Decoloniality

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?’

As an honest liberal, you would recognize that you do not want to ‘impose’ your knowledge and experience but to ‘work with the locals’. The problem is, what agenda will be implemented, yours or theirs?

But there is still another dimension in de-colonial politics of knowl-edge relevant for my argument: the claim that knowledge-making for well being rather than for controlling and managing populations for imperial interest shall come from local experiences and needs, rather than from local imperial experiences and needs projected to the globe,... See more

That is not to say that scientific theories from evolution to neuroscience have nothing to say about the materiality of living organisms propelled by nervous systems, but there are many thou-sands of miles from there to reach a conclusion about ‘human natures’. Furthermore, sociogenesis locates its origins not in the creation of the world by God or... See more

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.

Civil disobedience, within modern Western epistemology (and remember: Greek and Latin, and six vernacular European modern and imperial languages), could only lead to reforms, not to transformations. For this simple reason, the task of de-colonial thinking and the enactment of the de-colonial option in the 21st century starts from epistemic... See more

It would not be convenient for a Maori, Aymara or Ghanian philosopher or an Indian from Calcutta who are modern/colonial subjects and would rather have ‘our modernity’ than to listen to vanguard post-modern critics or Western experts on developing underdeveloped countries. Thus, geo-politics of knowledge comes to the fore. There are many kinds of... See more

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.

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