In the 3 years since I started my studies my principal concern has been to avoid the imposition of my perception and ideas on the people who I meet and the environment within which I am working. This is in direct contrast to the prevailing positivist approach associated with modernism and explains the range of ‘birth’ pains that I have had to manage in order to get this far. My curiousity was originally peeked by the HASS courses and the introduction to Post-Colonial thinking and specifically, Said and Foucault. Said critique is based centred the creation of the other, the orient defined and understood not on its own terms but within the discourse of Western science and history. Critics of orientalism however suggest somewhat ironically, that Orientalism (like much of the post colonialism) is still defined and constrain by modern methods of social science with its naive and simplistic (binary) forms of expression. Indeed, if the West truly defines what the Orient is, why is the reality so different to this notional representation (Young). In constrast, Mignolo refers to the cultural and intellectual tension defined as border thinking; Occidentalism (modernity and what the west thinks of itself) and the regional ontology (what the region. In theoretical terms tension finds its expresssion in Subaltern studies, an tradition originally concieved by Gramsci and continued in the works of Prakash, Spivak etc. Subaltern studies resides within the fileld of Post Colonial studies in the strictest post modern sense of the word i.e. a new ontology as opposed to the more limited (modernist) critique of modernism and colonailism itself. Mignolo continues by attempting to reveal subaltern experience and expression within Latin America (hence its significance to my thesis).