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ABSTRACT
This paper calls for a “fifth moment” in the field of intercultural communication that re-examines modern culture’s values, beliefs, and assumptions about human being in the world and the role of such in fomenting today’s ongoing planetary-wide ecological crises. To conduct this re-examination, we turn to ethnoautobiography, a framework rooted in story and in the indigenous paradigm. We raise deep questions regarding the default assumptions of a discipline ensconced almost exclusively within the monocultural logic of modern culture and civilization. We end by posing key problematics that we deem crucial for renewing the discipline toward contemporary relevance, ecological awareness, and responsibility.
Notes
1. The numbered junctures do not imply a linear progression; rather, they signify overlapping and co-occurring developments. It should also be noted that the emergence of the junctures reflected the broader reflexive turns in social research culture in the 1980s when scholars began addressing the crisis of representation and agency of the subaltern (e.g., Alcoff, Citation1991; Clifford, Citation1988; Rosaldo, Citation1989) and paying greater attention to the role of power, ideology, and context.
2. The majority of the 37 articles were published in the last 10 years. Perhaps, not surprisingly, Environmental Communication was the most popular outlet; 14 of the 37 articles were published in this journal. This is followed by Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture, which published six articles.
3. For example, out of the 37 articles, only three were published in National Communication Association journals (Conley & Mullen, Citation2008; La Fever, Citation2011; Pezzullo, Citation2013).
4. Positing the individual self as existing, thinking, and acting independently from the world outside.
5. Critical media scholars Shohat and Stam (Citation1994) argue that Eurocentrism is “the discursive residue or precipitate” of European colonialism that attempted to submit the world to a universal truth (pp. 15–16).
6. A version of this story appears in Mendoza (Citation2016).
7. See direct quote from Francis Bacon in The Great Instauration and New Atlantis, as cited in: http://sentientpotential.com/acceptance-vs-questioning-kurzweil-jobs-and-francis-bacon/ (last accessed: June 30, 2013).
8. I recall accessing this in a YouTube video, but this is now no longer available.
9. Colloquial for Filipino.
10. One of the regional ethnicities in the Philippines.
11. Interestingly, those dreading the “crime” of “romanticization of the native” are quick to draw the sword in denunciation of such seeming “idealization” of native life. Yet, no such reaction is knee-jerked against the gargantuan romance of modern industrial life, deemed “non-negotiable” by most, even when the same is what is driving the planet to the brink of destruction. Can we open up space—a tiny crack—to speak differently of a way of life that today appears to be the only remaining “outside” of modernity (and against which the most insiduous disinformation campaign has been, and continues to be, waged even as we speak) without immediately being shut down and dismissed as naïve romanticists or nativists?
12. See Derrick Jensen’s (Prechtel, Citation2001) online interview of Martin Prechtel in http://thesunmagazine.org/issues/304/saving_the_indigenous_soul.
13. Not to say they were any more virtuous than us modern humans, only that they appear to have evolved social arrangements and relationships with their given ecologies that are more reciprocal and balanced (cf. Sahlins, Citation1998; Woodburn, Citation1998). History shows that indigenous peoples, translated long enough into our modern environment, are just as capable of learning greed and rapaciousness in their everyday dealings.
14. The notion that you may take from the Wild what you need to live, but at your appointed time, you must agree to die, having lived a life that that makes you worthy food for others.