Provisional Notes on Decolonizing Research Methodology and Undoing Its Dirty History

Introduction: Re-search as a Dirty Word

This article is a revised and expanded opinion piece that first appeared in The Conversation on September 26, 2017, under the title “Decolonizing Research Methodology Must Include Undoing Its Dirty History.” This publication of the opinion piece provoked intense debates with some scholars insinuating that research methodology is a sacred cow that must not be subjected to decolonization. Others commended the piece for its boldness in tackling the complex subject of research methodology, which is often approached as though it was an innocent, objective, and technical issue of procedures, instruments, and techniques of gathering data. This expanded article is not only a provocation but also boldly posits the process of decolonizing methodology as an urgent ethical, epistemic, ontological, and political exercise rather than simply one of the approaches and ways of producing knowledge.

Three major works inform the decolonial position taken on rethinking and unthinking research methodology. The first is a seminal book Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (2012) by the leading Maori anthropologist, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, who boldly declared that “re-search” is a dirty word. She correctly hyphenated “research” into “re-search” so as to reveal the dirty history, politics, embedded power dynamics, concealed conceptions of being human, and indeed the form of undressing other people so as to see them naked. She also meant that “re-search” is a process of reducing some people to the level of micro-organism—literally putting them on a magnifying glass to peep into their private lives, secrets, taboos, thinking, and their sacred world. In this sense, “re-search” assumes the character of invasion akin to modern espionage and intelligence gathering.

The second work is Methodology of the Oppressed by Chela Sandoval (2000) where she not only grappled with methodological issues confronting scholars and intellectuals but also activists committed to struggles for social change and making a difference in the world, especially women who are dealing with complex and complicated issues of patriarchy, race, class, gender, and sex. At the core of Sandoval’s (2000) decolonization of methodology is the objective of designing a liberatory method for emancipation, which is not useful in analyzing texts but for production of social movements and new identities that are bold and capable of speaking truth to power. What emerges poignantly from Sandoval’s (2000) analysis is the necessity for oppositional consciousness/decolonial mind-set for creating conditions and possibilities for radical decolonial transformation. She laid out “five skills” to underpin a methodology of emancipation: semiotics, deconstruction, meta-ideologizing, and democratic and differential consciousness (Sandoval, 2000, p. 1).

The third important work is Indigenous Research Methodologies by Bagele Chilisa (2012) where she begins by situating research methodology in a larger historical, cultural, global, and epistemic discursive context. Chilisa’s (2012, p. xv) departure point is the broader “social justice issues that arise from the research process itself.” In situating knowledge systems, Chilisa (2012, pp. 1–2) boldly stated that

current academic research traditions are founded on the culture, history, and philosophies of Euro-Western thought and are therefore indigenous to the Western academy and its institutions. These methodologies exclude from knowledge production the knowledge systems of formerly colonized, historically marginalised, and oppressed groups, which today are most often represented as Other and fall under broad categories of non-Western, third world, developing, underdeveloped, First Nations, indigenous peoples, third world women, African American women, and so on.

The three women scholars—Smith, Sandoval and Chilisa—have laid down a convincing and urgent case for decolonization of research methodology from different but related vantage points—Smith from the experience of indigenous Maori community in New Zealand, Sandoval from the experience of Latin Americans (Chicano) and African Americans, especially “women of colour” in the USA, and Chilisa from the African continent, which experienced sage colonial conquest and oppression that deeply affected the people’s view of their position in the world. The very fact that the decolonization of research methodology is put forward forcefully by these three women is decolonial in itself because under imperial and colonial knowledge production, mainly White men appeared as knowers and knowledge producers.

Whose Research Methodology Is It Anyway?

When Europeans made a radical shift in their thinking from a God-centered society and knowledge to secular thinking from the European Renaissance to European Enlightenment, they inaugurated the science of “knowability” of the world. God was no longer the only one who was the fountain of knowledge and who could understand the world. The rational human being could too. This radical shift was well summarized by the philosopher Rene Descartes in his famous dictum “Cogito ergo sum” (I think, therefore, I am) (see Descartes, 2013). In short, this intervention marked the rise of Cartesian philosophy. It was Enrique Dussel (2008), the father of philosophy of liberation, who exposed the colonial and imperial ideas cascading from Descartes’ dictum as one that served very well to philosophically enable and justify the emergence of an egocentric escalation of European knowledge into an objective, unsituated, and universally truthful.

Dussel is also the father of decolonial perspective, which has contributed to the unmasking and revelation of the person behind the Cartesian “I” as the “European Man.” Can we not trace methodology to these changes, which came about as a result of shifts from medievalism to Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Modernity? This is a necessary question because after claiming to have found a way out of the “Lacanian void,” that is, after knowing himself (after resolving the existential anguish of knowing one’s self) (see Austin, 2016), the Cartesian subject set out to know the world in what became known as “voyages of discovery.” It was during these so-called voyages that the encounter with the “Other” emerged. The “Other” emerged as the native Indian, as Caliban, as the African, as the Aborigines, and as the other natives. Because the Cartesian subject carried the mythologies of “terra nullius” and “terra cognito,” the “Other” had to be “re-searched” to establish whether they were human or not, in the first instance. Gananath Obeyesekere’s (1995) detailed case study of the encounter between James Cook and the Hawaiians in “Polynesia” in 1779 reveals a lot about how “discovery” and encounter had implications for knowledge. He uses the example of how the notion of “cannibalism” was constructed out of colonial encounters:

Polynesian cannibalism then is constructed out of an extremely complex dialogue between Europeans and Polynesians, a dialogue that makes sense in relation to the history of contact and unequal power relations and the cultural values, fantasies, and the common dark humanity they both share. The discourse of cannibalism, once initiated, affects a variety of cultural practices in which it is embedded; it affects, for example, the early British practice of ethnological science and the late Maori practice of cannibalism. The scientists on board ship were aptly called by the rest of the crew ‘the experimental gentlemen. The experiment on the Maori head is a product of the discourse of cannibalism and on science. (Obeyesekere, 1995, p. 27)

Such disciplines as anthropology and ethnographical science are traceable to colonial encounters and here was born their “Othering” methodology as a handmaiden of colonialism and imperialism. Imperial science was predicated on extractivism, “Othering” and social determinism. Collyer, Connell, Maia, and Morrell (2019, p. 8) introduced the concept of “imperial science” and explained its initial modus operandi:

The conquest of the world by European and North American power, over the five hundred years of modern empire and globalization, not only produced material wealth for the imperial powers. It also produced a rich dividend of knowledge. The colonized world was a fabulous mine of information, and the colonizers began sending back information and specimens as early as they sent spices, silver and gold. Brilliant feathers, exotic ornaments, strange plants, animal skins, fragments of languages, and of course samples of native people, were put on the ships to brighten the royal courts of Europe.

The dirtiness of “re-search” as introduced by Smith (2012) is also alluded to by Valentin Y. Mudimbe (2013). Drawing from the ideas of Jean Paul Satre in Being and Nothingness, particularly the concept of “Actaeon complex,” Mudimbe likened “re-search” to a “violation” and cited Satre who stated that “Every investigation implies the idea of a nudity which one brings out onto the open by clearing away the branches so that he can have a better view of Diana [the goddess being spied on by Actaeon] at her bath” (cited in Mudimbe, 2013, p. 6). This is where the issue of ethics in “re-search” arises. The ethics question goes deeper into the issue of the purpose of “re-search.” Mudimbe (2013, p. 6) elaborated on not only the dirtiness but also violence of “re-search”:

Positing oneself a knowing subject, one transcends the freedom of the Other, the transcended one. By being known, one is reified by a transcending subject and given freedom. […]. It is from this singular situation that the notion of guilt and of sin seems to be derived. It is before the Other that I am guilty. I am guilty first when beneath the Other’s look I experience my alienation and my nakedness as a fall from grace which I must assume. […]/ Again I am guilty when in turn I look at the Other, because by the very fact of my own self-assertion I constitute him as an Object and as an instrument, and I cause him to experience that same alienation which he must now assume. Thus original sin is my surge in a world where there are others; and whatever may be my further relations with others, these relations will be only variations on the original theme of my guilt.

Re-search was actively mobilized and deployed by colonial conquerors in their preoccupation with what they termed the “native question.” As defined by Mahmood Mamdani (1996), the “native question” had to do with how a minority of White colonial conquerors were to rule over a majority of conquered Black people. The genealogy of the “native question” in imperial logic and colonial methodology goes as far back as the Valladolid debates (1550–1551) centered on the question about the humanity of the indigenous peoples. The debates involved the Dominican friar Bartolome de Las Casas, Francisco de Vitoria and Gines de Sepulveda. The contest of the debates is summarized by Julia Suárez-Krabbe (2016, p. 59):

While Sepulveda’s thoughts spoke of a hierarchical order between humans based on the allocation of degrees of rational capacity to different races, those of Las Casas are founded on the notion of spiritual perfection. Both sets of ideas concern how Spanish presence in the colonies should be enacted, and not with whether Spanish invasion and colonization in itself was legitimate.

It was from such colonial debates that the disciplines of anthropology and scientific racism emerged. Las Casas represented what one would call “indigenous sympathism” that was claimed by colonial anthropology. Sepulveda was the progenitor of scientific racism. But the practice of dealing and resolving the “native question” is well-detailed in Mamdani’s slim book Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity (2013, pp. 2–3) where he stated that “native does not designate a condition that is original and authentic. Rather, as in Maine, the native is the creation of the colonial state: colonized, the native is pinned down, localized, thrown out of civilization as an outcast, confined to custom, and then defined as its product.” Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1986, 2009) explains in detail how the colonial cognitive empire/physical empire managed to colonize the minds of its victims. At first, the colonial cognitive empire simply detonates a cultural bomb at the center of the mental universe of its victims. This is how Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1986, p. 3) explains it:

But the biggest weapon wielded and actually daily unleashed by imperialism against that collective defiance is the cultural bomb. The effect of a cultural bomb is to annihilate a people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves. It makes them see their past as one wasteland of non-achievement and it makes them want to distance themselves from that wasteland. It make them want to identify with that which is furthest removed from themselves; for instance with other people’s languages rather than their own. It makes them identify with that which is decadent and reactionary, all those forces which would stop their own springs of life. It even plants serious doubts about the moral rightness of struggle. Possibilities of triumph or victory are seen as remote, ridiculous dreams. The intended results are despair, despondency and a collective death wish. Amidst this wasteland which it has created, imperialism presents itself as the cure.

What Ngugi wa Thiong’o has presented is the operative logic/methodology of colonial cognitive empire of invading the very mental universe of the colonized. Indeed, because of this invasion of the mental universe, a number of colonized people can surprise by saying it is impossible to decolonize methodology and the possibilities of success are remote. The second colonial methodology is this one “Get a few of the natives, empty their hard disk of previous memory, and download into them a software of European memory” (Ngugi wa Thiong’o, 2009, p. 21) If we take Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s thesis of invasions of the mental universe and removal of hard disk of previous memory together with Mamdani’s thesis of “define” and “rule” as the core modus operandi of colonialism, then we have to understand why the colonial state emerged as an ever “re-searching” “ethnographic state” and why today this “re-search” has been escalated into the current “biometric state.”

From “Ethnographic” to “Biometric” State: Data Colonialism

To resolve the “native question,” the conquered Black “native” had to be known in minute detail by the White colonizer. Thus, re-search became a critical part of the imperial-colonial project. Not only the European anthropologist but also colonial ideologues such as Thomas Babington Macaulay in India and Lord Frederick John Dealtry Baron Lugard (first governor of Nigeria) in Western and Eastern Africa, and Cecil John Rhodes in Southern Africa became important re-searchers, producing ethnographical data and colonial knowledge that was desperately needed by colonialism to deal with the nagging “native question.”

Imperial knowledge and anthropo-ethnological pseudo-scientific colonial methodology produced data that were used for malevolent colonial ends such as the creation of “Bantustans” during apartheid in South Africa. As a result of this desire to know the “native” for colonial administrative purposes, the colonial state emerged as an “ethnographic state,” interested and actively involved in “re-searching” the native so as to “define” and “rule” over the “native.” Indeed, such colonial ideologues as Lugard assumed the status of experts on the colonized natives and produced colonial treatise such as The Dual Mandate in Tropical Africa (1922), which assumed the status of modules on how to rule over “natives.” Nicholas B. Dirks in Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (2001) provided details of the operations and deployment of ethnographical colonial episteme and methodology. Vishal Jadhav (2001, p. 1) reflected on ethnographical colonial episteme and posited that:

It may be noted here that from the very beginning it was ethnography and its techniques of data collection that functioned as the basis for a lifeworlds, such as participant observation, anthropometry, physical and morphological measurements, case studies, field studies etc.

Today, with the rise of what has been named as “global terrorism,” drug-trafficking and the problem of migration, new forms of surveillance and state control have emerged. But Keith Breckenridge’s award winning book The Global Politics of Identification and Surveillance in South Africa, 1850 to the Present (2016) reflected on the concepts of “biometric state” and “documentary state” going as far back as the 1850s in South Africa. These types of states use machines and technologies to extract, capture, and store information about all people, but particularly “Muslims” and “Blacks,” whose ways of behavior, worship, living, and actions do not always fit into the European template. Human difference and diversity suffers from miscognition and raises anxieties mainly to Europeans who are stuck in problematic Eurocentric worldviews. What has risen now is a new digital colonial methodology called “data mining.” It mines data from the human beings using technology. Reflecting on this new “data colonialism” Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias (2018, p. 1) made this compelling observation:

We are often told that data are now new oil. But unlike oil, data are not a substance found in nature. It must be appropriated. The capture and processing of social data unfolds through a process we call data relations, which ensures the “natural” conversion of daily life into a data stream. The result is nothing less than a new social order, based on continuous tracking, and offering unprecedented new opportunities for social discrimination and behavioral influence. We propose that this process is best understood through the history of colonialism. Thus, data relations enact a new form of data colonialism, normalizing the exploitation of human beings through data, just as historical colonialism appropriated territory and resources and ruled subjects for profit. Data colonialism paves the way for a new stage of capitalism whose outlines we only glimpse: the capitalism of life without limit.

Data colonialism renders social life across the human globe “an open resource for extraction” (Couldry & Mejias, 2018, p. 2). At the center of data colonialism is appropriation of “personal data” “for ends which are not themselves ‘personal’” (Couldry & Mejias, 2018, p. 4). The storm troopers of data colonialism include firms and corporations such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, which Couldry and Mejias (2018, p. 5) term “the social quantification sector.” At the center of data colonialism are digital social platforms:

Digital social platforms are the technological means that produce a new type of “social” for capital: that is, the social in a form that can be continuously tracked, captured, sorted, and counted for value as “data.” (Couldry & Mejias, 2018, p. 6

Under the present moment of data colonialism, what is colonized is everyday human (social) life. How dangerous data colonialism is that it induces “self-colonization.” This is why Couldry and Mejias (2018, p. 9) posited “In the hollowed out social world of data colonialism, data practices invade the space of self by making tracking a permanent feature of life, expanding and deepening the basis on which human beings can exploit each other.” Human beings today are hostage to “datafication” and “algorithmic control” (Couldry & Mejias, 2018, p. 11).

Conclusion: Decolonizing, Unmasking, and Repositioning

This article is meant to be a provocation to intensify struggles for epistemic freedom (see Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018). This provocation is timely because it is delivered at a time when Immanuel Wallerstein (2004) defined it as characterized by “uncertainties of knowledge” and possibilities of reorganizing knowledge. This is an opportune time because as noted by Patrick Chabal (2012, p. 335) “the European ‘conceit’ has come to an end: The end of conceit is upon us. Western rationality must be rethought.” Research methodology continues to exist as a technology of sustenance of Eurocentric knowledge. Research methodology exists to block any attempt to know otherwise than what is already laid down as legitimate ways of knowing. We continue today demanding from students to tell us a priori how new knowledge is to be discovered through presentation of clear methodology. We continue to set a rigid criterion called methodology which tells new researchers that there is a highway of discovering and presenting knowledge and nothing more.

Methodology has become that straitjacket and lens that every new researcher has to wear if she/he has to discover knowledge and survive in our “publish or perish” institutions of higher learning (universities). Methodology has assumed the status of “disciplinary” tool. As a disciplinary tool, it makes it impossible for new knowledge to be discovered and generated. Whatever is discovered has to be disciplined into an existing methodology in the process, draining it of its profundity. This is why it is urgent to decolonize methodology. This entails unmasking its role and purpose in re-search; rebelling against its limiting demands and “apriories.” Decolonizing research methodology cannot be possibly without painstaking processes of “rethinking thinking,” “unthinking,” and “learning to unlearn in order to relearn” (Hoppers & Richards, 2012; Tlostanova & Mignolo, 2012; Wallerstein, 1991).