Transmitting Understanding of Indigenous Genocide and Historical Hermeneutical Injustice

A Mexica, or Aztec, scribe communicated part of his experience of the Spanish conquest of Tenochtitlan, modern-day Mexico City, as follows:

Along the roads the splintered javelins lie, scalps are strewn around. Roofless are the houses and bright red their walls. Vermin swarm in the streets and in the squares and the walls are smeared with splattered brains. Red flow the waters, as if they were dyed, and when we drink them it is as if we were drinking salt-petre (Wachtel, 1977, p. 26).

A Maya eyewitness relayed part of his experience of the Maya genocide in the Guatemalan highlands during the early 1980s as follows:

Crisanto Gomez had a house on the banks of the Xalbal River. He did not want to leave for the jungle-he wanted to stay home. When the soldiers came upon a camp of people in Xalbal, the people fled exactly in the direction of his house. But he did not flee. The soldiers went in pursuit of the people. Seven people were killed in Kaibil: Crisanto, about thirty years old, his wife, his son Manuel, who was about twenty, Manuel’s wife and their baby, and two more of Crisanto’s children. He had a lime oven. They burned two people in it as it blazed; his daughter-in-law had her eight-day-old baby. They placed it on stones where the flames came out of the oven. The baby melted like oil on the stones (Falla, 2021, p. 135).

Both the Mexica and Maya speakers convey their understanding of their experience of injustice, namely genocide. These speakers undoubtedly suffered grave moral and political injustices. But these speakers suffer epistemically. This epistemic wrong, I assume, is a species of hermeneutical injustice. I submit that that they suffer hermeneutical injustice because their testimony has so little uptake in North America. Some evidence of the fact that their testimony has received so little uptake in the US is that the public discourse vis-à-vis immigration in the US almost never involves mention of the fact that Guatemalan qua Central American migrants attempt to enter the US because they flee conditions that the US culpably caused through its support for the military forces that perpetrated events such as this Maya genocide otherwise known as La Violencia (Grandin, 2004).

Hermeneutical injustice obtains if a subject cannot either communicate their understanding of their experience of injustice or maximally understand their experience of injustice because of hermeneutical marginalization (Fricker, 2007). Hermeneutical marginalization obtains if a dominant group disproportionately influences a society’s shared set of interpretative resources (Fricker, 2007). This view of epistemic injustice trades on a distinction between the communicative harm and the cognitive harm of hermeneutical injustice (Goetze, 2018; Medina, 2013). The communicative harm obtains if a subject cannot communicate her experience of injustice. The cognitive harm obtains if someone cannot maximally understand their experience of injustice. I will focus on the communicative form of hermeneutical injustice instead of the cognitive harm.

Even though these two cases similarly feature a speaker that aims to convey their understating of their experience of injustice, these cases importantly differ because the Mexica speaker is deceased and the Maya speaker, I assume, lives. This difference matters because the epistemic injustice literature involves the assumption that hermeneutical injustice must feature a living speaker who suffers vis-à-vis their capacity to transmit understanding of their experience of injustice. This raises the question of which party suffers an injustice in these cases.

I submit that this question admits of at least three possible answers. The first is that the speaker in these cases suffers hermeneutical injustice. The second is that the non-dominant group to which the speaker belongs suffers hermeneutical injustice. The third is that either the speaker (i) or the group (ii) to which they belong suffer injustice, or both (i) and (ii) suffer injustice.

An appealing answer is that the speaker in these cases suffers hermeneutical injustice. This answer’s appeal depends on the plausible idea that cases of hermeneutical injustice must feature a subject that cannot communicate their understanding. But this answer does not comport with the at least equally plausible idea that there is some hermeneutical wrong in the Mexica speaker’s case. The notion that the Mexica scribe suffers an epistemic injustice even though he is a historical person, I assume, rests on the idea that deceased people can be wronged. Promises we make to our loved ones who are deceased depend on precisely the idea that we can either do right by them through fulfilling our promises or wrong them by failing to act according to our promises. I will assume that we can wrong historical persons. I find this assumption safe because it comports with not only with how people speak about deceased persons, but also our legal practices and customs such as complying with deceased persons’ legally binding will and testament and performing spiritual rituals. So, this answer according to which only current speakers can be wronged seems inapt because it does not capture an important wrong at issue in the Mexica case.

A second answer to the question of the possible victims of hermeneutical injustice is that in these cases it is the present-day Nahua (descendants of the Mexica) and Maya peoples who are wronged hermeneutically and thus suffer a hermeneutical injustice. In the Mexica case, one can point to the Nahua as the wronged party because not only are they extant, but, importantly, when present-day audiences fail to receive the understanding that the Mexica scribe attempted to transmit, they fail to understand the injustice that modern-day Nahua people have suffered and currently suffer in Mexico. Even though this answer captures the intuition of wrongness that the prior answer fails to capture, it leaves uncaptured the wrong that the living Maya speaker suffers. So, this answer is only partly correct.

The third answer to our question is that either (i) the speaker or (ii) the group to which they belong suffer the injustice, or both (i) and (ii). This answer captures the intuition of wrongness that readers may have with respect to both cases because it acknowledges that both non-dominant speakers and the groups to which they belong can either individually or jointly suffer hermeneutical injustice. This result is felicitous because it not only coheres with these two cases, but it also coheres with the social turn in epistemology which recognizes that epistemic value need not only inhere in individuals because such value can and importantly does inhere in groups (Alcoff, 2007; Goldberg, 2010; Greco, 2020; Harding, 1995; Longino, 1994; Mills, 2007). A basic idea that motivates the social turn in epistemology is that if one aims to understand the nature and value of epistemic phenomena such as knowledge, understanding and epistemic justification, then one should not only focus on individual subjects as targets of analysis, but also, importantly, focus on groups, communities and societies as such targets. Some examples of this social turn are that some have pointed out that knowledge cannot be properly analyzed apart from understanding the role it plays in human communities (Craig, 1990), that subjects’ epistemic justification can often depend on the reliability of community or group processes (Bayruns García, 2020; Goldberg, 2010) and that groups themselves can be assessed in terms of beliefs they hold qua groups (Brown, 2024; Lackey, 2021; Schmitt, 1994)

I have presented two cases of hermeneutical injustice in which speakers cannot communicate understanding of grave injustices, genocides, to audiences. By considering these two cases, I have put into view the notion that hermeneutical injustice can obtain even if the subject, whose understanding does not have uptake in the present, is a historical person. I briefly motivated the claim that hermeneutical injustice’s wrong can inhere in a non-dominant group instead of merely in an individual subject. I motivate this against the standing assumption in the epistemic injustice literature that hermeneutical injustice can only obtain if there is an extant or living subject.

Photo: Maya Hierogliphs taken by the author

References

Alcoff, L. M. (2007). Epistemologies of ignorance: Three types. In S. Sullivan & N. Tuana (Eds.), Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance (pp. 39–57). State University of New York Press.

Bayruns García, E. (2020). How Racial Injustice Undermines News Sources and News-Based Inferences. Episteme, 2020, 1–22.

Brown, J. (2024). Groups as Epistemic and Moral Agents. Oxford University Press.

Craig, E. (1990). Knowledge and the state of nature: An essay in conceptual analysis. Oxford University Press.

Falla, R. (2021). Massacres In The Jungle: Ixcan, Guatemala, 1975-1982. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429040993

Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford University Press.

Goetze, T. S. (2018). Hermeneutical Dissent and the Species of Hermeneutical Injustice. Hypatia, 33(1), Article 1.

Goldberg, S. C. (2010). Relying on Others: An Essay in Epistemology. Oxford University Press.

Grandin, G. (2004). The last colonial massacre: Latin America in the Cold War. University of Chicago Press.

Greco, J. (2020). The Transmission of Knowledge. Cambridge University Press.

Harding, S. (1995). “Strong Objectivity‘: A Response to the New Objectivity Question. Synthese, 104(3), Article 3.

Lackey, J. (2021). The Epistemology of Groups (1st ed.). OUP Oxford. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199656608.001.0001

Longino, H. E. (1994). In Search Of Feminist Epistemology. The Monist, 77(4), Article 4.

Medina, J. (2013). The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations. Oxford University Press.

Mills, C. W. (2007). White Ignorance. In S. Sullivan & N. Tuana (Eds.), Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance (pp. 11–38). State Univ of New York Pr.

Schmitt, F. F. (1994). Socializing epistemology: The social dimensions of knowledge. Rowman & Littlefield.

Wachtel, N. (1977). The vision of the vanquished: The Spanish conquest of Peru through Indian eyes, 1530-1570. Barnes and Noble.