Écologie des savoirs
ecology of knowledges ; epistemologies of the South
At Boaventura de Sousa Santos’, the ecology of knowledges rejects the monopoly that Western science claims over truth. It argues that every form of knowledge is incomplete in its own way, and that recognizing this mutual incompleteness is what he calls *cognitive justice*. It falls under the “epistemologies of the South”: a set of inquiries into the construction and validation of knowledges born from struggles against the oppression of capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy. Acknowledging these knowledges is not about placing them side by side but about making them engage in dialogue in all their diversity.
The ecology of knowledges is based on the idea that different forms of knowledge are incomplete in different ways and that creating awareness of this reciprocal incompleteness is a precondition for achieving cognitive justice.
Santos’s diagnosis targets a “monoculture”: the notion that modern Western science is the sole valid form of knowledge, the standard against which all others must be measured—consigned to the status of beliefs, folklore, or superstition. Against this, he proposes an ecology—a coexistence of heterogeneous knowledges.
« The ecology of knowledges is based on the idea that different forms of knowledge are incomplete in different ways and that creating awareness of this reciprocal incompleteness is a precondition for achieving cognitive justice. » The ecology of knowledges rests on the idea that different forms of knowledge are incomplete, each in its own way, and that recognizing this mutual incompleteness is the condition for cognitive justice.
The point is not that all knowledges are indistinguishably equal. Rather, each sheds light on one part of reality while leaving another in shadow—including scientific knowledge. Hence the second term, which grounds this ecology: the epistemologies of the South, which Santos defines as « a set of inquiries into the construction and validation of knowledge that has emerged out of the struggles of those who have resisted the systematic oppression of capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy »—a body of investigations into the production and validation of knowledges born from resistance to oppression. This “South” is not a geography but a position: that of the oppressed, wherever they may be. This plurality of worlds of knowledge extends Escobar’s pluriverse and its way of knowing through sentir-penser; it also applies to the defense of the commons.
The ecology of knowledges ≠ relativism: the latter abandons all criteria and declares that everything is equally valid. Santos, by contrast, upholds the demand for validation—but makes it plural rather than entrusting it to a single jurisdiction. And the epistemologies of the South ≠ a “Southern” knowledge reserved for one region: it is an epistemology of struggle, one that can emerge anywhere resistance arises against the erasure of one’s own ways of knowing.