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- Convenors:
-
Antonio Ortega Santos
(University of Granada Spain)
Maria Paula Meneses (Center for Social Studies)
Admire Mseba (University of Southern California)
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- Formats:
- Panel
- Streams:
- Envisaging A Global South
- Location:
- Room 11
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 20 August, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
Epistemologies of the South propose the expansion of the political imagination beyond the intellectual and political exhaustion of the global North. In this sense they are proposed as a tool of interpretation-reaction to the processes of genocide-ecocide and epistemicide of Eurocentric knowledge.
Long Abstract:
This panel proposes to recover processes of interepistemic knowledge dialogue with which to address the civilisational crisis that capitalist modernity has imposed on the territories of the Global South and North. The frontiers of suffering and socio-environmental vulnerability are increasing and expanding both in space and in their predatory dimension of resources and traditional knowledge. At this time it is necessary to look for ways in which human groups seek to rebalance their ways of life with the territory, biocultural knowledge from the recovery of processes of building communality as a way out of the civilisational abyss that the climate crisis is looming at the beginning of the 21st century. It is urgent to seek to build a new biocentric ethic that incorporates decolonial knowledge for a new socio-epistemic transition towards "another sustainability".
To this end, a series of themes are proposed for debate:
1. Social Justice and Cognitive Justice. Knowledge in Dialogue for a new Construction of the Territory.
2. Redefining the process of Constitutionalism to insert the rights of nature in the forms of construction of a new democracy.
3. Management of Territories for Agroecology and Food Sovereignty.
4. Climate Change and Environmental Refugees. Perspectives on Socio-environmental Vulnerability in the Global South.
5. Decolonising Archives. Building a new Epistemology of Overflowing Eurocentric Knowledge.
6. Sentipensar la Tierra. Identities for a new Global Sustainability.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 20 August, 2024, -Paper short abstract:
This work intends to understand the nature, land, and climate perceptions of territorial movements led by women that face the dominant extractivism model in the tropical forest of Brazil and the Democratic Republic of Congo (RDC).
Paper long abstract:
This work intends to understand the nature, land, and climate perceptions of territorial movements led by women that face the dominant extractivism model in the tropical forest of Brazil and the Democratic Republic of Congo (RDC). Departing from the idea that their political ontologies, the form of struggles, and their relation to land and nature can be a path to the constitution to what Federici calls the new commons (2011).
It looks closer to the context of tropical forests, where many major international sustainability agendas still understand as empty, inorganic spaces, as objects to be incorporated “sustainably” into the world market, and how, in this context, women carry a double burden as primarily responsible for the cultural protection and environmental justice of the commons, and, in equal proportion, the most attacked for defending their communities from extractive projects.
Despite the very unfavorable scenario, this research, looking in specific at the cases of the Coalition of Women Leaders for the Environment and Sustainable Development in DRC, and the Interstate Movement of Babaçu Coconut Breakers, explores how the notions articulated by these movements can be consolidated as a catalytic point of emancipatory climate narratives and to a decolonized climate sociology. One that challenges the notion of property, subverts the legislative systems of nation-states and simultaneously gives sense to the idea of being in common.
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses, based upon oral narratives from Southern Mozambique, the possibilities of storytelling, recorded throughout research carried out over two decades, for grounding critical environmental interpretations, inspiring the future which can foster other approaches.
Paper long abstract:
Linking the ongoing ecological crisis with contemporary conditions of disenchantment in our societies, this papers investigates the capacity of orature to reconnect people to their territories and renew their experience of nature, place and their own existence in the world. How to recuperate silenced and forgotten environmental practices that could generate intercultural dialogues that could maximize efforts to protect the Earth? Science traditionally delivers its results through mostly written expressions (scientific journal articles, milestones of selected events, newsletters, etc.). In cultures based primarily on orature, many of their knowledges are transmitted through narratives , raising important issues with respect both to community building and to the potential of fostering ecologies of knowledges. Specifically in this paper I discuss, based upon oral narratives from Southern Mozambique, the possibilities of storytelling, recorded throughout research carried out over two decades, for grounding critical environmental interpretations, inspiring the future which can foster other approaches.
Paper short abstract:
El siguiente trabajo busca poder generar una visión integral de nuestros ecosistemas desde una nueva concepción ambiental que tiene en cuenta la postura indígena Huarpe, comunidad originaria pertenience a la provincia de San Juan de la República Argentina.
Paper long abstract:
La provincia de San Juan, dotada de un entorno árido, en la actualidad es fuertemente afectada por el continuo cambio climático y por la contaminación industrial de los mega emprendimientos extractivistas. Comprendiendo que el cuidado ambiental es prioritario y se encuentra alineado con los lineamientos planteados por la Agenda 2030, el objetivo del trabajo indagar en la concepción indígena de ambiente y sus problemáticas a partir de la entrevista realizada a una referente de la comunidad huarpe, para realizar un aporte a la construcción de la Historia Ambiental desde el punto de vista indígena. Para poder generar una visión integral de nuestros ecosistemas se hace necesario conocer la concepción ambiental de los pueblos indígenas, postura históricamente ignorada por el modelo hegemónico del saber.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the intricate relationship between the concept of “savage knowledge,” its significance during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the emerging field of ethnosciences. It specifically focuses on the Amazon region as a pivotal area in the development of the ethnosciences.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the intricate relationship between the concept of “savage knowledge,” its significance during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the emerging field of ethnoscience. It specifically focuses on the Amazon region as a pivotal area in the development of ethnosciences, examining the contributions of the naturalists Carl von Martius, Richard Spruce, and Richard Schultes, who each conducted scientific expeditions to the Amazon basin between the 19th and 20th centuries. Their works are crucial in reevaluating the dynamic interplay between the Western perception of the “savage,” the scientific principles that underpin it, and the asymmetrical geopolitics of knowledge exchange between countries in the global north and south. I argue that the contextual conditions which made possible the emergence of ethnoscience as an imperial area of investigation – including imperial assimilation, extraction, and coloniality – continue to exert influence on twentieth-century political discourses concerning the integration of indigenous cultures into global politics. The study concludes that the incorporation of indigenous knowledge, systematised by the ethnosciences, has often served as a pretext for controlling geographical areas historically regarded as “natural resources,” ultimately transforming them into reservoirs of indigenous epistemologies.
Paper short abstract:
The book of short stories Xitala Mati (1987), by Mozambican writer Aldino Muianga, is a literary work whose narratives engender epistemic resistance by create erasures in the paradigm of coloniality.
Paper long abstract:
The book of short stories Xitala Mati (1987), by Mozambican writer Aldino Muianga, is a literary work whose narratives engender epistemic resistance by create erasures in the paradigm of coloniality. Along these lines, this endeavor seeks to interpret how, based on values from Mozambican rural cartography, an epistemic dissent is generated in the collection of short stories under study. To deepen the analysis, we fundamentally used the theoretical contributions of Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2014); Francisco Pereira and Emílio Fernandes Junior (2018); Alexandre de Oliveira Fernandes (2019); Eduardo Miranda (2020) and Luiz Rufino (2021).
Keywords: Ancestral knowledge. Dissident writing. Epistemic erasure. Mozambicanity.
Paper short abstract:
Examining UNESCO World Heritage Impact: Shikoku Henro Pilgrimage Case Study. Power dynamics, identity reformation, and heritage narratives.
Paper long abstract:
In November 1972, UNESCO adopted the Recommendation for Protecting Cultural and Natural Heritage at the National Level (UNESCO; 2023). By August 17, 2023, 1157 "properties" in 195 countries had been registered under this framework. While UNESCO's World Heritage program outlines its goals through the five pillars of Credibility, Conservation, Capacity-building, Communication, and Communities, research on World Heritage sites in Japan, notably by McGuire (2013), suggests that World Heritage status often functions as a branding strategy primarily benefiting cultural elites. This strategy is frequently related with efforts to promote tourism within regional revitalization initiatives.
An illustrative case is the 2004 inclusion of the Kumano Kodo pilgrimage route on the World Heritage list, which triggered a trend among sacred sites in Japan to seek this designation. Notably, the initiative to register the Shikoku Henro pilgrimage began in 2006 and is ongoing. Existing studies have illuminated numerous challenges linked to registering heritage sites in Japan. Nevertheless, a gap exists in the literature regarding how World Heritage inclusion shapes the reinterpretation of a site's history and identity, impacting various stakeholders.
This paper contends that, in the context of the Shikoku Henro pilgrimage, World Heritage status disproportionately favors specific actors. Furthermore, it can be employed by cultural elites to advance their perspectives on a particular space, often at the expense of alternative viewpoints. This study delves into the intricate dynamics and power struggles inherent in the World Heritage designation process, ultimately showcasing its role in molding the narratives and interests associated with heritage sites.
Paper short abstract:
In this paper we propose a general reflection on the processes of agroecological production not only in its productive dimension of food sovereignty but also in its character of political process that creates communities of life and knowledge.
Paper long abstract:
We propose a global vision on the agroecological processes oriented towards three central objectives that we can frame within what is identified with the so-called process of bioregional socio-political construction in which the Epistemologies of the South can play an important role to build knowledge from below. We take as a strategy the identification with digital tools of all the participatory work projects that identify the elements from which to build healthy food and cooking.
To this end, we propose as results to share with the participants.
a. Design of a digital tool for the identification of "revolutionary" processes when building communities and local, healthy production and consumption.
b. Presentation of emerging projects in the field of building food commons both in Europe, Africa and America.
c. To this end, we propose the debate on the construction of Political Agroecologies that generate processes of construction of participatory local democracies that are born from the sustainable production of food and knowledge linked to the kitchen and situated knowledge.
d. Design of a methodology for the construction of a citizenship committed to food as a communitarian social process, fracturing market logics and betting on "new communalities", in order to transfer these socio-political forms to the field of public policy.
e. Energy Transitions of Agrifood Systems.
f. Sustainable management of Agroecosystems in Chile, Mexico and Peru: knowledge of quelites and camelids.
g. Agro-vislvopastoral systems in the Amazon. Experiments from the point of view of food security.
h. Do we devour the Oceans? Marine extractivism and relocation of artisanal fishery production.
Paper short abstract:
In Latin America, the proposed change to halt the depredation of nature by capitalism through profound political transformations following the inclusion of indigenous thought in the constitutions of Ecuador and Bolivia has been held back by deep contradictions within the State and the society.
Paper long abstract:
The constitutional changes associated with the recognition of the rights of nature made it possible to rethink the current paradigm from a perspective that starts from a critique of the idea of nature but does not bring with it a critique of property or of the political-economic system necessary for the materialization of these rights. Its core points to crucial aspects that so far have not been considered as far as it questions not only the relationship of people among themselves, but also with society as a whole and their relationship with the nature world around them.
Thus, the constitutionalization of the rights of nature proposes a paradigmatic transition that breaks with the reifying perspective of nature of modernity and seeks a theory that incorporates nature as a common space of interconnection and interdependence between different forms of life and non-life. It is a relationship with the environment that ceases to be conceived as a relationship of acting subjects that dominate nature (and other human beings).
However, the new-old state structures that emerged after the constituent processes had reproduced a liberal arrangement which is organized from the colonial order through structures of domination that endow extractivism as the resulting product of a process of historical accumulation. Having into account this, its proposed to critically analyse how we could construct effective questions and answers that have in mind a new socio-epistemic transition through not only another form of Constitutionalism (and State) but also the materialization of the rights of nature.
Paper short abstract:
Seeking to recover lost or silenced voices of places and peoples, the paper meditates on re-connecting alternative epistemologies with histories and ecologies for two Australian rivers: the Yarra (Birrarung) River in Victoria, and the Fitzroy (Martuwarra) River in West Australia.
Paper long abstract:
Can we recover the ‘lost’, ‘forgotten’, and ‘invisible’ voices of rivers and other ecosystems? And what of the silences of the dispossessed and colonised Indigenous peoples who are the custodians of these ecologies? Many of their voices and stories have been lost, and must be recovered and listened to in a reconnected ecology of care and justice.
Epistemological colonialism calls for a re-orientation to encourage southern, subaltern and Indigenous and other non-Western knowledges and epistemologies to be recovered, and placed as central to a reconnecting of humans and non-humans in decolonising histories.
This paper explores interconnecting vulnerable, and lost or destroyed ‘Southern’, and Indigenous epistemologies and histories, with ecologies and communities, to encourage sustainable ethical, dialogical engagement around place, people and region.
The paper places into their environmental historical contexts legal, policy and resource management developments that recognise rivers as ‘living systems’. The two Australian rivers that form the empirical focus for the paper are the Yarra (Birrarung) River in Victoria, and the Fitzroy (Martuwarra) River in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. The Yarra River Protection (Wilip-gin Birrarung murron) Act 2017 (Vic) establishes a Burrarung Council to ‘represent’ the river, a body that includes Victorian First Nations people. In the Kimberley, the Martuwarra Fitzroy River Council Native Title group governs the Fitzroy/Martuwarra as a single, living entity on the foundations of First Law and ancestral knowledge.
This textual reading of jostling narratives, epistemologies and histories of these rivers engages inter-disciplinary conversations that gesture towards developing alternative environmental histories.
Paper short abstract:
Kiní is a prehispanic indigenous Mayan town in the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico. It has been very little studied; however, locals are interested in documenting their history and biocultural heritage. We share the process of making a book of public environmental history along with the local people.
Paper long abstract:
Kiní is a prehispanic indigenous Mayan town of 1,500 inhabitants in the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico. It has been very little studied; there is, at most, a handful of academic works and references in History books. Kiní is not a main town; however, local people are interested in documenting their history and biocultural heritage, and they feel proud of it. The authors (one local agroecology student, the local chronicler of the town, and one outside university researcher) decided to organize a book about Kiní environmental history. The book’s topics have been designed according to locals’ demands, including the history of Kiní with hurricanes, past agricultural practices, the diversity of plants in Mayan gardens, and the history of the church, among others. The book has academic rigour, but the main target audience is the Kiní local people. We have looked for collaborations with other academics and university students and, above all, the involvement of local people in several workshops and research activities. We plan to record the book’s contents in audio format in order to give the product back to the population following their oral tradition. In this proposal, we want to share the process of making this book of public environmental history, our learnings and failures, as we think other small town inhabitants and researchers would be interested in writing their local environmental histories, helping to keep their biocultural heritage alive.
Co-authored with: Jonathan Cruz Tamayo (Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán) and Rafael Falla Pech (Chronicler of Kiní)
Paper short abstract:
The Constitution of Bolivia generates a false discourse with a sensitivity of regressive and extractivist application far from the original precepts of indigenous peoples. Therefore, it is urgent to rethink the democratic exercise, the rights of nature and respect for Pachamama.
Paper long abstract:
In Bolivia, the economic model that accompanied the return to democracy that began in 1986 showed that the weak construction of the ideal of the Nation-State and the consequent fragility of state institutions due, among other factors, to the historical debt in the recognition of otherness and the guarantee of the full exercise of the rights of a large part of the population, mainly indigenous people, women and children and adolescents, among others.
In the democratic stage of the 80s and 90s, as previously indicated, different demands and scenarios of conflict in general, and with respect to indigenous peoples in particular, began to become visible, among which two areas mainly stand out: 1) Agrarian issues on tenure and regularization of land rights, and 2) Access and use of natural resources.
The proposals of the indigenous peoples have been studied, which focus on: “Territory and dignity” in balance with nature, presented during the constituent process, assessing their partial inclusion in the constitutional text approved by referendum.
Internationally, the environmental advances in the Constitutions of countries such as Bolivia and Ecuador have been valued. However, in the Bolivian case, the CPE establishes principles, definitions and legal scope with a restrictive approach, which generates false discourse with environmental sensitivity in the face of the regressive application of an extractivist approach that is distant from the original precepts of indigenous peoples.
The aim is to reflect on constitutional alternatives to strengthen the democratic exercise that guarantees the rights of nature and respect for Pachamama.