Reading via performance training: Loosening the grip of hegemonic epistemologies

Abstract (English)

I learnt to read at school in Malta, it was a Catholic girls school. I especially remember comprehension homework and tests. The questions asked in this homework was about information and logic internal to the stories we were given to read. I don’t remember ever being asked how reading the stories made me thinkfeel (Escobar 2018). During my anthropology undergraduate I was still being taught how to read in this way; to attend to the content of the text, the argument the text was making, how the ethnographic descriptions supported this argument, and so on. At this point I was expected to share something of what I thought: what was my interpretation of this text. However, the interpretations that were valid included for instance how a text related to wider debates within anthropology, or whether there were logical flaws in the argument, or whether the empirical evidence was convincing or not. What was not valid was, for instance, whether a text made me angry, or had me laughing out loud (to the envy of the law students in my study group). I was never taught what to do with the emotions and personal associations that inevitably arose with anything I ever read.

Reading is actually a historically and culturally contingent practice (Gatt 2017/18). The hegemonic assumption that books contain information that is transferred into a person’s mind through reading participates in structuring and in perpetuating ‘Abyssal thinking’ (Boaventura de Sousa Santos 2014). Such thinking is based on dichotomies between for instance mind and body, nature and culture, reason and emotion and so on; a structure that forms the basis for the onto/epistemology that is imposed through epistemic coloniality.

In the presentation I share different reading practices that I have developed by bringing together my training in anthropology with my training in laboratory theatre. I have used these different reading practices with students in European universities in order to draw attention to the colonial assumptions and loosen the grip of these. The aim of this is to enable myself and my students to come to value different ways of knowing and being in their own right as necessary and vital for scholarship.