Decoloniality & Kyriarchy

Intro

What if everything we ever knew was a lie?

Well, okay, not exactly, but close.

But what if our entire system of values and the way that we attribute values to everything is so deeply entrenched in colonialism that we don’t even realize it?!

In this post, we will lay the foundation for the posts to come.

Kyriarchy

Years ago, while we were getting read up on the term patriarchy, we started to get a nagging feeling about the similarities between different systems of oppression. About how one system of oppression had erie similarities to others. How racism disenfranchised peoples of colour. How patriarchy disenfranchised women and those who don’t identify with the gender they were born with?!

Could it all be connected?!

What if it was all connected!

And we needed a term for this.

Luckily - and perhaps (doubly) ironically so - there already was one:

Kyriarchy.

From Wikipedia:

In feminist theory, kyriarchy (/ˈkaɪriɑːrki/ KY-ree-arr-kee) is a social system or set of connecting social systems built around domination, oppression, and submission. The word was coined by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza in 1992 to describe her theory of interconnected, interacting, and self-extending systems of domination and submission, in which a single individual might be oppressed in some relationships and privileged in others. It is an intersectional extension of the idea of patriarchy beyond gender. Kyriarchy encompasses forms of dominating hierarchies in which the subordination of one individual or group to another is internalized and institutionalized.

To give a crude but short introduction/summary:

Intersectionality is a framework through which privilege and opportunity, respectively the benefits of immutable social aspects of identities, like gender, race/skin colour, sexuality, class, age, etc., within society, and/or the lack thereof, can be analyzed as overlapping and compounding factors.

Or in other words, when reflecting on privilege, due to the amount of overlap, an older homeless and disabled queer trans sex worker of colour, will always experience more oppression within the context the Global North than someone who is the polar opposite.

On top of that, Kyriarchy posits that:

• the intersectionality of power is not linear or binary.
• systems of power and domination are situational.

We will demonstrate this in more detail after we introduce Coloniality/Decoloniality.

Decoloniality

From Wikipedia:

Decoloniality (Spanish: decolonialidad) is a school of thought that aims to delink from Eurocentric knowledge hierarchies and ways of being in the world in order to enable other forms of existence on Earth. It critiques the perceived universality of Western knowledge and the superiority of Western culture, including the systems and institutions that reinforce such perceptions. Decolonial perspectives understand colonialism as the basis for the everyday function of capitalist modernity and of imperialism. As Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera notes, “decolonial thinking endeavors to disrupt the Eurocentric prescriptions regarding who counts as human and thus who is considered possible of producing a valid thought.”

Decoloniality emerged as part of a South American movement examining the role of the European colonization of the Americas in establishing Eurocentric modernity/coloniality — according to Aníbal Quijano (1928-2018), who defined the term and its reach.

The Wikipedia article goes into identity the coloniality of knowledge and power by its colonial roots and names imperialism as the successor to colonialism, including the effects of the coloniality of gender.

In summary, we can posit that Decoloniality sees Coloniality as the state of systems as influenced by colonization after its former phase of expansion has ended. That long term effects of colonization can be found in modern systems of knowledge and power, as extensions of and in the prescriptiveness of the European colonial systems.

Coloniality posts that colonization effectively leaves blueprints in the societies it touches.

For examples, as Western philosophy is built on Greek philosophy and all its subsequent works, the logic of Western philosophy will always be rooted in the sum of all developments within the colonial system that developed it and any development will consequently will be measured by that same construct and frameworks. By extension, the same applies to medicine, language, law, sociology, anthropology, etc., as well as the systems of power that are part of it.

But perhaps it is better to reflect on that.

Cultural Imperialism

For reasons that will become apparent, we will go deeper into this later, but perhaps one of the more, if not most, under-represented aspects of colonization, is the aspect of cultural colonization or cultural imperialism.

Cultural imperialism is the (forced) imposition of a dominant culture onto (what is perceived to be) a non-dominant culture.

We posit that in order to fully understand the effects of global colonization, that we need to separate the processes of colonization and imperialism from the (socio)cultural aspects.

To put that in reference to our previous post, while the initial Motivations, Actions and Goals of colonization were monetary in nature, the cultural imperialist aspects should be seen as a separate aspect within the context of the Age of Discovery and the consequent empire building.

We posit that the culturally imperialist aspects of subsequent colonial settlement should be seen as a separate stream of actions with a separate set of motivations and goals to the initial [Age of Discovery/Exploration](Age of Discovery/Age of Sail.

We will revisit this in the future.

The Coloniality of Morality

Having contemplated the concept of Decoloniality, we tried to see if we could integrate this concept further.

To which - in our ever so humble opinion - the only logical conclusion would be to develop the concept of the Coloniality of Morality.

Given that coloniality postulates that all systems of knowledge and power are inherently rooted in colonial systems, then by extension all moral systems derived from those colonial systems are implicitly rooted in those colonial systems.

The character of the Coloniality of Morality is inherent to the moral frameworks upon which these colonial systems are built.

Putting it all together

If, instead of looking at Western colonization as the means, we start looking at Western colonization as the vehicle on which the cultural imperialism was spread, we can start to breakdown the motivations, actions and goals of the cultural imperialism of Western colonization.

Because if the cultural imperialism is not the same, then we can start to ask and dig into the underlying question of the ‘why’.

Why is the world the way that it is?

And to dig into that why, we have just over 2000 years of cultural history to reflect on.

Why are we still Romans?