https://doi.org/10.25058/20112742.188
Arturo Escobar
aescobar@email.unc.edu
Departamento de Antropología
Universidad de Carolina del Norte, Chapel Hill
Abstract:
This article presents and examines critically the work of a group of researchers in LatinAmerica and the United States that are crafting a novel reinterpretation of modernity, globalityand difference. I label this group as «the modernity/coloniality research program», to refer towhat seems to be an emergent but already significantly cohesive perspective that is fuelling aseries of researches, meetings, publications, and so forth around a shared –even if coursecontested—set of concepts. This body of work constitutes a novel perspective from LatinAmerica but not only for Latin America but for the world of the social and human sciences as a whole. By this I do not mean that the work of this group is just of interestto allegedlyuniversal social and human sciences, but that that the group seeks to make a decisiveintervention into the very discursivity of the modern sciences in order to craft another spacefor the production of knowledge –an «other way of thinking», «un paradigma otro»,the verypossibility of talking about «worlds and knowledges otherwise». What this group suggestsis that an other thought, an «other knowledge» –and another world, in the spirit of PortoAlegre’s World Social Forum—, are indeed possible.
Keywords: Modernity, coloniality, geopolitics of knowledge, pluriversality.
