The Backlash to Decolonizing Intellectuality

How do we develop an anthropological gaze that avoids the fallacies of the superior position? How do we decolonize intellectuality when translating other people's knowledges and ways of thinking? To answer such questions is first and foremost a political endeavor, but it is also crucial to the future intellectual and academic success of the discipline. The present culture of audit and accountability attached to governmental and university managerial strategies works against the task of creatively rethinking knowledges other than our own. This article begins with these crucial questions and turns to Amazonian ethnography as a case for consideration of such issues. A main question being raised is, how do we understand an Amazonian aesthetics of egalitarianism in sociological terms? Within such aesthetics we find a well‐developed consciousness of power and rich poetic expression of it. This article argues that it is necessary to revise considerably our notion of the sociological to achieve the conceptual means sufficient for the task of capturing the dignity of Amazonian egalitarianisms. In recent years, the postcolonial critique within and beyond anthropology has worked toward a decentering of certain key grand narratives about Society, and it has been especially productive toward this end. While it is the wisdom of modernist social thought to place all the richness of living and everyday life outside the boundaries of Society, beyond the pale of the sociological, many postcolonialists see poetics as central to the social. In line with such a view, this article considers the role of the genre of the grotesque as it is used by narrators of myth among Piaroa people of the Orinoco Basin. In their narratives the political concern is to unfold codes of decorum and the arts of folly in order to enable a congenial sociality and disable tyrannical hubris. Reflecting on these lessons, the article concludes by outlining some of the dangers of a neoliberal academic backlash against our more recent endeavors to decolonize intellectuality and to establish interesting conversations with alternative ways of thinking about polity and the social. The backlash is a reaction taking place in the wake of the increasing establishment of neoliberal and governmental policing and managerial technologies, emerging today as a culture of audit and accountability that is becoming general both within and outside of academia. The relentless process of audit culture has strong political implications that work toward blocking the intellectual creativity required to engage in conversations that might lead to reflections about the myriad follies that lurk within the social and political processes through which we ourselves live.