Vida asked me if I can translate a text I wrote for one of the episodes of the radio show Mejenje/Bordering I do in Slovene for Radio Robida. You can listen to the original one in Slovene here: https://soundcloud.com/radio-robida/ep-26-mejenje-meje
And here's the translation:
The Borders of Research / Meje raziskovanja
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“I knew that there were limits to what I could ask—and then what I could say.”
When we read this quote outside of any context, some of you might first think of the distinction drawn by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant: the distinction between what we can know—the world of phenomena—and what we cannot know, the world of things-in-themselves, things that undoubtedly exist but nevertheless remain beyond the reach of human cognition. For Kant, the nature of these limits to questioning and answering is epistemological; they are determined by the capacities of human knowledge. Others, however, might instead be reminded of Ludwig Wittgenstein. If the limits of my language are the limits of my world, then I can only inquire into what lies within those limits. Wittgenstein himself confines his investigation to language and facts, beyond which stretches the realm of the unsayable: the realm of ethics, religion, aesthetics, and mysticism. Yet beyond these limits lie not only value judgments, but also the world of the other. For Wittgenstein, the other appears as something that can never be fully contained within my categories, my language, or my understanding. The other is precisely that which exceeds my world. None of this, therefore, can be spoken of in the same way that we speak about facts. It cannot be described or demonstrated, and this is why Wittgenstein concludes his Tractatus with the famous words: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
“I knew that there were limits to what I could ask—and then what I could say.”
Let us remain, for a moment longer, without any context. Regardless of any affinities with the thought of Kant or Wittgenstein, the very voice of the speaker already leads us in a different direction. We are not listening to the voice of a philosopher attempting to define the universal limits of knowledge, as in the case of Kant, or of language, as in the case of Wittgenstein. Instead, we hear the voice of a woman speaking in the first person. The limits of questioning and speaking are therefore no longer necessarily epistemological or logical; they may be social, political, historical, or intimate. They point not only to what cannot be known or expressed, but also to what one is not permitted to ask, and to what cannot be said without risking certain consequences.
The quotation takes on an entirely different meaning once I reveal that these are the words of the political anthropologist Audra Simpson, a member of the Mohawks of Kahnawà:ke, an Indigenous community living in what is now Canada. What interests Audra Simpson—and many other anthropologists working, in one way or another, within decolonial studies—is not merely the epistemological or linguistic limits of research, but its ethical and political limits. As the researcher Cory-Alice André-Johnson reminds us, anthropology's foundational structure, with its unmistakable colonial roots, has long been organized around the attempt to define the “true human” by collecting knowledge about the supposedly “other”. In her article Refusal and Aporia: At the Limits of Anthropological Knowledge, André-Johnson argues that contemporary anthropology is indeed different from its historical predecessor. Whereas earlier anthropology established and maintained the binary opposition between the civilized West and the savage residue, contemporary anthropology has shifted towards expanding the category of the human, rather than defining it in opposition to the other. Yet, André-Johnson cautions: “[T]he other can claim increasing proximity to humanness so long as it makes itself available for anthropological knowledge production.” The other, in other words, becomes fully human only on the condition of being legible, intelligible, and researchable. The old binary opposition has ultimately been replaced by a triad: the human, the potentially human, and the illegible, unintelligible, non-human. It is precisely this demand for legibility that Simpson resists through refusal:
“I knew that there were limits to what I could ask—and then what I could say.”
To quote André-Johnson once more: Refusal seeks an alternative to anthropology's dependence on difference “by specifically rejecting the epistemic project in which both “carceral and the decolonial engagement” similarly demand “performative transparency” (Shange 2019, 15). Refusal, then, marks the limit of the anthropological will-to-know, including all of its legacies of extraction, subjection, and othering.”
The theme of refusing to conduct research, or refusing to publish research, first came to my attention, perhaps, through the work of Pavel Medvešček Klančar, who studied the traditions of the staroverci (Old Believers) of the Soča Valley. In his book From the Invisible Side of the Sky (Iz nevidne strani neba), which explores the Old Faith, the Old Believers, and staroverstvo as a way of life practiced by our ancestors before Christianization, he also discusses the conditions under which research on this subject was carried out, as well as the publication of his research and the conversations he conducted with the Old Believers.
In 1965—fifty years before the publication of From the Invisible Side of the Sky—Medvešček began a series of conversations with Janez Strgar, the man who did the most to help him glimpse the invisible side of the sky, and to whom he ultimately dedicated the book.
Their conversations begin with the charcoal burners' oath. In a footnote, Medvešček writes the following about this oath, and I quote:
“Jože Jugov, born in 1916, from Volčanski Ruti no. 24, once told me that charcoal burning had existed in the Doblarca Valley and the surrounding area since time immemorial. Preparing the wood for charcoal kilns was a long and demanding task. The wood was cut only in leased forests, for payment. Great care was taken when constructing the kiln to ensure that the logs were arranged correctly in a circle around the central pole and that they were all of equal length. Once this was completed, the kiln had to be carefully covered with leaves, branches, and moss before finally being sealed with earth. The uninterrupted burning of the kiln over several days determined the quality of the charcoal. Charcoal burning in this region was always carried out by three charcoal burners working together in what was called a trišman. Others would help if necessary, but only until the moment the kiln was lit. At that point they received payment from one of the three trišman members, who served as the foreman. That the period during which the kiln was burning was the most important part of the work is also evident from the charcoal burners' oath. The three men entering into the trišman would first erect the kiln's central pole, known as the strž. Each would then lean a peeled hazel log against it so that the three logs formed a triangle, and only then would they swear the charcoal burners' oath. First, they soaked a small cloth in močeradovec, [a spirit whose distillation procedure purportedly includes fire salamanders]. One of them placed it in his right palm, and another covered it with his own right hand. They pressed their palms together until the močeradovec had evaporated. Throughout the entire time the kiln was burning, they drank močeradovec and ate frika. They slept in turns beside the kiln in a small shelter, called a zavetnik, built from branches, bark, and moss. Naturally, each man had to take the oath twice, once with each of the other two members of the trišman. The oath bound them to remain beside the kiln day and night for as long as it burned, working whenever necessary. Anyone who broke the oath would lose his third of the proceeds from selling the charcoal. Moreover, the oath-breaker would bring upon himself the zduhec—the spirit—of the salamander, which had served as witness to the oath.”
Before Medvešček could therefore speak with Strgar, the two of them first had to perform the oath. Their first conversation from 1965 is recorded in the book and goes as follows:
“Pavel: After a long time, I finally found a local man who seemed to me to be ‘the right one’.
Janez: What does ‘the right one’ mean? Is it possible that someone could also be ‘not the right one’?
Pavel: By the words ‘the right one’ I mean someone who would be able to tell me what Štefan Bucin’s son did not know, or had forgotten.
Janez: Or perhaps he simply did not want to tell you.
Pavel: When I spoke with him nine years ago, he had most likely truly forgotten some things, or perhaps he did not know them at all.
Janez: It seems to me that he did not trust you, as a forešt (foreigner). That is why he used a poor memory as an excuse. In any case, our conversation will soon come to an end as well if you do not tell me openly and very clearly what you want to hear from me!
Pavel: Very briefly. I would like to hear about three things: the tročan, the snake’s head, and the brtin.
Janez: Well, well, look at this little policeman! Who do you think you are? How dare you ask about these things? These matters are none of your concern. If you want us even to begin talking, first tell me whether you have a brtin and whether you have ever even seen one.
Pavel: Neither one nor the other. I already told you that your neighbour Štefan told me about it. Most likely he spoke to me about it only because he knew that this secret no longer served anyone and that today it is merely history — but if no one hears about it, it will be lost forever.
Janez: Is that what you think? And you say that Štefan thought the same? I can hardly believe that. Perhaps he truly had lost his mind at the time; otherwise, he would not have told you. We all know very well that only the person who possesses a brtin knows about these things, and perhaps someone else from that household as well. No, no, this will not do! These matters will first need to be slept on and carefully considered. Only then will I decide whether I will speak about them or not.
Pavel: More than a month had passed since our conversation. What should we say today?
Janez: During this month while you were away, I thought everything through carefully. I came to the conclusion that perhaps you are the “right one” to whom these things should be explained in detail. Above all, so that future generations will also become familiar with these things, which may seem backward to some, but which, when they were still alive, were good for our people. Because of their belief in them, they did not live any worse than those who believed in the new faith.
I also thought about the fact that, from the day when we had that rather unfriendly conversation beneath that tree, I have never met a single outsider who would openly say those three names and ask me about them. This subject has always been silenced, just like childbirth, which was never spoken about. The placenta, however, was an even greater mystery — a true taboo! When I reflected on all this, it awakened my trust in you.
But I can only entrust these things to you under the conditions that we will establish at the end of our conversation, when we have all your notes about these matters in our hands. Then it will become serious. You will take them out of this house only if you swear that you will abide by our agreement. Otherwise, everything will end in the hearth fire.
Pavel: I tell you already today that I will accept all your conditions and abide by them. My only interest and intention is simply to write this down, so that others may one day learn about it as well. When that will happen, however, will ultimately be your decision. If you are ready, we should begin in the way you wish.”
Thus begins the first conversation about Old Believer traditions, rituals, and fundamental concepts. After a brief conversation, Medvešček says:
“Pavel: Now I will read your account back to you. Afterwards, I expect you to finally tell me under what conditions I may publish all of this, if I am even still alive at that time.
Janez: I have no objections to anything you have read. I might cross out a small thing here or there, but let it remain as I said it; I said what I said, and I will not take back my words. From you I ask only for an oath, and it will be our charcoal burners’ oath. I will soak this woolen cloth in salamander liquor and place it on my right hand. You will cover it with your own right palm. Together we will hold it there until it is dry. After this act, know that if you break this oath, the salamander spirit (močeradov zduhec) will find you and close your windpipe forever.
Pavel: I will swear, as you have said. You only need to tell me when I may publish all of this.
Janez: I had several possibilities in mind. The first was that you could do so on my hundredth birthday, in 1998. But since it seems to me that this would place too much importance on myself, I chose instead the one spoken of by Jože Blažev. It concerns a lunar crescent that will turn towards the Earth again in 2007. Well, at that time you may do whatever you wish with these writings. The responsibility will then be yours alone. Well, until then you have a full 42 years, if I have calculated correctly.”
Medvešček’s next conversation with Strgar concluded with the following words, which I quote:
“As a friend and as a man who has experienced much in life and has also endured many disappointments, I would like to advise you in the end that, although you will offer everything that has been said and written to the public only after 2007, you should first think everything through carefully. I am convinced that these stories of ours may then hurt someone. Some will feel threatened; others will be, to put it mildly, horrified and angry that staroverstvo is being given the opportunity to speak publicly, when they were firmly convinced that it had died long ago and forever. Bringing a dead person back to life is always a risky and unpredictable thing. This is all I wanted to say. I know that you are a wise man and that you will think carefully before deciding what to do with this. Whatever decision you make, I wish you only well. I know that your intention from the very beginning was brave, honest, and truthful, which is rare today. What if you simply kept this only for yourself, or informed only your friends about it?”
Returning to Audra Simpson, we can recognise in Strgar’s relationship with Medvešček something that has become known in contemporary anthropology as the right of refusal. It is not that the community is hiding the truth or that it opposes research. On the contrary. Strgar is willing to speak. But he is willing to speak under his own conditions.
Medvešček does not enter the position of a researcher who collects data, but rather the position of a person to whom something has been entrusted. The difference is fundamental. In the first case, the researcher assumes that knowledge is something that can be acquired. In the second case, knowledge becomes something that may be given to him — but may also be withheld.
In the radio programme about the Old Believers prepared by Val Zalaznik for Radio Študent, there is a warning concerning research: “The tradition of the Soča Valley Old Faith immediately awakens a multitude of attractive narratives — suppressed and oppressed knowledge which, through its radical difference, offers solutions to the troubles of the present; an alternative to alienated institutional spirituality; a tradition with deep ‘our’ roots; a unique and hidden community; a heterotopia capable of transforming existing understandings of the historical development of society … In the decade since the publication of Medvešček’s book From the Invisible Side of the Sky, the central reference material, the tradition of the Soča Valley has provoked a storm of acts of semantic appropriation, shaped by popular, academic, artistic, and commercial discourses.”
It seems that every research engagement with Indigenous practices and forms of knowledge is threatened by precisely this kind of appropriation of meaning. This therefore quickly leads us to a crucial question: What is the purpose of research itself? And it is precisely in relation to Indigenous communities that this question becomes most clearly articulated.
An excellent article on this topic was written by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, entitled R-Words: Refusing Research. In this article, they do not merely present a refusal of research; in addition to arguing that the academic world does not deserve certain forms of knowledge, they also identify as their first axiom the idea that the subaltern may indeed speak, but is invited to the table only in order to speak about their pain.
They write in the article: “Research is a dirty word among many Native communities (Tuhiwai Smith, 1999), and arguably, also among ghettoized (Kelley, 1997), Orientalized (Said, 1978), and other communities of overstudied Others. The ethical standards of the academic industrial complex are a recent development, and like so many post–civil rights reforms, do not always do enough to ensure that social science research is deeply ethical, meaningful, or useful for the individual or community being researched. Social science often works to collect stories of pain and humiliation in the lives of those being researched for commodification. However, these same stories of pain and humiliation are part of the collective wisdom that often informs the writings of researchers who attempt to position their intellectual work as decolonization. Indeed, to refute the crime, we may need to name it. How do we learn from and respect the wisdom and desires in the stories that we (over) hear, while refusing to portray/betray them to the spectacle of the settler colonial gaze? How do we develop an ethics for research that differentiates between power—which deserves a denuding, indeed petrifying scrutiny—and people? […] In this essay, we theorize refusal not just as a “no,” but as a type of investigation into “what you need to know and what I refuse to write in” (Simpson, 2007, p. 72). Therefore, we present a refusal to do research, or a refusal within research, as a way of thinking about humanizing researchers.”
For Tuck and Yang, because the question of research is inseparable from the question of power, research ethics cannot be relegated to the background. At the same time, it cannot be reduced merely to a set of rules that determine how to obtain the consent of participants or how to anonymize data, as is often the case in academic research. Such procedural ethics remains within the same epistemological framework in which the researcher continues to appear as the one who has the right to collect, interpret, and distribute the knowledge of others.
Their critique reaches deeper: it addresses the very desire for knowledge itself, which often remains unquestioned. Who wants to know? Why do they want to know? And whom will this knowledge ultimately serve?
From this perspective, the ethics of research begins with restraint: the researcher’s ability not to ask a particular question, not to enter into a particular experience, and not to demand access to everything that exists. The refusal of research is therefore not an anti-intellectual gesture, but rather an ethical practice of recognizing limits. Some stories are not an untapped source of data, but belong to the people, communities, and relationships from which they emerge. Not everything is intended for publication, archiving, or analysis, especially when we recognize that all of these acts are entangled with imperial interests. It is precisely the failure to recognize or the crossing of these boundaries that forms the epistemological-ontological foundation of settler colonialism. Tuck and Yang write, and I quote: “Under coloniality, Descartes’ formulation, cognito ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”) transforms into ego conquiro (“I conquer, therefore I am”; Dussel, 1985; Maldonado-Torres, 2007; Ndlvou-Gatsheni, 2011). Nelson Maldonado-Torres (2009) expounds on this relationship of the conqueror’s sense-of-self to his knowledge-of-others (“I know her, therefore I am me”). Knowledge of self/Others became the philosophical justification for the acquisition of bodies and territories, and the rule over them. Thus the right to conquer is intimately connected to the right to know (“I know, therefore I conquer, therefore I am”). MaldonadoTorres (2009) explains that for Levi Strauss, the self/Other knowledge paradigm is the methodological rule for the birth of ethnology as a science (pp. 3–4). Settler colonial knowledge is premised on frontiers; conquest, then, is an exercise of the felt entitlement to transgress these limits. Refusal, and stances of refusal in research, are attempts to place limits on conquest and the colonization of knowledge by marking what is off limits, what is not up for grabs or discussion, what is sacred, and what can’t be known.”
Here, Tuck and Yang cite Audra Simpson, who writes: “To speak of limits in such a way makes some liberal thinkers uncomfortable, and may, to them, seem dangerous. When access to information, to knowledge, to the intellectual commons is controlled by the people who generate that information [participants in a research study], it can be seen as a violation of shared standards of justice and truth.” (Simpson, 2007, p. 74)
Tuck and Yang then continue: “By forwarding a framework of refusal within (and to) research in this chapter, we are not simply prescribing limits to social science research. We are making visible invisibilized limits, containments, and seizures that research already stakes out.” Such a position also implies an important shift from an extractive to a relational understanding of knowledge. Whereas the traditional researcher was often understood as someone who enters a particular environment, takes something from it, and then leaves, decolonial approaches begin research with the question of responsibility toward the relationships that the research process creates. Knowledge is not an object that can be excavated, but something that emerges through relationships between people, places, languages, and histories.
If we return to Janez Strgar, we can observe something interesting. His demand was not that the Old Faith should never be spoken about. Nor did he demand that it remain a secret locked away forever. He instead asked for time. He asked for responsibility. He asked for reflection on the consequences of publication. His refusal was not absolute. It was relational. It was grounded in the question: what happens to knowledge when it leaves the relationships from which it emerged? In this sense, Medvešček’s story is not merely an example of research into a particular tradition; it is an example of a negotiation over the very conditions of knowledge itself.
This brings us to a fundamental ethical question: is it possible to conduct research without appropriation? Tuck and Yang do not offer an easy answer, but they do suggest a direction. Rather than repeatedly demanding testimonies of trauma from marginalized communities, they propose a shift towards researching desire, creativity, survival strategies, and forms of futurity that these communities are already creating. This does not mean denying violence or inequality, but rather refusing the reduction of people to their suffering. A person is not merely a bearer of a wound; they are also a bearer of knowledge, imagination, and a world.
The authors ask why research based on woundedness has become so widespread: “Why do researchers collect pain narratives? Why does the academy want them? In settler colonial logic, pain is more compelling than privilege, scars more enthralling than the body unmarked by experience. In settler colonial ideology, pain is evidence of authenticity, of the verifiability of a lived life.
Later, with the help of Fredric Jameson, they further reveal how woundedness and pain can be challenged through desire: “[T]he academy as an apparatus of settler colonial knowledge already domesticates, denies, and dominates other forms of knowledge. It too refuses. It sets limits, but disguises itself as limitless. Frederic Jameson (1981) writes, “[H]istory is what hurts. It is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis” (p. 102).
For Jameson, history is a master narrative of inevitability, the logic of teleos and totality: All events are interconnected and all lead toward the same horizon of progress. The relentlessness of the master narrative is what hurts people who find themselves on the outside or the underside of that narrative. History as master narrative appropriates the voices, stories, and histories of all Others, thus limiting their representational possibilities, their expression as epistemological paradigms in themselves. Academic knowledge is particular and privileged, yet disguises itself as universal and common; it is settler colonial; it already refuses desire; it sets limits to potentially dangerous Other knowledges; it does so through erasure, but importantly also through inclusion, and its own imperceptibility. Jameson’s observation also positions desire as a counterlogic to the history that hurts. Desire invites the ghosts that history wants exorcised, and compels us to imagine the possible in what was written as impossible; desire is haunted. Read this way, desire expands personal as well as collective praxis.”
On the one hand, an important contribution of their text lies in its demand for humility, since the researcher is not the one who reveals the truth, but rather the one who learns to live with the fact that not all truths belong to them. Ethical research is therefore not a question of complete transparency, but of the capacity to listen, to take responsibility, and to respect the untranslatable. Sometimes the most ethical act of research is precisely to leave something unsaid, to allow a story to remain where it emerged, and for research to withdraw before another person’s right to their own secrecy.
Of course, not every silence is an expression of freedom. Many communities throughout history have been forced into silence. Silence can be the result of prohibition, violence, assimilationist pressures, or fear. This is precisely why it is important to distinguish between silence imposed by power and silence chosen by a community itself. The decolonial refusal of research does not advocate muteness; rather, it defends the right to self-determination over what will be said, to whom it will be said, and under what conditions it will be said.
On the other hand, refusal is not merely a protection against the violence of knowledge; it is also a protection of the possibility of different forms of knowledge. Not knowledge as a representation of pain, but knowledge as a practice of a world that cannot be reduced to harm. In this sense, refusal does not oppose desire, but transforms it — from a desire for appropriation into a desire to sustain relationships that are not exhausted by the act of knowing.
If colonial epistemology is the one that says, “I know, therefore I conquer, therefore I am,” then a decolonial ethics of research might perhaps be expressed more uncertainly: “I do not know everything, therefore I must learn how to be with others without exhausting them through knowledge.” And it is precisely within this tense space between ignorance, responsibility, and desire that what Tuck and Yang call refusal within research begins — not as the end of knowledge, but as its ethical transformation.
While reading Tuck and Yang, I repeatedly found myself thinking of Benečija. Benečija is often spoken about through its losses: depopulation, linguistic assimilation, an ageing population, the emptying of villages, and so on. All of these are indeed real problems. Yet if we follow the logic of research centered on harm, Benečija becomes primarily a wounded subject. It becomes a place that can be understood above all through what it has lost.
But the question is: what remains invisible when we look only at wounds? Which forms of knowledge, which community practices, which forms of care, language, imagination, and futurity do we overlook because we are primarily searching for evidence of loss?
Tuck and Yang do not suggest that we should simply stop speaking about violence or historical injustices. They propose something more demanding: that communities should be understood as something more than merely the consequences of the violence they have endured.
Desire is not the opposite of pain. Desire is that which persists despite pain. It is not merely a memory of a lost world, but also the capacity to create new worlds. If research remains focused solely on harm, it will continue to reproduce the image of communities as victims. But if it also opens itself to desire, it can begin to recognize communities as creators of their own futures.
Tuck and Yang conclude their contribution with several questions for reflection that I wanted to share with you:
First: “How do we learn from and respect the wisdom and desires in the stories that we (over)hear, while refusing to portray/betray them to the spectacle of the settler colonial gaze?” How might this question be important to the research you are considering, designing, or conducting?
Second: “In which ways is the stance of refusal in social science research “more than just a ‘no’”? […] What do these refusals accomplish? How might the stance of refusal be necessary in your research?”
And third — for me personally, the most important question: “The authors ask readers to consider whether there are some forms of knowledge that the academy doesn’t deserve. What is your reaction to this notion? Why do you think you have this reaction?”
If this question made you feel uncomfortable, you are not alone. I feel that discomfort myself. Perhaps it is precisely this discomfort that reveals how deeply rooted within us is the assumption that knowledge is, by definition, a universal good and that access to all knowledge is an unquestionable right.
Perhaps this is why we are inclined to believe that research is always a neutral activity and that all people deserve to know everything that constitutes our world. Yet it is precisely here that we encounter the possibility of what Tuck, Yang, or Simpson would likely recognize as epistemological imperialism: the belief that the desire for knowledge always takes precedence over another person’s right to maintain a boundary.
Perhaps, however, it is precisely this boundary that marks the place where ethical research truly begins.