Published: 20 June 2024 An autoethnography of a transformative odyssey: decolonizing anthropology, the hegemony of Engl

Published: 20 June 2024

An autoethnography of a transformative odyssey: decolonizing anthropology, the hegemony of English, and the pursuit of plurilogies


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The beginning of a transformative journey

In agreement with Reed-Danahay (1997) that autoethnography is a rewriting of the self and the social, in this article, I present my own transformative journey, which, as I will demonstrate, contains challenges, opportunities, coping mechanisms, and a way forward. By linking to the “politics of the possible” and to “pluriversal politics” (Escobar, 2020), I elaborate on the legacy of colonization, in particular the hegemony of the English language in academia, which has posed significant challenges for me (and for many others as well) throughout my academic career.

I connect this hegemony to the current debates on “decolonizing anthropology”—and provocatively ask whether it is actually possible for anthropology to “decolonize” the discipline and to what extent? My provocations include various questions regarding reconstructing anthropology and promoting many anthropologies (Ali, 2023). Can anthropology, for instance, and “reputable” academic journals, in particular, afford to allow publications in native languages and to provide prompt and free-of-charge English translations of such works? Why must the onus of doing so fall on their authors who are not native English speakers, who must often pay themselves for translations that they may face challenges to proofread and validate? Can the major anthropological platforms afford to allow panels and/or sessions in native languages?

With these pressing questions, I challenge anthropologists to question the dominance of English in our mutual field and to find new ways of communicating with and understanding each other. The discipline should accept as well as promote what I call plurilogies, an idea that builds on the concept of “pluriversal” (Escobar, 2020). Extending Escobar’s argument, my use of the term “plurilogies” refers to the coexistence and acceptance of multiple diverse perspectives, narratives, or wisdoms—all of which have their own logical ways of thinking. Accepting and promoting that coexistence through anthropological platforms would facilitate the inclusion of a broader range of cultural and intellectual perspectives, thereby enabling their acceptance and contributing to the restructuring of the discipline. By recognizing the plurality of logical ways of understanding and interpreting the world, the term “plurilogies” denotes the acknowledgment and exploration of various sociocultural, linguistic, and theoretical frameworks or knowledge systems rather than a singular dominant perspective. This acceptance, promotion, and practice by anthropology’s reputable platforms would provide anthropologists with various possibilities to minimize the impacts of what I have called “colonial debris” (Ali, 2020, 2023) as much as possible on its theories and practices.

A “colonial debris”: the hegemony of the English language
Although colonization seems a phenomenon of the past, many of its legacies or colonial debris prevail not merely in anthropology but also endure in Pakistan and in many other countries, despite efforts toward de-colonization (Ogan, 1975; Uddin, 2011; White, 2019). The English language, the world’s lingua franca, is part of the colonial debris that works as an apparatus or “those basic infrastructures [that] were historically fashioned by and continue to facilitate colonial and imperial power” (Agrama, 2020, p. 16). In order to minimize or eliminate the impacts of these infrastructures, we need to build new structures that are based on and promote anthropology’s “other” narratives. Escobar (2020) argues that this restructuring is possible. Yet this challenge is as large in scale and depth as it is intricate in nature. And because decolonizing is as complex a process as being colonized and requires significant efforts to overcome, the forceful tactics and strategies that were used to colonize must be doubled in decolonizing efforts.

More:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-024-03218-8