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Book Chapter

De_colonial? Archives, memory and power

 In: Racialised Faces in white Creative Spaces: Ein Sammelband über Rassismus in der Kultur- und Kreativwirtschaft. Org.: Dis_Check Antidiskriminierung Beratung. Münster : edition assemblage.
Berlin, Münster. 2023.


De_colonial? Archives, memory and power
Suelen Calonga, Obará

Today I address in particular Black African people - continental or diasporic - who are workers and service providers in museal institutions in Europe. In particular, people who do work that supports or disseminates “decolonial” initiatives and discourses in these endeavors. I think this indication of direction is important, because we are not always truly aware of the roles we play within institutional “diversity” narratives, especially since these narratives are always constructed to make it seem like museums are institutions genuinely committed to education, when in fact they are commercial and rhetorical enterprises. Not exclusively museums, but especially museums, and I will explain myself later. When I refer to museums I mean all “archives of knowledge” - all institutions dealing with the safeguarding, maintenance, and diffusion of historical, artistic, or cultural heritage, inheritance, or legacy (whether museums of any kind, archives, galleries, thematic libraries, universities, repositories, cultural centers, etc.). I take license to name and reduce all of these institutions - including museums - to the name Archive. I have done so in many of my more recent texts. I understand that the reason for the existence of these enterprises and their modes of operation all converge on the same original motivation: the articulation of the exercise of power. This is done through the control of narratives about a given fact, theme, biography or context, from a privileged place of enunciation. Thus, generating an accumulation of heritage, inheritance or legacy, and material, political or intellectual capital that accredit these sites to position themselves as “public places of memory”. This convergence of factors enables the construction or destruction of a collective memory, as well as the construction or destruction of a collective forgetting. The relationship between these “places of memory” and their referent territories, the roles of the agents working in the service of these institutions, and the procedures of engagement with the past and “history” (remembering) are, therefore, power-based relationships.
Throughout the 20th century, especially since the wars in African countries for independence from Europeans, and in the struggles of Latin American countries for sovereignty in the face of North American domination, many philosophers, historians, social scientists, artists, filmmakers, and authors from different fields have proposed broader transnational discussions about the damage that European epistemic practices cause to our subjectivities [1] .1 Reflections on the notion of representation and the relations between different systems of representation (Hall, 1992), the role of narratives in the constitution of individuals and social groups (Santos & Meneses, 2010), the effects of the adoption of a single globalizing paradigm (Silva, 2007), the politics of silencing (Kilomba, 2010), epistemicide (Carneiro, 2005), the hierarchization imposed by white- European cultural forms in social theories and ethnic-racial relations (Munanga, 2009), the forms of territorial colonization and, above all, psychological colonization as structuring modernity (Fanon, 1961), just to name a few exponents, are themes addressed around the supremacy of white-European institutions, especially since the seventeenth century.
The first step to restore our sovereignty and self-determination is to get out of the condition of colonized peoples; it is to recognize that colonization has long ceased to be territorial and is since then installed in our collective mind; it is to recognize that we have entered a war that we do not want and that, once inside it, we have not yet made all the necessary moves to emerge victorious. Sometimes because we lack the strength to resist, sometimes because we lack the clear perception that we are being taken away and must react. We need to understand as soon as possible that “history is a weapon”, and that we have been systematically and intentionally ’de-educated’ (Woodson, 1933) of everything that would guarantee our intellectual and spiritual freedom and emancipation. Our history is much older and much more glorious. If white-European civilizational pattern falls today, it will not have lasted half as long as any of those that existed before. The European spirit has so imposed itself upon our minds that we have come to believe that we are no longer capable of having ownership over our own inventions, of maintaining our own practices, or of best keeping the objects that we ourselves have created, for our own use. We have been robbed, and we must stop being both accomplices and victims of the thieves of our treasures.
That said, I will continue with my explanation starting from the idea that power is the control over something or someone, determining beforehand to whom I refer when I talk about the dominator and the dominated. Simply and directly on a geopolitical scale, here I refer to the dominator, or the holder of power as the European, or rather, as pointed out by John R. Clarke (as cited in Ani, 1994), “the evil spirit of Europe”. The dominated, or over whom this power has been exercised, are the other human societies, subjugated materially, intellectually and spiritually by the evil spirit of Europe since Roman Imperialism and its subsequent sophistications.
Since the European is the last trunk of the human family to join this arena we call humanity, it is necessary that we constantly remind them that more than half of human history had already passed when most people from Africa and Asia realized that there was a European in the world. As with many rebellious teenagers, unfortunately it is also part of the bad European spirit to think that what is younger is better than what is older, and what is more modern (in the technological sense) is better than what is ancient. This will be reflected from micro scales of relationships to geopolitics in general.
Arrogance, greed, and exacerbated competitiveness caused Europeans to destroy more cultures and civilizations than they built, and during the 15th and 16th centuries they not only succeeded in colonizing the entire world, but they also colonized “information about the world, developing a monopoly of control over concepts and images” (Ani, 1994, p. xvi). “They studied people without understanding them and interpreted them without knowing them, making the conquest of the minds of African and Asian people - on their original continents or in diaspora–their greatest achievement” (p. xvii).
Also according to Ani (p. xxvi), “white nationalism” or “European nationalism,” understood here as the ideological commitment to the perpetuation, advancement, and defence of a white culture, politics, race, and way of life, not determined by the boundary of a “nation-state”, is the set of forms of white–European thought and behavior that promote European hegemony. They identify and hierarchize racial and cultural characteristics in a linear spectrum that positions white-Europeans with superiority and Africans with inferiority. This way of operating in the world leads to cultural imperialism, the systematic imposition of an alien culture that fractures the ancestral legacy of a population, destroying self- determination, the political will of a collective of dominated people, causing cultural insecurity. One of the most efficient ways that Europeans have developed for this control is what Ani calls scientism: an ideological use of science as “an activity that sanctions thought and behavior, that is, [Eurocentric] science becomes sacred, the highest standard of morality” (p. xxvi). What I mean by this is that Archives, invented and disseminated as places of “production” of knowledge, be they museums or universities or even the mass media, for example, are devices for exercising power through the control of narratives [2] - through the manipulation of art and cultural objects/information to transform them into material heritage and white-European political capital.2 There are many ways in which narrative control can be exercised, from the most violent to the most subtle, from the most concretely coercive to the most psychologically subjective. Among the privileged places of enunciation and attribution of narratives, notably Academia, the Media, and Art, I will choose here to deal specifically with narratives supported by objects of art and culture, because I understand that these objects emanate a precipitate of cultural essence (Bazin as cited in Velthem, 2012) that will give meaning to the articulation of ideas that I present in this text.
Art and culture objects, whether material or immaterial, participate decisively for the production and social reproduction and represent important mediators for the relationships that are established between individuals and groups, within the collectivity (...) whose emphasis falls mainly on social and symbolic relationships (Velthem, 2012). That is: because these objects are means for relations, and not the end of them, it is not possible to deposit, measure, access or transfer the values inscribed (in these objects) without emptying them completely from what makes them valuable. And here lies an important point to understand where I start from and the path I will take later on: what are these meanings and how do these emptyings occur from the accumulation, collecting, archiving or disguising the narratives over these objects. In short: cultural appropriation, which, contrary to what the most recent white-European deliriums propagate–mainly on the Internet –, has less to do with the limitation of individual liberties of white people, who do not want to have their choices questioned in terms of clothing, adornments, and hairstyles, and more to do with installed processes of colonial violence. These make it possible, for example, that central artifacts in daily, liturgical, and secular practices of cultural groups that were stolen in the past remain today in institutionally legal possession of their thieves–and on exhibition.
The spoliation, dispossession, and deprivation of access that the true owners of objects (whether material or immaterial) suffer in the process of cultural (dis)appropriation is directly proportional to the symbolic and financial profit that usurpers acquire by obtaining them. The accumulation, collecting, or archiving of these objects is today called heritage, inheritance, or legacy, depending on the type, and the figure (person or institution) who controls it is always endowed with a lot of power. Because we live immersed in a system that attributes and prioritizes the economic/financial value to everything, we tend to mistake power with money, but when we observe the issues that run deep inside relationships, we realize that money only flows in the direction of power, but they are not the same thing. Power attracts money. Power is speculative and ideological. The one who is powerful is so because they have control over relationships (political, financial, coercive, etc.); is so because they can convince others that they are powerful (the control of the narrative of the self) and that “the other” is not as powerful as they, so they can/should be dominated (the control of the narrative about the other). Archives are therefore very powerful epistemological weapons, and workers in museum institutions are often only partially aware of the roles they play within these power structures.
Although the concepts of archive, memory, legacy and history discussed in this text are of great importance for understanding the general dimension of the subject, I cannot help but highlight the practical and concrete dimension of the roles played by the European national Archives in global politics, especially between the 18th century (when most of them were established) and the 20th century (when they began to be questioned as an instrument of state policies). This is where the real exercise of power of these institutions lies, as they work, even today, in support of their governments in the interdiction of the sovereignty of other peoples and territories, and in the selective erasure of the global magnitude of historical facts.
The institutional collections of Europe are direct legacies of looting, appropriation, and theft of intellectual, material, and symbolic property of peoples who were colonized by European nations. These collections, which today make up the much visited and lucrative European archives and museums, especially ethnological museums, are derived from the private collections of missionaries, scientists, military personnel, and artists commissioned by their countries on ethnographic colonial journeys. The white-European “narcissistic pact” (Bento, 2002) has allowed that, even despite the political differences between nations at different moments in history (during the Nazi regime, for example), there were agreements to transfer collections from one nation to another within Europe without, however, considering the possibility of returning them to their original and rightful owners. The creation of museums (the French model [3] , which is how we know them today all over the world) as institutions with the purpose of educating the modern population, having the political function of narrative control and discourse of supremacy since its foundation, gained an even more complex dimension with the sophistication of the capitalist system, with the possibility of multiplying wealth working in its own favor: treasures previously untouchable and hidden, with access restricted to very few people, were then elevated to the condition of tourist attraction that would bring people from all over the world and generate even more commercial relevance. So, it would be a two-way gain: from a single investment (the exploratory trips of ethnographers to other lands), the set of collected objects, whether bought, acquired in exploratory situations, or simply stolen, would serve both economic and political purposes. It is also worth mentioning that memory, the central object of these enterprises, gives legitimacy to the institutional project and the social agents dedicated to it (Heymann, 2005). This is why museums, today, compete with tourism over our current notion of what “heritage” is.3 Marlene Suano (1986) explains how the European bourgeoisie organized knowledge and know-how in order to consolidate their newly acquired power: education would be the great weapon of domination in modern countries, and museums were very well suited to the needs of the bourgeoisie for this purpose. In France, for example, the National Revolutionary Convention approved the creation of four museums with an explicitly political purpose and at the service of the new order in 1792 (p.28-29): The Museum of Monuments (Trocadéro), the Louvre Museum, The Museum of Arts and Crafts, and the Natural History Museum. In the wake of this same social movement other European cities have built museums to hold the largest collections of ethnographic objects brought from other continents: Vienna (1783), Amsterdam (1808), Madrid (1819), Berlin (1810), St. Petersburg (1852). Although their collections were being migrated and merged with others over time, and in some cases the original collections are in other museums today, these buildings still retain the same status of “great works” that they signified in the past. In this way, this new ruling class sought to act on different fronts for the establishment of new national identities, acting strongly in the cultural and artistic fields, but always with trade and finance in mind.
This museological plan deserves attention. The narrative power exercised expands its network of relations, produces new meanings, establishes lines of thought, determines what should be known, multiplies the institutions of memory (and forgetfulness) assigning them a role of source of knowledge, light and illumination (Chagas, 2011, p.7).

There are founding myths for every aspect of every culture. Since Western culture (in general) is very much marked by Greek heritage, I would like to recover a history of European tradition that justifies not only the existence of museums as we know them today, but the mode of operation of these institutions. Although it has been adapted over the centuries, it still retains its easily recognizable mythical essence today:
Zeus, god of the gods and great father of strength and order, son of Cronos (Time) and Rhea (the Queen Mother), had the gift and habit of disguising himself as other beings to seduce and deceive people, always driven by a great passion. He disguised himself as a bird to attract and deceive his sister Hera. He disguised himself as a swan to seduce and dissuade Leda. He transformed himself into a blue-eyed white bull to kidnap and rape Europa and have her bear his children. Zeus even transformed himself into a golden rain that invaded Dânae’s bedroom and penetrated her body to conceive the famous hero Perseus. He once disguised himself as a shepherd and lovingly conquered the titan Mnemosyne (Memory), daughter of Uranus (Heaven) and Gaia (Earth). Over the course of nine nights, 132 they begot their nine daughters, the Muses, personifications of the arts and sciences, of memory and storytelling, charged with singing the victories, beauties, and divine acts that would make humans forget anxiety and sadness and inspire them to great deeds. The house-temple where they lived, the Mouseion, stood high on Mount Parnassus and was a place dedicated to the worship and contemplation of the crafts of each muse: Clio, was the guardian of history and science and Calliope was the guardian of literature and rhetoric – these two became known as the favorite daughters – Euterpe of music and lyric poetry; Erato of erotic verses; Melpomene and Thalia of tragedy and comedy, respectively; Polyhymnia looked after sacred music and geometry; Terpsichore of song and dance; Urania of astronomy and astrology [4].4 My way of telling the myth is freely adapted from many sources, oral and written (and, among the written, formal and non-formal), that I gathered by reading sites on the Internet, such as Wikipedia entries and mythology blogs, and by talking to experts on Hellenic myths and the Olympic pantheon. Since it is a public domain narrative, I will take the liberty of telling it in my own way, without punctually quoting the references.
Sandra Pesavento (2003) proposes the exercise of considering what the attributes and profile of Clio, the favorite of the muses, would be today, in the new millennium. According to the author, it would certainly be named Cultural History.
Serene physiognomy, frank gaze, incomparable beauty, in her hands, the stylus of writing, the trumpet of fame. Her name is Clio, the muse of history (...) Perhaps Clio even surpassed Mnemosyne, since, with the stylus of writing, she fixed in narrative what she sang, and the trumpet of fame conferred notoriety to what she celebrated. In the time of men, and no longer of gods, Clio was elected the queen of sciences, confirming her attributes of recording the past and holding the authority of speech about facts, men, and dates of another time, marking what should be remembered and celebrated (Pesavento, 2003, p.7).
There are many interesting points that I would like to highlight in the stories about Mouseion on Mount Parnassus, which helps us understand how the museum has a program already inscribed in it since its mythical conception. For example, despite being discursively programmed as a place of creativity and leisure, its patron-manager was Apollo (lord of pure reason) and not his brother Dionysius (ruler of freedom, games and pleasure). Another interesting point is that Clio, favorite daughter and muse of history and science, who disseminates and celebrates great achievements, is often evoked because she is the daughter of Mnemosyne, and shares with her mother the gift of remembering. But people usually don’t pay much attention to the fact that she is also the daughter of Zeus, the King of the Gods, the greatest authority on Olympus and owner of power (law and order); the one with the gift of ideological falsehood, who metamorphoses his voice and appearance to seduce and deceive, kidnap and rape other people and other gods. Zeus is thus the bearer of power, and controls the narratives about himself (by pretending to be something else) and the other (dissuading and deceiving), facilitating the exercise of physical and symbolic violence. History–Science, the privileged inhabitant of the house-museum institution, holds attributes inherited from its mother, Memory, but I would like to point out that it expresses itself more in the manner of her father, Power. This is an aspect that can never be lost sight of. This is why the archives archive.
In my view, among the many gradations of the same original motivator that exists among all archives, Europe’s ethnological museum collections are the ultimate demonstration of power: the exercise of narrative control over themselves and their colonial ventures over the rest of the world. This exercise of power necessarily involves detaching objects of art and culture from their original contexts of meaning and emptying them of their holistic communicative power by making them mere “ethnographic objects,” especially if stored in an institution under the rhetorical justification of “safeguarding”. This exercise of power also aims to legitimize the narrative of being open spaces of education and knowledge construction – and, more recently, of “decolonial” efforts - by staffing them with Black or racialized people from non– European territories. Especially in positions that deal directly with the public, or so that the faces of these workers may illustrate a certain notion of “representativeness”, “inclusion”, or “diversity” in the media. These people, however, are never the Archive holders, decision makers, or political and/or economic managers of the enterprise’s resources. That is, within the building, they are almost in the same role as the (ethnographic) objects on display, whatever the type of Archive. This “ethnologization” in form and content can be identified in all museal/archival enterprises.
The modern use of the term “ethnology” is credited to the jurist and historian Adam Franz Kollár, defined in his Historiae ivrisqve pvblici Regni Vngariae amoenitates published in Vienna in 1783 as “the science of nations and peoples, or, that study of learned men in which they inquired into the origins, languages, practices, and institutions of various nations, and, finally, into the ancient homeland and settlements, in order to be able to better judge nations and peoples in their own time” (as cited in Mandavilli, 2018). Today, the term is understood as the science that studies the documents gathered by and through “ethnography” (ethnography is the method of ethnology), seeking the analytical and comparative appreciation of cultures and societies in relation to the ethnographer’s place of statement. Although it is constantly criticized, revised, and updated, the development of ethnology over time has followed the expansion of Europe around the world in its various dissimulations, adaptations, subtleties, and sophistications. 
I could say – again supported by Marimba Ani – that, being a logos, a way of reason and understanding, ethnology can be understood as part of the European cultural DNA and the ultimate expression of the success of European cultural-scientific nationalist imperialism [5] . That is, ethnology is the seed, the founding logic of this culture that, in fact, does not know itself, but is able to describe in detail everything it is not from the comparison with others. Since this cultural seed is not self-expressing, but depends on a cultural vehicle of others (ethnos) to make itself viable in the world, I consider this expression to be the ethnographic method itself. Ethnography was first established with the justification of otherness. Then it started working to justify a fallacious ideal of evolutionism, which proposed that it was necessary to understand the so-called “primitive societies” (because they were older) and analyze the path that would have been taken to reach the supposed point of complexity of European society, considering a line of evolution that would place Europe as more “advanced” (because it was younger). Following this, governments and other institutions in European countries began to see great profit opportunities in financing expeditions of adventurers, religious missionaries and scientists from the most diverse areas (geology, botany, zoology, anthropology, etc.) so that they could collect reports, objects, samples of biodiversity, minerals, fauna, flora, and often even human individuals from other territories. The detailed description of other peoples’ way of life, practices, behaviors, values, beliefs, and social rules quickly proved efficient for European colonization objectives. It would be easier to conquer, dominate, exploit another territory the better one knew the details of the socio-cultural background of the people who occupied it. The collections derived from these assortments were composed of exoticized objects of “people from distant lands” – which, upon their arrival in Europe, composed what they called at that time as “freak-shows”, human zoos or the so famous Cabinets of Curiosities that originated many of the ethnological museums existing today mainly in England, France, Holland and Germany – but also trophies of battles that became government treasures: souvenirs from colonial wars, collected and displayed for the same reason that a hunter displays the head of a deer he has shot in the forest in his living room : because this is a genuine expression of European power.5 Marimba Ani, in dealing with the legacy of European nationalism, presents the “universalism” of the Victorian Era (1837-1901), which, within the European worldview, meant “a more objectively valid moral state, the assumption being that European values were arrived at “critically” and ’rationally’ and were therefore universally valid. This was a legacy from the ‘enlightenment’, so-called.” (Ani, 1994, p.55). Another legacy of European nationalism identified by Ani is the cultural- scientific imperialism institutionalized in the Academy. The transformation, inaugurated by Plato, of “epistemology into ideology” (p.104), which, because it dragged on for centuries in which the European cognitive style became an extension of Platonism, caused “not only all European intellectuals, but all intellectuals to be trained in the academy” (Ani, 1994) because this is Plato’s legacy, and, today, a proof of the success of European cultural-scientific imperialism. 
I observe with interest when I read a text written by a European (or Eurocentric) author calling African populations “fetishists” for their use of objects in ritual and daily practices. In fact, I perceive the European practice of taking these objects out of their contexts and senses of use in order to compose the collections of their national Archives, as well as using the image of Black and racialized people working in their spaces to fill the credibility gaps of the institutions’ discourses, as the true fetishism. Ethnography is the white-European means of expropriating and appropriating “ethno- knowledges”, whether by collecting material or immaterial “ethno- objects”, for analysis and later archiving, under the argument of safeguarding, or by observation, description and academic record, of practices and customs of the “éthneos” (others). Or, on the other hand, trying to get rid of the label of “ethnocentric”, or mitigating the criticism of the “colonial” character of the collections by inviting Black people (educators, artists, employees) to compose the staff and programs. The goal has always been, and will always be, to enrich and empower the holder of the Archive, never to exalt what is archived. The institutionalization of collections within museums and archives – created with the rhetorical purpose of education and preservation of memory – always has a political character, “as memory is a political instrument, capable of creating identities, producing a discourse about the past and projecting perspectives about the future” (Heymann, 2005).
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett explores the paradox of displaying ethnographic objects in museums, since once obtained, they will never cease to be just fragments created by ethnographers when they define, segment, detach, and carry them away. Such fragments become ethnographic objects by virtue of the manner in which they have been detached. They are what they are by virtue of the disciplines that “know” them, for disciplines make their objects and in the process make themselves. I want to suggest that ethnographic objects are made, not found they did not begin their lives as ethnographic objects. They became ethnographic through processes of detachment and contextualization. Whether in that process the objects cease to be what they once were, is an open and important question. That question speaks to the relationship of source and destination, to the political economy of display. The answer tests the alienability of what is collected and shown (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 1998, p.2-3).
This means, therefore, that the process of trying to construct a memory about the place of origin of the objects based on ethnography; the attempt to attribute the possibility of archiving memory (or remembrance) to these objects by forcibly inscribing a narrative in them that does not emanate from them or from their original users/holders and, worse, not registering the ways in which the objects were acquired in this narrative, makes these European Archives, true dead Archives, at the same time as Archives of death: an accumulation of meaningless objects, that, the way they are stored and displayed, do not even narrate the memory of the physical and epistemological death of the objects themselves, neither of the people who made use of them previously and gave them meaning, nor of the people who is (mis)using them now.
The systematic accumulation or compilation of these objects of memory (archiving) brings the idea of heritage legacy, or collection: a temporal link between what necessarily refers to the past, but is projected into the future [6] . Therefore, a collection of objects, elevated to the category of legacy (of a nation, for example), creates a permanent updating of the meaning of its creation, as it promotes the link between memory and history on the one hand and, on the other, the power and control over the narrative based on the objective proof acquired from the ownership of the objects. The collection of these memory objects becomes the more important the more records of historical facts they accumulate. Any collection portrays the collector better than the history of the objects made into a collection. 6 In Portuguese, the language in which this text was originally written, the notion of legacy (legado) is sometimes confused with that of inheritance (herança), as they are very close in meaning. Inheritance is better understood as something inherited by right or by attribution, usually of a material nature (related to property, patrimony, asset), while legacy is a symbolic ballast that is passed from one generation to another and/or that is projected to posterity, in a collective way. Legacy can be understood as a public declaration of symbolic power. 
In the case of ethnographic goods, when we observe all of them gathered in one place, we see a very clear picture of the person or the society that gathered them and made them into a collection. I would like to leave a reflection here, which is personal, but which deserves to be shared here in this space: there is no possibility of doing “decolonial” work for a European Archive (or a Eurocentric one in another territory). This is because the decolonial is not a metaphor: it is about effectively mobilizing a concrete effort for the destruction of a structure that oppresses bodies, knowledge, and territories. As long as the white-European regime remains the center of “production” of knowledge about the world, it will present the deepest expression of the structure of its cultural thought in collectionism. No decolonial discourse, no decolonial art, no decolonial museum education work will do any harm if it is hired, invited, and funded by the very colonial institution that houses it. This is part of yet another stem of European ethnological- ethnocentric collecting: obtaining objects, knowledge, discourses, words, and now, more recently, faces/presences, with a view to the same end: the maintenance and/or increase of its heritage and legacy. The fetishism about objects of memory (be they things or people) is one of the strongest pillars that sustain the symbolic universe of the European colonizing spirit, and has served as justification for the continuous material and cultural expropriation of other peoples and the archiving of this booty in institutionalized collections of European national museums. No matter how much the ownership of the pieces that form a collection changes hands; no matter how “diverse” the public programming of exhibitions curated from the collections, no matter how institutions change their names, one or two objects are returned (without considering the true meaning of the word “reparation”) or if society undergoes transformations that change the meaning of a collection over time, the character of the intentionality of its formation follows the core of an Archive’s collection as long as it exists. Do we work for it or against it?
To understand the power relations that act mutually to generate the process of building (or destroying) a memory (or a forgetting) is to understand the negotiations made to achieve the power to control a narrative. And at the point where we are, in a total loss of control over our own narratives, a structured (re)organization is urgently needed in order to reestablish our self-determination at the individual and, above all, collective level. 
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