Guyanese Amerindian epistemology: The gift from a pacifist insurgence

Abstract

This article introduces the idea that Amerindian modes of knowledge are intellectual strategies for defeating racism in Guyana. It is suggested that coming to terms with radically different concepts of time and space provides the means for understanding viable alternatives of social being. The current invisibility of, or deleterious prejudice against, indigenous Amerindian renderings of social being serve merely as opportunities lost to a postcolonial state, which might otherwise apply new forms of power and polity and offer these to both the nation and the global community. The familiar use of essentialism or, even, of multivocality, which some indigenous peoples have to implement to combat racism, is not good politics, it is argued. Indeed, providing the means for identifying and sympathetically understanding the different modes of knowing the world is good political action. Copyright © 2007 Institute of Race Relations.