Epistemologies of Resistance: Knowledge in the Peruvian Amazon

• Main Author: Lorena Reinert
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Dalhousie University Libraries 2020-10-01
• Series: The Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography
• Subjects: indigenous epistemology; decolonial theory; hybridity; cultural change; amazonian ethnography
• Online Access: https://ojs.library.dal.ca/JUE/article/view/10352

Epistemologies of resistance are knowledge frameworks that challenge oppressive structures and the ideologies that sustain them. In this paper, I analyze three weeks of ethnographic eldwork among the Asháninka of the Peruvian Amazon to demonstrate the ways in which the epistemologies that I encountered challenge oppressive structures and their underlying ideologies. My ndings consider the use of social and environmental context as epistemic indicators. I contrast these context-dependent epistemologies with the context-independent epistemologies that dominate contemporary “Western” thought, where the goal is to separate knowledge from context. I then consider how, as hybrid epistemologies that have emerged out of interaction and exchange in a globalized world, indigenous knowledge frameworks resist the notion of a binary di erence between indigenous and “Western” itself. These epistemologies of resistance critique the double binds created and sustained through the colonial model.