The challenges of the Social Sciences in times of transformation
Arturo Escobar[1]
Preamble: A double crisis and resistance to normality.
I begin with a proposition: The social sciences (SS) and social theory (ST) are in crisis, in a world affected by a civilizational crisis. In other words, if the civilizational model is in crisis, so too are its sciences and knowledge. There is an intimate relationship between the civilizational crisis and the crisis of the SS, insofar as the latter belong to the modern configuration of knowledge, which is an integral part and one of the foundations of the crisis and of Terricide. My question is: Is it possible to reconstitute the SS in a state of transition, at the service of broader, civilizational transitions? Because at this moment they are not. I clarify that I adopt the concept of “Terricide” from the Indigenous Women's Movement for Good Living, initiated in Argentina a few years ago by the great Mapuche intellectual and activist Moira Millán—author of the excellent novel, The train of oblivion, eloquent saga of the Mapuche resistance to English colonialism and the Argentine nation-state, with its genocidal project, as one of its founders.
We have all seen the powerful banner that says: We do not respond to normality because normality eradicates the problemThe great challenge for the social sciences is to reconstruct themselves as a space to challenge the prevailing normality, the heteropatriarchal, racist, and capitalist system of Eurocentric modernity that destroys life. Taken as a whole, even in most of their critical versions, the social sciences have functioned within this normality, being functional to it. That is why I sometimes say that academia, taken as a whole, is part of the forces of dispossession and the ontological occupation of the territories and experiences of peoples. A break with this normality requires rethinking Latin America from other civilizational perspectives, such as Ladino Améfrica, or Abya Yala/Afro/Latin America.
I would like to make a few notes after this preamble, and I apologize for being so schematic:
1) Taking into account the theme of the LASA congress (Latin America: Linking worlds and knowledge, weaving hopes), the first point is that the social sciences have severed the connection between knowledge and world, between knowledge and life (understood as flow, as Pachamama, Earth, Gaia, or world-of-life, or as the network of interdependencies and interrelations of everything that exists, Ubuntu).
2) Reuniting social theory with life requires examining its dependence on the episteme of modernity, since this episteme was historically established from a separation from the flow of life. As is well known, this episteme has been built on two fundamental dualisms: the colonial division between the West and non-West, and the anthropocentric division between humans and non-humans. The social sciences and all their practices (paradigms, trends, concepts, disciplines, pre-constituted spheres such as “economy,” “society,” “culture,” “individual,” as well as all research projects and theses, etc.) operate unawares within this episteme.
3) For some time now, in recent decades, the possibility of a post-Enlightenment, post-Western, and post-academic episteme, as well as an autonomous social theory, has been emerging. We could propose a hypothesis: Latin America, conceived as an exquisite and intense network of interrelations, including the framework of thought, may be moving, through a combination of complex social processes (struggles, re-existences, subjectivities, actors, knowledge, mobilizations, theories, shared thoughts, collective efforts, intellectual and activist debates, networks, decolonized academic spaces), toward a thought resistant to, and different from, the dominant globalized episteme.
4) This would be an explicitly collective and potentially communizing and re-localizing thought, fostering subjectivities that no longer so readily reproduce the seductive logics of modernity and capital with their heteropatriarchal ontologies of separation, hierarchy, appropriation, control, violence, and war. (Because this is what we see in the world today, isn't it?).
5) The debates and struggles on the continent are reaching such a threshold of intensity that the emergence of this alternative, collectively developed episteme is becoming a real possibility. We see this intensity in feminist, Afro-descendant, Indigenous, and environmentalist thought, but it is beginning to emerge in many other areas of knowledge, from communications, digital technology, and art, to alternative economies, health, and design, as well as a whole series of recent rural and urban movements. To foster a truly alternative episteme, we must go beyond discourse and theory, focusing on the most pressing dilemmas and problems of current reality, with a willingness actively open to diversity, capable of becoming a clear vector of transformation. The concern for rankings and hierarchies of knowledge would be a thing of the past if, especially through the efforts of young researchers, we could collaborate toward a kind of meta-thinking or collective intelligence that responds to the life force felt with particular intensity on the earthly continent we have been fortunate enough to inhabit. Much like how musicians sometimes describe their collaborations and collective performances, it would be a matter of all of us doing "what is best for music as a whole," and not for this or that particular musician or instrument—or expert or connoisseur.
6) This would involve the collective design of a whole framework of thought and research, a kind of meta-system of critical thinking, intimately linked to transformative action on the most pressing problems of reality and as a political practice that fosters subjectivities different from patriarchal-capitalist, consumerist and techno-centric subjectivities.
Some additional thoughts on this hypothesis. We are talking about:
- A “meta-thought” or collective episteme, not as the expression of particular authors or trends, but as a result of complex processes emerging on the continent (social, onto-epistemic, economic, political, ecological and non-human).
- “Poor” theory, minimizing egos and maximizing the collective process and community practices, and therefore could be called “post-academic”.
- Radical but broad and pluralistic at the same time, in social and epistemic terms.
- That it prioritizes the categories and experiences of the victims of the system of domination.
- Let it emerge from multiple places of enunciation, from collectives and communities to academia.
- Knowledge that is conceived and built from the epistemic space of communities in resistance, collectives and movements.
- That they be the product of profoundly collective forms of work, collective action research, co-labor and heartfelt understanding, decolonial pedagogies, sentipensamiento, networks and mingas for knowledge and for good living, etc.).
- They should circulate explicitly from and among subaltern political spaces—that is, where worlds and knowledge are actively constructed in other ways—; they are not produced solely or primarily to circulate within academia, although this can also occur. They should maintain a relationship with academia based on the autonomy of subaltern categories of thought and experiences.
- The fundamental objective is to contribute to the struggles for the (re)constitution of worlds from the categories and experiences of the actors in struggle and resistance.
Finally, some additional characteristics from an academic perspective. The knowledge, wisdom, and interpretive frameworks that inhabit this collective episteme can be said to be:
- They go beyond the modern epistemology and ontology of separation, of subjects, objects and processes understood as intrinsically existing.
- They problematize the disciplines and interdisciplinarities as they are currently constituted.
- They question the anthropocentrism, androcentrism, and logocentrism that constitute academic knowledge, taken as a whole.
- They are oriented towards a non-dualistic or post-dualistic episteme and open themselves to the perspective of understanding reality from its deep constitutive relationality.
- They therefore embrace the repressed poles of modernity's binaries, such as the body, emotions, spirituality, feelings, intuition, and artistic inspiration.
- From this new onto-epistemic space, they propose novel reinterpretations of patriarchy, capitalism, racism and modernity, as well as the multiple resistances against these, and promote dialogues and practices for the reconstitution of worlds in decolonial, post-developmental and pluriversal ways.
In conclusion: Modern social sciences have been functional to the system of domination and world-building that is now in crisis. I have suggested that they are capable of reconstituting themselves as a space for acting and thinking in service to life and autonomy, as a praxis of liberation, healing, and care for the fabric of life, thus contributing to a non-patriarchal, non-racist, post-capitalist, and non-liberal pluriverse, conceived as taking place within a living universe. They could become a transformative force from and for the very fabric of life. But I emphasize that this is still not the case. a powerMoving in this direction requires a firm commitment to embark on a genuinely collective process of epistemic autonomy within a worldview of resistance, and one completely opposed to the globalized capitalist patriarchal worldview. We are still far from this goal, but it is in this direction that the dissident imaginations of this century can be directed.
[1] Colombian anthropologist. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Paper presented at the Presidential Panel “The Challenges of the Social Sciences in a Transforming World”, at the LASA Congress 2020.
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