south, west to non-west, or non-west to non-west.

References

Acharya, A., 2014. The End of American World Order. 1st ed. Cambridge: Polity.

Anthony Giddens, M. M. a. I. W., 1989. Comments on Paul Kennedy’s the Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. The British Journal of Sociology, 40(2), pp. 328-340.

Chinese Government , 2008. Official Publications. [En línea]
Available at: http://www.gov.cn/english/official/2008-11/05/content_1140347.htm
[Último acceso: 27 November 2015].

Ikenberry, J., 2011. Liberal Sources of American Unipolarity. En: M. M. W. W. John Ikenberry, ed. International Relations Theory and The Consequences of Unipolarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 216-251.

Jacques, M., 2009. When China Rules the World. New York: Penguin Press.

Katzenstein, P., 2012. China’s Rise: Rupture, return, or recombination?. En: P. Katzenstein, ed. Sinicization and The Rise of China. Civilizational processes beyond East and West. Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, pp. 1-38.

Kennedy, P., 1988. The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000. 2nd ed. London: Unwin Hyman.

Krejsa, H., 2015. The National Interest. [En línea]
Available at: http://www.nationalinterest.org/feature/the-real-meaning-behind-americas-fonops-the-south-china-sea-14195
[Último acceso: 29 October 2015].

Mearsheimer, J., 2003. The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. Updated Edition ed. New York: Norton.

Nau, H., 2001. Why ‘The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers’ was wrong. Review of International Studies, Issue 27, pp. 579-592.

Reuters, 2015. Reuters. [En línea]
Available at: http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/10/23/us-china-corruption-idUSKCN0SH08I20151023#Up18EcepK9HhvcTP.97
[Último acceso: 16 November 2015].

Waltz, K. N., 1993. The Emerging Structure of International Politics. International Security, 18(2), pp. 44-79.

 

Claudio Coloma is with the School of International Studies, University of Santiago of Chile

Southern Panoramas: Perspectives for Other Geographies of Thought

SOUTHERN PANORAMAS: PERSPECTIVES FOR OTHER GEOGRAPHIES OF THOUGHT (Bilingual: Portuguese/ English)

Edited by Sabrina Moura

Texts by Milton Santos, José Rabasa, Arjun Appadurai, Jean e John Comaroff, Joaquín Torres García, Artur Barrio, Cildo Meireles, Rasheed Araeen, Southern Conceptualisms Network, Moacir dos Anjos, Anthony Gardner, Charles Green, Geeta Kapur, Néstor García Canclini, Achille Mbembe, Sasha Huber, Ana Longoni

Part of the publications launched by the 19th Festival of Contemporary Art SESC_Videobrasil (São Paulo, Brazil), the book SOUTHERN PANORAMAS | PERSPECTIVES FOR OTHER GEOGRAPHIES OF THOUGHT organized by Sabrina Moura, explores the notion of Global South as an axis of thought and knowledge production.

Conceived in the form of an anthology of texts, the book features contributions from various disciplines and offers a critical perspective on the formation of the concept of South. “Over the last twenty years, the South expands on a global level, configuring a map of historical and political experiences that have refused to keep within hemispheric lines. If its uses sometimes incur in the contradictions inherent in binary thought, they also indicate new and complex flows of economic, cultural and symbolic capital”, says Sabrina, who brought together works of artists Joaquin Torres-Garcia and Cildo Meireles, philosopher and political scientist Achille Mbembe, researcher and writer Ana Longoni, art critic Geeta Kapur, among others.

By revisiting essays, historical documents and manifestos, the publication presents debates previously unpublished in Portuguese — as the work of South African anthropologists Jean and John Comaroff on Southern theories — and translates into English reference texts written by Brazilian authors, such as Spatiotemporal relations in the developing world, written by the geographer Milton Santos in 1976 during his exile in Paris.

From the claims of non-aligned countries that gained strength during the Cold War, to the emergence of post-colonial thought and its critique, the publication offers an important contribution to the debates that question the validity of Eurocentric representations and narratives.

About the editor:
SABRINA MOURA is a researcher and curator based in São Paulo, Brazil. She is a PhD candidate at the University of Campinas (Unicamp) and holds a master’s degree in aesthetics and art history from University Paris VIII and in cultural projects direction from University Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle. She is the curator of Public Programs of the Contemporary Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil (2013, 2015).

Epistemologies of the South (Sydney 14 April 2016)

Epistemologies of the South

Epistemologies of the South

Epistemologies of the South: Mapping new directions in Australian social sciences

When: 9:00am – 5:00pm, Thursday 14 April 2016
Venue: Conference Room, 174 City Rd, Darlington Centre, University of Sydney

Conveners:
• Raewyn Connell
• Fran Collyer
To RSVP, please contact: Rebecca Pearse rebecca.pearse@sydney.edu.au

Calls to decolonize the social sciences have raised questions about the global and national politics of knowledge, the shifting structures of knowledge production, and the capacity of existing social theory to explain the world. At present, the place of Australian social science in the global postcolonial knowledge project is unclear. This workshop will bring together scholars developing postcolonial and Southern perspectives in the social and political sciences. The event will be an important moment in the development of Australian social science agendas that challenge Eurocentricism and carve out new directions for theory and research. Across the day, there will be focused discussion about current and future possibilities for research and collaboration.

The workshop is a free event. ECRs and HDR students are invited to apply for travel funding. Please send your CV and 200 word expressions of interest before 15 December 2016 to:  fran.collyer@sydney.edu.au

An-other way of being in the contemporary world

Reflections on Nobel Laureate Rigoberta Menchú Tum

Dr Riccardo Armillei
The Alfred Deakin Research Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University

Dr Eugenia Demuro
School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Deakin University

‘Que todo lo que hagamos tenga una dosis de humanidad’
(Rigoberta Menchú Tum)

Rigoberta Menchú Tum

Rigoberta Menchú Tum

 

On Wednesday 29th of July, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Dr Rigoberta Menchú Tum delivered the UNESCO Chair for Cultural Diversity and Social Justice Annual Oration at Deakin University. Since its inception, the UNESCO Chair Program has promoted the establishment of hundreds of UNESCO Chairs and UNITWIN Networks, serving the dual function of ‘think tanks’ and ‘bridge builders’ between academia, policy-makers, local communities, research and civil society (UNESCO 2013). The Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation was endorsed with this prestigious recognition in 2013, when Prof. Fethi Mansouri was awarded the UNESCO Chair in comparative research on ‘Cultural Diversity and Social Justice’. Due to her illustrious career in the struggle for Indigenous rights and ethno-cultural reconciliation, Rigoberta Menchú Tum was chosen, and kindly accepted the invitation, to be this year’s orator.

Rigoberta Menchú Tum was born in 1959 into a Quiche Mayan peasant family in Guatemala. A year later Guatemala was plunged into a civil war that lasted 36 years. It has been estimated that the civil war caused the death of 200,000 people, the displacement of more than half a million people, and the destruction of countless Mayan villages. The worst of the war came between 1979 and 1984, ‘during which over 90% of the total human rights violations were committed’ (Chamarbagwala & Morán 2011, p. 42). In 1982, following the military’s systematic oppression of any form of insurrection, and after the death of several members of her own family, Menchú Tum fled to neighboring Mexico. At that time, she was virtually unknown in her own country. It was after the death of her father in 1981—when he was burned alive by the Guatemalan army in the Spanish Embassy along with another thirty-eight members of the Committee for Peasant Unity (CUC)—, that Menchú Tum’s public visibility started to grow (Arias 2001). In 1983, she published I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala, a gripping document that charts her path to political awareness and which attracted international attention and courted controversy. Since then, she has become an icon of indigenous resistance, a leading advocate of indigenous rights and a voice in recognition and reconciliation processes, not only in Guatemala but globally. Her work has earned her several international awards, most notably, the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992 (The Nobel Foundation 1992).

At Deakin University, Menchú Tum spoke on the guiding principles of her philosophy and of her ancestral knowledge – a model for another way of thinking. Her message was to imbue all our actions with a dose of our humanity, and for those of us working within academia, to put ourselves in the service of the world and to work towards an ‘integral academic vision’. This approach entails three different dimensions: human beings are composed of a spiritual, a material and a social dimension, which need to be in equilibrium with each other. The emphasis on materialism, and the lack of consideration for the spiritual and social dimensions, has had disastrous consequences for the times we live in. This is grounded on the premise that ‘what happens to others happens to us’. In this way, the need to bring together the personal and the collective is an important means to enact community practises of mutual respect and cooperation. The practise of respecting others, of acknowledging and seeing others, must be central to our behaviour and code of ethics.

For Menchú Tum, the social is built on the practise of a true egalitarianism that emphasises our social selves within a collective, with the aspiration of bettering ourselves in the service of others. This, Menchú Tum cites as the creation of a ‘culture of peace’. According to Menchú Tum the biggest secret of human beings is humility, as it is through humility that we can experience gratefulness towards other living creatures and towards the earth. Without dismissing the material dimension–for we are material beings—we should be content to take only that which ‘fits in our hands’ and leave the rest to others, as when we accumulate beyond our needs we are taking what is meant for others. Menchú Tum’s words, derived from the accumulated wisdom of her Mayan ancestors, spoke of a ‘science for life’ that provides guiding principles to live and to address three pressing questions: Who am I? Where do I come from? And, Where am I going? According to Menchú Tum, answering these involves seeing, listening and feeling. Our eyes, she tells us, are not enough.

For social scientists this requires developing new standards and categories of ‘knowledge’, and to re-consider how knowledge is used and re-produced. For instance, what social scientists regard as Education (with a capital E) within a Western context, and by extension what often defines Indigenous peoples the world over as ‘uneducated’, excludes non-Western epistemological and ontological traditions, and fails to recognise and appreciate other ways of knowing. If Indigenous peoples measured knowledge only within this Western frame, they would loose other ancestral ways of knowing the world. In an academic context measured by outputs, citation indexes and our ability to generate commercial returns, the idea of academia in the service of humanity is a revolutionary stance. And with academic peer-review plagued by gatekeepers and conservatism, opening up research to new ways of knowing the world and accommodating ‘subaltern’ epistemologies is a radical call to action. Any response will require us to shift the value system of the academic endeavour away from competition and the status quo, and towards community, humanity and new possibilities.

Menchú Tum has been often characterised as a ‘subaltern voice’ and has herself become an ‘object’ of study under the intensive scrutiny of Western intellectual elites. In particular, as Arturo Arias (2002) has argued, the controversy regarding Menchú Tum’s testimonio should be interpreted as ‘a symbolic lesion (lesson?) about the unwillingness of hegemonic intellectuals to listen to subaltern ones’ (p. 481) – part of a broader tendency to distort and transform other voices with the aim of misrepresenting ‘subaltern’ narratives. At one point of her oration, recalling the torture of her family members, tears welted in her eyes, yet her message was an optimistic one: to promote a different ‘code of thinking’; to reconfigure ourselves in the contemporary world. Those of us working within humanities and social sciences, and more broadly within academia, cannot be impassive in the face of these requests. We are left pondering on the need to open up new horizons of inquiry and on how to accommodate different perspectives within our academic endeavours. Undoubtedly, this will also require listening and engaging with seriousness and respect to the wealth of Indigenous scholarship and other knowledges. Today, the still-apparent lack of an intellectual investment in this direction, as Rigoberta Menchú Tum stressed, is frustrating any real possibility to enact other ways of being in the world.

 

Bibliography

Arias, A 2001, ‘Rigoberta Menchú’s history within the Guatemalan context’, in A Arias (ed.), The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy, University Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, USA, pp. 3-28.

Arias, A 2002, ‘After the Rigoberta Menchú Controversy: Lessons Learned About the Nature of Subalternity and the Specifics of the Indigenous Subject’, MLN, vol. 117, no. 2, pp. 481-505.

Chamarbagwala, R & Morán, HE 2011, ‘The human capital consequences of civil war: Evidence from Guatemala’, Journal of Development Economics, vol. 94, no. 1, pp. 41–61.

The Nobel Foundation 1992, ‘Rigoberta Menchú Tum – Biographical’, Nobelprize.org, retrieved 3 August 2015, <http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1992/tum-bio.html>.

UNESCO 2013, University Twinning and Networking, UNESCO, retrieved 11 August 2015, <http://www.unesco.org/en/university-twinning-and-networking/university-twinning-and-networking/>.