Eurasian Borderlands in Dialogue with Mesoamerica

Abstract

The previous chapter helps to easily move to the next part of the book where it becomes necessary to go back to Mesoamerica, yet do it on a different level, connected with the quest for trans-epistemic and transvalue grounds for a possible global dialogue between Eurasian and Mesoamerican borderlands. My attempt to analyze R.K.’s testimony was also an attempt to practice decolonial gender anthropology a fascinating example of which is to be found in Sylvia Marcos’s book Taken from the Lips: Gender and Eros in Mesoamerican Religions (Marcos 2006). What follows is a virtual dialogue with its author. I attempt to interpret and at the same time rethink her method in relation to Central Asian and Caucasus subjectivities and local histories. This method is not a merely participatory anthropology. As a Bolivian scholar Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (Cusicanqui 1990) pointed out, participatory anthropology may still remain within the traditional anthropological agenda. A decolonial anthropology would mean epistemic and political projects with indigenous agendas working with anthropologists , such as THOA (Taller Historia Oral Andina) or the Zapatistas. In such a radical anthropology the very object in the traditional understanding is gone and the ethnographer is a part of the world she or he describes, establishing close inter-personal relations with subjects of her/his research, in order to avoid sliding back into othering as a methodological basis of traditional anthropology, betraying its historical links with missionary or civilizing discourses.