Walking decolonially with nick shepherd
This chapter provides a postscript to the volume as a whole. Beginning with an account of the universalization of modern Western temporalities and notions of time, the chapter goes on to describe the “rhetoric of modernity,” a key term in this analysis. The central section of the chapter describes the origins of the disciplines of archaeology and linguistics in the modern university system, and gives an account of the coloniality of knowledge, the process whereby modern Western conceptions of knowledge came to supplant knowledge formations in other parts of the world. The key question that is asked in the chapter is: “what is it that archaeologists and linguists should envision?” And the following answer is proposed: “what is needed is to question the assumptions upon which disciplinary formations have been built…Conversation is the only way forward, to rule the expert out, and build a communal praxis of living.
