Abstract
In her essay, “The Bible and 500 years of Conquest,” Mexican-born biblical scholar Elsa Tamez invites Christians to move beyond trying to construct “liberating hermeneutics” and instead focus on “a critical analysis of our own Christian-biblical discourse.” Commenting on the limits of “Western rationality” to respond to the religious practices of Indigenous, African Brazilian, and African Caribbean communities, Tamez asks what it would mean to follow Kuna theologian Aiwan Wagua’s observation that “to think things from outside indigenous thought” is quite problematic. Without naming it, and still using a terminology that did not fully acknowledge the plurality of Latin American Christianities, Tamez’s observation can be taken as a challenge for Latin American Christians to undergo a more radical cultural and epistemological turn, critically reviving their self-understanding in the region. The Christian Church might have shown itself to “be sensitive to the poor,” Tamez writes, “but not to the other.” Speaking at the time indigenous peoples in Latin America were commemorating the 500 years of resistance to the European invasion of their land and world, Tamez takes the Christian Church—its practices, its theology, and its hermeneutics—to task for its complicity in the destruction of life, denouncing “that many deaths have been caused, maybe more than the actual liberation of persons and peoples.” Thus the significance of taking a further step in the critical analysis of Christian biblical-theological discourse in Latin America. As Tamez notes, it is no longer possible to “substitute the work of the Indigenous or blacks who are the subjects” of such experiences. Instead, the task of Christian theologizing in the region “is to help the non-Indigenous people to open up their mentality to receive with joy and equality those different practices of faith.” Ultimately, Tamez admits, elaborating “a biblical hermeneutics that includes other-non-Christian practices…is a task that we will learn from Indigenous exegetes themselves.”
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- 1.
Elsa Tamez, “The Bible and 500 Years of Conquest,” in R.S. Sugirtharajah (ed.) Voices from the Margin: Interpreting the Bible in the Third World, 25th Anniversary Edition (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2016), 14; Note on essay (direct quote): “This is a revised version of a lecture presented at one of the plenary sessions at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in 1992 at Philadelphia. It is reprinted from God’s Economy: Biblical Studies from Latin America , ed. Ross Kinsler and Gloria Kinsler (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2005), pp. 3–17.”
- 2.
Tamez, 22–23. See Aiwan Wagua, “Consecuencias actuales de la invasión europea: Visión indigena,” Concilium, No. 232 (1990): 422–26 (qtd. In Tamez, 22–23).
- 3.
Ibid., 23.
- 4.
Tamez, 23.
- 5.
According to Luciana Ballestrin, the term “decolonial turn” was coined by Nelson Maldonado-Torres in 2005, meaning “the movement of theoretical and practical resistance, political and epistemological, to the logic of modernity / coloniality.” See her “America Latina e o Giro Decolonial,” Revista Brasileira de Ciência Política, n°11. Brasília, maio – agosto de 2013, 89–117. (105). See also Carlos Cunha, Provocações Decoloniais à Teologia Cristã (São Paulo: Terceira Via, 2017), 82ff. For Nelson Maldonado-Torres’ own discussion of the term, see his “La Descolonización y el Giro Des-colonial,” Tabula Rasa. Bogotá – Colombia, No. 9: 61–72m Julio-Deciembre 2008.
- 6.
We highlight the Indigenous Christian communities here in light of the challenge Latin American Indigenous Christians are faced with when they claim Christianity as their own whereas acknowledging the paradox of the cultural genocide caused by the European Christian invasion of their world. The movement of revitalization of Indigenous and African-derived religions in the region are also significant expressions of the decolonial turn, even if not using the terminology. Although the coloniality of power, knowing, and being deeply affect Indigenous lives and living, for many of them this revitalization means the reclaiming and reaffirmation of their ways of knowing and knowledge. For an early work highlighting the voices of Mayan Indigenous Christians, their view on the cultural genocide perpetrated in the context of a “Christian invasion of the Maya world,” and the reclaiming of the Mayan spirituality in the context of Indigenous Christian practices, see Guillermo Cook (ed.), Crosscurrents in Indigenous Spirituality , Interface of Maya, Catholic and Protestant Worldviews (Leiden, The Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1997). In particular, see the chapter by Vitalino Similox Salazar, “The Invasion of Christianity into the World of the Mayas,” 35–48.
- 7.
Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “Thinking through the Decolonial Turn: Post-continental Interventions in Theory, Philosophy, and Critique—an Introduction,” Transmodernity, (Fall 2011), 1.
- 8.
See Cunha, op. cit., 64ff.
- 9.
Walter Mignolo, “Epistemic Disobedience: the Decolonial Option and the Meaning of Identity in Politics,” Gragoatá, Niterói, N. 22, 11–41, 2007 (13).
- 10.
Ibid.
- 11.
Cunha, op. Cit., 88.
- 12.
Coloniality is a concept originally developed by Peruvian scholar Anibal Quijano, and later expanded by Walter Mignolo, which refers to the systemic legacy of colonialism. According to Mignolo, it “names the underlying logic of the foundation and unfolding of Western civilization from the Renaissance to today of which historical colonialisms have been a constitutive, although downplayed, dimension.” Walter D. Mignolo. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Latin America otherwise: languages, empires, nations) (Duke University Press. Kindle Edition), 2.
- 13.
Maldonado-Torres, op. cit.
- 14.
For a representative sample, see: Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000); Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto Press, 1986); Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, (New York: Grove Press, 2004); Chela Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); María Lugones, “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System,” Hypatia 22. 1 (2007): 186–209; Sylvia Wynter, “1492: A New World View,” in Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas: A New World View, edited by Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford, (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 5–57; Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity , (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); Walter Mignolo, “Delinking. The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of De-coloniality,” Cultural Studies. Vol. 21. Nos. 2–3 (March/May 2007), pp. 449–514; Walter, Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity : Global Futures, Decolonial Options, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011); Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza , (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987); Linda T. Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, (London: Zed Books Ltd., 1999); Enrique Dussel, The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of “the Other” and the Myth of Modernity, trans. Michael D. Barber (New York: Continuum, 1995).
- 15.
Mignolo, op. cit. Kindle version, 9–10.
- 16.
Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “On the Coloniality of Being,” Cultural Studies, 21:2, 262.
- 17.
Mark G. Brett and Jione Havea (eds.), Colonial Contexts and Postcolonial Theologies: Storyweaving in the Asia-Pacific (Palgrave, New York: 2014), ix.
- 18.
Raimundo C. Barreto, “Mark G. Brett and Jione Havea (Eds), Colonial Contexts and Postcolonial Theologies: Storyweaving in the Asia-Pacific. Postcolonialism and Religions Series (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Pp. 273 x. $87.40.” Scottish Journal of Theology 70, no. 3 (2017): 374–76 (376).
- 19.
Ada María Isasi-Díaz and Eduardo Mendieta (eds.), Decolonizing Epistemologies: Latina/o Theology and Philosophy, (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 5.
- 20.
Ibid., 3.
- 21.
David Tavárez (ed.), Words and Worlds Turned Around: Indigenous Christianities in Colonial Latin America , (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2017).
- 22.
In the past few years, several efforts linking decolonial thought, religious studies, and theology have emerged in the region. Among them, see Teresa Delgado, a Puerto Rican Decolonial Theology: Prophesy Freedom (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); Santiago Slabodsky, Decolonial Judaism: Triumphal Failures of Barbaric Thinking (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); An Yountae, The Decolonial Abyss: Mysticism and Cosmopolitics from the Ruins (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2017); Paulo Agostinho Nogueira Baptista, “Challenges of Decolonial Epistemologies and the Ecological Paradigm for Religious Studies,” Interações 13/23 (2018): 94–114; and Michel Andraos (ed.). The Church and Indigenous Peoples in the Americas: In Between Reconciliation and Decolonization (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2019). Enrique Dussel, himself, as an inter- and transdisciplinary scholar identified with the rise of both Latin American liberation theology and philosophy, and an acknowledged influence on leading decolonial theorists, is a living example of the unavoidable connection between the study of religion (Christianity, in particular) and decolonial thinking. Discussions on the relationship between liberation theology and decolonial thought have been an ongoing piece of this conversation, as exemplified in the Theology of Liberation and Decolonial Thought Summer School, in Santiago de Compostela on June 3–7, 2019.
- 23.
See, for example, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “On the Coloniality of Human Rights,” Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais, dezembro 2017: 117–136; Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “Outline of Ten Theses on Coloniality and Decoloniality.” Posted on Oct. 26, 2016. Frantz Fanon Foundation and website of the Caribbean Studies Association. Retrieved from: http://fondation-frantzfanon.com/outline-of-ten-theses-on-coloniality-and-decoloniality/
- 24.
A term used by Diego Irrarazaval in “Mission within Cultures and Religions,” Exchange 30, no. 3 (2001): 230.
- 25.
See Raimundo C. Barreto “Beyond Contextualization: Gospel, Culture, and the Rise of a Latin American Christianity,” in World Christianity as Public Religion, edited by Raimundo Barreto, Ronaldo Cavalcante & Wanderley Pereira da Rosa (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2017), 97–117.
- 26.
Ibid., 99.
- 27.
For the connection between decoloniality and border thinking, see Walter D. Mignolo, “Geopolitics of Sensing and Knowing: On (De)coloniality, Border Thinking, and Epistemic Disobedience,” Confero, vol. 1, n. 1, 2013, 129–150.
- 28.
Lamin Sanneh, Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture. Revised and Expanded (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2009).
- 29.
For more on Dussel’s association with CEHILA and EATWOT, see Raimundo C. Barreto, “The Epistemological Turn in World Christianity: Engaging Decoloniality in Latin American and Caribbean Christian Discourses,” in Journal of World Christianity 9/1 (2019): 48–60.
- 30.
See Raimundo C. Barreto, “The Epistemological Turn in World Christianity: Engaging Decoloniality in Latin American and Caribbean Christian Discourses,” Journal of World Christianity 9/1 (2019): 48–60.
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Barreto, R., Sirvent, R. (2019). Introduction. In: Barreto, R., Sirvent, R. (eds) Decolonial Christianities. New Approaches to Religion and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24166-7_1
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