Decolonizing Mosquitoes: Processes and Experiments from the Periphery

In this essay, I argue that we must de-transcendentalize our ideas about decolonization within anthropology. In other words, I argue that we must learn to see decolonization as an ongoing and open-ended process, rather than as an event after which we are simply done with interrogating the coloniality of anthropology. I also call for the training of the decolonizing eye upon medical anthropology and for deepening questions of accountability and responsibility of US-based ethnographers who research Puerto Rico and other US colonies.

Zora Neale Hurston’s work is highly relevant to thinking about the processes and modes of decolonizing ethnography as a contemporary mode of literary representation of and for colonized and colonizing peoples. Hurston was trained in ethnographic research at Columbia University by none other than the father of American anthropology, Franz Boas, and also studied under the iconic Africanist anthropologist Melville Herskovitz. Yet she has been “peripheralized,”¹ neither considered as primarily an anthropologist nor given her due within the discipline, because she wrote not empirical accounts of observed cultural phenomena in a scientific voice, but ethnographically informed fiction from the margins of the discipline and the academy.

Given recent developments in ethnographic fiction, ethnographic poetry, and other forms of experimental contemporary ethnography, Hurston is now considered to be a trail blazer within anthropology. A Black scholar who wrote and published during the Jim Crow era, she also conducted research among Afro-Caribbean peoples just a few decades after the end of chattel slavery in the Caribbean region and before the majority of Caribbean countries had achieved decolonization. But her significance transcends her social identity or the context of her research agenda. Hurston made formal and stylistic innovations that were unique and ahead of her time, and she continues to exert pressure and influence on contemporary approaches to both ethnography and fiction.² Although arguably Hurston’s work has generated more interest among literary critics than anthropologists, her stature as a figure within anthropology continues to grow, especially as new generations of anthropologists increasingly inquire about and draw inspiration from foundational Black scholars in the field.³ Hurston’s influence is not only felt among African American ethnographers and writers, however. Due in part to her precise attention to vernacular forms, she has been referred to as a “progenitor of afrofuturism”⁴ and looms large in the intellectual genealogy of decolonizing or decolonial ethnographers, not least of all to those who study the Caribbean, which after all is where Hurston cut her teeth as an anthropologist.

While many contemporary anthropologists and Caribbeanists might see themselves as engaging in or at least with decolonial or decolonizing work, most would also probably acknowledge the systemic and institutional power relations of a deeply colonial character that continue to structure both anthropology and cultural politics in the Caribbean. On this point, the inimitable Edward Said ferociously and famously critiqued anthropology’s “heedless appropriation and translation of the world by a process that for all its protestations of relativism, its displays of epistemological care and technical expertise, cannot easily be distinguished from the process of empire,” and rails against the “almost total absence of any reference to American imperial intervention as a factor affecting the theoretical discussion” on culture.⁵ Today the role of imperialism in American anthropology’s historical conditions of possibility remain largely unacknowledged and undertheorized, including those that led Hurston and Katherine Dunham to study in Haiti and other parts of the Caribbean. Anticipating his critics’ objections to the characterization of American anthropology as an imperialist discipline, Said further demands, on “how – and I really mean how – and when” anthropology and empire became separated, “I do not know when the event occurred or if it occurred at all.”⁶

This critique still cuts deep. As a Puerto Rican anthropologist who was born and raised on the islands, I am a colonial subject of the United States, but as an academic who teaches in the United States and studies Puerto Rico, I am in some ways also implicated in the imperial project of American anthropology (for example, by writing in English). Whether this is an unresolved contradiction or simply an ambivalence with which I have learned to live, it is one that sometimes keeps me up at night. Said’s observation that there is a common lack of analysis or self-reflexivity with regards to imperial relations between American anthropology and the Caribbean is one of the foundational critical moments of anything we might call a decolonial anthropology, despite the fact that it came from the pen of a scholar who was not himself an anthropologist. This last should not surprise us, however, since anthropology is not the sole stalwart keeper of knowledge about culture but, as Said himself was at pains to show through his notion of Orientalism, in actuality only one of the scholarly modalities of objectification and analysis of non-European cultures.

Hurston’s ethnographically informed texts, her “artistry, creative experimentation, and disciplinary boundary blurring,”⁷ and her literary use of vernacular language constitute innovations in writing and new ways of representing marginalized, enslaved, and/or colonized people. What implications or resonances does this have for contemporary ethnographers and anthropologists? In 1991, Faye Harrison, another important Black anthropologist, published Decolonizing Anthropology, with a title that she states was inspired by the African literary critic Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s (1986) book Decolonising the Mind.⁸ Harrison points to Hurston and Dunham as two “peripheralized” anthropologists whose application of ethnographic methods to the crafting of literature and choreography in the early twentieth century actually prefigured experimental and cross-disciplinary anthropological projects now considered cutting edge or postmodern. Thus, decolonial critique within anthropology has always been linked to literary criticism and to cultural theory that emerges out of other scholarly and creative fields of endeavor.

Once we relinquish the expectation that there should be an event squarely within anthropology after which we could authoritatively say that anthropology or ethnography have been finally and definitively decolonized or else are impossible to decolonize, we can discern how previously disregarded or undervalued contributions and ethnographic experiments may usefully be thought of as decolonial or as contributing to the project of decolonizing anthropology, instead of only those that happened after the 1960s, 1980s, or some other epochal marker. Instead of a linear narrative about the decolonization of anthropology, then, we should be willing to tell a messy truth – one that can account for the unfinished and recursive, often painful and dangerous ongoing work of decolonizing gender, bodies, islands, methods, knowledges, approaches, institutions, and disciplines.⁹ To be clear, my emphasis on the recursive and nonlinear aspects of decolonization work is not meant to de-historicize decolonization movements or decolonial philosophies. Rather, I am interested in the ways that decolonial history can be event and process simultaneously.

Decolonizing Medical Anthropology

In their landmark essay on the “decolonizing generation in anthropology,” Jobson and Allen note the open-ended quality of decolonization and argue that, “the location of anthropology’s decolonization remains an open question to be resolved through and against the emerging institutional arrangements and neoliberal policies of contemporary academe.”¹⁰ Yet they argue that the historically situated emergence of a decolonial critique of anthropology as “both a mode of knowledge production and an assembly of knowledge producers” occurred in tandem with and as a response to the force of twentieth-century social movements whose challenges to institutional power produced epistemological and institutional crises and transformations not only within anthropology, but also across all academic disciplines.¹¹ Nonetheless, Jobson and Sinclair describe a “decolonizing generation” of authors specifically within anthropology whose work “troubled the conceptual and methodological precepts of anthropological discourse while adopting the mantle of ethnographic and ethnological inquiry in service to the imperatives of political and epistemic decolonization.”¹² This move shifted the terrain of collective inquiry away from how it might be possible to decolonize anthropology and toward whether and how anthropology might be used in the service of decolonization without knowing ahead of time whether or not ethnography could be “radically repurposed against its traditional provisions.”¹³  Jobson and Sinclair argue that the work of the decolonizing generation “challenges us to consider how anthropology has maintained itself as a closed system of scholarly inquiry that legitimates its own procedures of investigation as a means of subjecting the native Other to its North Atlantic theoretics.”¹⁴ They thus implicitly call for an anthropologization of anthropology that is very much in the spirit of Said’s earlier critique and demand a critical appraisal of ethnography itself as a tool that often reinforces colonial power, but that has also been wielded to debunk imperialist paradigms and modes of knowledge production. Any such anthropologization of anthropology and ethnography is itself, of course, by necessity an open-ended process.

I suggest that a similar task is at hand with regards to medical anthropology and the anthropology of zika and that, indeed, one cannot fully understand historical events without attending to the ways in which public health and medicine have been part of or in collusion with modes of imperial and colonial domination, as well as the ways that public health and medical discourse have been mobilized in the service of anticolonial aims.¹⁵ For example, the successful movement against aerial spraying of the chemical Naled to combat the mosquitos that transmit zika virus in Puerto Rico will not be fully understood as cultural phenomenon if not considered within a broader history of anticolonial resistance to military and corporate biotechnological experimentation and medical dissidence on the islands. A decolonial anthropology of mosquitos and zika virus in Puerto Rico requires attention to the textured practices and complex meanings of health and care in daily life.

Much medical information and scientific discourse in the United States on zika virus in 2016 reproduced colonial logics vis-à-vis the Caribbean and reinforced the epistemological privilege of North Atlantic knowledge producers by presenting zika as a potential threat to North Americans rather than as a real disease affecting people living within the vectors’ range.¹⁶ Such representations often reinscribed the colonial power relations that form the institutional basis and condition of possibility for epidemiological knowledge about Caribbean peoples within global health formations and that in many cases paradoxically circumscribe local capacity for response to outbreaks of contagious disease.

What is the value of vernacular knowledge about how to avoid mosquito bites in the Caribbean versus institutionalized knowledge about Zika prevention? What should a decolonizing anthropology say about people and mosquitos who live in colonized territories while trying to cultivate decolonized minds, tongues, whole bodies, and relations that can act as vehicles to futurity? How do we narrate a different future observable as a possibility that emerges out of a reading of the autochthonous or even folkloric present? Can epidemiology be a site of decolonial praxis?

One of the ways that epistemic and academic power is preserved for the West is through the maintenance of forms of concerted “colonial unknowing”¹⁷ or, alternatively, of what philosopher Charles Mills calls “white ignorance” or “epistemologies of ignorance.”¹⁸ Alyosha Goldstein argues that “enduring colonial epistemologies and political norms, as much as their ongoing contestation, have relied on the protracted liminality of Puerto Rico” (meaning, Puerto Rico’s being normatively considered neither wholly Caribbean, nor fully Latin American, nor entirely part of the United States) and that such liminality is maintained through “a persistent agnosia with regard to the legacies of colonial slavery and indigenous peoples.”¹⁹ This ignorance or form of colonial unknowing, though differentially articulated, functions both in the United States discourse about Puerto Rico and in Puerto Rican discourses about Puerto Rico. One of the clearest expressions of this agnosia is that most US Americans have no real knowledge of the character of Puerto Rico’s political relationship to the United States. I see this all the time in my classes and public lectures, wherein students and audience members are continually shocked to learn some of the imperial history of a country they have been taught to think of as constitutionally anticolonial (the United States).

But it is also true that modes of colonial agnosia about Puerto Rican history are maintained and reproduced among Puerto Ricans ourselves. This should perhaps not be very surprising, given the state of public education in Puerto Rico and in the United States more broadly, as well as the lack of accessible historical information in Spanish that explains the causes and foundations of Puerto Rico’s political status.²⁰ Personally, I had to become a graduate student at Columbia University in 2003 before I could find in the stacks of Butler and Lehman libraries the books that bore congressional records, theoretical frameworks, and historical details that illuminated for me both the racist foundations of Puerto Rico’s political subjection to the United States and the colonial history of American anthropology in the Caribbean.

Latinxs in the United States live in a “racial state of expendability.”²¹ As a racially indeterminate part of the United States, the whole island of Puerto Rico appears expendable. Zika in Puerto Rico was seen predominantly as a threat to public health in the continental United States. The other main concern was Zika’s potential effects on the tourism industry – a central feature of the economic recovery plan that would see the island continue to pay debt service on $76 billion in loans owed mostly to US creditors. As the Zika epidemic expanded in the Caribbean and Central America, many Latin American scholars examined the racialized and gendered forms of death-in-life presumed by imperialist public health formations at the margins and in the shadow of the US nation-state and sought to undo the discursive disposability of Black and Brown people, as well as the strategies available in resistance to such prescribed inevitabilities.²²

Politics of Ethnography in the Margins

What should a decolonizing American anthropology do when it confronts US colonial state violence and movements for decolonization in US colonies? What is the meaning of the “American” in the American Anthropological Association’s name? How should decolonial ethnographers represent colonial and postcolonial violence against Black people, Indigenous people, trans people, and/or environmentalists, and in what language? How should anthropology explain the federally appointed and undemocratic Fiscal Control Board that now rules Puerto Rico – or is this not considered culture? These questions point to the colonial tensions beneath contemporary anthropology and its conceptualizations of culture.

Hurston’s ethnography was distinguished by its “sensitivity to the historical experience of colonial peoples.”²³ She was part of a notable cohort of artists who abandoned anthropology as a career and dropped out of graduate training in anthropology. Like Hurston, Katherine Dunham also did not complete her PhD in anthropology despite conducting ethnographic field research as a graduate student. Dunham eschewed academics in favor of a very successful career as a dancer. She was a “decolonizing dance pedagogue” who recovered African dance epistemologies in the Caribbean, incorporated ethnographic material into her choreography, and developed a method of dance known as the Dunham Technique.²⁴ Dunham’s ethno-choreographic explorations and innovations left their mark on multiple disciplines and continue to reverberate in many fields of study. It was Northwestern University professor Melville Herskovits who supported Dunham’s and Hurston’s field research in the Bahamas, Haiti, Jamaica, the Virgin Islands, and Martinique.²⁵ Research in the Caribbean altered the life course and careers of both these creative geniuses, even though for complicated reasons they each eventually decided to leave anthropology.

William Burroughs is a third member of this wayward-genius-ethnographer cohort. Burroughs also abandoned graduate studies in anthropology at Columbia, where he spent less than a year before taking off to write a book called Junky based on his experiences as a gay man using and dealing morphine and heroin in 1940s New York City.²⁶ Like Hurston and Dunham, Burroughs employed ethnographic and auto-ethnographic techniques to produce significant pieces of art not commonly considered to be anthropology per se. Yet for each of these artists, such art is in a sense unimaginable without the ethnographic training these artists received and the anthropological questions that animated their creation.

Despite their ambivalence to anthropology as an academic pursuit, these three artists used ethnographic methods to blur the boundaries between poetry, fiction, folklore, and journalism in their work. Likewise, they shared an interest in the representation of marginalized people in ways that moved, “to decolonize ethnography by manipulating it away from a tendency to represent native populations as exotic and dependent Others,”²⁷ even if the conditions of possibility for the practice of anthropology itself were always bound up with imperial privilege. These wayward anthropologists “produce texts that ‘decolonize’ ethnography but they also contribute to portrayals of the exotic and the so-called primitive”²⁸ to varying degrees. In my reading, this double impulse to exoticize and demystify is present in both Hurston’s and Dunham’s work on Afro-Caribbean cultures,²⁹ as well as in Burroughs’s work.

Burroughs, a white, male writer who achieved literary success in his lifetime, is in many ways a strange companion to Hurston and Dunham, and I do not argue that his work was substantively anti-colonial, since quite the opposite is true, unfortunately.³⁰ Instead, I argue that to a lesser degree than Dunham and Hurston, Burroughs’s experiments with autoethnograhic fiction writing were born out of his own belonging to, participation in, and desire to reflect on a marginalized culture–that of urban gay or homosexual life in New York City in the 1950s (a time when homosexuality was illegal), and to document and understand the language and culture of drug dealers and addicts as stigmatized (and often also racialized) queer subjects.³¹ These were indeed unusual methods for studying and representing such exotic “natives.” Burroughs’s approach to writing Junkie²⁶ shattered the distance between anthropological observer and “native” or (marginalized and criminalized) “practitioner,” determined as he was to undermine the fortified boundaries between knowledge and experience in the written representation of (queer and drug-using) fugitive subcultures. In this sense. Burroughs, like Hurston and Dunham, mobilized academic training in anthropology in unanticipated ways, using the representational dogmas of ethnographic fieldwork (living “as a native”) against the discipline’s orthodoxies (i.e., always studying the Other). Although differently positioned in important ways due to their distinct social locations, all three artists experimented with ethnography in ways that unmoored knowing from normative subjectivities.

Processes and Experiments

Historicizing the nonlinear conditions of possibility for decolonizing anthropology requires critical attention to the ways academic institutional power reinforces colonial, white supremacist, and patriarchal modes of relation and representation. It also requires that we consider decolonial philosophies, friendships, modes of relationality, experiments, and hybrid processes that happen in the interstices or at the margins of the academy. The history of such processes and experiments at the disciplinary and social peripheries of empire is, by necessity, where we can learn skills to continue decolonizing ethnography and the academy. This tricky work can sometimes be uncomfortably close to, be fully implicated in, and/or appear similar to processes of appropriation and tokenization that are actually about monumentalization and wealth accumulation, and not at all about decolonization. But they are not the same thing.

Poet Luke Skrebowski argues that while conceptual and visual art suffered a shift from an aesthetic of administration to a critique of institutions that “turned the violence of that mimetic relationship back onto the ideological apparatus itself, using it to analyze and expose the social institutions from which the laws of positivist instrumentality and the logic of administration emanate in the first place,” contemporary writing has not yet produced a school of conceptual writing. Literature and ethnography nonetheless find themselves within an artistic category (the contemporary) that is defined by its relation to post-conceptual art.³² Skrebowski writes, “If being post-conceptual is an ontological marker of contemporaneity, then contemporary writing has to be thought in terms of its constitutively post-conceptual status, incorporating a thoroughgoing reflection on the implications of the collapse of the system of the arts with the opening of the expanded field.”³³ If anthropology and ethnography are to continue to confront decolonial thought, the profound implications of epistemic collapse for the disciplinary origin story authorizing (American) anthropological knowledge must be acknowledged in more than theory.³⁴

What defines contemporary ethnography? Is it the sign of the postconceptual or is ethnography stuck in time, still trying to come up with a deconstructed concept of itself (a conceptual ethnography before the post-conceptual)? These questions may be of the moment, but the answers reach back in recursive circles in time to include these writers and ethnographers whose best-known works fall mostly outside the anthropology canon. For those of us who work to represent the Caribbean, including Puerto Rico and its diaspora, through a decolonizing frame, learning through Hurston’s example can mean valorizing the vernacular cultural forms that contradict colonial notions of who we are supposed to be. It can mean embracing who we actually are–as complicated, contradictory, confusing, and painful as it may be to sort through that “densely textured, multi-layered series of masks.”³⁵  

Local vernaculars and marginalized forms of knowledge hold much wisdom about wellbeing and coexistence with other species (like mosquitos) that is outside the direct purview of science and medicine. Hurston’s experimental approaches and methodologies provide alternative models for anthropology and ethnography, but also for cultural survival for marginalized people in the era of climate change, pandemics, and racial capitalism.

1. Faye Harrison and Association of Black Anthropologists, Decolonizing Anthropology: Moving Further Toward an Anthropology of Liberation (American Anthropological Association, 2010), 6. [↩]
2. Graciela Hernandez, “Multiple Subjectivities and Strategic Positionality: Zora Neale Hurston’s Experimental Ethnographies,” in Ruth Behar and Deborah A. Gordon, eds., Women Writing Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 148–65. [↩]
3. Ira Harrison and Faye V. Harrison, African-American Pioneers in Anthropology (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1999). [↩]
4. Isaiah Lavender III, “An Afrofuturist Reading of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God,” Lit 27, no. 3 (2016): 230. [↩]
5. Edward Said, “Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors,” Critical Inquiry 15, no. 2 (1989): 213. [↩]
6. Ibid., 214. [↩]
7. Harrison and Association of Black Anthropologists, Decolonizing Anthropology, 6. [↩]
8. Carole McGranahan, Kaifa Roland, and Bianca C. Williams, “Decolonizing Anthropology: A Conversation with Faye V. Harrison, Part I,” Savage Minds blog, 2 May 2016; Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind (London, Heinemann, Harare: East African Educational Publishers, 1986); and Harrison and Association of Black Anthropologists, Decolonizing Anthropology. [↩]
9. Clelia Rodriguez, Decolonizing Academia: Poverty, Oppression, and Pain (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). [↩]
10. Jafari Sinclaire Allen and Ryan Cecil Jobson, “The Decolonizing Generation: (Race and) Theory in Anthropology since the Eighties,” Current Anthropology 57, no. 2 (2016): 131. [↩]
11. Ibid., 133. [↩]
12. Ibid., 130. [↩]
13. Ryan Cecil Jobson, “Decolonization Matters,” Association of Black Anthropologists, Anthropology News, 2016. [↩]
14. Allen and Jobson, “The Decolonizing Generation,” 133. [↩]
15. Carlos Rodriguez-Diaz, Adriana Garriga-Lopez, Souhail M. Malave-Rivera, and Ricardo L. Vargas-Molina, “Zika Virus Epidemic in Puerto Rico: Health Justice Too Long Delayed,” International Journal of Infectious Diseases 65 (2017): 144–7. [↩]
16. Brenda Goodman, “Zika On Our Doorstep,” WebMD, 7 March 2016, https://www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/news/20160307/zika-virus-puerto-rico#1 [↩]
17. Jodi Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). [↩]
18. Charles Mills, “White Ignorance,” in Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana, eds., Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007). [↩]
19. Alyosha Goldstein, “Promises Are Over: Puerto Rico and the Ends of Decolonization,” Theory & Event 19, no. 4 (2016): 1. [↩]
20. Artists such as those who form the collective AgitArte are addressing this lack by producing participatory art that helps people learn about this legal and political history in an accessible and sensory way. See AgitArte, “End The Debt,” https://agitarte.org/projects/end-the-debt-decolonize-liberate-scroll-project/. [↩]
21. John Márquez, “Latinos as the ‘Living Dead’: Raciality, Expendability, and Border Militarization,” Latino Studies 10, no. 4 (2012). [↩]
22. Claudia Rivera-Amarillo and Alejandro Camargo, “Zika Assemblages: Women, Populationism, and the Geographies of Epidemiological Surveillance,” Gender, Place & Culture 27, no. 3 (201): 412–28; and Manuel Alejandro Rodríguez Rondón, “Salud, abandono y sujeción,” Centro Latinoamericano en Sexualidad y Derechos Humanos, Programa de Estudios e Investigaciones en Género, Sexualidad y Salud del Instituto de Medicina Social de la Universidad del Estado de Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2017. [↩]
23. Mark Hebling, “‘My Soul Was with the Gods and My Body Was in the Village’: Zora Neale Hurston, Franz Boas, Melville Herskovitz, and Ruth Benedict,” in The Harlem Renaissance: The One and the Many (Westport, Greenwood Press, 1999), 304. [↩]
24. Ojeya Cruz Banks, “Katherine Dunham: Decolonizing Anthropology through African American Dance Pedagogy,” Transforming Anthropology 20, no. 2 (2012): 160. [↩]
25. Melville Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past (Beacon Press, 1941). [↩]
26. William Burroughs, Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict (New York: Ace Books, 1923). [↩] [↩]
27. Kevin Meehan, “Decolonizing Ethnography: Zora Neale Hurston in the Caribbean,” in Paravisini-Gebert and Romero-Cesareo, eds., Women at Sea: Travel Writing and the Margins of Caribbean Discourse (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 246. [↩]
28. Lydia Platón Lázaro, Defiant Itineraries: Caribbean Paradigms in American Dance and Film (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 95. [↩]
29. Aisha Mahina Beliso-De Jesus, “A Hieroglyphics of Zora Neale Hurston,” Journal of Africana Religions 4, no. 2 (2016): 298. [↩]
30. William Burroughs, Everything Lost: The Latin American Notebook of William S. Burroughs (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2017). [↩]
31. William Burroughs, Queer (New York, Viking Press, 1985). [↩]
32. Luke Skrebowski, “Approaching the Contemporary: On (Post-)Conceptual Writing,” Amodern 6 (2016): Reading the Illegible, http://amodern.net/article/approaching-the-contemporary/. [↩]
33. Ibid. [↩]
34. E. Tuck and K.W. Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40. [↩]
35. Pierre Walker, “Zora Neale Hurston and the Post-Modern Self in Dust Tracks on a Road,” African American Review 32, no. 3 (1998): 389. [↩]