Rumo a uma Antropologia (Radicalmente) Decolonial: Revisitando o Encontro da Escola Ibérica da Paz com (os Direitos d)os Ameríndios
| Autor | Bethânia de Albuquerque Assy e Florian Fabian Hoffmann |
| Páginas | 10-27 |
Direito, Estado e Sociedade n.51 p. 10 a 27 jul/dez 2017
Towards a (radically) decolonial anthropology:
revisiting the Iberian school of peace’s
encounter with (the rights of) Amerindians
Rumo a uma antropologia (radicalmente) decolonial:
revisitando o encontro da escola ibérica da paz com (os
direitos d)os ameríndios
Bethânia de Albuquerque Assy*
Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro-RJ, Brasil
Florian Fabian Hoffmann**
Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro-RJ, Brasil
1. The decolonial turn in human rights
One of the sites of contestation of the current decolonial turn in the human
and social sciences is the concept of human rights. Building, in part, on the
earlier “cultural relativism” debates that brought together an epistemological
critique, from within the global North, of the universalism (purportedly)
inherent in human rights, and a political critique, from the global South,
of their (alleged) attachment to hegemonic projects1, the decolonial litera-
ture has sought to uncover what Walter Mignolo has termed the “logic of
coloniality” that pervades the discourse of (Western) modernity, including
human rights2. However, the decolonial perspective goes beyond these ear-
lier critiques in that it seeks, again in the words of Mignolo, to “shift the
geography of knowledge and recast critical theory within the frame of a
geo- and bio-politics of knowledge [with] the first step in the grammar of
* Professor of Law in PUC-Rio and UERJ’s Law Department. E-mail: bethania.assy@gmail.com.
** Professor of Law in PUC-Rio’s Law Department. E-mail: f-hoffmann@puc-rio.br.
1 See, for instance, EVANS, 1998; CAMPBELL, 2001; and HOFFMANN, 2012, pp. 81-96.
2 See MIGNOLO, 2007.
11
Direito, Estado e Sociedade n. 51 jul/dez 2017
Towards a (radically) decolonial anthropology:
revisiting the Iberian school of peace’s encounter with (the rights of) Amerindians
decolonization […consisting of] learning to unlearn”3. Such unlearning
calls both for a historical deconstruction of the modern narratives deriving
from the concrete colonial past -and, hence, for a methodological “turn
to history”-, as well as for the explicitation of the ever-present yet ever
supressed radical alterity against which modern human rights have been
constructed -and which implies a parallel “turn to language”. The objec-
tive is both to expose what Makau Mutua has called, in relation to inter-
national (human rights) law, “[its uses] as a medium for the creation and
perpetuation of a racialised/genderized hierarchy of […] norms and insti-
tutions that sub-ordinate non-Europeans and Europeans alike”4, as well as
to reverse the colonial epistemicide by which, as Ramon Grosfoguel puts
it, the South has been reduced first to a place without culture, then to a
place without history, then to a place without development, and, finally
to a place without democracy5. The latter, in particular, implies the need
for a turn to a new anthropology in which the (colonial) experience of the
global South is resurrected from its connotation as merely “parochial wis-
dom […] antiquarian traditions […] exotic ways and means [and] above
all […] unprocessed data […not] sources of refined knowledge […but]
reservoirs of raw fact”.6 Instead, a new perspective sees that experience as
the key to, as the Comaroffs put it, a “privileged insight into the workings
of the world at large” 7. It is from here, they add, “that our empirical grasp
of [this world’s] lineaments, and our theory-work in accounting for them,
ought to be coming…”8.
The point of a decolonial anthropology is, therefore, not to simply invert
the modern (colonial) account of subjectivity by outlining its radical oppo-
site, but to understand it from and through its encounter with the radical
alterity inscribed in the colonial experience. Indeed, instead of focussing
(only) on the unfolding of the “logic of coloniality” within a universalist
Eurocentric modernity in which, epistemically, all otherness has already
been absorbed and subjected, a decolonial perspective seeks to recover
3 MIGNOLO, 2007, p. 485.
4 MUTUA, 2000.
5 GROSFOGUEL, 2011.
6 COMAROFF; COMAROFF, 2012. This is an agenda articulated in various strands of ‘southern theory’
such as in CONNEL, 2007; SOUSA SANTOS, 2014; or BHAMBRA, 2014.
7 COMAROFF, COMAROFF, 2012, p. 81.
8 COMAROFF, COMAROFF, 2012, p. 81.
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