Other Ways of Knowing: Alternative Epistemologies, Rival Knowledges, and Systems of Justice
School of Consciousness and Transformation ANTH 6172 3.00
As sociologist and critical legal theorist Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2008) writes, there is no global social justice without global cognitive justice. According to this theorist, epistemicide was the other side of genocide. From a "postcapitalist" perspective, such recognition is crucial. The epistemological privilege granted to modern science from the 17th century onward, which made possible the technological revolutions that consolidated colonial/capitalist order, was also instrumental in establishing what de Sousa Santos calls "abyssal thinking": drawing an abyssal line between scientific knowledge and other, nonscientific forms of knowledges (Sousa Santos 2008). Our intention is to show how the reinvention of social emancipation is premised upon replacing the "monoculture of scientific knowledge" by an "ecology of knowledges" (Sousa Santos 2008). Priority to ANTH students
