A Decolonial Imagination: Sociology,Anthropology and the Politics of Reality

Abstract

While the recent proliferation of sociological engagements with postcolonial thought is important and welcome, central to most critiques of Eurocentrism is a concern with the realm of epistemology, with how sociology comes to know its objects of study. Such a concern, however, risks perpetuating another form of Eurocentrism, one that is responsible for instituting the very distinction between epistemology and ontology, knowledge and reality. By developing a sustained engagement with Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s work, as well as establishing possible connections with what has been termed the ‘turn to ontology’ in anthropology, in this article I argue that in order for sociology to become exposed to the deeply transformative potential of non-Eurocentric thinking, it needs to cultivate a decolonial imagination that may enable it to move beyond epistemology, and to recognise that there is no social and cognitive justice without existential justice, no politics of knowledge without a politics of reality.

Keywords

anthropology decolonial thought epistemologies of the South Eurocentrism imagination Kant ontology reality sociology

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Alberti

Fowles

Holbraad

. (2011) ‘Worlds otherwise’: Archeology, anthropology, and ontological difference. Current Anthropology 52(6): 896–912.

Asad

(1973) Anthropology and The Colonial Encounter. London: Ithaca Press.

Bhabha

(1994) The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.

Bhambra

(2007a) Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination. Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

Bhambra

(2007b) Sociology and postcolonialism: Another ‘missing’ revolution? Sociology 41(5): 871–884.

Bhambra

(2014) Connected Sociologies. London: Bloomsbury.

Braver

(2007) A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-realism. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Carrithers

Candea

Sykes

. (2010) Ontology is just another word for culture. Critique of Anthropology 30(2): 152–200.

Chakrabarty

(2000) Provincialising Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

10.

Clifford

(1986) Introduction: Partial truths. In: Clifford

Marcus

(eds) Writing Culture. Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 1–26.

11.

Clifford

Marcus

(1986) Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press.

12.

Connell

(2007) Southern Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press.

13.

Daston

Galison

(2007) Objectivity. Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books.

14.

Denzin

Lincoln

Smith

(2008) Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

15.

Durkheim

(1965) The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: Free Press.

16.

Eisenstadt

(2000) Multiple modernities. Daedalus 129(1): 1–29.

17.

(2013) Postcolonial Sociology. Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

18.

Gutiérrez Rodríguez

Boatcâ

Costa

(2010) Decolonising European Sociology: Transdisciplinary Approaches. Farnham: Ashgate.

19.

Holbraad

(2012) Truth in Motion: The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

20.

Kant

(1998) Critique of Pure Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

21.

Keim

Çelik

Ersche

. (2014) Global Knowledge Production in the Social Sciences. Farnham: Ashgate.

22.

McLennan

(2006) Sociological Cultural Studies: Reflexivity and Positivity in the Human Sciences. Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

23.

Marx

Engels

(1998) The German Ideology. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

24.

Meillassoux

(2008) After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. London: Continuum.

25.

Mignolo

(2009) Epistemic disobedience, independent thought and decolonial freedom. Theory, Culture & Society 26(7–8): 159–181.

26.

Mignolo

(2011) The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Durham, MD; London: Duke University Press.

27.

Quijano

(2007) Coloniality and modernity/rationality. Cultural Studies 21(2–3): 168–178.

28.

Papadopoulos

(2010) Alter-ontologies: Towards a constituent politics in technoscience. Social Studies of Science 41(2): 177–201.

29.

Said

(1978) Orientalism. London: Penguin.

30.

Santos

(1992) A discourse on the sciences. Review 15(1): 9–47.

31.

Santos

(2002) Towards a New Legal Common Sense. London: Butterworths.

32.

Santos

(2007) Cognitive Justice in a Global World. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

33.

Santos

(2008) Another Knowledge is Possible: Beyond Northern Epistemologies. London: Verso.

34.

Santos

(2014) Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.

35.

Savransky

(2012) Worlds in the making: Social sciences and the ontopolitics of knowledge. Postcolonial Studies 55(3): 351–368.

36.

Savransky

(2014) In praise of hesitation: ‘Global’ knowledge as a cosmopolitical adventure. In: Keim

Çelik

Wöhrer

(eds) Global Knowledge Production in the Social Sciences. Farnham: Ashgate, 237–250.

37.

Savransky

(2016) The Adventure of Relevance: An Ethics of Social Inquiry. London; New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

38.

Seth

(2013) ‘Once blind but now can see’: Modernity and the social sciences. International Political Sociology 7(2): 136–151.

39.

Spivak

(1988) Can the subaltern speak? In: Nelson

Grossberg

(eds) Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 271–316.

40.

Viveiros de Castro

(1998) Cosmological deixis and Amerindian perspectivism. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4(3): 469–488.

41.

Viveiros de Castro

(2003) AND. Manchester Papers in Social Anthropology, 7. Available at: https://sites.google.com/a/abaetenet.net/nansi/abaetextos/anthropology-and-science-e-viveiros-de-castro (accessed 15 September 2015).

42.

Viveiros de Castro

(2004) Perspectival anthropology and the method of controlled equivocation. Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America 2(1): 3–20.

43.

Viveiros de Castro

(2014) Cannibal Metaphysics. Minneapolis, MN: Univocal.

44.

Wallerstein

(1996) Eurocentrism and its avatars: The dilemmas of social science. New Left Review 226(I): 93–107.

45.

Weber

(1949) The Methodology of the Social Sciences. New York: Free Press.

46.

Whitehead

(1978) Process and Reality. New York: Free Press.