Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide

Abstract

For any scholar or activist familiar with the critical discourses that circulated in the Forum, many of Sousa Santos' themes will sound familiar, particularly his insistence on the dialogue between different forms of knowledge, his search for a non-sectorial critical language, and a serious concern for methods to bridge antagonisms between clashing perspectives and procedures. [...]it seems to suffer from an extreme tendency to divide the world between good (the South, the non-West) and evil (the North within the North, the hegemonic Western epistemology), as well as from a hurry in proposing bridges between antagonistic Southern forms of knowledge and politics, without a more careful analysis of real practices of negotiation.

Boaventura de Sousa Santos. 2014. Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers. 292 pages, 978-1612055459 Paper ($32.95).

Many critical theorists have tried to deal with the formidable task of establishing the parameters for a critical theory of the present time that would take into account the historical and analytical limits of marxism. Nevertheless, in the wide terrain of a global academic left, very few scholars have accepted the challenge of proposing the epistemological basis for a global, anti-colonial, anti-capitalist, anti-patriarchal critical theory for the current moment. Boaventura de Sousa Santos, in his Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide faces exactly this great task.

In this challenging and inspiring book, Sousa Santos brings together many of the issues that he tackled in his scholarly work, dating back to the late 1980s. Sousa Santos - probably the most important sociologist in the Portuguese speaking world - is a uniquely productive critical thinker, having dealt with issues such as the epistemology of modern sciences, social movements of the Global South, multiculturalism, the production of law in the practices of slum dwellers, and anti-hegemonic forms of knowledge production, among many others. Somehow, all these topics come together in Epistemologies of the South. In this book, Sousa Santos presents a long critique of hegemonic western epistemology - including the limits of critical projects that emanated from the western experience and perspective, such as marxism - and provides a few parameters, both analytical and conceptual, for an anti-hegemonic ecology of knowledges that would avoid one of the key consequences of the domination of western epistemology: the extermination of alternative forms of knowing and living.

The book develops three critical insights: there is no global justice without global cognitive justice; the understanding of the world exceeds the western, hegemonic understanding of the world; and the emancipatory transformation of the world may follow narratives that are not contemplated by the western, critical tradition. It is easy to notice that Sousa Santos aims to provide a synthesis of different post-marxist critical discourses, particularly Postcolonial Theory, Critical Race Theory, and Feminist Theory. But he also wants to establish analytical ground-rules for a diversity of yet un-thought of critical perspectives, as long as they challenge a broadly defined dominant western epistemology - which encompasses neoliberal economics, conventional conceptions of modern science, and a traditional marxism that remains blind to forms of domination other than that defined by class struggle. These are great and critical questions, which are by themselves a sign of the importance of this intellectual project. Nevertheless, Sousa Santos is only partially successful in providing helpful and clear answers; this is partly due to the lack of connection between the empirical cases that inspire the work and the concepts proposed, but also to the unnecessary, confusing, and unproductive conceptual inflations that characterize the book.

From the very beginning of the book, Sousa Santos has to deal with a central contradiction: the work intends to speak from the practices of anti-systemic movements from the global South; these practices would provide the experiential and political basis for a diversity of knowledges that would challenge western1 epistemic and political projects. Nevertheless, the author acknowledges that due to its language and structure, the primary audience of the book is critical scholars trained in the western tradition. This is thematized - far from reaching a final solution - in the two manifestos that open the book: one for "good living", the other "for Intellectual-Activists." I would like to argue that the book has limitations on both fronts alluded to in the manifestos, despite its critical importance for expanding the horizon of our contemporary critical discourses.

First, regarding the connection with the experiences of the global South, it is important to note that Sousa Santos was one of the most important intellectual voices associated with the World Social Forum (see p. 42). For any scholar or activist familiar with the critical discourses that circulated in the Forum, many of Sousa Santos' themes will sound familiar, particularly his insistence on the dialogue between different forms of knowledge, his search for a non-sectorial critical language, and a serious concern for methods to bridge antagonisms between clashing perspectives and procedures. This is certainly a positive aspect of the book, but it also raises at least two problems. First, the alternative epistemologies that define the political imagination of the book are treated at a very high level of abstraction. There is a shocking lack of attention to the pragmatics of knowledge production and their associated political struggles in the history of real communities and social movements. Sousa Santos is, of course, familiar with many of these stories, and some of his edited works published in Portuguese address these issues. But it is unclear how the plethora of concepts proposed by Sousa Santos in this book connects with those dynamics.

In this sense, the book seems to propose a particular type of standpoint theory - actually, a method for the composition of a diversity of critical standpoints. But each one of those perspectives and voices is slightly swept under the rug of Sousa Santos' conceptual profusion. Also, it is unclear how the book speaks to the key phenomenon in global contestation in the last five years: the emergence of a global wave of protest and the diversity of movements, politics, philosophies, and pragmatics associated with them. In this sense, the book reads as at least a decade old. Finally, it seems to suffer from an extreme tendency to divide the world between good (the South, the non-West) and evil (the North within the North, the hegemonic Western epistemology), as well as from a hurry in proposing bridges between antagonistic Southern forms of knowledge and politics, without a more careful analysis of real practices of negotiation.

Regarding the Intellectual-Activist dimension of the book, most readers will notice that Sousa Santos has a very peculiar writing and analytical style. The main trace of such a style is the constant need to coin new concepts, some of which, such as his analytical pair "sociology of emergences" and "sociology of absences," are of great value. But many of the concepts seem more like unnecessary reaffirmations of the originality and the importance of the project than solutions to intellectual problems (such as the romantic concept of a "baroque ethos" in chapter 1, or the oppressed as the "wagerer" in chapter 3). Others sound like easy metaphorical replacements for truly hard problems (such as the concept of "sfumato" as the basis for a baroque subjectivity). Overall, the book would gain a lot from a clearer dialogue with other contemporary works that have addressed similar questions, particularly because it would probably lead to a more clearly defined quest for conceptual invention.

But the book has clear contributions to a critical theory of the present times, and I would like to argue that most of them are present in the last two chapters. In those chapters, Sousa Santos delineates the parameters for an ecology of knowledges against the risk of epistemicide imposed by dominant western epistemology (or the "monoculture of scientific knowledge," in Sousa Santos' expansive vocabulary). This is a pragmatic theory of the possibility of the horizontal coexistence of non-dominant forms of knowledge and life, in which knowledge is evaluated according to its capacity for critical intervention in the world. Sousa Santos acknowledges that the creation of such a world requires mechanisms of translation between different cultural practices and vocabularies - an issue he deals with in chapter 8. This is also the part of the book in which Sousa Santos' formulations gain some empirical treatment, as in his brief analysis of the clash of "scientific" and "traditional" forms of irrigation in Indonesia. These two chapters prove Sousa Santos treads the center of critical theory today, especially given the breadth of his concerns and his personal and political history of effective interchange with Southern social movements.

Footnote

1!Or "northern" - the author moves back and forth between the two adjectives, as well as between "southern" and "non-western."!