Initial remark:
The following comments are based on the experience of having conducted ‘interviews’ with Ayoreo people about their ‘being indigenous’ or ‘Ayoreo’. But they also stem from years of exploring the uncharted realm of intercultural communication. I dare say that such experiences and their ensuing analysis my even be helpful in other communicational constellations, in which the implied parts are not necessarily members of diverse cultural groups, but simply in many, often unclear and also unexplored ways ‘different’…
Asking questions
In order to grasp and to start understanding the Ayoreo, instead of asking direct questions, it is far better just to be listening and waiting for knowledge, understanding and eventually meaning to appear, much as a hunter waits patiently for his prey.
If questions are asked at all, they serve to tentatively start, to motivate, to direct or redirect a conversation. Open, wide-ranging questions are better than precise ones, which leave only a narrow scope for answers.
The reason for this lies in a fact which is not new, but is not usually taken sufficiently into account: when talking to indigenous people, we communicate with a radically diverse realm, and one of its chief characteristics is its wholeness, its indivisibility.
In the communication with this realm, two very different ‘awarenesses’ come to speak with each other, each from within its own paradigm. Paradigms are essentially incommensurable. The difficulties in the communication between these two specific paradigms arise from radical differences.
If we try to explain some of the differences from the point of view of (our) non-indigenous realm and its characteristics, there is, among others, the fact that our knowledge is fragmented and represents a fragmented world-view. Further, we use abstractions: when we speak, we often use generic terms, which by abstraction refer to entire groups of things. Apart from that, our way of relating to reality and the world expresses itself – in the language – by the fact that we reduce what is being talked about to an object.
The Ayoreo discourse, in turn, always refers to an entire reality in its wholeness, and speaks about individual, concrete events, people, phenomena, very often using images which have a great sensual charge or quality that abstractions don’t have. The discourse also expresses the relationship of the speaker with what he talks about, he speaks about it, but is also part of it.
Within such a frame, questions in general, and even more previously formulated ‘standard interview questions’, cannot reach across adequately: either they miss their aim and fall into empty space, or they hit but only create confusion.
Frequently, questions prompt responses that try to adapt somehow to what was asked about and to what is intuitively perceived as the interviewer’s own vision of things, inducing her/him to confirm what she/he had already believed in the first place. We often don’t even realize that this happens, unless we remain sharply aware of the radical, paradigmatic diversity.
Communication is not chiefly verbal
Very often, non- indigenous people are intent on verbal communication and concentrate on it in a way which deprives them from the possibility of perceiving ‘messages’ and signals coming and going in the manifold non verbal dimensions. This is also related to the fact that non-indigenous communication is goal- oriented and intent on the implementation of the own purpose or plan. The more we are charged with the intentionality of what we have to do or achieve in a given time and within a previously formulated plan, the less we perceive what is gong on around us. If this happens to us in a modern, occidental type town- setting in heavy traffic, we can manage thanks to the fact that the ‘script’ of what happens is well known to us, we have been in that situation thousands of times and know almost blindly how to react to what happens without even giving it a thought, always on the way to reach our goal or destination.
But if this happens in intercultural communication, for instance in an indigenous community, provided we are genuinely interested in real communication, we cannot afford to be blind and unconscious of what is happening around us. Then we note that communication is occurring much more in the non- verbal – ‘situational’ – dimension: attitudes, reactions, the way one laughs, who one greets first, where one stands or sits with regard to others, what a way of dressing communicates, and thousands of other characteristics of our and the other’s being which become active signals.
Being in itself is always also communicating, means being in communication.
We are in need a methodology of listening, a methodology which allows us to ‘tune in’ on this ‘communication of being’.
Hunting on the verbal level
Returning to verbalized communication: in my personal experience, the initial mention of the subject matter, or else the posing of a highly open-scope question, prompts the surging, on the indigenous side, of verbally expressed associations. They often appear without visible order, quite irrationally for us, and they can take the form of tales, images, anecdotes, jokes, sometimes myths. Often, there is no visible connection whatsoever between them and the topic we had mentioned or asked about. As a consequence, the tools of our non-indigenous rationality fail, and there remains only our intuition as a cognitive device to link elements to each other in order to detect the meaning they convey once they are linked up.
Trusting our intuition is often difficult for us non-indigenous people. Our culture, does not usually train us to do so, or even discourages its use as a cognitive tool, as it normally happens in academics. Thus, using it can give us a sensation of walking on ice that may prove to be too thin for our weight. There is no guarantee. But indeed, through the use of intuition, the images appearing in an indigenous person’s discourse can gradually facilitate our access to the knowledge we seek; they contain leads to an answer, and intuition can find these leads. A meaning starts to ‘compose it- self’, and, in the Ayoreo realm, it is always a complete idea, a whole complete image, not an abstracted and marginalized fragment.
This method, which is something like reading between lines and which obviously requires training and experience, goes beyond the scientific procedures commonly accepted by non-indigenous science. Its results, in our non-indigenous understanding, remain subjective, and as such could easily be disqualified.
I have often made great efforts to be able to present a result acceptable also in non-indigenous, scientific methodological terms, until I recognized that this was an absurd pretension, precisely because the communication here occurs between the mentioned two radically, paradigmatically different realms. We discover that communicating with indigenous peoples forces us to abandon our own method, to abandon the safety of our own world, and it forces us specifically to reintroduce cognitive tools our own culture has long discarded: intuition, sensual qualities, ‘the heart’.
We also discover, or reconfirm, that even a method carries the genetic code of the culture that generates it, and, if applied without awareness, will transform into a colonial tool and end up colonizing the world.
Benno Glauser (2012)