certification

Monday 11.7.2016

The vast majority of our first day in Lima was spent, using the vernacular that Molly and I developed, “shmubbing around.” Successful shmubbing is remarkably easy – typically, only a couch and TV are required, preferably with an accessible stash of junk food.

We stayed in doors all day because after a while, when we take a moment to examine ourselves, we realize just how unbelievably tired we actually are.  The exhaustion doesn’t come from intensive physical labor or even severely stressful situations; we just get worn down from speaking Spanish all the time, never really having a clear conversation with someone else, eating food that never quite sits right, and fighting with cab drivers. Woe is me, right?

But the idea of exhaustion is an excellent template to jump in to Kwasi Wiredu and his concept of conceptual decolonization.  I wrote about this several weeks ago, when we were back in Panama, but support for his framework makes a lot more sense to me now.

To start, Wiredu proposes that the political and social challenges facing nations generally and West African societies specifically is a sort of generalized miasma resulting from everyone in that society having to deal with difficult psychological problems.  At an individual level, a Ghanaian is forced to reconcile the language of her people, Akan – and the vast body of historical, conceptual, and religious templates that Akan relies on to be relevant to speakers – with English, the cosmopolitan and legal language of her state.  This discongruity, between what is spoken at home and what is spoken in a court, plays out in many different ways that impact Ghana and the lives of anyone living in a society whose ancestral language was replaced with an imposed language that shares very few (if any) similarities.

I don’t have Cultural Universals and Particulars with me on this trip but there is an example that Wiredu uses which elucidates this point. 

• Christian theology supports the idea that upon death, an immaterial soul leaves a material body and leaves the realm we live in for one in which God inhabits.  This process of soul removal, transcendence, and divine judgement is a quality or essential part of Christian theology.  Among many other reasons, Christians claim that this process is a quality of God that shows practitioners that their religion is worthy of recognition.
• Akan theology supports the idea that upon death, you continue into another stage of life that began at birth, transitioned in puberty, transitioned again with adulthood and then old age, and will continue again based upon your invocation as an ancestor by the people who love you.  This process of ancestor-attainment is a quality or essential part of Akan theology.  Among many other reasons, the Akan claim that this process is a quality of [I can’t believe that I don’t remember the Akan name for God] that shows practitioners that their religion is worthy of recognition.

A culture that exists for thousands of years with a religion develops/is shaped by the force of that religion on heir culture.  In Ghana, it is customary today to pour a portion of one’s drink on to the floor of a house as a libation to the ancestors of that family.  In the United States, burial by coffin, proceeded by a sermon from a pastor, is a traditional death ritual.  Both death rituals developed distinctly from each other and impact their respective cultures by influencing ideas on death, the role of the family, and the role of the dead in living spaces.

Imagine living in a place where your people buried the dead in coffins for thousands of years.  Another culture, with completely different ideas about the role of death in your society, uses armies and the threat of enslavement to punish people who refuse to stop using coffins and start pouring libations.  Your culture’s practices become outlawed, your religion becomes sacrilegious, and when you are arrested for practicing in the supposed safety of your home, they read off your crimes in a language that you can’t understand.

Such is the case of the Ghanaians, who have endured the fall of their most powerful empire in Africa, the genocide and enslavement and forced separation of their people, and political control over all areas of their state by an invader for hundreds of years – and still managed to preserve the act of pouring libations.

The essence of Wiredu’s work is this: the process by which we individually evaluate the impacts of imperialism on our language and psyche for the end of creating states which embody objectively sound cultural factors is called conceptual decolonization, and everyone in Ghana, and country under the influence of imperialism, and any country who benefits from imperialism must undertake that process to end industrialized, globalized oppression.

I’m a big fan of his writing so I may be aggrandizing a bit.

But the point is the same; if we can acknowledge that some places speak a different language than they used to, and that our languages dramatically impact our ways of organizing the world, and that the linguistic switch was not really done by choice, then we can also acknowledge that there are long-standing maladies affecting the organization and progress of these cultures.

I’ll get to how all of this relates to Lima and South America next.