Walking and Doing: About Decolonial Practices

The essay that follows is an English language version of chapter 10 of the book Sjalel kibeltik, Sts'isjel ja kechtiki', Tejiendo nuestras raíces (Köhler et al. 2010).¹ Sjalel kibeltik (Interweaving our roots) is a co-authored book in four languages—Tsotsil, Tseltal, Tojolabal, and Spanish—and in three codes of representation: writing, oral, and visual.² The co-authors call it an (audio) book because of the weight we give to orality and visuality. The (audio) book was collaboratively assembled by a team of two Maya painters, four Maya community communicators, a Japanese violinist, a German visual anthropologist, and me, a woman with Mixtec roots and a Maya heart, who is also an anthropologist.³ Some of the Maya co-authors are members of peasant and indigenous organizations, others belong to artistic or musical groups, and yet others are associated with transnational networks. All of us are members of the Red de Artistas, Comunicadores Comunitarios y Antropólogos/-as de Chiapas (RACCACH, Chiapas Network of Artists, Community Communicators, and Anthropologists).⁴

In the collectively written introduction to our (audio) book we explain that Sjalel kibeltik was not an end in itself, nor did it originate in an academic research project. Rather, it arose out of a convergence of our own life projects and struggles and, above all, out of the need we all felt to engage in closer communication with the youth and women of rural and urban indigenous communities, from which seven of the ten authors come; we also felt the need to work more closely as a collective (Leyva et al. 2010).

Once we agreed on this objective at RACCACH meetings, we decided on long-term, medium-term, and short-term plans of action. In the medium term we proposed to develop the book Sjalel kibeltik and began to set out a dialogical and collective method for working together and for writing and taping our contributions. Our methodology drew upon the ways in which indigenous communities and organizations create consensus, but we were also influenced by dialogical strategies in the social sciences, including anthropology, and by the forms of transmitting indigenous knowledge used by the Maya co-authors of Sjalel kibeltik. This collective method provided us with a guide for organizing the content and arriving at a narrative style; contributions were written individually by each of the ten RACCACH members but then discussed in pairs and at RACCACH meetings. In this way, we set about co-producing oral, visual, and written narratives that responded to three basic questions: Where do I come from—what are my roots? What kind of work am I doing in my organization and my community? Where are we now and in what direction are we advancing as a community, collective, group, or organization? These questions—which were drawn up collectively—guided preparation of our collective-individual stories. Our aim was to reconstruct our wanderings, our encounters, and the challenges we face. The narrative texture was influenced by biweekly meetings at which we read chapters aloud and shared commentaries that were then incorporated into our writing or audio taping. We feel that the way contributions were developed both reflects our methodology and deepens our engagement with our communities. We also feel that it allows us to achieve the same goals in our communities as we do in a classroom.

Despite age differences, the co-authors of Sjalel kibeltik share the experience of being cultural activists, but six of us also studied in university and two of us are academic researchers.⁵ In my case, in addition to lecturing at CIESAS Sureste (Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social del Sureste) in San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico, I am involved in academic networks focused on the challenge of an epistemic struggle to decolonize ourselves, the social sciences, and anthropology.⁶ This struggle includes a search for cognitive justice and epistemic democracy (Sousa Santos 2009) and has sought, from the standpoint of our concrete experiences, to build knowledge from and for feminist and altermundista networks, anti-systemic movements, anti...