Indigenous Epistemology and Placing the Cultural Self in Crisis: A New Hermeneutic Model for Cultural Studies.

The field of cultural studies is yet to decisively facilitate its stated aim of providing meaningful and genuine understanding of the so-called 'cultural self' and its myriad cultural transactions. Deconstructive analysis unearths the cultural presuppositions inherent in this field, which is laden with enduring colonial tendencies and biases still prevalent in today's academic discourse. My argument is that the understanding of a culture is inevitably enigmatic when one's scholarship is situated in the presupposition of a binary that opposes self to other. Subjects studying other cultures, I argue, better understand and empathize with the subjects of their study when they are willing to sacrifice their own self-constructed cultural otherness. A deeper dialogue, a dialogue embedded at the core of self-experience, I argue, is the hermeneutical key for understanding cultural subjects. This approach of deconstructing the self in an effort to recognize the other, I believe, has a greater potential to bridge abiding differences and heal a multiplicity of culturally wounded subjects. Real cultural dialogue occurs in that 'fusion of horizons' that arises from the bracketing of one's own culturally constructed presuppositions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]