Decolonizing methodologies and the reversal of colonial logic

This paper exists as a call for decolonizing methodologies and the reversal of colonial logic. Drawing in part on my own ethnographic research on soccer in the Fiji Islands and popular music and society in Indonesia, I explain how local participants and supporters can and should be encouraged to operate as co-interviewers and co-researchers so that the project has an Indigenous flavour and orientation and functions in terms of Indigenous understandings of relationships, practices and values. I look at how Indigenous myths, often subaltern myths, exist within a mythscape where the governing myth is usually the inherited myth of the colonial power. Subaltern myths and Indigenous ways of knowing combine and I try to illustrate how they differ from European knowledge through the example of the results of a soccer match. Wins against white imperialistic countries enter myth status, while losses are willfully forgotten, and refused entry into the mythscape. A loss that reinforces white European dominance is redundant in the wider scheme of things. It tells us nothing new nor does it empower.