Walking the complexities between two worlds: A personal story of epistemological tensions in knowledge production

Abstract

In this article, I tell the autoethnographic stories of epistemological tensions emerging from my entanglement with Indigenous and Western ways of knowing in my journey towards my doctoral research in social work. I link these tensions to broader socio-political and historical tensions that tie together the West and the Global South. I highlight the sharp contrasts and contradictions as well as the nuanced contestations in the production of knowledge. I follow a chronological order to organize my narratives into four parts. In the first part, I describe my experiences of walking in two worlds. In the second part, I explore how I knew what I knew, depicting my indigenous ways of knowing. In the third part, I examine Western ways of knowing, depicting the subjugation of my indigenous ways of knowing. In the final part, I address the hybrid ways of knowing that I embody by walking in many worlds.

Keywords

Autoethnography knowledge production epistemological tension indigenous knowledge Western knowledge hybrid knowledge qualitative research immigrant

I am curious. I ask many questions as an immigrant who walks in two worlds. Some of my questions lead directly to my qualitative research in social work. Why does Canada attract the “best and the brightest” of highly skilled immigrants from around the world, only to throw them into the swelling ranks of the unemployed or underemployed? Canadian multiculturalism policy affirms the value and dignity of all Canadians regardless of their racial or ethnic origin, language, or religious affiliation (CIC, 2012). This is the promise on which Canada selects highly skilled immigrants with broad transferable skills that would ensure their long-term economic success. In practice, however, the country has witnessed a dramatic decline in the economic welfare of its most skilled immigrants; especially, racialized skilled immigrants suffer disproportionately (Reitz & Elrick, 2014). Among racialized immigrants, the deterioration of employment status is more severe for recent arrivals although they are far more educated and experienced than the previous generations (Sharaf, 2013).

What is it that makes Canada seek out immigrants in the first place? What is it that slots immigrants into job ghettoes after they arrive? How does this lead to the deskilling of highly skilled immigrants? What is the role of social work in all this and what can social workers do to alleviate the problem? For my doctoral thesis, I want to conduct qualitative research examining the phenomenon of deskilling and its impact on the wellbeing of racialized skilled immigrants. I want to understand the deskilling phenomenon through the eyes of racialized immigrants to explore the meaning, structure, and essence of their lived-experiences in the Canadian labor market. I seek in-depth understanding of the experiences of immigrant settlement and integration as well as the theories and processes of international migration.

Now I will be dishonest if I say my own experience and my identities will not creep into my research or my analysis. I am a racialized skilled immigrant myself. I was born in Nepal and am studying in Canada. My research interest and the very choice of my research topic emerge from my personal experiences of racialization in academia, the Canadian labor force and health services. My identity is tied into my research interest. What I want to know, whom I want to know, and how I want to know are all interconnected. I cannot escape the entanglements of these identities as I walk in two worlds here too – the world of my personal experience and the collective world of racialized immigrants in Canada.

Perhaps I can consciously “bracket off ” these identities if I use phenomenology as my qualitative method (Creswell, 2013; Moustakas, 1994) in searching for the essence of immigrant experiences. This methodology can allow me to gather and evaluate immigrants’ lived experience, their written or oral self-reports, or even their aesthetic expressions such as art, narratives, and poetry. It can give me some objective distance to do objective qualitative research. But what can I do about the unconscious aspects of who I am? Will it not creep into my research? How can I escape the subjectivities I bring into my research? I lean towards reflexive approaches (Myerhoff & Ruby, 1982) to understand how individuals make sense of the social world and their places in it. I need to be aware of the tension arising from different social positions in relation to class, gender, and race. I also lean towards narrative research (Spector-Mersel, 2010) to investigate not just how we are constructed through stories but also the relations of power through which stories are produced, silenced, accepted, or contested (Foucault, 1980). As I want to examine both the objective and the subjective experiences of participants, I wrestle with the subjective/objective dichotomy in research. I want to straddle both. I want to walk in both worlds. I want to understand the subjective and objective experiences of my participants. Andrews et al. (2013) argue that narrative research carries traces of human lives; it digs into the unspoken and unheard words of my participants that I want to understand. In this, I see the subjective and the objective as intertwined and inseparable.

Curiously, this walking in two worlds is not just a dilemma in my qualitative study. It is also a central tension in my entire life as a racialized immigrant. The identities I bring with me from my homeland, Nepal and the evolving identities I am constructing here in Canada are in constant tension. I also see these tensions in the broader socio-political and historical context and the global injustices that filter into my research. I see the impacts of colonialism on my indigenous ways of knowing and the ensuing epistemic violence (Marker, 2003; Smith, 1999). As I walk the two worlds, I encounter tensions between Western knowledge and my subjugated indigenous knowledge. Please do not get me wrong here. I do not mean these two worlds are monolithic or homogeneous. They both have their own diversities within.

How I knew What I knew

We are not myths of the past, ruins in the jungle, or zoos. We are people and we want to be respected, not to be victims of intolerance and racism. – Rigoberta Menchu Tum

How do I know what I know? In the beginning, there was my indigenous ways of knowing that offered me up to this world. I was primed with my ancestors’ physical, mental, emotional and spiritual ways of knowing. I saw the world of my childhood through the eyes of my parents. I learned to respect my elders and honor my ancestors, just like them and just like others in my small community in Taplejung, Nepal. No matter what my community was going through (i.e. colonization, political turmoil, suppression, and poverty), there was tremendous love, respect, and cultural solidarity, which became my source of knowledge. As my parents raised and nurtured me, their visions, stories, and spiritual insights became mine too. I was embodied with family values and communal solidarity in my tender years. This is the embodied knowing I bring to my research.

In social work, we dig deep into our clients’ stories seeking their embodied knowing. If I want to dig deep into my research participants’ embodied knowing and experience, I must also bring my own into the equation as an ethical stance (Myerhoff & Ruby, 1982; Scott, 1992). What is echoed in my methodology is the utilization of the inner self to make the unknown known (Absolon, 2011). As others have argued (Gunaratnam & Lewis, 2001), my various emotions (like fear, shame, anger, and happiness) will all unavoidably come into my research with this inner self. However, inner subjective self is also inseparably connected and in tension with objective social structures and broader ways of knowing. The oral traditions and narratives such as storytelling, ceremonies, songs, teachings, rituals, and sharing are the major tools used to search for my indigenous knowledge. I believe that the lived experiences of individuals, and their deeper meaning embedded in their ways of knowing are possible only when a social phenomenon is learned in its own historical, cultural, and social settings (Mannheim, 1936). Therefore, I step back and reflect as far back as I can remember. And this is how I knew what I knew.

I sit here and recollect as far back as I can remember

And you were always there with me, Dad.

Every day helping me learn

about our great-great grandparents.

You were telling me

not to forget those stories, because

they were from our great-great-grandparents

Take them from generations to generations.

And you were always there with me, Mom.

Everyday helping me read

The verses of the Geeta

every morning, before breakfast

wishing for a blissful day.

You were telling me the stories

of Dashain and Tihar celebrations

And the story of the journey to the Pathibhara temple,

worshipping the gods and goddesses

for peace, prosperity, and happiness.

And you were always there with me, Dad.

Telling me to go to the travelers’ rest-area

And talk to those porters

with wrinkled faces, bare feet, worn clothes,

and heavy loads on their backs,

carrying for the tourists.

Wasn’t that story beautiful, Dad?

The story I wrote about the old porter?

That was indeed his true story of

‘A Porter and his Life’.

And you were always there with me, Mom.

Taking me with you

To let the cattle graze in the woods,

on the bank of the Tamor River

How interesting those stories you told me

of those wild animals and of our cattle

grazing together

as if they were from the same family,

and the wild animals waiting for our cattle

to come and play the next day.

And you were always there with me, Dad.

helping me compose a poem

of a new beautiful rainbow so full of colors

under the blue sky and above our house

just at the horizon of

the Kanchenjunga and the Kumbhakarna Himal

and linking to the Sagarmatha

A new beautiful rainbow so full of colors.

And you were always there with me, Mom.

Taking me to the Witch-doctor,

for my healing, the healing of

unfamiliar pain…a strange agony

that started on the first day of my school.

A reaction in Elementary School,

Was that what made you take me

to the Witch-doctor, Mom?

What was it that pained me, Mom?

So I sit here and recollect as far back as I can remember,

the nurture I had, the errands I ran

as I walk in two worlds

Dad and Mom, Mom and Dad.

The souls of my soul; you are my inner voice

I will listen to you as you step into my research

You will talk with me as I talk with participants

You will analyze the data and write the findings with me.

Western ways of knowing

We are technology and concept oriented – we abstract, analyse, and categorise the external objective world through our thinking and sensation functions. – Vera Bührmann

I was immersed in the world of Western knowing when I started school. There the world of my parents’ knowing was turned upside down. And the values of my community went inside out. I can see the epistemic violence that Absolon (2011), Smith (1999), and Marker (2003) talk about and how colonization has made the realities of indigenous peoples indiscernible. Through colonization, western ways of knowing have invalidated indigenous knowledge and disconnected indigenous peoples from their ways of knowing.

Even though, Nepal was never physically colonized, I can see our socio-cultural values, economy, and polity have been disfigured and devalued by the colonial masters. Spivak (1985) reacts against the epistemic violence to the subalterns because the colonial masters not only rehearse political domination, economical exploitation, and cultural erasure, but also colonize at the level of the idea. The colonizers thought that the knowledge my society generated was outdated, useless, and unscientific. So the new knowledge system the colonizers tried to introduce in my society was scientific knowledge system, and I also gradually accepted that as superior knowledge system because they were given to me by the masters. I see the miseducation that comes wearing the face of education and the injustice that comes wearing the face of the civilizing mission. Can I claim that I am free from the colonial masters? Can I claim that I am free from colonial culture and their ideas?

In international social work, we talk a lot about global injustice and the inequities meted out to the Global South. Can I cut this aspect of my identity and leave it out of my research? Can I hide the privilege I aspire to in seeking Western education? As I walk in the tensions of my two worlds, can I hide from the injustices this double walk does to my indigenous ways of knowing? Can I hide my role, my own complicity, in this system of global injustice? And can I keep this knowing out of my research? So, here again, I step back and reflect as far back as I can remember on the world of my Western knowing.

I sit here and recollect as far back as I can remember

And you are, since then next to me, Mom.

Since the unfamiliar pain began in school

where I was taught English letters

‘A’ for ‘America’, ‘B’ for ‘Britain’, and ‘C’ for ‘Canada’

My textbooks were not like me.

The contents were strange

the stories you told me were not in there, Mom.

Because it was the Western school

where knowledge meant Western knowledge.

And you are, since then next to me, Dad.

the stories of great-great grandparents are worthless here

Your stories are replaced by astronomy and economy

Your poetic verses are replaced by algebra and geometry

Because this is the Western college, Dad.

And your Geeta is replaced by the Bible, Mom.

And so are Dashain and Tihar by Christmas.

The stories of porters have no worth here, Dad.

nor does the wisdom in their wrinkled faces,

nor does the travelling knowledge encoding their bare feet,

This is the Western world, Dad.

And you are, since then next to me, Mom.

But the Tamor River doesn’t speak to me in your language

It just quietly takes tourists to the Kanchenjunga.

And the porters carry their loads; quietly

as their silence breaks my heart.

The Sagarmatha doesn’t speak your language either, Mom

Because she is christened as Mt. Everest

from her sacred abode of the snow peak,

the highest of the highest in the Himalayans

she looks down quietly

she doesn’t hear when I call her Sagarmatha

I call her again and again;

O Sagarmatha!

Sacred Sagarmatha!

But she doesn’t respond to me

This is the Western world, Mom

the language is English

her name is Everest

And you are, since then next to me, Dad.

Your beautiful rainbow has no meaning here

Because whiteness has whited out other colors

And only white is valued here

Because white is assumed the brightest here.

And there is no witch-doctor here, Mom.

Medical doctors prescribe medicine here.

And no more incense-sticks to light, Mom

for gods and goddesses.

because Science has the Truth locked in its hands.

This is the Western world, Mom.

the world assumed for the brightest.

the assumed World of truth

So I sit here and recollect as far back as I can remember

the injustice that took away your knowing.

the foreign tourists, the Masters.

the native porters, the Beasts of Burden.

I sit here and recollect, Mom

I sit here and remember, Dad.

Your children are still the Beasts of Burden here

And the tourists are still the Masters.

as I walk in two worlds

thinking of ethical research.

Can I leave out this injustice?

Can I bracket it off?

Can I delete it from my recollection,

as though it never happened?

this is my research, Dad

this is my study, Mom.

Hybrid ways of knowing

Hybridity can offer the opportunity for a counter-narrative, a means by which the dominated can reclaim shared ownership of a culture that relies upon them for meaning. – Homi Bhabha

I embody both Indigenous and Western ways of knowing and this is the knowledge that informs my research. Despite my desire for epistemological purity and decolonized Indigenous ways of knowing, my reality dictates hybrid ways of knowing. Sometimes I go back to the injustices of Western way of knowing that marginalizes and ignores the legacies of diverse histories and cultures of my indigenous knowledge. I reflect on how Western knowledge is exercised as power for the production of otherness and reproduction of strangeness (Ahmed, 2000; Young, 1990). Western knowing needs my indigenous knowing in order to exist. That means the two ways of knowing are bound together forever in this play of inequitable power relations. In this inescapable bond of injustice, I see myself embodying both ways of knowing and this sharing of a common knowing tells me that the dominant Western knowing needs indigenous knowing to define itself. Without indigenous knowing Western meaning crumbles. As Homi Bhabha argues, this inescapable bonding together in hybridity offers me the opportunity to produce a counter-narrative in my pursuit of justice. And I ask myself; am I hybrid now? I do not want to be mingled with both worldviews. I do not like hybridity. I fantasize the purity of my culture and my ancestors’ way of knowing! And in my fantasy, I want to go back to the purity of my indigenous roots! I am engulfed by this burning desire to get back the purity and originality. And I am utterly confused as I go back and forth between purity and hybridity.

According to Shizha (2006), knowledge hybridization seeks to demystify, and deconstruct knowledge universalism and globalization. But the hybridization tells me there is no such a thing as purity of culture. And what does this mean to me for the epistemological dimensions of knowledge production while conducting qualitative research I conduct qualitative research with racialized minority immigrants? And how do I bring justice to them without violating their epistemology? Is it even possible? For my research, I hang on to hybridity with all its trials and tribulations. I borrow the term “hybridity” from the postcolonial thoughts of Bhabha (1994) who defines hybridity as a cultural mixing or mingling between the West and the East. I am particularly lured by his assertion that hybridity is a subversive tool whereby colonized people might challenge various forms of oppression. As he notes, hybridity is a mode of resistance on the part of the colonized and it refers to the notion that both the colonial and colonized cultures and languages cannot be presented in their purest form:

Hybridity is the revaluation of the assumption of colonial identity through the repetition of discriminatory identity effects…. It unsettles the mimetic or narcisstic demands of colonial power but reimplicates its identification in strategies of subversion that turn the gaze of the discriminated back upon the eye of power. For the colonial hybrid is the articulation of the ambivalent space where the rite of power is enacted on the site of desire, making its objects at once disciplinary and disseminatory – or, in my mixed metaphor a negative transparency. (Bhabha, 1994: 34–35)

That means, hybridity, as the representation of culture is a site of contestation where resistance can be mobilized. The colonized and colonizer are not external to each other; they are internally and inseparably connected. In this postcolonial hybridity, the colonized are not simply out there in the Global South; they are also here in the North. Skilled immigrants come to Canada not only because Canada attracts them/us but also because they/we seek out Canada. Our site of desire is successful employment in Canada. The experience of unemployment, underemployment, and deskilling is the antithesis of our desire that leaves us in what Bhabha (1994) calls an “ambivalent space where the rite of power is enacted on the site of desire”. I want my research to be this ambivalent site of contestation and subversion where racialized immigrants return the racializing colonial gaze back on the sites of power with the purpose of improving access to employment.

For all these reasons, I frame my research as a postcolonial project where the knowledge I produce together with the research participants will be a site where resistance is enacted to redress the injustice. However, hybridity is not only the melding of the colonial and the colonized; it also involves my other identities and subjectivities. As Shizha (2006) argues, no knowledge is neutral, objective, absolute, or value-free; rather it is embedded in people’s cultural, social and political lives, and flows from assumptions shaped by such factors as gender, class, race, ethnicity, language and religion. This prompts me to acknowledge that I cannot escape the entanglement of my identities. Nor can I escape the entanglement of the broader social and global inequities of power. As I envision my research to be a hybrid space of all these intersections, I see how my walking in two worlds gets much more complicated and how I snake through the multiple worlds that surround me. For example, I slither into my male identity and enjoy the benefits of male privilege in Canada at the same time as I get smacked down by the racializing gaze of Canadian systemic racism when I slip into my subjectivity of a racialized immigrant. I slip into the privileges of my aspiring middle class status as a doctoral student at the same time as I anticipate the possibility of my doctoral aspiration marginalizing unemployed immigrant participants in my research. Each of my identities and subjectivities in my hybrid life positions me in a specific place in this web of global and local power relations. While I will focus my research on racialized immigrant identities and their experiences of deskilling, I will also keep an eye on how all these hybrid identities and subjectivities play out in these experiences.

So I sit here and recollect

as far back as I can remember

you are here still with me Mom and Dad

you are treading with me in these hybrid spaces

but you’re not silent anymore

Your eloquence tells my stories

Our cattle are no more innocent, Mom

they know those wild animals will eat them

The porter is quiet no more, Dad

he talks back to the tourist; he questions

even as he knows he is tied to the tourist forever

the tourist is meaningless without him

he is meaningless without the tourist

in these hybrid days

he questions the injustice, nonetheless

The Tamor River rises in rage, Mom

it doesn’t flow quietly in these hybrid days

It rises as it fall and it falls as it rises

There is no pure direction, Mom

In these hybrid days

and the Sagarmatha speaks from the peak of the world

She speaks for herself; she claims back her sacredness

from the colonizer

from the tourist

but all the same, she knows

She is bonded to the colonizer, the tourist

Only through them could she speak to the world

In these hybrid days

The beautiful rainbow so full of colors

just over the horizon of

the Kanchenjunga and the Kumbhakarna Himal

is now the burning fire of my desire

taking me to the heartland of Ivory Tower

as the wavy colors mix and match

in harmony and discord

in these days of hybridity

So I sit here and recollect as far back as I can remember, Dad.

But I can’t. Because I live in a settled and unsettled world.

My world is settled and unsettled at the same time

I find myself ‘there’ not ‘here’

and then I’m ‘here’ not ‘there’

My spaces are separate and separated,

And they converge simultaneously.

It is a paradox of being and belonging.

A paradoxical uncanny frightens me, Mom.

Not because it is unfamiliar or new,

But because the familiar has become strange,

And the strange familiar

In these hybrid days

With you, Mom and Dad

I walk in many worlds

I sow hybrid seeds

I do hybrid research

and reap hybrid knowledge

to contest, to reclaim

and redress the grand (in)justice

In conclusion, in this prose and poetry piece, I tried to express my intense struggles in trying to carve out an epistemological position for my doctoral dissertation. I shared the conversations I had with the voices in the literature as well as my critical self-reflection and the deepest of my emotional wrestling with them. In presenting these struggles to you, the reader, I adopted a step-by-step chronological exploration of how I came to know what I know. In the first part I made sense of the indigenous ways of knowing from where I was born and raised in Nepal. In the second part, I delved into how Western ways of knowing infused my traditional (the Nepalese) ways of knowing and how I integrated both in a tension-filled oppositional binary relations of the colonizer and the colonized. This position felt like a good place to do my research because it would allow me to point out and critique the racializing structural barriers in the Canadian system. In this position, I don’t have to look at how I may be implicated in this system of oppression. As you may have realized, it was very hard for me to leave this righteous position and look at my own multiple identities implicating me in these systems of injustice. In the final part, I drove these struggles further home to hybridity. In hybrid ways of knowing, I needed to implicate myself in the webs of power relations, in the structures of privilege and marginality. I could no more point outwards to oppressive structures; in hybridity, these structures are also embodied in me. This realization that I am both colonized and colonizer is hard to accept. But here I am taking this way of knowing along with its tensions and discomforts into my doctoral research. I hope that, as a reader, you have followed me through the ups and downs of these struggles.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to first and foremost thank my family, relatives and friends, who supported through this journey for helping me locate my voice in this autoethnography. I would also like to thank three anonymous reviewers for the Qualitative Social Work Journal for their insightful comments on the earlier version of this article, which has helped strengthen and clarify my arguments.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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