ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates how the concept of indigeneity works within specific epistemic confrontations in the context of a particular configuration of diversity. The archaeological discipline views indigeneity as otherness; and indigenous archaeology tends to recapitulate disciplinary assumptions and, finally, Western episteme. Archaeological things are enmeshed within local theories of relationality, and are themselves actively related. The inter-epistemic trip that begins to un-discipline archaeology ends with its own epistemological/philosophical consequences: local theories of relationality act upon the knower that comes from afar as much as the knower is related and becomes through those relationalities; in theoretical and political terms, this implies a standpoint from which to decolonize oneself from Western modern assumptions codified in the disciplines of knowledge. Essentialist theories such as Nazism, culture-historical archaeology and multiculturalism are based on the assumption of identity of culture and meta-culture, and social scientists and archaeologists tend to evaluate the correspondence between both as authentic and the lack of correspondence as fake.
