Incommensurable? Grant Arndt, ‘The Indian’s White Man: Indigenous Knowledge, Mutual Understanding, and the Politics of Indigenous Reason’, Current Anthropology, 2022 | settler colonial studies blog

Incommensurable? Grant Arndt, ‘The Indian’s White Man: Indigenous Knowledge, Mutual Understanding, and the Politics of Indigenous Reason’, Current Anthropology, 2022

23Mar22

Abstract: This article uses three Ho-Chunk discussions of “whiteness” (from first contact to the mid-twentieth century) to outline an approach to Indigenous knowledge that challenges approaches that depict other cultures as constituting incommensurable worlds. Arguing that the idea of ontological alterity leads to a form of ethnographic entrapment, it instead theorizes Indigenous knowledge production as a process rooted in empirical observation, moral evaluation, and critical engagement within a common but contested world. The Ho-Chunk examples illustrate a long-term, collective process of inquiry that produced an understanding of settler whiteness emphasizing its relationship to practices of dispossession and governance. They also show events in which such knowledge was used by Ho-Chunk people in efforts to compel white interlocutors to self-awareness and more reasonable forms of behavior.

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