The Colonialist Mindfield and its Supply
Colonization, emptiness, pleasure, and direct experience
These violent delights have violent ends (and means)
The colonialist mindfield is an imaginary landscape forcibly projected onto people, cultures, systems, structures, land, animals, natural resources, and things.
Violent heroes traverse this landscape, subjugating and stripping it of wealth while branding colonized spaces and beings as empty or deficient and in need of filling with the “new” or “superior” or what is deemed “missing.”
The realness and intrinsic value of colonized people and traditions are strategically called into question at the same time that their labor and intellectual, cultural, and natural wealth are plundered.
The Chinese invaded Tibet assisted with narratives of Tibetan lack of voice, technology, and infrastructure. England colonized India with narratives about the lack of administrative systems, transportation, proper religion, and proper social conventions. Europeans colonized North America with narratives of primitivism and lack of morals and God.
Every major indigenous naturopathic medical tradition has been colonized with narratives of primitivism, outlandish methods, and lack of proof, and the value of direct experience and lineage has been radically undermined.
Acts of colonization are accompanied by narratives of a hero who enters the "wild", conquers it, and fills it with himself: his methods, analyses, culture, and concepts of civilization. Colonization has deep and violent roots in the sexualized attachment to penetrating conquest, a.k.a. rape. Colonization and misogyny are inextricably bound, not the least of which is by the systematic rape of the colonized.
A repair drone shows up when nothing is broken
Repair fantasies—narratives of rescue, improving, and re-dressing the broken, outdated, and unscientific—are key vectors of domination for the colonialist mindfield .
Epistemic violence1 and trespassing2 are simultaneously forms of destructive “repair” and the lived experience of dominated beings.
Epistemic violence, from the perspective of the colonized, means that you are subject to attempts to destroy, suppress, and supplant your knowledge and knowledge systems.
Think of the many instances when children of colonized cultures have been forced into the educational systems of their invaders and forbidden to speak or learn their native languages.
Epistemic trespassing is when colonizing peoples and cultures devalue, discount, and disparage knowledge systems and methodologies about which they know little or nothing. The knowledge systems, what counts as knowledge, and methods for obtaining knowledge of colonized cultures are deemed childish stupid, backward, illogical, uninformed, over-emotional, mentally unstable, unrigorous, or unscientific. They are “repaired” by being forcibly replaced by the knowledge systems and methods of colonizers. (Epistemic violence)
Think of the devaluation of traditional medical systems and midwifery by the Euro-American scientific regulatory establishment. Think of the last time someone who is not knowledgable about a subject tried to school you.
Everyday Heroes
But the colonialist mindfield is also a distributed, everyday affair, not contained within the pursuit of heroic renown and empire.
This mindfield infects and reconfigures people who think that they have nothing to do with colonization.
Of course, millions of ordinary people participate in the pursuit and enabling of empire every day, those fields of capture, command, control, and domination. We call these fields or zones racism, misogyny, ableism, sizeism homophobia, transphobia, genderism, capitalism, fascism, and so on.
But there are expressions of the colonialist mindfield both within and without these zones that are less visible to those who embody them.
You might be possessed by the colonialist mindfield if you generate a sense of value (and perhaps actual money) by identifying your knowledge, cultural productions, social formations, or religious traditions as heroically “new,” “superior,” or “discovered or revealed by me.“
If you have ever wielded the power of the definer to invalidate other people's experience, knowledge, and practices, you are possessed by the colonialist mindfield. This is true especially if you have inadequate familiarity with what you are invalidating.
Whenever you categorize, define, and explain other cultures about which you know little or nothing, you are possessed by the colonialist mindfield. Nothing has been as violent as this power of the definer, and many other brutalities flow from this.
For instance, you go on a two-week trip to India and, upon returning home, you have now taken up the position of an expert on Indian culture and peoples. Whenever we gain position, however briefly, by generalizing and pontificating about people over whom we assume any kind of descriptive, categorizing dominance, we are enacting the role of colonizers.
Your personal and/or professional adoption of missionary zeal in order to lend importance and meaningfulness to yourself and your enterprise is a vector of the colonialist mindfield.
All individualism, rugged or otherwise, is a product of and supports the colonialist mindfield in that it fails to acknowlege the fact that it takes a whole world to draw a single breath.
Any time you take pride in having done something on your own, you are possessed by the colonialist mindfield. I don’t mean any time you feel happy about something you have done. I mean any time you feel a sense of “better than” weaponized by a fantasy of having done it by yourself.
No one does anything alone, and in order to build yourself up with I-did-it-myself-ism, you have to evacuate an entire world and everything that ever happened here.
Colonialist supply: the great sucking sound
The colonialist mindfield provides the justification that enables colonizers to suck up colonialist supply.3
For empires, the contents of colonialist supply lines are obvious: people, labor, goods, land, knowledge, and every sort of domination.
But ask yourself: What colonialist supply am I receiving through the imposition of narratives of lack, lesser than, epistemological poverty, and saviorism.
Am I sucking admiration out of people? Bolstering my self-esteem? Earning money, cultural power, or political power? Demanding and enforcing interpretive dominance?
Each time you performatively re-word, re-interpret, or discredit someone else’s expertise, experience, or self-report, you are receiving colonialist supply. This supply comes in the form of the momentary (but infinitely repeated) embodied experience of superiority. It comes as pleasure.
Despite some people’s claim to intellectual, technical, or cultural superiority, on a mico-level, in the moment, the moment of disparaging and erasing, it boils down to an inchoate ping of visceral pleasure.
The damage to direct experience
In the colonialist mindfield, the category of “experience,” is often opposed to the objective or quantifiable or scientific or rational. Experience and the communication of that experience by subject beings, including say, indigenous people, women and animals, is very often painted as unproven, belief, illogical, perceptually impoverished, instinctual, or even insane.
And the colonialist mindfield generally doesn’t even know about the deep, deep experiential, observational, and also normative scientific knowledge that subject beings gather about their oppressors as a matter of survival and liberation.
Recently I read that some difference has been found in the blood of people with long COVID and that this is the first proof that long COVID exists. I’m happy that a blood marker has been identified. But yet again, the direct report of millions of ill people has been given lesser status than one data point uncovered by scientific research. Many people with chronic illnesses such as Lyme and Epstein-Barr have lived and died in agony because of this devaluation of lived experience.4
The conjoined twins of processes of colonization and Euro-Am scientific rationalism have severely maimed our confidence in, ability to use and, in some cases, even to access our direct experience.
I have seen this many times in my students. Some of them are so highly trained to rely on a limited kind of intellectual engagement with life, they find it difficult to locate or consult other forms of experience much less rely on those forms of experience to guide them.
What they feel with their bodies or sense more subtly, becomes a locus of doubt, skepticism, and even scorn. The flash of direct knowing—our most precious birthright and reliable beacon—has been evacuated of reality and validity.
Given these circumstances, it is difficult for some folks to connect to their bodies, any form of subtle experience, or to immerse themselves in spiritual practice.
A little question
People and cultures wielding epistemic superiority narratives break things apart, forcing the reconfiguration of medicine, justice, birthing, food systems, infrastructure, interpersonal relations, economies, housing, clothing, food, neighborliness, professionalism, and your relationship to your own knowing.
Most people experience subtle communications from other forms of life and from the internal flash of wisdom. But we are highly trained to ignore, doubt, and discount this direct, more perceptually open clarity.
Perhaps, in the face of those communications, you experience doubt. Perhaps you attempt to use more conventional intellectual or conceptual tools to aid you in deciding whether or not to act on those communications. Perhaps, you even doubt your ability to use those more conventional tools.
Or perhaps you are so monolithically trained to use your mind in a normative intellectual way, you don’t know what I’m talking about, and you suspect I’m a little woo woo.
And perhaps you spend your life in an unsettled state of doubt and self-interrogation about what you know and how you know it, even if you enjoy a strong connection to innate wisdom or are highly trained in a discipline.
And you might ask yourself this little question: How did I get here?
with infinite love,
Shambhavi
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The phrase “epistemic violence” originated with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in her influential essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Spivak is University Professor at Columbia University, Department of English and Comparative Literature.
The phrase “epistemic trespassing” originated with Nathan Ballantyne in his article of the same name. Ballantyne is an Associate Professor in the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at Arizona State University.
Colonialist supply: c.f. “narcissistic supply.” What you demand and get: your desired rewards for being a drone of the colonialist mindfield.
The Quiet Epidemic is a brilliant documentary that unpacks the medical establishment’s complexly layered denial of chronic Lyme disease.
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