The Ethics of Decolonization

Abstract Sampling from the “Indigenous turn” in anthropology, this article asks what might be relevant for our thinking about the politics and ethics of social research practices in the Middle East/North Africa (MENA) region from the decolonizing efforts of those working in New Zealand, Hawaii, Bolivia, and Native America. It begins with Linda Tuhiwai Smith's 1999 classic Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples and her judgment that “from the vantage point of the colonized . . . the term ‘research’ is inextricably linked to European imperialism and colonialism.” Decolonizing means shifting the focus from the power/knowledge formations and questions of representation that Edward Said's work highlighted for those of us in MENA studies toward the ethics of social research itself and the silences on the political contexts that shape research and make research possible. If we were to transpose the practical ethical questions about the methods and purposes of social research, imagining our research subjects as analogous to “Indigenous” people in settler-colonial states insofar as they are living in the region or coming from the region under study—despite their diversity of location, class, ethnicity, religion, social capital, political power, living conditions, and possibilities, not to mention experiences of displacement, coercion, and violence—how would the decolonial impulse translate?