Indigenous Knowledge Becomes Magic in Academia

Existing academic conventions rely on a linear citational framework that presumes knowledge must be mapped through sequential intellectual genealogy. This structure privileges Western theoretical lineages as the primary reference points, often demanding that non-Western scholars position their work within an inherited European intellectual tradition in order to be 'legible.' However, such expectations fail to account for alternative epistemologies in which knowledge is not transmitted through linear progression but through relational, embodied, and cyclical structures.

Western academic theory has long relied on non-Western cultural practices as a source of intellectual revitalization, often without acknowledging the epistemic foundations from which such practices arise. This pattern is evident in the ways that non-Western performance traditions, ritual practices, and oral knowledges are 'discovered,' abstracted, and then reintroduced as theoretical insights within Western discourse. Such extractions not only erase the contexts from which these ideas emerge but also reposition them as intellectual 'advancements' attributed to European theorists.

Calls for legibility in academic discourse are not neutral.

They reflect deeply embedded assumptions about who is centered as a theoretical subject and who must justify their intellectual presence. When scholars working from non-Western frameworks are asked to 'map' their ideas within existing discourses, the unspoken expectation is that such mappings must conform to Western genealogies - an expectation that assumes the universality of European intellectual history as the organizing structure for knowledge production. This is not a demand for intellectual engagement; it is a demand for assimilation into a colonial episteme.

A decolonial approach to citationality recognizes that knowledge is not legitimized through its ability to be mapped onto an existing Western trajectory but through its capacity to generate meaning within its own relational and epistemic contexts. Rather than reproducing the hierarchy in which non-Western thought is made 'legible' through alignment with European theory, this approach insists that knowledge can and must be recognized on its own terms, without requiring translation into a Western citational economy.

The discomfort that Western academia experiences with such epistemologies is not incidental - it is structural. If knowledge is not 'progressive,' if it is not bound to written citation, if it is not attributed to singular theorists, then it cannot be disciplined within the university's framework of intellectual production. To recognize and validate shamanic epistemologies, then, is not simply a matter of inclusion but of fundamentally disrupting the academy's modes of knowledge classification. This is precisely why such epistemologies are often reduced to 'cultural practice' rather than recognized as critical theory in their own right.

As much as I don't want to use such terns as Western and non-Western anymore sadly that is the reality of how this thought becomes legible.