Why Postmodernist Ethnographers Become Self-Flagellating Propagandists
The preprint article "To Write or Not to Write? Contestations on Researching ABOUT Indigenous Peoples" by Leonardo D. Tejano, opens with an "Author's Acknowledgement of Positionality.”1
I am not an Indigenous person. I come from an Ilokano background, an ethnolinguistic group whose history in Northern Luzon has, at times, contributed to the marginalization of Indigenous communities. As an academic, I have been part of a system that takes. I have written about Indigenous lives, learned from stories that were never mine to claim, and benefited from knowledge rooted in experiences not my own.
It's curious that "position" here is defined in terms of ethnolinguistic identity and profession. Tejano does not acknowledge his:
Social status
Gender
Sexuality
Race
Religion
Citizenship
Political affiliations
I suppose this is because the article is on the ethics of research about "Indigenous Peoples." When you divide the world into IP and non-IP, I guess it makes sense that the most important positionality is your location in this divide.
But why isn't Ilokano "Indigenous" and why is "Indigenous" spelled with a capital I?
Oona Paredes, in her 2019 article, “Preserving ‘Tradition’: The Business of Indigeneity in the Modern Philippine Context,” explains:
The concept of indigeneity carries distinct political connotations in the Republic of the Philippines. Indigeneity is not only defined legally by the national Indigenous Peoples’ Rights Act, it is also used to refer to ethnic minorities who are widely regarded by the general public as not merely culturally differentiated but also racially distinct from the mainstream Filipino population.
So "Indigenous Peoples" is actually jargon used within Philippine anthropology and other domains that work with these communities. My Bisaya ancestors have been in these islands as long as the Austronesian IPs, so I'm technically "small i" indigenous but I'm de jure not "big I" Indigenous.
The entire article is a kind of mea culpa for the author's involvement in what he calls "epistemological injustice," which to him is present in the everyday mechanics of scholarship. What universities celebrate as public service, he writes, is often “the violence of reducing the sacred to paragraphs, the relational to citations, the lived to data,” a process that—regardless of our intentions—replicates colonial power by making “Indigenous” life legible on academic terms alone. Because journals reward tidy narrative arcs, the researcher’s first-person voice inevitably dictates the interpretive lens, deciding what details survive and which silences remain, thereby “rendering communities as subjects” and reinscribing the very hierarchy the project set out to critique. In other words, injustice is baked into the workflow: funding cycles that rush encounters, preservation rhetoric that frames cultures as endangered, and citation systems that court prestige while packaging someone else’s living knowledge for institutional gain.
The article’s vibe is very much in the vein of what Clifford and Marcus describe as the "postmodern turn" in ethnography in their introduction to Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (1986). Here's how they describe the epistemology of postmodernist ethnographers:
They see culture as composed of seriously contested codes and representations; they assume that the poetic and the political are inseparable, that science is in, not above, historical and linguistic processes. They assume that academic and literary genres interpenetrate and that the writing of cultural descriptions is properly experimental and ethical. Their focus on text making and rhetoric serves to highlight the constructed, artificial nature of cultural accounts. It undermines overly transparent modes of authority, and it draws attention to the historical predicament of ethnography, the fact that it is always caught up in the invention, not the representation, of cultures (Wagner 1975). As will soon be apparent, the range of issues raised is not literary in any traditional sense. Most of the essays, while focusing on textual practices, reach beyond texts to contexts of power, resistance, institutional constraint, and innovation.
[...]
A conceptual shift, "tectonic" in its implications, has taken place. We ground things, now, on a moving earth. There is no longer any place of overview (mountaintop) from which to map human ways of life, no Archimedian point from which to represent the world.
We might call this centerless epistemological positionality "Nietzschean" or "Foucaudian." But this is incomplete. In Philosophy's Violent Sacred (2021), Armitage draws on René Girard's critique (and appreciation) of Nietzsche to uncover the unspoken ethical axiom of postmodern scholarship: it retains Christianity's preferential option for the oppressed.2 If we are to pair this with the study of mass movements following Eric Hoffer's seminal The True Believer (1951), we could look at various movements and identify what they hold sacred and the devil that this sacred core must be defended from:
Marxism: defend the proletariat against Capitalism
Nationalism: defend the nation against the outsider
Postcolonial nationalism: defend the nation against the colonizer
Feminism: defend women against the Patriarchy
DDS: defend the ordinary citizen against drug addicts
The article’s self-flagellation seems to come from the ethics of a variant of postcolonialism. In this worldview, the sacred is the indigenous and the devils are the colonialists. Since the Ilokano and the Bisaya are somewhat Westernized and relatively wealthy and powerful, their victim status are not as pure, so they are not as sacred as the official and oppressed IPs.
To postmodernists, power games underpin all discourse, including knowledge creation. Plus, they have an “incredulity to metanarratives,” as Lyotard famously declared. Through this lens, academic work—a system that emerged from the West—unavoidably creates knowledge through an epistemology that also emerged from the West, and thus non-indigenous: it is "violence" which "has historically been a tool of empire," we read in the article. To a postmodernist, all knowledge work is propaganda. The question is: for whose side, for the oppressed or for the oppressor? If postmodernist ethnographers retain Christianity's preferential option for the oppressed and continue to work in academia, the choice is clear: they'll need to be self-flagellating propagandists.
My novel Rajah Versus Conquistador closes with a fictional afterword entitled “Disclosing the Author’s Positionality,” by Maria Carmen Kintanar-Lozano, PhD, the story’s fictional author and descendant of its indigenous protagonist. I have long been surrounded and fascinated by this epistemological stance that it felt natural and easy for me to employ it for the sake of storytelling.
I previously wrote about this at length:
