Description
Book SynopsisThe contributors to Constructing the Pluriverse critique the hegemony of the postcolonial Western tradition and its claims to universality by offering a set of “pluriversal” approaches to understanding the coexisting epistemologies and practices of the different worlds and problems we inhabit and encounter. Moving beyond critiques of colonialism, the contributors rethink the relationship between knowledge and power, offering new perspectives on development, democracy, and ideology while providing diverse methodologies for non-Western thought and practice that range from feminist approaches to scientific research to ways of knowing expressed through West African oral traditions. In combination, these wide-ranging approaches and understandings form a new analytical toolbox for those seeking creative solutions for dismantling Westernization throughout the world.
Contributors. Zaid Ahmad, Manuela Boatca, Hans-Jürgen Burchardt, Raewyn Connell, Arturo
Table of Contents
Foreword. On Pluriversality and Multipolarity / Walter D. Mignolo ix
Introduction / Bernd Reiter 1
Part I. Toward the Pluriverse
1. Meeting at the Edge of Fear: Theory on a World Scale / Raewyn Connell 19
2. One Planet, Many Sciences / Sandra Harding 39
3. Transition Discourses and the Politics of Rationality: Toward Designs for the Pluriverse / Arturo Escobar 63
4. On Pluriversality and Multipolar World Order: Decoloniality after Decolonization: Dewesternization after the Cold War / Walter D. Mignolo 90
5. Internationalism and Speaking for Others: What Struggling against Neoliberal Globalization Taught Me about Epistemology / Aram Ziai 117
Part II. Other Ontologies
6. Local Aquatic Epistemologies among Black Communities on Colombia's Pacific Coast and the Pluriverse / Ulrich Oslender 137
7. The Griots of West Africa: Oral Tradition and Ancestral Knowledge / Issiaka Ouattara 151
8. Experimenting with Freedom: Gandhi's Political Epistemology / Manu Samnotra 168
9. Development as Buen Vivir: Institutional Arrangements and (De)Colonial Entanglements / Catherine Walsh 184
Part III. Other Sciences and Epistemologies
10. Caribbean Europe: Out of Sight, out of Mind? / Manuela Boatcă 197
11. How Spinoza and Elias Help to Decenter Our Understanding of Development: A Methodological Research Proposal on the Pluriverse / Hans-Jürgen Burchardt 219
12. In Quest of Indigenous Epistemology: Some Notes on a Fourteenth-Century Muslim Scholar, Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) / Zaid Ahmad 240
13. Anekāntavāda: The Jaina Epistemology / Venu Mehta 259
Part IV. Rethinking Politics, Democracy, and Markets
14. First People of the Americas: Lessons on Democracy, Citizenship, and Politics / Bernd Reiter 279
15. Iran's Path toward Islamic Reformism: A Study of Religious Intellectual Discourse / Eshan Kashfi 298
Conclusion / Bernd Reiter 313
Contributors 319
Index 325
