Diversity Under Pressure

A Gentle Critique of Totalising Tendencies in Postcolonial Analysis

Postcolonial Critique – Approach and Scope

This text forms part of the section Postcolonial Critique and takes as its point of departure the field as a necessary and still fruitful area of research. Colonial power relations, epistemic hierarchies, and historical inequalities have had – and continue to have – profound consequences that demand analytical attention.

At the same time, the analysis adopts a reflexive and non-totalising approach. It seeks to avoid explanatory models in which relations between “them” and “us” are presented as absolute and irreconcilable oppositions. Instead, emphasis is placed on empirical complexity, historical variation, and the many institutional and everyday practices in which boundaries are porous, situational, or of limited analytical significance.

The aim is not to weaken postcolonial critique, but to strengthen it by maintaining its openness to diversity, internal tensions, and intermediate positions. Critique is understood here as a tool for understanding – not as a closed explanatory framework.

Introduction

Over recent decades, postcolonial critique has made a decisive contribution to understanding the historical and contemporary effects of colonialism. It has opened new fields of research, made marginalised voices visible, and challenged the notion of Western knowledge as universal and neutral. Much of this scholarship is both necessary and productive – and continues to hold possibilities for insight that we have only partly explored.

Precisely for this reason, it is crucial that postcolonial critique also retains its capacity for self-criticism. In its effort to expose structures of power, it sometimes risks developing new forms of analytical simplification. This becomes particularly problematic when relations between “them” and “us” are presented as total and irreconcilable oppositions. In such cases, the diversity of practices, institutions, and experiences that should be the very object of analysis is displaced.

Totalisation as an Analytical Risk

When colonial and postcolonial relations are described through fixed dichotomies – centre/periphery, coloniser/colonised, withholding of knowledge/loss of knowledge – a strong sense of moral clarity is often achieved. Yet this clarity comes at a cost. The models become explanatory precisely because they are stringent, but they simultaneously risk erasing those realities that do not fit their structure.

Hybrid institutions, cross-cutting forms of cooperation, pragmatic adaptations, and internal differences are either marginalised or rendered invisible. In this way, a classificatory logic reminiscent of colonial thinking is paradoxically reproduced: complex realities are reduced to manageable categories. The difference lies mainly in who now defines those categories.

Greenland: When a Valid Critique Becomes Too Broad

The claim that Denmark historically withheld knowledge that Greenland needed is, in many contexts, both accurate and well documented. Real power asymmetries existed, and knowledge was often produced and controlled outside Greenland. However, when this claim is used as a total explanatory framework, it loses analytical precision.

How, then, are we to understand that Greenlandic midwives, nurses, and doctors were educated in Denmark over decades and returned with professional medical and scientific knowledge? These educational trajectories were undoubtedly embedded in unequal relations, but they also constituted concrete forms of knowledge circulation that cannot simply be described as withholding. To overlook this is not to sharpen critique – it is to simplify reality.

Scientific In-Between Spaces and Institutional Complexity

A related example is the bilingual journal Forskning i Grønland – Tusaat, which included both natural and social scientific research and had Greenlandic researchers represented on its editorial board. Here, Greenlandic and Danish scholars contributed side by side.

Reducing this type of institutional practice to an expression of unambiguous colonial dominance over knowledge requires ignoring concrete forms of collaboration, linguistic diversity, and the active scholarly roles of Indigenous researchers. The point is not that power relations disappear – but that they are not uniform and do not always operate through exclusion.

International Parallels: Siberia and Russia

The same analytical problem appears in international contexts. In Russia, research environments – particularly in St Petersburg – have for decades educated Indigenous peoples from Siberia in the natural sciences, precisely because this knowledge is in demand locally. At the same time, linguistic and cultural studies have been preserved and further developed through Indigenous researchers affiliated with university environments.

Here, too, the relations are asymmetrical, but not characterised by unambiguous dispossession of knowledge. Rather, they involve complex processes marked by negotiation, participation, and institutional intermediary positions that are difficult to capture through simple them/us dichotomies.

Experience as a Break with the Model

This issue became particularly clear to me through my own long engagement with Fredrik Barth’s theory of ethnicity. For more than twenty years, I worked with his concept of ethnic boundaries as the central analytical point of departure. The model was productive and methodologically convincing – and precisely for that reason, its limitations only became visible very late.

It was not new theory, but repeated empirical experience that led to this realisation. Everyday life in Greenland and among Russian Sámi, where I worked over extended periods, could simply not be understood as relations between irreconcilable ethnic oppositions. On the contrary, coexistence, overlap, pragmatic cooperation, and situation-specific identifications were far more prominent than the boundaries the theory had trained one to look for.

The decisive turning point was the recognition that what is most immediate is often the hardest to see when one has been theoretically and methodologically trained otherwise. When attention is trained to identify boundaries, one becomes correspondingly less attentive to the many situations in which boundaries play no role. Theory sharpens perception in one place and narrows it in another.

This experience points to a more general insight: theories do not only shape our explanations, but also our attention. They make certain phenomena visible and others almost invisible. In this case, the focus on ethnic boundaries meant that precisely those everyday practices in which ethnicity was porous, irrelevant, or mutually integrated long appeared analytically secondary – even though they were empirically dominant.

Conclusion: Towards a More Inclusive Postcolonial Critique

This text is not an attack on postcolonial critique, but an attempt to preserve its analytical strength by safeguarding complexity. Postcolonial analysis does not lose relevance by acknowledging diversity – it gains precision, historical depth, and empirical credibility.

A critique capable of encompassing both domination and cooperation, inequality and knowledge circulation, boundaries and shared spaces, is better equipped to understand the actual relations that have characterised – and continue to characterise – colonial and postcolonial societies.

Read also: Postcolonial Critique and Its Limits — Bhabha, Zinoviev and the Greenlandic Example and Postcolonial Critique – A Mosaic of Voices and Places develop related themes of complexity and diversity in greater depth.