Book Chapter:

“Towards a Performative Ethics of Reciprocity.” Qualitative Inquiry and the Politics of Resistance: Possibilities, Performances, and Praxis. Edited by Norman K. Denzin and Michael D. Giardina, Routledge 2020. 115-129.

Abstract:

The 14th International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, held in May 2018 at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, featured the workshop titled “Indigenous Philosophy and Posthumanism: Connections and Productive Methodological Divergences,” co-developed by Jerry Rosiek, an Education Studies and Philosophy professor at the University of Oregon, and Jimmy Snyder, a citizen of the Kickapoo Tribe in Kansas pursuing doctoral studies in Education at the same institution. I was fortunate to attend this workshop whose participants were invited to engage with the political implications of the rise of new materialism and posthumanism in the Euro-American academy.

While Rosiek and Snyder assert that embracing this paradigm shift marks an important turn in the academy, they identify connections with other traditions that promote a reciprocal form of relationality inclusive of other/more-than-human life, and they urge Euro-American researchers to acknowledge that claims to doing something new must be vigorously discredited given the ethical necessity of engaging with the work of “Indigenous scholars [who] have been writing about non-human agency for a long time” (ICQI workshop). Such an understanding of agency may be associated with the “performative ethics of reciprocity” which is central to Indigenous cultural practices “that produce something else than a spectator subjectivity in relation to the non-human” (ICQI Workshop). Rosiek and Snyder thus challenge non-Indigenous scholars to recognize and address the “Columbus problem,” namely, the claim to have “discovered” new materialism and posthumanism (ICQI Workshop). This requires engaging with Indigenous ways of knowing, whose pivotal notion of interconnectedness includes all forms of life, as articulated by several generations of Indigenous scholars.

Taking up this challenge, I argue that what distinguishes Indigenous worldviews from new materialist/posthumanist perspectives is their spiritual dimension, which is compellingly foregrounded by Vine Deloria Jr, Manulani Aluli-Meyer, and Shawn Wilson, among many other Indigenous scholars. I build on their work in my research on vocality to develop an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural approach that accounts for the complex ecology of human and other/more-than-human relations, and that engages with the transformative power of the sensorially experienced materiality of sonic/aural/phonic/vocal performativity. I therefore explore the non-discursive, affective efficacy of vocality, beyond notions of voice as a conceptual abstraction or a metaphor, and beyond its association with speech and language, making vocality exclusively human, hence problematically anthropocentric.