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World and Consciousness

How to Read the History of Knowledge Without Academic Pomp and White Gloves

Picture a classic museum display case: polished glass, the yellowed journal of a pioneer explorer, a dignified oil portrait, and an imposing list of his scholarly treatises.

Andrey Zarinsh · Maria Evilkut16 min readW-20-N04
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Picture a classic museum display case: polished glass, the yellowed journal of a pioneer explorer, a dignified oil portrait, and an imposing list of his scholarly treatises. A museum guide announces with bated breath how the great naturalist heroically overcame malaria and, all by himself, gifted civilization knowledge of a miraculous medicinal shrub. And only at the very margin of a tattered page, an orphaned pencil note reads: the plant's location and medicinal properties were pointed out by local residents. No names, no surnames—just an anonymous natural resource.

This scene is fictionalized for clarity, but it illustrates a possible setup of the academic theater: some are cast as ingenious creators of progress, while others silently haul trays of crushed stone for them. Even if the curator hangs a photograph of the local guide next to it, the distribution of authority itself does not necessarily change. The question lies elsewhere: by what backstage rules is it decided who counts as the author of elevated thought, and who is merely a complimentary attachment to the herbarium?

What This Discussion Is About

Critical reading helps untangle how colonial habits made themselves at home in university curricula, citation indexes, and criteria of truth. Here, it is vital to avoid zealotry: key authors—Aníbal Quijano, María Lugones, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui—never sat on the same party committee and never co-authored a unified catechism. On the contrary, they debate one another with gusto. All modern examples below are our own hypothetical illustrations, not verbatim quotes from the classics.

1. Changing the Signboard Does Not Erase Old Habits

In Aníbal Quijano’s work, coloniality designates a structure of power that can persist long after colonial governors have packed their trunks and sailed back home. In his paper "Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America," he demonstrates how racial classifications became fused with the global division of labor. Eurocentrism here is not the scholar’s passport registration, but the claim of one local experience to serve as the yardstick for the entire planet. Yet this is a rigorous historical theory, not a magic skeleton key with which to indiscriminately explain away any everyday injustice.

Imagine a university that ceremoniously replaced its signboard, its rector, and its language of instruction. A seeming triumph of independence. Yet the required reading list, the evaluation grid, and the very image of a respectable professor have remained untouched. Formal reforms gallop ahead, while the habits of academic recognition creep at a snail's pace.

It does not follow from this that every old rule is criminal. The takeaway is far more modest: a round seal on a decree does not answer the question of how the factory of authority operates. It is equally naive to believe that the past evaporated with the stroke of a pen, or to shout that absolutely nothing has changed. When you label literally everything around you as colonial, the term dissolves into meaningless noise. A critical concept must expose a tangible mechanism of exclusion, not serve as a cue for ritualistic hand-wringing.

2. The Supplier of Raw Material and the Author of the Theory Are Not the Same Person

Let us return to our traveler. The reality could have been anything. The naturalist might have diligently transcribed what locals had known for centuries. He might have been the first to synthesize disparate accounts from five different healers into a cohesive system. He might have made a fool of himself due to lost-in-translation blunders. And the interlocutors themselves might have deliberately withheld half the information from a suspicious outsider. While uncataloged documents gather dust, we have no right to invent a convenient narrative just for the sake of poetic justice.

Yet the pecking order in handing out laurels is immediately visible. The local resident, who knows the forest like the back of their hand, is filed away under raw materials ("informant"). The visiting gentleman, who packaged it into Latin terminology, receives an academic chair ("researcher"). Sometimes this reflects a real division of labor. The trouble begins when the former party is permanently barred from co-authorship, from verifying conclusions, and from having any say over the end result.

A perfunctory line of acknowledgments on the back of the title page will not fix the system. But lumping everyone together out of pity is just as absurd: an honest acknowledgment of contribution does not turn any folk belief into an automatically proven truth, just as fact-checking does not erase the merit of the person who helped frame the question. Fairness demands documentary precision, not noble daydreams.

3. Lugones: Gender Cannot Simply Be Bolted on as an Afterthought for the Report

In her article "Heterosexualism and the Colonial / Modern Gender System," María Lugones gives Quijano’s concept a serious shake-up. She demonstrates that coloniality cannot be understood without examining how the very concepts of sex and gender were imposed. At the same time, Lugones cautions against treating women as a homogeneous club with identical concerns while ignoring racial barriers. Her goal is to expose the problem, not to issue a one-size-fits-all prescription for every era and continent.

Picture a hypothetical grant foundation survey. The administrators tick the boxes: gender, income, language, location. On paper, everything looks progressive. Yet two female participants holding identical degrees can find themselves ushered into completely different corridors: one is invited to the plenary session to shape the research agenda, while the other is asked to pose in ethnic attire and share a touching personal anecdote.

If a researcher only tallies the percentage of women on the dais, they remain blind to the actual balance of power. What matters is not mere physical presence at the banquet, but having a voice. Nor should one rigid abstraction be swapped for another: the actual structure of family and authority in a given society must be derived from archival evidence, not forced to fit a trendy metropolitan handbook.

4. Linda Tuhiwai Smith: Who Calls the Scholarly Tune

In the introduction to Decolonizing Methodologies, Linda Tuhiwai Smith speaks candidly about the traumatic history of European science engaging in outright cultural plunder under the guise of objectivity. Yet Smith does not claim the mantle of an oracle for all Indigenous peoples. Her objective is to substantiate the right of communities to formulate their own research agendas rather than serve as guinea pigs.

A hypothetical scenario: a university landing party arrives at a lake to document rare dialect names for reeds. The locals implore them to investigate the toxic runoff from a nearby construction site. The first topic wins a handsome grant; the second is dismissed as insufficiently academic. In the end, power was divvied up behind an official's desk long before the scholars unzipped their audio recorders. The fact that people consented to answer questions about reeds does not mean in the slightest that they chose the topic.

Participation comes in many forms, and here it pays to strip away romantic illusions right off the bat. In practice, three tiers emerge: basic notification about what is going on; fine-tuning research questions with an eye toward local interlocutors; and finally, full collaborative determination of objectives, interpretations, and publication terms. This does not imply an automatic veto over your every sneeze. A small-scale project may have a limited format of participation—the main thing is not to put on airs and to outline those boundaries honestly from the start. Keep in mind, too, that no community is a monolith: an energetic activist or an official spokesperson rarely speaks for everyone, and the temptation to overlook dissenters and sweep internal disputes under the rug is equally strong on both sides.

5. Translation Traps: Between Faux Exoticism and Bureaucratic Spreadsheets

Translating concepts is a minefield. Imagine an ancient document where a single word denotes a plot of land, ancestral memory, and reciprocal obligations among neighbors. The cataloger breathes a sigh of relief and writes "real estate," because management understands it better that way. The concept becomes accessible, but its original meaning has been turned inside out.

The knee-jerk reaction is often an arrogant posture: "This word is untranslatable, you wouldn't understand, just take my word for it." That is just as much of an appropriation of power. The opposite extreme is leaving the original term untranslated as a sacred fetish, completely gutting its practical context.

When a cataloger insists on squeezing an intricate web of relationships into a single narrow column of a summary table, brevity stops being the soul of wit and becomes an instrument of flattening. Yet demanding endless tomes of commentary for every breath is a surefire way to stall any dialogue. An honest researcher does not pretend to be a sorcerer: they offer a working translation, openly delineate the boundaries of its applicability, and never pass off the convenience of phrasing as absolute truth.

Form dictates content here as well: a personal narrative, a ritual chant, a mental map, and a dry list of bullet points forge fundamentally different semantic links. A neat summary of oral history condensed into digestible bullet points may serve your research purpose splendidly, but let's be blunt: you have just created an entirely new object. Maintain a clear distance between the source document, its translation, and your own commentary, never allowing the researcher's analytical lens to be the only voice in the room—and this is a baseline rule of working hygiene for any shift in genre, not an exotic quirk of some particular tradition.

6. A Gap in the Inventory Is No Excuse for Unbridled Fantasy

If an empty space gapes in old records, it does not automatically prove an ingenious colonizer conspiracy. The individual might have been illiterate. The manuscript could have simply perished in a fire. An editor might have struck out a paragraph to save paper. Or the interlocutor may have simply shown the meddlesome visitor the door and refused to open up.

A caption on a museum placard reading, "Informant's name has not been established; no further evidence has been found to date," looks dry and won't fetch likes on social media. Yet it honestly separates facts from conjecture. Fabricating a heroic backstory for an oppressed individual retroactively is not respect—it is the exact same patronizing high-handedness.

Another trap: a manuscript is unearthed, digitized, and practically begs to go online. Yet the technical ability to make a file open-access is not the same as the narrator's consent to worldwide publicity. A folk tale may have been meant strictly for an inner circle. Then again, handing over all locking rights to the first influential activist who comes along is equally untenable: the rights of an individual storyteller and the interests of dissenting members within a group often collide. There are no universal blueprints; every case has to be parsed on its own merits. This is framing an ethical question, not handing down a ready-made legal ruling.

7. Rivera Cusicanqui: Radical Chic in Faculty Lounges

Bolivian scholar Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui strikes unsparingly at the rawest nerve of progressive academia. In her essay "Ch’ixinakax utxiwa," she takes aim at the academic manufacturing of theory: influential power centers can monopolize authority, leaving regions relegated to serving as suppliers of fresh case studies and raw field data. This is Rivera's argument, not an established guilty verdict against all universities.

In a hypothetical modern scenario, this looks both hilarious and cynical: a publishing house rolls out a premium book series on marginalized voices. A glossy cover, an inflated preface about dismantling colonial matrices, and down at the bottom—an exploitative contract and disenfranchised translators working for pennies.

Shifting the geography of idols does not guarantee democracy. If, instead of one unassailable patriarch, an academic chair is occupied by a tight clique of approved, "correct" authors, any dissenting colleague from the provinces gets shut out all over again. Genuine decolonization is not about juggling esoteric jargon at symposiums; it is about transparent agreements, fair pay, and the right to open intellectual sparring.

8. A Citation's Pedigree Does Not Make It Holy Scripture

The fetish of "authenticity" deserves its own dose of sarcasm. A young author from an Indigenous community pitches a witty story about metropolitan hipsters to an editorial board. The editor frowns: "No, that won't do. Write us something about shamanic dances and yearning for ancestral roots—you're a representative of your people!" They will only publish the person on the condition that they obediently cater to external exotic fantasies.

Flipping the dynamic in reverse is not a bit smarter, though. The notion that any assertion stamped "Made in the West" is inherently tainted, while every local legend is infallible, is merely a mirror-image hierarchy of authority. Stripping people of their right to skepticism, scholarly error, and internal disagreements in the name of preserving "pristine, primordial wisdom" is the pinnacle of academic hypocrisy.

The origin of an idea does not determine its veracity. Data gathered during a predatory expedition may prove botanically accurate—though that hardly excuses the plunder. Conversely, the most respectful, ethical, and politically correct roundtable can wholeheartedly endorse an erroneous hypothesis. Here, it is useful to decouple procedural ethics from fact-checking.

And one last point: the pedigree of a concept—be it European roots or an explicitly local origin—does not of itself guarantee universal applicability or fatal irrelevance. Rather than offering blind faith or wholesale dismissal, it is far more fruitful to probe the limits of its utility. Similarly, decolonial analysis and the philosophy of liberation, though walking hand in hand, are not synonymous: dissecting the historical baggage of categories is one thing; confronting actual exclusion from public life and the burden of responsibility is another. Lumping everything into one box under a catchy label is tempting, but the differences among authors, contexts, and mutual debates are infinitely more valuable than a seamless monolith.

9. Workshop: Dissecting a Single Page of Text

Deflating the pomposity of an inflated narrative doesn't require grants. It is enough to take precisely one page—a museum label, the preface to a school textbook, or a passage from a popular encyclopedia. This is an optional exercise in sober thinking, carrying no obligation to publish manifestos or litigate someone else's legal disputes:

  • Fact inventory. Set aside righteous indignation. Write down on paper with strict sobriety: what facts are stated, how are they substantiated, and where does the author frankly admit, "we do not know"?

  • Verb audit. Look at who gets assigned the triumphant action verbs ("discovered," "systematized," "formulated"), and who is described merely as an object or a data supplier ("was located," "provided data").

  • The line between fact and conjecture. Where does the source quotation end and the commentator's flight of fancy begin? Try rewriting the caption in neutral terms, keeping a notation for what remains unknown.

  • The right to dissent. Record: whose voices could push back against this text, and where are their documented testimonies preserved? Do not invent words on their behalf—write down only what is backed by evidence.

10. Scholarship Is Getting More Complex—And Thank Goodness for That

In honest research, one must be prepared for negative findings. You might suspect a treacherous erasure of a name, only to discover upon meticulous archival digging that the author credited the assistant's contribution in the footnotes. You might search for centuries of communal solidarity, only to stumble upon a mundane squabble over resources. Or you might expose a glaring injustice, yet never manage to dig up the victim's name. All three outcomes are entirely normal. A scholarship that recognizes only the validation of pet dogmas is indistinguishable from propaganda.

Respect for those erased from the historical record lies in the rigorous verification of documents, not in turning them into convenient cardboard cutouts for modern denunciations. A fair history of knowledge does not have to culminate in a saccharine idyll where everyone embraces and sings in unison. Its true purpose is far more demanding: learning to hear genuine debates, honestly owning up to blanks, and keeping the door open for facts we do not yet possess.

Sources of the Original Article

The references and reading limitations declared in the original article are preserved below. This adaptation does not claim independent reading of all these works.