When the idea of ‘epistemologies of the Global South’ travels

In his book, The End of the Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South, Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2018) offers a powerful political and epistemological proposal pointing out that, along with the oppressive practices of colonialism, patriarchy, and capitalism, there has been a massive epistemicide. This recognition is based on two premises: first, that knowledge of the world far exceeds the narrow confines of the Western understanding of the world; and, second, that the cognitive experiences of the world are extremely diverse. I begin this contribution with an explanation of what I find to be outstanding and inspiring about Santos’ work and follow up on this by highlighting some potential backfires when these thoughts travel into the Arab world.

Santos argues that global social justice cannot be achieved without global cognitive justice, and examines concrete propositions for theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical alternatives in our knowledge production. These explorations are continuations of his longstanding work regarding the exclusion along the abyssal line (i.e., the economic, social, cultural, political, and linguistic divisions between the Global North and the Global South), and include elaborations on the sociologies of absences and emergences, the ecologies of knowledge and intercultural translation, and the artisanship of sociological practices.

Santos unfolds some concepts that emerged in the struggles of resistance against Western-centric domination and formed in noncolonial languages and cultures such as ubuntu, Sumak Kawsay, Pachamama, chachawarmi, Swaraj, and ahimsa. For instance, Santos, along with the late British philosopher Roy Bhaskar, criticizes the Cartesian ethos that delineates a sharp difference between persons as subjects versus objects in the world (which includes other subjects). Both approach the ontology of persons in terms of the thought embodied in some southern African languages through the notion of ubuntu, which means roughly ‘I am because you are’ (Bhaskar, 2020). According to Santos, this concept exerted a decisive influence on South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission that dealt with the crimes of apartheid, and continues to serve as a topic of major debate in the field of African philosophy.

The concept of Pachamama, which is included in the Constitution of Ecuador, designates a non-Cartesian, non-Baconian conception of nature—one that considers nature not as a natural resource, but as a living being and source of life, to which rights are ascribed similarly as they are to humans.  

For Santos, the credibility and usefulness of such epistemologies of the South depend less on erudite theoretical elaborations, and more on the practices of the social groups and movements that utilize them in their struggles against capitalist, colonial, and patriarchal domination. This kind of theoretical extension is always sensitive to power structures, from wherever they may come, and raise questions such as ‘whose voice?’ and ‘whose silence?’ Santos brings the example of Gandhi who used Hindi to express key concepts in his struggle against British colonialism. Santos does not romanticize Gandhi and proposes his work should be read with Habermas and Chomsky rather than as an ‘either/or’ selection. This reminds me of the excellent book Sociological Theory Beyond the Canon by Alatas and Sinha (2017), which, through reading Ibn Khaldoun with Max Weber, Fatima Mernissi with Nancy Fraser, Karl Marx with W.E.B. Du Bois, and José Rizal with Frantz Fanon—rather than ‘either/or’—mitigates some of sociology’s hegemonic and androcentric shortcomings. 

When ideas travel …

To tell the truth, I read this book with caution, as I know how it could be perceived in the Arab region. Needless as it may be, I remind you of the way many leftists and Islamists in this region have appropriated Edward Said’s Orientalism, using it to help establish a sharp dichotomy between North and South, and using it to make the validity of a given knowledge dependent on its genealogy. While the title of Santos’ book alone can be misleading, Epistemologies of the South rejects epistemological or political ghettos, and calls for a search for expanded commonalities on the basis of otherness: “[t]he epistemologies of the South do not aim to replace the epistemologies of the North and put the South in the place of the North. Their aim is to overcome the hierarchical dichotomy between North and South” (p. 7).

My worries about the perception of the book are based on my work in knowledge production where I observed two problems or abuses in the postcolonial discourse in the Arab world and beyond (Hanafi, 2020). First, this post-colonial discourse has established a binary logic of antagonistic categories, such as East/West and universalism/contextualism. Santos clearly does not reject universalism, but gives it some qualifications—notably, rather than abstract universality, he calls for pluriversality. His kind of thinking promotes decolonization or creolization through intercultural translation, where such diversity translates into an “ecology of knowledges, that is, the recognition of the copresence of different ways of knowing and the need to study the affinities, divergences, complementarities, and contradictions among them in order to maximize the effectiveness of the struggles of resistance against oppression” (p. 8). In fact, his call is similar to the proposition of Michel Agier (2013) to replace universalism tout court with cosmopolitan universalism as sort of a bottom-up, subaltern cosmopolitan conceptualization of universal concepts.

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