Epistemologies of the South Quotes

“Since scientific knowledge is not distributed in a socially equitable way, its interventions in the real world tend to serve the social groups having more access to such knowledge.”
― Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide

“I shall start by identifying the most fundamental problem confronting us, in my view, in the first decades of the twenty-first century. This problem is the failure to acknowledge the permanence of an abyssal line dividing metropolitan from colonial societies decades after the end of historical colonialism. Such a line divides social reality in such a profound way that whatever lies on the other side of the line remains invisible or utterly irrelevant.”
― Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide

“The point is not to ascribe the same validity to every kind of knowledge but rather to allow for a pragmatic discussion among alternative, valid criteria without immediately disqualifying whatever does not fit the epistemological canon of modern science. The equality of opportunities to be granted to the different kinds of knowledge is not to be taken in the liberal sense, that is to say, as an equality of opportunities to achieve predetermined objectives. As understood here, an equality of opportunities implies that each kind of knowledge participating in the conversation of mankind, as John Dewey would say, brings along its own idea of “another possible world”; the discussion involved has little to do with alternative means to reach the same ends and more to do with alternative ends.”
― Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide

“One of the specific features of hegemonic knowledge is that they only recognize internal limits. The counterhegemonic use of modern science constitutes a parallel and simultaneous exploration of its internal and external limits. For this reason, the counterhegemonic use of science cannot be restricted to science alone. It only makes sense within the ecology of knowledges”
― Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide

“modern capitalist societies are characterized as favoring practices in which the forms of scientific knowledge prevail.”
― Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide

“The utopia of interknowledge consists of learning new and less familiar knowledges without necessarily having to forget the old ones and one’s own. Such is the idea of prudence underlying the ecology of knowledges.”
― Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide

“Sabemos mejor qué es lo que no queremos que lo que queremos.”
― Boaventura Sousa de Santos, Justicia entre saberes: Epistemologías del Sur contra el epistemicidio

“There is, then, a capitalist, colonialist diversity and an anticapitalist, decolonial diversity, one hegemonic globalization and a counterhegemonic one. The mark of the conflicts among them traverses all the epistemological debates of our time. That is why it is so important to go from internal plurality to external plurality, from the internal discrimination of scientific practices to discriminating between scientific and nonscientific knowledges.”
― Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide

“The attempt to contribute to the emergence of rearguard theories calls for repeated exercises of self-reflexivity about the ongoing untraining and reinvention. The context is similar to St. Augustine’s eloquent statement as he was writing his Confessions: Quaestio mihi factus sum (“I have become a question for myself”). The difference is that the question is no longer the confession of past errors but rather participation in the construction of a personal and collective future, without ever being sure that past errors will not be repeated again.”
― Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide

“What cannot be said, or said clearly, in one language or culture may be said, and said clearly, in another language or culture. Acknowledging other kinds of knowledge and other partners in conversation for other kinds of conversation opens the field for infinite discursive and nondiscursive exchanges with unfathomable codifications and horizontalities.”
― Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide