Knowing the Day, Knowing the World: Engaging Amerindian Thought in Public Archaeology

Preface

vii PREFACE What dialogues are possible between different ways of knowing? is different knowledge necessarily cultural, and is “indigenous knowledge” only translatable as a cultural version of an already established discipline such as “ethnoastronomy” or “ethnophilosophy”? What possibilities are there for different ways of knowing the world to offer the means of analysis? Based on a decade of research in Palikur lands known as arukwa in the state of amapá, Brazil, the material presented in this volume rethinks the grounds for a dialogue between scholarship and amerindian ways of knowing. Beginning and ending with a public archaeology project in the region in 2000–2001 via a round-trip through a decade of further field research, story recording, transcription, and translation, the book traces out different ways of thinking about space, time, and personhood in amerindian philosophy, history, geography, astronomy, and geometry. Demonstrating that Palikur knowledges are based on movement and a careful theorization of the consequences of one’s presence in a place, the work makes a sustained case that allowing different ways of knowing to surface can generate rich dialogues about nature, reality, and the ethical production of knowledge. The question to which the book returns throughout the text is, Why was our initial translation of archaeology as “looking at things left in the ground” later translated by Palikur speakers involved in the public archaeology project as “reading the tracks of the ancestors”? The volume offers a narrative of learning as the project developed. The chapters enter into the ethnographic material from the perspective of familiar disciplines—the philosophy of personhood, history and geography , astronomy, geometry—and engage the moments of disconcertment in which their frameworks are inadequate to convey the knowledge of the world that gives form to the stories of arukwa. The first chapter reflects on questions of personhood, ethics, ethnicity, and ways of knowing. The second chapter rethinks the frameworks offered in history and geography, setting out reasons why chronology and cartography do not have ready equivalents. The third chapter offers an alternative way of thinking about astronomy. The fourth chapter draws on linguistic material to argue that viii Preface the topological concepts embedded in everyday Palikur speech extend to ways of knowing the landscape. The final chapters return to the problem of doing history and archaeology in arukwa in ways that open the possibilities for thinking with the practice of tracking to explore the confluences of ways of knowing in archaeology and amerindian thought. ...