Paper short abstract:

In recent years, knowledge practices of academic-intellectuals have been contaminated by alternative sites of knowledge production. By focusing on three examples, I want to make claims on the possible directions in which a transformation of the dominant regime of power/knowledge might proceed.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I want to explore how the knowledge practices of some academic-intellectuals are shifting in such a way as to signal a radical departure from the 'traditional' role that academic-intellectuals have had in Latin America. This re-direction is part and parcel of a much larger process, namely, the gradual rejection of the modern project by increasingly larger sectors of the Latin American population and their ongoing efforts to bring about 'worlds and knowledges otherwise.' In effect, some of the social movements that have become highly visible in Latin America at the turn of the 21st century are probing the modern project - including established knowledge practices of academic-intellectuals - according to expectations, logics and standards other than the ones that have dominated at least for the last two centuries. Particularly, I want to suggest how these avenues already opened by social movements, local intellectuals and other sites of knowledge production regarding the intellectual-political project in Latin America, have productively contaminated the project of the World Anthropologies Network (WAN). By focusing on three particular cases where this contamination is currently taking place, I want to make claims on the possible directions in which a reconfiguration of the dominant regime of power/knowledge might proceed. These developments include the relative equalization of diverse knowledge practices through the proliferation of sites of encounter between them but also a certain disposition by the collective of the World Anthropology Network (WAN) to allow for the contamination of academic-intellectuals' knowledge practices by the insurrectional movements' non-modern knowledge practices.