Episteomologies of the South: Notes from the End of Cognitive Empire (2018, Boaventura Sousa Santos):

“The epistemologies of the South concern the production and validation of knowledges anchored in the
experiences of resistance of all those social groups that have systemically suffered injustice, oppression, and
destruction caused by capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy. The vast and vastly diversified field of such
experiences I designate as the anti-imperial South. It is an epistemological, nongeographical South,
composed of many epistemological souths having in common the fact that they are all knowledges born in
struggles against capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy. They are produced wherever such struggles occur,
in both the geographical North and the geographical South. The objective of the epistemologies of the South
is to allow the oppressed social groups to represent the world as their own and in their own terms, for only
thus will they be able to change it according to their own aspirations.” (Santos 2018, 1).

The epistemologies of the South concern the knowledges that emerge from social and political struggles and
cannot be separated form such struggles. They are not, therefore, epistemologies oin the conventional sense
of the word Their aim is not to study knowledge or justified belief as such, let alone the social and historical
context in which they both emerge (social epistemology is a controversial concept as well). Their aim, rather,
is to identify and valorize that which often does not even appear as knowledge in the light of the dominant
epistemologies, that which emerges instead as part of the struggles of resistance against oppression and
against the knowledge that legitimates such oppression. Many such ways of knowing are not thought
knowledges but rather lived knowledges. The epistemologies of the South occupy the concept of
epistemology in order to resignify it as an instrument for interrupting the dominant politics of knowledge.
They are experimental epistemologies. There are epistemologies of the South only because, and to the extent
that, there are epistemologies of the North. The epistemologies of the South exist today so that they will not
be necessary someday.” (Santos 2018, 2).

“Focusing initially on the critique of scientific knowledge, epistemology today has to do with the analysis of
the conditions of identification and validation of knowledge in general, as well as as justified belief. It has,
therefore, a normative dimension. In this sense the epistemologies of the South challenge the dominant
epistemologies in two levels. On the one hand, they consider it a crucial task to identify and discuss the
validity of knowledges and ways of knowing not recognized as such by the dominant epistemologies.”
(Santos 2018, 2).

Sociology of absences: “turning absent subject into present subjects as the foremost condition for
identifying and validating knowledges that may reinvent social emancipation and liberation” (Santos 2018,
2).

“Since such subjects are produced as absent through very unequal relations of power, redeeming them is an
eminently political gesture.” (Santos 2018, 3).

“The recognition of the struggle and of its protagonists is an act of preknowledge, an intellectual and
political political pragmatic impulse implying the need to scrutinize the validity of knowledge circulating in
the struggle and generated by the struggle itself. Paradoxically, in this sense, recognition precedes
cognition.” (Santos 2018, 3).

“On the other hand, the subjects that are redeemed or disclosed, or brought to presence, are often collective
subjects, which completely changes the question of knowledge authorship and, therefore, the question of the
relation between the knowing subject and the object of knowledge.” (Santos 2018, 3)

“The knowledges redeemed by the epistemologies of the South are technically and culturally intrinsic to
certain practices - the practices of resistance against oppression. They are ways of knowing, rather than
knowledges. They exist embodied in social practices.” (Santos 2018, 3).

metropolitan and colonial societies and sociabilities in Western-centric modernity; “in terms of whatever is
valid, normal, or ethical on the metropolitan side of the line does not apply on the colonial side of the line . .
.Being on the other, colonial, side of the abyssal line amounts to being prevented by dominant knowledge
from representing the world as one’s own and in one’s own terms. . . The South is the problem; the North is
the solution. (Santos 2018, 6).
“The alienation, self-estrangement, and subordination of the mind that this state of affairs effects on non-
Western people. . .” (Santos 2018, 7).

“The epistemologies of the South move beyond internal criticism. They are not so much interested in
formulating one more line of criticism than in formulating epistemological alternatives that may strengthen
the struggles against capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy. In this regard, the idea that there is no social
justice without cognitive justice is followed, as mentioned above, by the idea that we do not need
alternatives; we need rather an alternative thinking of alternatives.” (Santos 2018, 6).

Epistemologies of the North; basic assumptions p. 6

The aim of the epistemologies of the South is to overcome the hierarchical dichotomy between North and
South. . .Rather than abstract universality, they promote pluriversality. (Santos 2018, 7-8).

epistemicide: “the destruction of immense variety of ways of knowing that prevain mainly on the other side
of the abyssal line - in the colonial societies and sociabilities. Such destruction disempowered these societies,
rendering them incapable of representing the world as their own in their own terms, and thus of considering
the world as susceptible to being changed by their own power and for their own objectives.” (Santos 2018,
8).

“Retrieving the suppressed, silenced, and marginalized knowledges requires enganing in what I have been
calling a sociology of absences, a procedure aiming at showing that, given the resilience of the abyssal line,
many practices, knowledgesm and agents existing on the other side of the abyssal line are in fact actively
produced as nonexistent by the dominant ways of knowing on this side of the abyssal line, and all the more
so when they are engaged in resistance against the abyssal exclusions caused by capitalism, colonialism, and
patriachy. Identifying the existance of the abyssal line is the founding impulse of the epistemologies of the
South and the decolonization of knowledge that is their main objective. Identifying the abyssal line is the
first step toward overcoming it, whether at the epistemological or political level.” (Santos 2018, 8).

Ecology of knowledge: “the recognition of the copresence of different ways of knowledges, that is, the
recognition of the copresence of different ways of knowing and the need to study affinities, divergences,
completemntarities, and contradictions among them in order to maximmize the effectiveness of the struggles
of resistance against oppression.” (Santos 2018, 8).

“The concept of ubuntu, a southern African idea that calls for an ontology of co-being and coexisting (“I am
because you are”), exerted a decisive influence on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that dealth with
the crimes of apartheid; it has also exerted some influence on South Africa’s constitutional jurisprudence
after 1996, besides remaining a topic of major debate in the field of African philosophy.” (Santos 2018, 10.)

“Besides, the formulations that allow them to enter broader political agendas are necessarily hybrid.” (Santos
2018, 11).

“The quest for the recognition and celebration of the epistemological diversity of the world underlying the
epistemologies of the South requires that these new (actually, often ancestral and newly reinvented)
repertoires of human dignity and social liberation be conceived of as being relevant far beyond the social
groups that caused them to emerge from their struggles against oppression. Far from leaving them stuck in
identitarian essentialisms, they must be seen as constributing to the renewal and diversification of the
narratives and repertoires of the concrete utopias of another possible world, a more just world. . .” (Santos
2018, 12).

“Such a renewal is all the more needed because the Eurocentric concepts that designated such utopias in
modernity seem to have exhausted their mobilixing efficacy, whether the concept of socialism or even of
democracy. Hence, the African idea of ubuntu or the Andead ideas of pachamama and sumak kawsay, once
inscribed in the world by the voices of oppressed African or Latin American social groups, become
potentially relevant to the struggles against oppression and domination in the world at large. Far from bein an
idiosyncrasy or eccentricity, they are rather constitutive of a pluriversal poluphony, a polylectal, rather than
ideolectal, conception of cultural and political imagination. . .they may be sources of inspiration for other
struggles in other times and contexts.” (Santos 2018, 12).

CH 1: Pathways toward the epistemologies of the South

“the concept of subhuman as an intergral part of humanity. . .In Western modernity, there is no humanity
without subhumanities. At the root of the epistemological difference there is an ontological difference.
(Santos 2018, 20).

Franz Fanon p. 20
the zone of being and nonbeing

Maldonado-Torres: the coloniality of being, power and knowledge

“Invisibility and dehumanization are the primary expressions of the coloniality of being. . .” p. 20

the metropolitan world and the colonial world p. 20-21

abyssal and nonabyssal exclusions

“The political agenda of the groups struggling against capitalist, colonial, and patriarchal domination must
then accept as a guiding principle the idea that abyssal and nonabyssal exclusions work in articulation, and
that the struggle for liberation will be successful only if the different struggles against the different kinds of
exclusions are properly articulated.” (Santos 2018, 22).

An incursion into the lived experience of the abyssal . . .exclusion

“Following the end of historical colonialism, the abyssal line persists as colonialism of power, of knowledge,
of being, and goes on distinguishing metropolitan sociability from colonial sociability. These two worlds,
however radically different, coexist in our postcolonial societies, both in geographical global North and in
the geographical global South. Some social groups experience the abyssal line while crossing between the
two worlds in their everyday life.” (Santos 2018, 22).

“. . .the resistance against abyssal exclusion includes an ontological dimension. It is bound to be a form of
reexistance.” (Santos 2018, 23).

“The end of historical colonialism produced the illusion that the political independence of the former
European colonies entailed strong self-determination. From then on, all the exclusions were considered to be
nonabyssal; accordingly, the only struggles considered to be legitimate were those that aimed at eliminating
or reducing nonabyssal exclusions. This powerful illusion constributed to legitimate struggles that, while
attenuating nonabyssal exclusions, aggravated abyssal exclusions.” (Santos 2018, 23).

The Sociology of Absences and the Sociology of Emergences (p.25):

“The sociology of absences is the cartography of the abyssal line. . .Today the sociology of absences is the
inquiry into the way colonialism, in the form of colonialism of power, knowledge, and being, operates
together with capitalism and patriachy to produce abyssal exclusions, that is, to produce certain groups of
people and forms of social life as nonexistent, invisible, radically inferior, or radically dangerous - in sum, as
discardable or threatening.” (Santos 2018, 25).

“. . .Hence the second moment consists of recognizing and engaging with other ways of knowing that offer
alternative understandings of social life and social transformation. . .” (Santos 2018, 26).

“The sociology of emergences concerns the symbolic, analytical, and political valorization of the ways of
being and knowing made present on the other side of the abyssal line by the sociology of absences. The main
focus of both sociology of absences and the sociology of emergences lies with the abyssal exclusions and the
resistance and struggle they give rise to. But while the sociology of absences addresses the negativity of such
exclusions, in the sense that it highlights and denounces the suppression of social reality brough about the
type of knowledge validated by Northern epistemologies, the sociology of emergences addresses the
positivity of such exclusions as it captures the victims of exclusion in the process of setting aside victimhood
and becoming resisting people practicing ways of being and knowing in their struggle against domination.
Such passage from victimhood to resistance is after all the main political task of the sociology of
absences: to denaturalize and delegitimize specific mechanisms of oppression. The sociology of
emergences starts from here and focuses on new potentialities and possibilities for anti-capitalist,
anticolonialist, and antipatriarchal social transformation emerging in the vast field of previously
discarded and now retrieved social experience. With resistance and struggle, new evaluations of lived
conditions and experience that resignify individual and collective subjectivities emerge. These new
features, appearing as material or symbolic practices, affirm themselves always in a holistic, artisanal, hybrid
way, thus acknowledging the multidimensional presence of ecxclusion and oppression. The sociology of
emergences evaluates them according to premises that amplify their symbolic and material potential.
Herein lies their definition as emergences, as embyonic realities, as inchoate movements, tendencies that
point to a successful struggle against domination. They constitute what Ernst Block designated as the “not
yet” (see Santos 2014: 182-83). They are building blocks of the politics of hope. ” (Santos 2018, 28).

“While the task of the sociology of absences is to produce a radical diagnosis of capitalist, colonial, and
patriarchal social relations, the sociology of emergences aims at converting the landscape of suppression that
emerges from such a diagnosis into a vast field of lively, rich, innovative social experience. (Santos 2018,
28)

“They [the peasant women] are, of course, women, and most of them consider themselves feminists, but they
are, besides all that, protagonists (or victims) of many other local, national, and transnational agendas -
economic, political, religious - that remain outsides the system of identity labels and are for that reason
neglected or made invisible.” (Santos 2018, 28).

“. . .the epistemologies of the South are doubly present. On one side, they exert espitemological care vis-à-
vis the embryonic experiences, the “not yets” by inviting social, political, and analytical investment to
nurture them in the most empowering way. On the other side, they provide an epistemological defense
against the false allies of the struggles that often force these emergences into accommodating themselves into
boxes that separate different existing dimensions of modern domination: the boxes of anticapitalism,
anticolonialism, and antipatriarchy.”

“I distinguish three types of emergences: ruin seeds, counterhegemonic appropriations, and liberated zones.
Ruin seeds are an absent present, both memory and alternative future at one and at the same time.
They represent all that the social groups acknolwdge as conceptions, philosophies, and original and authentic
practices, which, in spite of having been historically defeated by modern capitalism and colonialism, remain
alive in their memory and in the most recondite crevices of their alienated daily lives. These are the
sources of their dignity and hope for a postcapitalist and postcolonial future.” (Santos 2018, 29).

“We are thus before ruins that are alive, not because they are visited by living people but because they are
lived by people that are very much alive in their practice of resistance and struggle for an alternative
future. They are, therefore, bot ruins and seeds at the same time.” (Santos 2018, 30).

“To answer the question whether we can build an expanded commons on the basis of otherness, we need
non-Eurocentric concept such as those mentioned in the introduction: ubuntu, sumak kawsay, pachamama.”
(Santos 2018, 30).

“By counterhegemonic appropriations I mean concepts, philosophies, and practices developed by dominant
social groups to reproduce domination, but which are appropriated by oppressed social groups and then
resignified, reconfigured, refounded, subverted, and selectively and creatively changed so as to be turned
into tools for struggles against domination. Examples of such appropriations include law, human rights,
democracy, and the constitution.” (Santos 2018, 31).
Thirs kinf od emergence consists of liberated zones, spaces that organize themselves according to principles
and rules radically opposed to those that prevail in capitalist, colonialist, and patriarchal societies. Liberated
zones are consensual communities, based on the participation of all their members. They are of a
performative, prefigurative, and educational nature. . . designed to experiment with alternative ways of
building collectivities.” (Santos 2018, 31).

The Ecology of Knowledges and Intercultural Translation (p. 32)

The ecology of knowledges and intercultural translation are tools that convert the diversity of knowledges
made visible by the sociology of absences and the sociology of emergences into a empowering resource that,
by making possible an expanded intelligibility of the contexts of oppression and resistance, allows for
broader and deeper articulations between struggles combining the various dimensions or types of domination
in different ways. The exology of knowledges includes two moments. The firs consist of identifying the
main bodies of knowledge that, if brough into discussion in a given social struggle, might highlight
important dimensions of a concrete struggle or resistance: context, grievances, social groups involved
or affectedm risks and opportunities, and so on.” (Santos 2018, 32)

The ecology of knowledges must be complemented with intercultural and interpolitical translation. (Santos
2018, 32).

“To the extent that i permits the articulation of different social movements and different struggles,
intercultural translation contributes to turning the world’s epistemological and cultural diversity into a
favourable, capacitating factor in furhtering the articulation between struggles against capitalism,
colonialism, and patriacrchy. Intercultural translation is not an intellectual exercise independent of social
struggle, nor is it stirred by any cosmopolitan dilettante drive. It is rather a tool that, premised upon the
recognition of difference, aims at promoting enough solid consensus to allow for the sharing of struggles and
risks. Since it is not an intellectual exercise, it need not be accomplished by militnat wiht an “intellectual
profile” or by “organic intelelctuals,” as Antonio Gramsci (1971: 6) called the politicized or conscious
members of the working class in Europe in the 1920’s. A lot of the work of intercultural translation occurs at
meetings or militant workshops devoted to formation, popular education, and empowering, and is carried out
with interventions from the different participants but with no special protagonism. For this reason, as regards
building resistance and social struggles, intecultural translation is not a particularly individualized activity
either. It is a dimension of cognitive work whenever there are present ecologies of knowledges, exchange of
experiences, assessment of struggles (their own and others), and careful examination of the knowledge that
the dominant social groups mobilize to isolate or disarm the oppressed. The work of intercultural translation
does have a dimension of curiosity, however, is born not of dilettante curiosity, but rahter of necessity. In the
great majority of the cases, the work of intercultural translation is carried out anonymously by groups and in
informal oral interactions. (Santos 2018, 33).

“According to the criterion of knowledges or cultures enganged in translation, it is particularly relevant to

distinguish two kinds of translation: South-North or North-South translations, and South-South translations.
The former occur between knowledges or cultures of the global North (Eurocentric, Western-centric) and the
global South, the east included; the latter occur between different knowledges or cultures of the global South.
To situate knowledges and cultures accoring to different epistemic regions of the world does not at all mean
that we are facing [. . .] completely autonomous and distinct structures that are thereby endowned with
sufficient reason. After so many centuries of transnational axchanges and movements of peoples and ideas,
exponentially expanses in the past few decades by information and communication technologies, there are no
longer cognitive or cultural entities that can be understood without taking into account influences,
miscegenations, and hybridizations. We speak of cultural and epistemic regions as sets of styles,
probelamtics, or priorities of thought and action, regions that are endowned with some identity compared
with others.” (Santos 2018, 34).

2: Preparing the Ground

“As shown by Aníbal Quijano and Enrique Dussel, modern epistemological arrogance is the other side of the
arrogance of modern colonial conquest.” (Santos 2018, 38).

“The work of the epistemologies of the South consists of evaluating the realtive reasonableness and
adequateness of the different kinds of knowledge in light of the social struggles in which the relevant
epistemic communit is involved.” (Santos 2018, 39).

“The major difficulty challengeing the epistemologies of the South in this regard is that they must validate
their orientations in a world dominated by the epistemologies of the North, the basic assumption or prejudice
of which is to consider diversity as superficial (appearance) and unity as profound (underlying structure).
(Santos 2018, 39).

“The will to understand invites someone to see what one sees very well from the perspective of someone
who does not see it very well; it also invites one to understand what one considers as relevant from the
perspective of someone who does not consider it equally relevant.” (Santos 2018, 40).

“At the time when the large majority of the world population was under colonial domination, knowledge as
emancipation was excluded from colonial socieites. Deprived of its counterpoint (knowledge as
emancipation), knowledge as regulation was applied in the colonies as a way of ordering that guaranteed the
reproduction of appropriation and violence. Such a duality also ruled the relations with the knowledges
existing in the colonies. Any kind of knowledge not susceptible of serving the objectives of the colonial
orfer, and thus of being appropriated, was violently suppressed. Thus, epistimicide was much more
devastating in the colonies than in metropolitan socities.” (Santos 2018, 41).

“Exclusion, understood as order, and solidarity, understood as chaos - such is the deadlock to which the
epistemologies of the North have pushed us since the nineteenth century. This deadlock today afflicts both
modern and postmodern critical theories.” (Santos 2018, 42).

“The crisis of governability that, is one way or the other, is present in contemporary socities is the result of a
historical condition intrinsically linked to the current phase of global capitalism (neoliberalism) in which
knowledge as regulation is poised to free itself from its counterpoint (knowledge as emancipation) and, as a
result, to produce a kind of order structures by the duality bewteen appropriation and violence, the duality
charasteristic of colonial regulation. As this epochal trend advances, the abyssal line moves insidiosly and in
such a way that this side of the line, the side of metropolitan societies and sociabilities, shrinks, while the
other side of the line, the side of colonial socities and sociabilities, expands.” (Santos 2018, 42)

“The epistemologies of the South concern several kinds of knowledge as well as the articulations that can be
established among them in the struggle against oppression. Such articulation I call ecologies of knowledges.
There are two basic kinds of knowledge in the ecologies of knowledges: knowledges that are born in the
sruggle and knowledges that, while not born in the struggle, may be useful in the struggle. Either of these
kinds may include scientific and nonscientific knowledges. I designate nonscientific knowledges as artisanal
knowledges. They are practical, empirical, popular knowledges, vernacular knowledges that are very diverse
but have one feature in common: they were not produced separately, as knowledge-practices separated from
other social practices.” (Santos 2018, 43).

“In the epistemologies of the North, the question of objectivity is linked to the question of neutrality, even
though they are two distinct questions. . .the question of neutrality speficically concerns results and
contextual values (moral, social political). From the point of view of the epistemologies of the South,
neutrality makes no sense because the criterion for trust lies in the vicissitudes of the struggle against
oppression, thus immediately precluding any contextual indifference. . . Neutrality is an ideological device in
a society divided between oppressors and oppressed. In such a society, to remain neutral amounts to being on
the side of the powerful and the oppressors.” (Santos 2018, 44).

there is no objectivity without subjectivity to give it meaning and direction remains valid.

“Resistance must therefore be plural: the forms of articualtion and the aggregation of stuggles always invovle
a multiplicity of subjects that are irreducible to homogeneity or singularity. For the epistemologies of the
South, objectivity is always intersubjectivity, indeedn, self-conscious intersubjectivity. Thus, the knowledges
born in or used in the struggle are always cocreations. (Santos 2018, 44).

“- - - there is no knowledge in general, just as ther is no ignorance in general.” (Santos 2018, 45).

“Given their pragmatic nature, the epistemologies of the South do not, as a matter of principle, reject any
form of knowledge. Regarding science, what is rejected is just its claim to the monopoly of rigor, that is to
say, its pretension to being the only valid kind of knowledge. Once integrated in the ecologies of
knowledges, modern science can be a useful tool in the struggles against oppression.” (Santos 2018, 45).

“For the epistemologies of the South, scientific knowledge is what the relevant scientific community
considers as such. That which in a given spatial-temporal contexts works as science can be used as science in
the ecologies of knowledges. To be integrated into the ecology of knowledges, science must meet the two-
fold trust criterion mentioned above; that is, it must meet the trust criterion of objectivity as well as the trust
criterion of strenghtening the struggles against oppression.” (Santos 2018, 45-46).