it seems urgent to me that the scientists in Africa, and perhaps more generally in the Third World, question themselves on the meaning of their practices as scientists, its real function in the economy of the entirety of scholarship, its place in the process of production of knowledge on a world-wide basis.

body-politics describes de-colonial technologies enacted by bodies who realized that they were considered less human at the moment they realized that the very act of describing them as less human was a radical un-human consideration.

While recogniz-ing the ‘improvements’ in material conditions in some countries, such as laboratories, libraries, buildings, etc., he strongly argues that Third World countries are, economically, providing natural resources to industrial countries and, scientifically, providing data to be processed in the labora-tories (literal laboratories in the... See more

The de-colonial option is the singular connector of a diversity of de-colonials. The de-colonial path has one thing in common: the colonial wound, the fact that regions and people around the world have been classified as underdeveloped economically and mentally.

If you engage in the de-colonial option and put anthropology ‘at your service’ like Smith does, then you engage in shifting the geography of reason – in unveiling and enacting geopolitics and body-politics of knowledge.

I would surmise, following Chatterjee’s argument, that what Foucault did not have was the colonial experience and political interest propelled by the colonial wound that allowed Chatterjee to ‘feel’ and ‘see’ beyond both Kant and Foucault

we did not know how to use land and other resources from the natural world, we did not practice the ‘arts’ of civilization. By lacking such values we disqualified ourselves, not just from civilization but from humanity itself. In other words, we were not ‘fully human’; some of us were not even considered partially human. Ideas about what counted as... See more

. As we know: the first world has knowl-edge, the third world has culture; Native Americans have wisdom, Anglo Americans have science. The need for political and epistemic de-linking here comes to the fore, as well as decolonializing and de-colonial knowledges, necessary steps for imagining and building democratic, just, and non-imperial/colonial... See more

A common topic of conversation today, after the financial crisis on Wall Street, is ‘how to save capitalism’. A de-colonial question would be: ‘Why would you want to save capitalism and not save human beings? Why save an abstract entity and not the human lives that capitalism is constantly destroying?’