MÁSTER INTERNACIONAL EN ESTUDIOS DE PAZ,CONFLICTO Y DESARROLLO

MASTER THESIS

Diversity in Peace:
Towards intercultural dialogue in peace studies

Submitted by: Carlos Javier Cordero Pedrosa
Supervisor: Dr. Alberto Gomes
October, 2014

Abstract:
Peace studies in its interdisciplinary and intercultural character acknowledges the
plurality of understandings of peace. Moreover, the epistemological statute of the
discipline has been revised contesting the value-free approach of modern science, and
expanding the notion of scientificity. This thesis looks at the relation of peace studies
with other forms of producing knowledge, and examines if cultural recognition in peace
studies is accompanied by epistemological recognition. To that effect, interculturality in
the work of four peace scholars is analyzed. Thereon, a dialogic proposal is carried out.

Keywords: interculturality, recognition, epistemology, peace studies

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Acknowledgment
I would first like to thank the UNESCO Chair of Philosophy for Peace at Universitat
Jaume I for giving me the opportunity to participate in the International Master in
Peace, Conflict and Development studies. I am thankful to all the personnel, the
professors and the students for this two year journey which will be the beginning of
other journeys. Many thanks to Kevin, Gigio, Ximena and Mike for the endless creative,
funny and philosophical conversations. Thanks to I Jin for her encouragement, love and
for shedding light and shaking certain foundations.
I wish to express my deepest gratitude to my parents for their support and
comprehension in every undertaking.
Ay ga sabu aran se: Anafi, Boube Diallo et Gueroual, Chantale, Djingarey, Dr. Laouali
Mahamane Abdoulaye, Dr. Salamatow Sow and Souleymane nda almayali. Fonda goy
nda kala tonton.
Last, but not least, I want to express my most sincere thanks to my supervisor, Alberto
Gomes, for his support, his ideas, his guidance and inspiration, without which this
would not have been possible.

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Table of contents

Introduction ............................................................................................................. 1
Presentation and Justification .......................................................................... 1
Personal motivation ....................................................................................... 3
Thesis Statement ............................................................................................ 4
Objectives ...................................................................................................... 4
Outline of the thesis ....................................................................................... 5
Scope of the research ..................................................................................... 6
Methodology and theoretical framework ....................................................... 8
Conceptual considerations ............................................................................. 10
Chapter I: From a monoculture to a polyculture of knowledges ........................ 13
1.1 The man and the rest ................................................................................ 16
1.2 The dark side of modernity ...................................................................... 22
1.3 Beyond epistemic violence ...................................................................... 30
1.3.1 A common construction of knowledge .......................................... 35
1.4 Peaces ...................................................................................................... 45
Conclusions.................................................................................................... 47
Chapter II: Diversity in Peace ................................................................................ 49
2.1 Transrational Peaces ................................................................................ 51
2.2 Social Cosmology and the Concept of Peace .......................................... 62
2.3 The human potential for peace ................................................................ 68
2.4 Peaceful Societies .................................................................................... 74
Conclusions.................................................................................................... 80
Chapter III Fulani Cosmology ............................................................................... 83
3.1 Introductory considerations ..................................................................... 84
3.2 The cow and the milk .............................................................................. 89

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3.3 Pulaaku .................................................................................................... 95
3.4 The place where people sit down............................................................. 100
Conclusions.................................................................................................... 113
General Conclusions ................................................................................................ 115
Limitations ............................................................................................................... 129
Concluding Remarks ............................................................................................... 130
Further Research ..................................................................................................... 131
Bibliography ............................................................................................................. 132

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Introduction
Presentation and justification
This thesis addresses the question of the relations between science and other
forms of producing knowledge and conceiving existence, and concretely how it has or
can been dealt in peace studies. It departs from two premises: on one side, from the
commitment of the UNESCO Char of Philosophy for Peace to relieve the suffering
between humans and with nature; on the other side, from De Sousa Santos (2007b)
tenet that there is no social justice without cognitive justice.
Colonialism, considered in this thesis as one of the constitutive elements of
what has been called modernity, the imposition of modern science as the only valid
form of knowledge has led to the destruction of the diversity of ways of producing
knowledge. This has consequences at many levels, since, contrary to the hegemonic
modern science stances that separate (or hide) epistemology and ontology from
politics, the form of producing knowledge and conceiving existence is closely linked
to the form of conceiving and organizing relations between humans and non-humans,
in a social, economic, spiritual and cultural way.
Therefore, one of these consequences is the deprival by modern science of the
way certain groups of people experience the world on their own terms (Santos, 2010).
Another consequence, and closely related to the first one, is the impoverishment of
the world by this monoculture of knowledge, affecting us all, humanity and nonhumanity. To illustrate this, in the first chapter I establish an analogy between a forest
as a complex set of interwoven relations and a forest product of the state intervention
that implements a monoculture program for economic reasons. This impoverishment
of human diversity has reduced our capabilities to respond to common threats that, in
different degree, affect all humanity.

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To that effect, this thesis proposes to look at the forms of knowledge and
existence of these groups that suffer from the imposition of Western epistemes and
how they resist and creatively combine them. This thesis proposes to look at these
neglected traditions which, not only have value and utility in themselves, but can also
provide lessons in the light of dominant economic, political, ecologic paradigms
(Comaroff, 2012; Santos, 2010; Gomes, 2012). However, in order to do that, as some
scholars have argued, (Martínez Guzmán, 2001; Santos, 2010), the Eurocentric
arrogance that has disabled the West to learn from other experiences must be rejected.
How this can be carried out is a question with neither a single nor an easy
answer. Thinkers from other disciplines like Raimón Panikkar (1990) or De Sousa
Santos (2010) propose dialogue and intercultural translation, to establish first a
middle ground where different traditions can meet without one imposing the terms on
the others. Santos (2010), who will be one of the main theoretical actors in this thesis,
calls for a “counter-hegemonic globalization”, by gathering together social groups
and movements whose perspectives have been neglected, and to engage in dialogic
and cooperative relations to subvert imbalanced relations.
Dialogue and interdisciplinarity are not alien notions to peace studies and to
peace practices. Neither is interculturality. Several authors (Martínez Guzmán, 2001;
Galtung, 1996; Dietrich, 1997) have talked about peace in plural to outline the
importance of recognizing other voices and understandings of peace besides and
beyond the Western concepts and views. Furthermore, the epistemological statute of
the discipline has been revised (Galtung, 1996; Martínez Guzmán, 2001) pointing
towards the expansion of the inner limits of science, towards a broader, more
inclusive notion of scientificity.

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However, as Alastair Mcintosh (2012) posits concerning indigenous
knowledge, these pose a challenge to the academy. What has been called, indigenous
“onto-epistemologies” (MacIntosh, 2012), embodied knowledges that do not separate
doing, living, feeling and acting from knowing, challenge many modern dichotomies.
The result of this tension has been the incorporation or assimilation into modern
science paradigms. Following this line of argument, to ask an indigenous group what
is peace for them, writing it down and producing theory, would not it be a Western
question? Would not it fall into assimilation or appropriation? I endeavor to explore if
cultural recognition in peace studies is accompanied by epistemological recognition.
Personal motivations
To situate the motivations of this thesis I could trace back four years ago when I
naively found myself in Niger as a part of a development project. My initial ingenuity
gradually gave way to a sort of stupor as the blindness and assertive attitude in certain
aspects of the development system were revealed to me. This contrasted with what
was occurring outside of the offices, where multiple ‘informal’ economic practices, of
modes of production and redistribution, of ways of social organization and
communication, and of ways to relating to the world, were creatively taking place,
not exempt of suffering. That led me to think that rather than teach, I should learn.
That learning commitment was one of the reasons that brought me to this
program, which revealed full of enriching and unexpected theoretical and practical
experiences. To name two, the critical thinking and the post-colonial aspects of the
Philosophy for Peace class raised many questions concerning the awareness or the
lack of it, of my position in the world. From the political ecology approach of the
Sustainable Development and Environment class, it was revealed to me how politics
are implicated in environmental practices, and how other forms of knowledge

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originate other practices. Thus, if as it was stated earlier epistemology is politics, I
might look at the former to see the roots of other power relations, and of other
politics.
At the same time, my come back to Spain, amidst of a not only economic crisis,
but also a downturn mood, and a sense of stagnation at different levels, albeit
counterpointed by bold mushrooming initiatives, made me reflect on the imagination
and creativity that in other contexts is employed to cope with difficult situations.
Thesis statement
Peace studies has opened up to other voices and understandings of peace.
However, in spite of the epistemological proposals leading to expand the limits of the
discipline, the treatment of interculturality may still reflect the dominance of Western
modern science. I want to explore how Peace Studies might go beyond the dominant
paradigm, based on appropriation and assimilation, towards epistemological
recognition, and create spaces for dialogue with other forms of producing knowledge.
Objectives
The general objective of this thesis is to inquire on the relation of peace studies
with other forms of producing knowledge. This is structured around three specific
objectives:
1) To analyze how epistemological and ontological diversity has been dealt in
peace Studies.
2) To situate, problematize and promote the debate on the unequal relations
between different forms of knowledge within the frame of the UNESCO Chair
of Philosophy for Peace and peace studies in general.
3) To explore how peace studies can engage in equal dialogues with other
understandings of peace beyond the dominant scientific paradigm.

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Outline of the thesis
The thesis will be structured into three chapters.
The first chapter establishes the theoretical foundations for the rest of the thesis,
and sets the basis for the analysis carried out in the second chapter. Although not
exhaustive, it reviews literature in regards to the position of science as the hegemonic
form of knowledge, it presents a brief discussion on modernity and modern Western
rationality, it inquiries into colonialism and the construction of the other, and
confronts the works of several authors concerning the subversion of this dominant
relation. It ends by situating peace studies, concretely the UNESCO Chair of
Philosophy for Peace within the debate. This chapter will be the base upon which the
case studies of the following chapter will be built.
The second chapter will start by introducing an important conceptual tool for
the analysis. Thereon, the work of four peace scholars will be critically analyzed,
focusing on the treatment of interculturality and of non-Westerns understandings of
peace. In each case, their epistemological position will be clarified and critically
analyzed, to then confront the above mentioned aspects of their work with the
theoretical framework of the first chapter and with new theoretical incorporations.
The third chapter proposes a change of mood in the thesis. It delves into Fulani
people of Niger, cosmology, practices and beliefs. Why I decided to focus on Fulani,
is basically due to the close relationships of my everyday life in what not long ago
was a Fulani village, now turned into a neighborhood of Niamey. These interactions
resulting from the hospitality by which I was received was accompanied by openness
to share many aspects and concerns of their culture. I do not explicitly use personal
reflections from those everyday interactions, although my own voice as an author was

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certainly influenced by these relations. Moreover, this chapter focuses on Wodaabe
Fulani, nomadic herders from the Southeastern region whose presence in the capital
city is temporary and as migrant labor, as it is explained in the chapter.
In this chapter, I will first briefly define my position in regards to ethnicity and
Fulani identity. Theron, I will particularly focus on certain aspects of their
cosmology, economic and social practices, relations with the state and development
agents, moral conceptions, ways of dealing with conflict, and their relation with the
environment, attachment to the land and their sense of place. At this particular point
an homology will be established with other traditions that express similar concerns,
namely the Germanic concept Heimatkunde, and Aymara cosmology. Finally, the
perspective of the UNESCO Chair of Philosophy for Peace will be brought into this
dialogue.
The last section summarizes the chapters, presents some conclusions, and hints
at some possible directions for future research.
Scope of the research
In this section I define the limits that I established to define the chapters.
However, this section may need to be complemented with the reflections on the
limitations provided at the end of the thesis.
Modern science, partly because it lies in its own nature and spirit, has been an
object of debate, revision and criticism concerning the epistemological, sociological
and political inner limits, and the different forms of practicing science. This has been
conducive to overcome old paradigms in regards to theoretical currents,
methodologies, the marginalization of certain groups as subjects, the relations with
the object of study, the autonomy of the scientist concerning the state, research
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agencies and economic institutions (Santos, 2007b). These debates, also present in
peace studies, have been fed by the contributions of feminists, social and cultural
studies, without forgetting the contributions of disciplines like physics or biology.
However, as it has been stated, this thesis in general, and the first chapter in
particular, do not intend to deal with these aspects, but proposes a look to the
conditions of possibility that led to the exclusivity of science concerning other forms
of producing knowledge. How these relations have been established, which dialogic
possibilities have been or can be opened.
The second chapter analyzes four cases studies of how interculturality has been
dealt from a Western epistemological perspective. The last case study covers the
organization Peaceful Societies which publishes his work on the website
www.peacefulsocieties.org. It is coordinated by Bruce D. Bonta who gathers the work
of other scholars whose contributions form the Encyclopedia of Peaceful societies.
The other three cases cover the work of Wolfgang Dietrich, Johan Galtung, and
Douglas P. Fry. The selection of these scholars that contribute to peace studies from
different

disciplinary

perspectives,

philosophy,

sociology,

psychology

and

anthropology responds to the need to provide – within the space and time limitations–
a sample that tries to show the broad disciplinary, methodological and
epistemological spectrum of peace studies. This is not intended to be considered as
exhaustive.
The third chapter focused on Fulani nomadic herders, dedicating special
attention certain aspects of Fulani worldview, knowledge and rituals, and its intricacy
with their economic, social and ecological practices. The last section of the chapter
delved into the relation with the environment and the practices that connect them to
the land.

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Methodology and theoretical framework
To set the aforementioned objectives this thesis employs a qualitative
methodology, based on secondary sources, and out of a critical analysis and
discussion of the literature reviewed. This thesis enhances the importance of an
interdisciplinary approach.
The literature review on the first chapter is based mainly on post-colonial
scholars such as Dipak Chakrabarty (2000), Gayatry Spivak (1998), Enrique Dussel
(2000), Ania Loomba (1998), and Santiago Castro-Gómez (2000). Concerning the
reconstructive proposals on the debate, I will confront briefly Walter Mignolo’s
position with de Sousa Santos’, right after I will extend on the work of the latter. To
situate peace scholars within the debate I will draw on the work of Wolfgang Dietrich
(1997) and Vicent Martínez Guzmán (2001).
The second chapter will confront the treatment of interculturality by four peace
scholars with the theoretical framework of the first chapter. New analytical tools will
be added to that effect. Namely, the concept of categorical violence from James Scott,
and the work of anthropologists like Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2010), Tim Ingold
(2000, 2011), and Alberto Gomes (2012). Furthermore, the work of Edward Said
(2012), Vandana Shiva (1988), Ramachandra Guha (1989) will play an important role
in certain sections of the critical analysis. Finally, a deductive approach will be
followed to draw some conclusions.
For the chapter on Wodabee Fulani I have relied on Fulani texts from their oral
tradition (Ba and Dieterlen, 1961; Amougou, 2009), for I considered that these tales,
mythologies and poetry have presence in the everyday life through the work of griots,
in radio broadcasts or cultural and social events.

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Concerning scholar work, I have relied on Fulani scholars such as Salamatou
Sow and Iba Fall, whose contributions were relevant to certain aspects dealt in the
chapter. There is a considerable literature on Fulani in the fields of anthropology,
linguistics and development economics. There is also a considerable quantity of
media coverage on Fulani. However, both scholar and media tend to measure Fulani
worldviews and practices in the light of Western values, and beliefs and standards.
Moreover, certain reveal a tendency either to vilify (Lott and Hart, 1977), or to
romanticize (Loftsdottir, 2001) this group of people. Therefore, it has not been an
easy task to find literature that present Fulani people as active and autonomous
epistemological and ontological subjects. On that basis, I have considered that the
anthropological contributions of Kris Loftdottir (2001, 2007), Paul Riesman (1977),
Nicholaus Schareika (2010) would meet these requirements.
The section that deals with Heitmatkunde

was entirely sustained by the

contributions of ethnologist Ullrich Kockel, and to a lesser extent, of Egbert Daum
(2007). Concerning Aymara cosmology I relied on the work of ethnographer and
philosopher Rodolfo Kusch, and his approach to think from indigenous and popular
thought, rather than to think about or over it. In the corresponding section of the third
chapter I will introduce Kusch methodology in more detail and my position towards
it.
Final considerations
Philosopher Mogobe Ramose (2013: 213) use the concept Africa “under
protest” to refer to how the continent was baptised by Greeks and Romans. What was
initially meant to designate the northern part of the continent was extended to the rest
of it by means of the “power to dictate the meaning of experience, knowledge and

9

truth on behalf of others.” Like the father baptises the child, terms like indigenous
people denote that power imbalances that allow encompassing multiple experiences
into a single category.
This does not only have consequences at the level of signs, like discourse is
understood in linguistics. For Foucault (1970) discourse consists in a series of
statements and practices that form and limit the object which they refer to. According
to the author, discourse lies at the intersection between power and knowledge since it
is one of the mechanisms through which a normative and disciplinary power is
reproduced and legitimized. Through this discursive power regimes of truth are
created, which determine and regulate what is considered to be normal or acceptable,
depriving the different as inferior.
Therefore, it is not with discomfort that I unavoidably employ terms like West,
non-West, North, South, Europe, or indigenous; terms which imply division and
denote the asymetrical relations that I attempt to bring to the debate. These tensions
and contradictions derived from knowledge production can be made visible by a
critical use of these terms, and it is by using them that they can be criticized.
I want to precise too that throughout this thesis I employ the concept
epistemology to refer to, ways of knowing, and ontology to ways of conceiving
existence.
Before delving into the thesis, and since a critique of Eurocentrism is going to
be a recurrent element in the first two chapters, I consider that another beforehand
precision might be convenient here, since it too raised certain discomfort during the
writing process. Firstly, too much focus on criticizing Eurocentrism might definitely
place Europe at the center again, which is contrary to the objective that I had set.

10

Secondly, and related to the first, an excessive anger in the name of others might end
up positing my own (self-righteous) voice at the center, which is a Eurocentric
deviation. I hope not to have fallen in these traps. Notwithstanding, I do not consider
this to be incompatible with connection with other people’s struggles and with
denouncing unequal relations, for one of the lessons that I personally draw from the
cultural perspectives in this research is the sense of togetherness, that there are things
that affects us all.

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Chapter I
From monoculture to a polyculture of knowledges
“definitions belong to the definers –not the defined.”
(Toni Morrison, 1987: 190)
Introduction
James C. Scott (1998: 13-21) describes the role of scientific forestry
advocated by the early European modern states in facilitating their functions and
satisfying their economic purposes of timber production. In the already existing
utilitarian view of nature, the multiple possibilities offered by the forest were yet to
be narrowed down for the state interests, and reduced to the formula tree equals
lumber. Leaving aside the intrinsic value of nature, and the complexity of all the
negotiated social uses for pasturage, hunting, fishing, gathering, poaching,
sheltering, dwelling, rituals and other symbolic uses, the Prussian and Saxon states
pioneered the politics of monoculture by engaging in a systematic plan based on
reductionist principles for, first, calculating, planning and designing a forest as
productive as possible; and second, by transforming the old, diverse, seemingly
chaotic and purportedly inefficient forest into a new forest, rationally ordered, the
product of scientists’ and state officials’ imaginary, thus turning

reality into

abstraction. This standardized laboratory forest whose homogeneity and uniformity
considerably simplified the variables to be considered –same age, same size, same
species, same distance- was easier to assess, manipulate and manage.
This simplification process facilitated the study and the introduction of the
more efficient species for timber production. The commodification of the forest
offered, in the short term, successful results in terms of wood production, leading
to the expansion of the method to other European countries. However, 100 years

13

later, after the second generation of trees was planted, the negative consequences of
the monoculture became apparent, and the ecological imbalance affected the yield
to the extent that a new term was coined, Waldsterben (dead forest). The
interwoven mesh of relations between fauna, flora, fungi, soil, insects and nutrients
had been ignored and impaired. The reduction of diversity turned the soil and the
ecosystem less resilient, more fragile and vulnerable to pests, stress, disease,
epidemics and weather severities. Apart from the economic losses due to lower
yields production, extra expenses had to be dedicated to fertilizers, insecticides,
fungicide, reintroduction of species, raising, nesting, and restoration practices with
irregular results, and a single objective: to reproduce the lost ecological complexity
and diversity.
Different readings can be made from the above-exposed account, my
intention is to establish an analogical connection between the simplified shaping of
the forest in Western science and the way and the effects of the dominance and
exclusivity of scientific rationality as the only valid form of knowledge. The
resulting landscape could be very similar to that Prussian Waldsterben. This
chapter focuses on how the transition from a polyculture of knowledges to the
monoculture of science, via colonial relations, has led to the ignorance and/or
erasure of other forms of knowledge, considered inferior, local, or contextual. This
“epistemicide”, in Boaventura De Sousa Santos (Santos, Nunes and Meneses,
2007b: ixx) words, affect directly certain specific social groups, indigenous,
peasants, mostly non-Western, by dispossessing them of their traditional ways to
perceive, experience, and make sense of the world. Moreover, the consequences of
the reduction of the epistemological diversity have resulted in “orthopedic
thinking” (Santos, 2009:110) –the limitations derived from the analysis of

14

problems with conceptual tools strange to them– with direct consequences on the
whole humankind. Western societies find themselves in the dead-end street of the
“dwarfed reason” (McIntosh, 2012) where it is assumed that the way we are living,
feeling and known is the only and the right one, with the consequent
impoverishment of human existence in political, cultural, social, economic, sexual,
ecologic and spiritual ways, by limiting it to the frames of modern science and its
rationality.
All along this chapter I will deal with the issues that spring from our
impoverished soils, their causes and their consequences. Therefore, I have divided
it into four sections.
The first two sections will examine the “conditions of possibility”, that is, the
social, historical, cultural and epistemological context (Mudimbe, 1988: 9), which
made possible the emergence and universalization of modern science and Western
rationality.
The first section will examine Cartesian ontology as the epistemological roots
of modern science and Western rationality. The split of body from mind, and
human from nature led to a series of dichotomies that undergird Western view of
reality. The contribution of Descartes, Newton, Hobbes, considered three of the
pillars of European modernity will be discussed.
Starting from the basis that the colonial logic pervades under the forms of
imperialism, neo-colonialism or global capitalism, the second section analyzes the
colonial construction of the ‘other’. It contextualizes Western rationality and
modern science by considering modernity and colonialism as constitutive of each
other. With colonialism, the concept of man detached from nature was narrowed
down to the European, white male of the Enlightenment. Based on a self-

15

proclaimed ontological and epistemological superiority, the colonized people were
denied of their subjectivity, treated as inferior, and deprived of their own ways of
live (Dussel, 2000; Latour, 1993). The role of natural and social sciences in the
temporal and racial classification of people will be analyzed, mainly through the
work of post-colonial scholars such as Aníbal Quijano (2000), Achille Mbembe
(2001) or Gayatri Spivak (1988).
The third section will briefly present the debate on Western rationality and
modern science from postmodern and post-colonial perspectives; concretely Walter
Mignolo’s view of epistemic de-linking. Finally, I will extend on Boaventura De
Sousa Santos’ Epistemologies of the South as a proposal that points towards a
common, counter-hegemonic construction of knowledge based on the experiences
and forms of knowledge that have been discarded by the imposition of Eurocentric
paradigms of modern science.
The last section attempts to situate Peace Studies and the UNESCO Chair of
Philosophy for Peace within the debate by drawing on the contributions of Vicent
Martínez Guzmán (2001, 2009) epistemological shift.

1.1 The Man and the Rest
One of the main characteristics of modern science and Western rationality,
starting from the subject/object distinction, is its dualistic character and its binary
and dichotomy producing logic ( Lander, 2000; Santos, 1992; Castro-Gómez, 2000;
Anzaldúa, 1987, Willems-Braun, 1997). This dualistic thinking, origin of
separations like mind/matter, human/nature, nature/culture, individual/society,
savage/civilization,

organic/inorganic,

secular/sacred,

traditional/modern,

local/universal, advanced/backward, individual/society, transcendence/immanence

16

lie at the roots of the objective and universal character of scientific knowledge. As
it will be examined in the next section, these separations are linked to to the
distinctions between the hegemonic form of knowledge, and that of the subaltern
cultures (Lander, 2000: 20).
Lynn White (1967) traces the separation of human from nature, and the
consequent exploitation of the latter, back to the Judeo-Christian tradition.
However, it was with Rene Descartes and Francis Bacon contributions in the
seventeenth-century when this view of nature as an object, an empty space at
human disposal, crystallized epistemologically and methodologically. This implied
the definitive rupture, initiated a century before during the so-called Scientific
Revolution, with Aristotelian and medieval knowledge, and a whole new stance
towards the world and life (Santos, 1992:13).
Descartes split between mind and body, reason and matter, depicts an
objectified portrait of nature, a functional, mechanistic worldview that situates the
man as a reasoning, objective observer apart from it (Apffel-Marglin, 1996;
McIntosh, 2012). This “ontological cleft” (Apffel-Marglin, 1996:3) voided the
world from any possible meaning, a dead extension, in contrast to the organic
worldview that had prevailed until then. As Apffel-Marglin (1996: 3) argues, “The
cosmos became what it is for citizens of the modern world, a despiritualized
mechanism to be grasped by concepts and representations constructed by reason”.
Disengaged from the sacred and from any ethical concerns, the world and the
living organisms were to be viewed (by the uninvolved observer) as machines that
could be studied and understood by separating its building objects and reducing it
to the basic material as if studying the functioning of the clockwork (Capra, 1982:
23). Colombian philosopher Santiago Castro-Gomez, as quoted in Mignolo

17

(2009:1), describes this as the “hubris of the zero point”, the detached position
where the Enlightenment man situates (hides) himself as the knowing subject from
where he classifies, explains and orders the world objectively (to his convenience).
The Cartesian disenchanted concept of the world based on separations,
(Lander, 2000: 13) set the epistemological and ontological premises for the
decontextualized production of knowledge, a trait of Western rationality not shared
by other cultures where different ontological assumptions result in different forms
of knowledge (Apffel-Marglin, 1996:7; Ingold, 2000).
At this point, it would perhaps be appropriate to digress in order to briefly
present the existence of other cases that differ from Western rationality. Although
the aim of this thesis is not to interpret indigenous thought, but, paraphrasing
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2010: 201), to experiment with it, and therefore, with
ours, it may be important to turn to other ways of conceiving existence and
knowledge that might allow us to de-reify the claims for objectivity and
universality of Western rationality (Lander, 2000:12). Georg Lukácks (1971) uses
the term reification to refer to the process by which things are made to look as
natural, hiding other implications.
Carlos Lenkersdorf’s (1996) study of Tojolabal cosmology through their
language shows what he defines as an intersubjective language, without
subordination resulting from the subject/object distinction. For example, the
English sentence ‘I told you’, in Tojolabal would be expressed as ‘I told. You
listened’. Instead of the subject- object English construction, the Mayan language
implies two subjects and two actions that complement each other. The object, the
thing said is not expressed since it is implicit in the verbs used. The two subjects
are at the same time active and passive, the one who talks listens to the listener, and

18

the listener talks to the talker. The importance of listening is enhanced in Tojolabal
culture regarding respect for the other, learning from it, and fostering the sense of
community over the individual. This sense of the communal appears when using
the first person plural pronoun to talk about nature.
Oyéronké Oyewùmí (1997; quoted in Lugones, 2000: 8) argues that before
colonization, Yoruba society had not a dualistic gender distinction to organize
society hierarchically. The mistranslation of their terms obinrin and okunrin into
the English female and male respectively, implied a binary opposition of gender
that did not exist until then. The introduction of the concept of women as opposed
to men, was used by the colonial machinery to remove women from the public
sphere, by attributing them the role that women had in the metropolis.
Tim Ingold accounts of hunter-gatherer societies show how their relation to
nature differs from Western rationality by not separating between an external
reality which has to be deciphered and codified by the mind “as a precondition for
effective action” (Ingold, 2000: 42). For the Objiwa people, the formation of the
self and that of the environment are part of the same process. To know a person
does not mean to go into his mind, but to go out in the world. The self is not
conceived as locked in a body that gathers information of its surroundings, but “as
a being in the world, caught up in an ongoing set of relationships with components
of the lived-in environment” (Ingold, 2000: 100; italics in the original). In relation
to this, the author outlines the importance of dreaming for the production of
knowledge since, rather than a break from reality, it represents an extension of this
open up to the world ontology, it implies complete freedom to wander through the
spaces that define everyday life (Ingold, 2000: 101-102).

19

Anthropologist Eduardo Viveiro de Castro (2010: 34, 54) posits the
inadequacy of the nature/culture dichotomy, and all the binary distinctions that
spring from it, when considering non-Western cosmologies. The author coined the
term multinaturalism, in contrast to multiculturalism, to refer to Amerindian
thought. Whereas multinaturalism starting point is the unity of nature and the
multiplicity of cultures –grounded on the universality and objectivity of body and
matter, and the subjectivity of meanings respectively– the Amerindians conceive
the unity of the spirit and the diversity of bodies. The unity of spirit comes from the
Amerindian understanding that everything that exists can be considered as
thinking, as a “cosmological subject”, it exists, therefore it thinks. If transposed to
Western thought, in multinaturalism culture would be universal, and nature would
represent the particular.
The Yoruba, Tojolobal and Objiwa relational sense of the self, connecting
knowledge with Being, engaging with the environment instead of detaching from
it, contrast sharply with Cartesian reductionism. This becomes relevant because of
the exclusionist character of the latter supported by its claim for certainty,
objectivity, and a value-free science (Capra, 1982:95). In spite of its cultural
specificity (Apffel-Marglin, 1996: 9), modern science denied rationality to any
other form that does not respect its epistemological principles and methodological
rules (Santos, 1992:13). It also promoted the distinction between the non-expert
and the expert as the only legitimate knowledge-holder (Shiva, 1988: 88).
By stating the cultural specificity of scientific rationality I am not making a
claim for cultural relativism, I intend, as Chakrabarty (2000: 43) posits, “a matter
of documenting how—through what historical process—‘its reason’, which was
not always self-evident to everyone, has been made to look obvious far beyond the

20

ground where it originated.” The aim is to point at the logic and the elements that
led to the expansion and subsequent naturalization of European rationality. The
claimed superiority of the emerging model over the rest was materialized through
the convergence of a series of political, cultural, and economic processes which
will be dealt with the next section in this chapter.
As it was mentioned above, Francis Bacon was another important figure in
the ‘othering’ of nature, whose contributions, together with Descartes, resulted in
nineteenth-century positivism. In his search of the human as “the master and the
owner of nature” (Santos, 1992:13), Bacon developed a scientific method to free
the observer from the inherent constraints of human condition. Based on
observation, induction of axioms, and testing the results for further observations,
Bacon designed a mechanical process to go from the particular to the general
without the interference of the observer’s characteristics’ (Bajaj, 1988:19-23).
The synthesis of Bacon’s inductive empirical method, Descartes deductive
and mechanistic worldview, and the previous findings of the Scientific Revolution
was achieved by Newtonian mechanical physics. The codification of the laws of
the universe reinforced the position of mathematics as the universal language for
analysis and representation, and reaffirmed the view of the universe as an
extension, a quantifiable, passive, ordered object. This theory of the universe
became the model to be followed by natural sciences during the Enlightenment,
and in its turn, for social scientists in the nineteenth century (Capra, 1982: 48-52).
Another important point of rupture with Aristotelian thought was that produced by
the work of Thomas Hobbes. For Hobbes, a move was needed from the state of
nature to civil society. If nature represented the irrational, anarchy, myth, chaos,
dreams and fantasies, civil society is based on science, rationality, order, and

21

stability. This move would be provided by the state or the sovereign through a
contract with its citizens where the former has the monopoly of violence, providing
peace and security in exchange of the natural rights (Visvanathan, 1988: 99-100).
For Shiv Visvanathan (1988), the importance of Hobbes thought lies in his view of
society as a scientific project. By linking science with society, the origin of society
does not lie in a contract but in a theorem, “the state as the source of ultimate
power does not antedate science; it is coterminal with science. In that sense,
science is the civics of the Hobbesian world. To be is to be scientific, and to
become in every sense of the term a subject and citizen” (Visvanathan, 1988:100).
The order/anarchy dichotomy and its relation to nature and society would
become one of the pillars for the subsequent construction of other dualisms
regarding progress, development, knowledges, and civilization. This dichotomy
still pervades in the assumptions of the main currents of disciplines like
International Relations (Grovogui, 2006: 85), so it does in the contemporary
imaginary derived from the naturalization of science (Lander, 2000: 22)
The set of divisions explored so far constitute what Bruno Latour (1993: 99)
calls the “Internal Great Divide”, that between human and non-humans. Western
unique separation of nature from culture, and science from society, will be used to
differentiate, and classify humans hierarchically, “the External Great Divide”,
which will be covered in the next section.
1.2 The dark sides of modernity
The epistemological confidence of the seventeenth-century conflated with a
series of processes and changes taking place in European society at economic,
cultural, political, religious, and scientific levels that were breaking with the culture
of the time, setting the frames for capitalism and the imperialist expansion. What

22

has been called modernity it is a much contested concept in terms of definition,
chronology, main features, and the form and spaces that it covered.
Some authors talk about modernities, in plural, to refer to the different
cultural and material interactions that the encounter with the West has provoked, a
variety of responses, contingencies, temporalities and spatialities, resulting in a
plurality of modernities (Appadurai, 1996; Chakrabarty, 2000; Willems-Braun,
1997; Lander, 2000; Comaroff, 2012; Santos, Nunes and Meneses 2007; Grovogui,
2006).
Wolfgang Dietrich and Wolfgang Sützl (1997:283) define modernity from
an Euro-centered point of view as “the societal project characterized by Newtonian
physics, Cartesian reductionism, the nation state of Thomas Hobbes, and the
capitalist world system.”
For this chapter, I will use a post-colonial perspective due to its concern with
the dominant discourse of the West, and the special attention it dedicates to such
questions as who produces knowledge, in which context, and to whom is addressed
(Santos 2007a: 44). Post-colonial Studies, although difficult to define due to its
heterogeneity, focus on the effects of colonialism, and the cultural, discursive,
epistemological and political remnants in current social, and cultural practices
(Willems-Braun, 1997:3). The post-colonial project questions Western assumptions
of moral superiority which have served to justify past and present power relations;
it deconstructs the centrality of the West as a political and cultural authority, and
the role played by its knowledge which constituted an integral part of colonialism
(Omar, 2008: 228).
From a post-colonial standpoint, Castro-Gómez (2000), emphasizes the
relation between modernity and colonialism as constitutive of each other. Enrique

23

Dussel (2000: 43-46) stands for a reconsideration of the concept of modernity and
criticizes the dominant view as a parochial, Eurocentric stance on modernity. The
author proposes a broader view of the modern world not only limited to the events
taking place within Europe. The intra-European side of modernity based on
rationality had its counterpoint in an extra-European process characterized by the
violence and irrationality legitimized by the first one. Dussel posits that the XVI
century did not imply a rupture with the Middle Age, but the beginning of the
world history, started with the Portuguese and Spanish expansion, where Europe
locates itself at the center of it and the rest at its periphery. This ethnocentric
position of Europe distinguished itself from other ethnocentrisms by its universalist
claim. In the same line, Santos, Nunes and Meneses (2007:55), argue that the
regulation/ emancipation dialectics constitutive of modernity only took place
within metropolitan societies, the colonized ones could only opt between the
violence of repression and that of assimilation:
The dominant versions of the paradigm of modernity turned the infinite into
an obstacle to overcome: the infinite is the infinite zeal to overcome it,
controlling it, taming it, reducing it to finite proportions. Thus, infinitude,
which from the outset ought to arouse humility, becomes the ultimate
foundation of the triumphalism underlying the hegemonic rationality, that of
orthopedic thinking (Santos, 2009:114).
The lack of humility and its etymological relation to human that relates both
to the earth, the ground (Martínez Guzmán, 2009: 28) might be the starting point.
The epistemological confidence showed by Descartes, Bacon, and Newton, turned
into the arrogance and self-consciousness of the universalist project (ApffelMarglin, 1996; Grovogui, 2006; Santos, 2007a, 2009, 1992).
In order to accomplish this universalizing mission, which has taken different
forms –civilization, evangelization, modernization, development, globalization–
(Lander, 2000) Europe was culturally and ideologically constructed as a mythic,

24

unified, eternal West built on the pillars of a shared race, religion, an intellectual
tradition, and the figure of ‘other’ (Amin, 1989:166). Western teleology
exemplified by Kant, Hegel, Locke, Montesquieu, posited the moral, political and
historical unity of Europe despite its internal conflicts (Grovogui, 2006: 115).
Its counterpart, the ‘other’, is fictionalized in negative terms. The ‘other’, as
Achille Mbembe (2001:4) points in regards to the discourse on Africa,
stands out as the supreme receptacle of the West’s obsession with, and
circular discourse about, the facts of ‘absence,’ ‘lack,’ and ‘non-being’, of
identity and difference, of negativeness—in short, of nothingness.
The problem lies not only in that the West portrayed itself “as other than the
other”, (Mbembe, 2001: 4) but also, more importantly, in that
to differ from something or somebody is not simply not to be like (in the
sense of being identical or being-other); it is also not to be at all (nonbeing). More, it is being nothing (nothingness) (Mbembe, 2001: 4; italics in
the original).
Fanon’s zone of nonbeing, “an extraordinarily sterile and arid region, an
utterly naked declivity where an authentic upheaval can be born” (Fanon, 1967:
20), is also rescued by Santos (2007b) in his abyssal thinking, a system of visible
and invisible distinctions that create a line that separates the two sides, the
hegemonic from the nonexistent. The abyssal thinking requires a sociology of
absences, this will be covered in the next section dedicated to the author’s
proposals.
The process of othering was grounded on ontological and epistemological
reasons. As it was hinted in the previous section, the Internal Great Divide
“accounts for the External Great Divide” (Latour, 1993:99). The ability to
distinguish nature from culture, and science from society is used to separate the
Western from the other, it defines the premodern/modern distinction. The
premodern cannot separate thing from sign, “what comes from Nature as it is from

25

what their cultures require” (Latour, 1993:99). The premodern lives trapped in that
‘confusion’, whereas the modern has liberated itself from the social and the
language through scientific knowledge (Latour, 1993:99-100). In short, the nonWestern, the other, is defined by its ontological and epistemological inferiority,
which is instrumentalized to justify and legitimize the universalist project (Lander,
2000; Grovogui, 2006, Spivak, 1988). From the original dichotomy mind/ matter,
the Man and the Rest explained in the previous section, with colonialism and the
worldwide expansion of capitalism and Western rationality, the concept of man as
humanitas was narrowed down to the modern, Christian, ‘rational’, liberal,
capitalist. The European male of the Enlightenment, its moral, its religion, its
knowledge, its history and its institutions, becomes the reference, Eurocentrism par
excellence (Loomba, 1998:66).
Gayatri Spivak (1988) used the term epistemic violence to refer to the
construction of the colonial subject as the other. The violence and domination of
the colonial and the neocolonial project is supported and legitimated by the
superiority of Western knowledge. The imposition of a dominant form of
knowledge denies the validity of any other form of knowledge, dispossessing
different groups of people of their own worldviews. In this process of designing
what counts as knowledge and who produces it, Europe becomes the explicative
subject, whereas the other is turned into an object to be explained (Omar, 2008:
147). Related to epistemic violence, Spivak (1985) coined the term worlding to
emphasize the way Western knowledge represents, and constitute the world as if it
was an empty space, a “mere uninscribed earth, anew, by obliging (…) to
domesticate the alien as Master” (Spivak, 1985: 253).

To illustrate this, Spivak

(1988) provides the example of the codification of the Hindu law by British

26

scholars “as an alien legal system masquerading as law as such, an alien ideology
established as the only truth, and a set of human sciences busy establishing the
"native" as self-consolidating other (…)” (Spivak, 1985:250).
In Peace Studies, Johan Galtung (1990: 291) coined the term cultural
violence to refer to “those aspects of culture, the symbolic sphere of our existence exemplified by religion and ideology, language and art, empirical science and
formal science (logic, mathematics) – that can be used to justify or legitimize direct
or structural violence”. As Sidi Omar (2008: 146) argues, these concepts cannot be
used interchangeably since cultural violence focuses on culture in general, and
epistemic violence entails specific social and historical events and realities.
In this construction of the other, time plays a key role. Spaces existing
outside of Europe were organized through the “ideological device of time”
(Grovogui, 2006: 54). The cultural distance between the West and the colonized
was measured by historical time. Civilization was the barometer that placed the rest
on the waiting room of history. Disregarding the spatial dimension, it was assumed
that humanity had evolved through a single continuum of time starting from
prehistory that had reached its developmental peak during Western Enlightenment
and the nineteenth century (Chakrabarty, 2000; Grovogui, 2006; Lander, 2000).
Anthropologist Johannes Fabian (1983:31) called denial of coevalness, to the
“persistent and systematic tendency to place the referent(s) of anthropology in a
Time other than the present of the producer of anthropological discourse.” In other
words, the anthropologist and the object of its discourse exist in a separate
historical time. This has had clear political implications in the construction of the
savage, the primitive, the indigenous, the lowest step in the scale of human
evolution (Castro-Gómez, 2000). By means of the denial of coevalness modern

27

Europe became the geographical and temporal center (Lander, 2000; Chakrabarty,
2000; Grovogui, 2006; Fabian, 1983). The reduction of the space to a single
temporal frame is linked to the idea of progress and, therefore, to scientific
rationality. The Western modern project, from the watchtower of its central
position and the authority endowed by scientific rationality, assigned itself the
mission to ‘liberate’ these “contemporary ancestors” from their own pasts
(Visvanathan, 1998: 101).
The colonial order entailed a reconfiguration of knowledges, languages,
economies and imaginaries. Founded on a particular epistemology, the West
neglected other conceptions of time, space, sovereignty, and territoriality
(Grovogui, 2006; Lander, 2000). As Edward Said (1978: 62-63) argues, approaches
to self and others, and stereotypes about races, cultures and civilizations existed
before colonization. The enhancement of the difference of these stereotypes, the us/
them logic, was not reduced with the objectivity of science, but reinforced and
reshaped (Loomba, 1998: 57-60). Colonization entailed a simultaneous reordering
and misrepresentation obeying to the dialectics of materialism and ideology
(Loomba, 1998: 57, 113). Mary Louise Pratt (1992) as quoted in Loomba (1998:
61) argues that from the eighteenth-century on, “science came to articulate
Europe’s contacts with the imperial frontier, and to be articulated by them”. The
hierarchical classification of people according to race was one of the foundational
principles of the colonial project. From this “new planetary consciousness”
(Loomba, 1998:61) which drove Linnaeus to his systematical classification of
plants, in 1770 J. F. Blumebach engaged in a classificatory project of human beings
on the basis of their physiological traits. The claimed superiority of white man was
reaffirmed by his use of the monogenetic theory of the human origin that dates the

28

beginning of man back to the white Caucasian man, considering other races as
degenerations of this single origin (Young, 1995: 62). Partially due to the assumed
objectivity and value-free of science, to the identity of the scientists themselves and
their attachment to the European, and to the lack of access to science of the labeled
as inferior, the absence of scientific opposition allowed the consolidation and
naturalization of the racial paradigm (Loomba, 1998: 64). Scientific rigor was left
aside, in theory and practice, in favor of the political and social agenda (Grovogui,
2006: 34). According to Anthony Padgen (1993; quoted in Grovogui, 2006: 34),
“scientists easily stepped outside of reigning scientific norms and wisdom when
questions of race culture, and civilization implicated the relationship between the
West and the Rest.” Anne Laura Stoler (2008) argues that colonial agents relied
more on sentiments and emotional elements, than on science and systematical
observation. Attachment, resentment, pity, or disdain, were assigned to the
treatment of specific social groups as part of the classification process.
Mudimbe (1988:32) distinguishes between two kinds of ethnocentrisms, the
ideological and the epistemological, both inseparably linked. The ideological refers
to the intellectual and behavioral attitude of the individual. The epistemological is
linked to an episteme, understood in the Foucaldian sense, as a set of theory that is
established as the dominant, setting aside others considered as inferior (Omar,
2008: 145). In sum, ethnocentrism emerges from the complexity of the interaction
of the scholar's individual consciousness, the prevailing scientific views, and the
values and norms of the society. The model of natural sciences plus the imperialist
ideology shaped the epistemological core of nineteenth-century social sciences
(Mudimbe, 1988). As had been done with other life forms, human behavior and
cultures were removed from their environment and “rewoven into European-based

29

patterns of global unity and order” (Pratt, 1992; quoted in Loomba, 1998: 61).
Disciplines like history, philology, anthropology, linguistics and biology
contributed to the “reification of the primitive”, and to the epistemological
superiority of Europe, by assigning “to things and beings both their natural slots
and social mission” (Mudimbe, 1988: 30). For Mudimbe (1988:32), the conditions
of possibility of social sciences lie in its intrinsic link to Eurocentrism, considered
by the author as “both its virtue and its weakness”.
Claude Lévi-Strauss (1973; quoted in Mudimbe (1988) thought that through
the study of cultural diversity it was possible to overcome ideology and refute the
falsehoods imposed by it. Derrida (1976, in Morton, 2002: 32) criticizes LéviStrauss’s portrayal of South American tribes as romanticized, recreating the noble
savage stereotype, and ignoring the complexity of their practices. Starting from
Lévi-Strauss, Derrida extends his critique to Western critical theory’s use of nonWestern societies to illustrate the limits of western knowledge. However, these
societies are represented as mute, passive, mere objects of Western representation
without culture or history.
1.3 Beyond epistemic violence
Epistemic violence needs to be addressed in two simultaneous ways, the
revision of the internal plurality of science, and the external plurality of science, the
relation of science with non-scientific knowledges (Santos, 2007b: 46).
Social and natural sciences, as part of their constant self-questioning process,
have overcome old paradigms, theoretical models of scientificity, methodologies,
and attitudes. The blurring of some protective inner barriers has erased the
reductionist view of science as a unified single epistemological model. The
consideration of science as a construction associated with social and cultural

30

practices has led to the acceptance of the situatedness and partiality of scientific
knowledge. The relation of science with power structures of domination and
exclusion of subjects, with institutions, entities and economic interests has also
been put into question (Santos, Nunes and Meneses, 2007).
The debate on the external boundaries of science, the recognition of cultural
and epistemological diversity, other forms of producing knowledge, has been
opened up, mostly, by postmodern, feminists and postcolonial thinkers (Santos,
Nunes and Meneses, 2007; Gorovogui, 2006).
As it has been shown in the previous section, the colonial military, political,
social and cultural domination was linked to the epistemological exclusivism of
science. The legacy of the colonial order and the Eurocentric teleology pervades
today under different, political, social, and economic forms and relations, and
therefore, its epistemological supremacy. Instead of civilization, evangelization and
modernization, Grovogui (2006: 33) argues that, “[t]oday the barometers of reason
and legitimacy in Western eyes are liberalism, secularism, democracy, rule of law
on governance, property and human rights.”
Postmodernism emerges as a contestation of Western rationality from a spirit
of doubt, disillusionment and disbelief in the modern construction of thought
(Dietrich and Sützl, 1997: 282-184). It implies a rejection of the big narratives of
peace, justice, order, equality, eternal truths, and the power structures embedded in
modernity.
Postmodernism questions the fixity of identities, and the social construction
of categories like gender, class, and ethnicity, and all the modern referents leading
towards emancipation (Grovogui, 2006: 49-52; MacIntosh, 2012); it denies the

31

universalist ideology underlying modernity and the lineal development of history
expressed through concepts such as progress, modernization, and development.
Rather than the modern erasure of differences, postmodern thought opens up
spaces for the production of difference, heterogeneity and plurality, and represents
an opportunity to a multiplicity of narratives against the centrality of modernity
(Castro-Gómez, 2000; Chakrabarty. 2000; Quayson, 2000). Postmodern thinking is
grounded on an anti-essentialist, constructivist epistemology (Santos, 2007a: 45).
Deconstruction is one of the main theoretical tools employed by postmodern
thinkers for critical analysis. For Spivak (Morton, 2002: 32, 39), deconstruction has
ethical and political implications since it allows the intellectual to analyze damage
caused on the subaltern by political representation.
However, postmodern thought has been criticized by its excessive focus on
European modernity. This European standpoint ignores and generalizes other
modernities, without acknowledgement of the power relations that affected identity
formation, and the subjectivity of non-European (Grovogui, 2006; Quayson, 2008).
The doubt and disillusion that Dietrich and Stülz mentioned are viewed from
a ‘Third World’ academics as disengagement and remoteness, as a sign of
“Western malaise which breeds angst and despair instead of aiding political action
and resistance” (Loomba, 1998: xii). For Santos (2007a: 42), the postmodern
attempt to rupture with modernity incurs in a basic contradiction since it is
grounded on the critical tradition embedded in modernity; the trap of solipsism as
pointed by Raimon Panikkar (2010; quoted in McIntosh, 2012: 44):
Like modernists, some influential postmodernists get trapped in the
solipsism - the circular self-referentality - of their own rationality because
they cannot accept the possibility of ways of knowing that go beyond their
own ego control and require opening up to the Mythos within which Logos
itself sits.

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The postmodern claim of the end of the modern metanarratives is in itself
another metanarrative (Santos, 2007a). Castro Gomez (2000) warns about the end of
the metanarratives if it implies that the emergence of the micro-narratives make
invisible the power relations within the current global capitalist system rather than
putting an end to it.
Dussel (2000), as it was covered in the previous section, deconstructs the
dominant Eurocentric versions of modernity which do not take into account
colonization. For Dussel, to dismantle the myth of modernity implies to deny its
innocence, to discover its violence and irrationality. By unveiling the Eurocentric
dimension and the fallacy of the modernization project it is possible overcome the
view of the emancipatory reason as liberation and transcend modernity. Dussel
does not reject reason in itself, but the Eurocentric, hegemonic and irrational
reason. He calls for a Transmodernity, a subsumed, and redefined modernity as a
worldwide project of liberation of otherness, “a multiplicity of decolonial critical
responses to Euro-centered modernity from the subaltern cultures and epistemic
location of colonized people around the world” (Grosfoguel, 2008:17).
Walter Mignolo (2002, 2009) focuses on the implications for knowledge
production of Dussel’s proposal. Mignolo draws from Aníbal Qujiano’s concept of
the coloniality of power and knowledge, to which I will briefly discuss before
proceeding on to examining Mignolo’s view on epistemic Eurocentrism.
For Quijano (2000), the previously mentioned racial hierarchy that structured
the power relations of colonialism pervades the current global capitalist world. This
“element of coloniality” (Quijano, 2000: 533), which places white man at the top of
the pyramid, serves as the axis that sustains the matrix of power and the current
Eurocentric domination in economic, cultural, social, linguistic, spiritual, sexual

33

and epistemic aspects. For Grosfoguel (2008: 7), these aspects are not additive, but
constitutive of the European modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world−system.
Departing from Dussel and Quijano, Mignolo (2002, 2009) proposes to think
from the colonial difference. The colonial difference is characterized by the denial
of the ability of non-Western societies to produce knowledge on Western terms. It
is from this colonial disinherited that “An-Other paradigm” can emerge. For him,
the history of knowledge is determined historically and geographically. Specific
languages, institutions and geo-histories lie behind the origin of the imperial
knowledge considered as universal, hence the necessity to question the foundations
of who produces and controls knowledge. To de-colonize knowledge implies not a
mere disciplinary or interdisciplinary critical thinking, but a shift of the locus of
enunciation. It is through the geopolitics of knowledge and epistemic disobedience
that a “de-linking” from the imperial knowledge and from the matrix of power is
possible.
For sociologist Gregor McLennam (2013: 129), rather than theoretical
arguments, many of Mignolo’s claims are closer to sociology of knowledge. Santos
(2007a: 53-54) argues that Mignolo’s critique is founded on geographical
determinism rather than on theoretical contents. A situated knowledge cannot be
based exclusively on geographical determinism. For Santos, the idea of a total
rupture as proposed by Mignolo’s An-Other Paradigm is idiosyncratic of Western
modern reason, which considered itself as the main actor in rejecting and breaking
with what is labeled as alien. Moreover, to emphasize exteriority instead of
promoting theoretical bonds and understanding reinforces the modern distinction
between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Even the idea of an absolute exteriority from which
Mignolo departs is put into question when considered dialectically, since the

34

exteriority is subjected to its exclusion from within the system of domination. For
Santos the focus must be brought into the difference between the oppressor and the
oppressed, and not into the differences between those contesting oppression.
Western thought is as indispensable as inadequate to understand and
transform the world (Chakrabarty, 2000; Santos, Nunes and Meneses, 2007). It is
this inadequacy, hidden behind the naturalization imposed by the hegemonic canon
of modernity that has led to the rigidity of orthopedic thinking and the uncertainties
of our time. The necessity to open up the canon of knowledge and to establish a
dialogic relation with other ways of producing knowledge, to learn with and from
these other ways, is the line of argument in De Sousa Santos thinking which will be
presented in the next section.
1.3.1 A Common Construction of Knowledge
De Sousa Santos thought runs parallel to that of postmodern and postcolonial scholars, converging and diverging on certain points in their critique of
modernity, and of the way that colonial logic underlies the current imperialist
relations. Santos (2011:16) proposal of the Epistemologies of the South starts from
two premises: The first one is that the cultural diversity of the world, the different
modes of experiencing, thinking, acting, relating and making sense of it are
infinite. The second premise is that the understanding of the world surpasses
Western knowledge. There are many possible ways to live in the world and to
transform it that are unthinkable and unimaginable for Western thought, hence the
need for a common construction of knowledge (Santos, 2011:17). However, in
order to do this, the West has to free itself from the colonial arrogance that has
made impossible for it to learn from and with others. Western narcissism has led to
its own stagnation and exhaustion. This does not mean to delink or dismiss certain

35

kind of knowledge but to engage in a dialogue with other forms of producing
knowledge where the West is placed as a province of the world (Santos, 2009).
In Santos’ proposal (2007b), rather than rejecting the concept of social
emancipation as a political and ethical aspiration because of its Western, modern
origin, the author proposes a reinvention of it. Although the West hid the relation
between epistemology, ontology and politics, it is not possible to rethink social
emancipation without epistemological changes (Santos, Nunes and Meneses, 2007:
xlviii). To that end, the infinitude of experiences, of ways of making sense of the
world cannot be reduced to any general theory. This is what Santos (2007b: 63)
calls “negative universalism”, the impossibility to grasp the diversity of the world,
its processes and changes, from a universal theory. To avoid the monocultural trap
of universal concepts for social emancipation, and the resulting subordination or
assimilation to it, Santos posits, the job of translating the different projects of social
emancipation is needed in order to create intelligibilities between the plurality of
social groups and movements that with their partial, emancipatory projects, form
the counter-hegemonic globalization. The work of translation, as it will be
explained later, “seeks to turn incommensurability into difference, a difference
enabling mutual intelligibility among the different projects of social emancipation”
(Santos, Nunes and Meneses, 2007: xl). According to De Sousa Santos (2011), the
fore-mentioned exhaustion of Western thought manifests itself under two forms,
the lack of alternatives, and the crisis of the Eurocentric critical theory.
Concerning the lack of alternatives for social emancipation, Santos (2010:35)
argues that modern remedies cannot transform modern problems. The financial
crisis we are currently submerged in is just one more symptom of the problems of
the West. The most worrying concern is the lack of political imagination regarding

36

the capitalist system and its underlying monocultural epistemic foundations.
Philosopher Mark Fisher (2009) states that today it is easier to imagine the end of
the world than the end of capitalism. The crisis of imagination has led to an
ideological blockage reflected in distopic thought like Fisher’s. What socialism
represented in the 20th century has not a clear equivalent nowadays; post-capitalist
and post-occidental initiatives emerging in certain contexts are still in embryonic
stage and have not defined their direction (De Sousa, 2011:13). The current thought
is more easily expressed in negative terms than in a constructive one, it is easier to
know what we are against than to define a desired world (Santos, 2011: 9-12). For
Santos (2007b, 2011:16) what is needed are not alternatives, but an alternative way
to think about alternatives. Since these are already there. There are other concepts
of time, other ways to look at the past, the present and the future, to relate to other
humans, to nature and to the sacred, different forms to organize life collectively,
and different economies; however, this diversity has been made invisible by the
hegemonic thought. To activate and visualize these experiences without enclosing
them in universal general theories is to look for plural ways of constructing
knowledge.
The second manifestation, closely related to the first one, is the crisis of the
Eurocentric critical theory. To be aware of it does not imply to reject it or ignore it,
but to take distance from it, and get closer to silenced, subaltern positions either
Western or non-Western (Santos, 2010:37). De Sousa Santos (2011, 2010)
formulates this argument around four main lines:
We live in a time of strong questions and weak answers. Strong questions
address “the roots and foundations that have created the horizon of possibilities
among which it is possible to choose”, whereas weak answers “are the ones that

37

refuse to question the horizon of possibilities”. The professionalization and
institutionalization of modern science as the privileged form of knowledge has
detached itself from basic questions which human beings have asked themselves:
the meaning of life, the relation to God, to other human and non-human beings, to
nature, the coexistence within society, or questions about a common future in a
more just and egalitarian society. This detachment has led to orthopedic thinking
(Santos, 2009:110).
Another sign of the crisis lies in the contradiction between the urgency for a
change, and its consequent demand for quick measures, and the slow pace that a
long-term deep civilizational change requires, since we are dealing with
mentalities, values, ways of living and coexisting. For example, this is manifested
in a number of institutions agencies, summits, and programs to eradicate poverty,
famine, or to fight global warming (Santos, 2011: 14).
A third aspect is what De Sousa (2011, 2010), calls the loss of nouns. By that
he refers to how critical theory limits itself by adding adjectives to overturn the
meaning of nouns used by liberal thought. Substantives like socialism, class
struggle, fetishism, alienation, reification were important elements of critical
theories’ discourse. However, critical theory has lost the nouns in favor of the
adjectives. Terms like sustainable development, intercultural human rights, radical
democracy or subaltern cosmopolitanism may serve as examples. Substantives
frame the terms of the debate and determine what exists, what is sayable, possible,
and believable, at the same time that determine what is unsayable, impossible and
unbelievable (Santos, 2010:30).

Nouns have no property, counter-hegemonic

movements have used and subverted hegemonic instruments for their own

38

purposes, but critical theory should be aware of the limitations that it implies
(Santos, 2011:15).
The last symptom of the current situation of Eurocentric critical theory refers
to the distance between theory and praxis. Santos (2010, 2011) argues that while
the Eurocentric critical theory emerged in a few European countries, a view shared
by some post-colonial scholars (Mignolo, 2009; Dussel, 2000), the most innovative
and progressive advances are taking place far away from these countries, and are
being carried out by actors and social movements different from the alternatives
foreseen by critical theorists; women, queer, indigenous people, unemployed,
peasants, the distance is not only geographical and contextual but also
epistemological. Much of these groups and movements forms of knowledge, and
existence were not based on the scientism of the Western theories (De Sousa, 2010:
33).
The Epistemologies of the South is a call for other practices, ideas,
experiences and forms of knowledge that have been silenced, discarded,
marginalized and turned into nonexistent. These knowledges come from groups of
people that have been systematically oppressed by capitalism, colonialism and
patriarchy, which have been deprived from experiencing the world on their own
terms because they do not fit in the hegemonic paradigms of orthopedic thinking
(Santos, 2009, 2010, 2011). It is a call to re-think and re-imagine another future,
and a call to re-place modern science, and Europe, in a world of infinite
particularisms (Goody, 2007; Santos, 2009). In sum, the aim is to establish new
relations between different kinds of knowledges, scientific and non-scientific,
where the premises of these dialogues are not pre-conditioned by the West (Santos,
2010, 2011).

39

Before continuing, it may be needed to specify the term South on Santos
approach, since it can be interpreted in multiple ways. The South and its relational
pair, the North may run the risk of recreating the discourse of the West and the Rest
(Hall, 1992), of two monolithic entities, constructed unidirectionally, and binary
opposed, where difference is used to legitimate inequalities. The South for Santos
is not the geographical south as in Raewyn Connell’s (2007) approach. In De Sousa
Santos proposal (2011: 16), the South is not understood geographically, but in a
metaphorical way. It is a metaphor of the inequality, the suffering and the injustice
caused by the fore-mentioned hegemonic structures. The South is anti-imperialist,
anti-capitalist, and anti-colonialist. As John and Jean Comaroff (2012) also point,
there are no clear boundaries between the North and the South, the limits are
porous and illegible, there is South in the North, and there is North in the South
(Comaroff, 2012; Santos, 2010, 2011). A sense of commonality, as opposed to
division, of the problems confronting human condition, is implied in this nuance.
There are, and have been, social groups, movements and thinkers in the North that
have been excluded “because they did not conform to the imperialist and
Orientalist objectives prevailing after the convergence of modernity and
capitalism” (De Sousa, 2009:106). It is the claim “for the exclusivity of the rigor”
of Northern epistemologies, and the resulting cognitive injustice, that brings about
the need for the Epistemologies of the South (Santos, 2011: 16).
In order to identify and recover these experiences of the world constructed as
non-existing, De Sousa (2009, 2010, 2011) proposes two empirical processes, a
sociology of absences and a sociology of emergences.
As it was stated in the previous section, the colonial order established an
“abyssal line” (Santos, 2010, 2007c) to separate the metropolis from the colonies,

40

agreements and rights were applied on one side of the line separating the included
from the excluded on the basis of the legitimacy of the universal. The sociology of
absences seeks an expansion of the present by making visible what has been made
invisible (Santos, 2011: 5); it points to show that what has been constructed as nonexistent, has actively been constructed as non-existent. The author distinguishes
five modes of Eurocentric absence construction: the ignorant, the backward, the
inferior, the local, and the unproductive; resulting respectively from the
monocultures of knowledge, of lineal time, of the naturalization of difference, of
the dominant scale, and of the capitalist criteria of productivity (Santos, 2010: 37).
The sociology of emergences consists in a look into the future through the
practices that are taking place in the present. To explain this, De Sousa Santos
(2010:41) draws from Ernst Bloch (1986) the concept of “Not-Yet” in his critique
of the stillness, that, according to Bloch, characterizes Western thought. The NotYet is a ““forward dawning and pre-appearance (…) Every age contains its
horizon, its Front over which this Not-Yet-Conscious flows when the block of
static and regressive thinking is lifted” (Bloch, 1986: xxix). Thus, the sociology of
emergences attempts to extend “this Front by venturing beyond, by inventing,
visualizing the possibilities of the world that is coming over the threshold” (Bloch,
1995: xxix). The Not-Yet is the future hinted at by the concrete possibilities and
capacities of the present. Therefore, the sociology of emergences acts upon the
horizon of possibilities, knowledges, practices, and agents of the present, in order
to increase the probability of hope (Santos, 2010: 41).
The ecology of knowledge and the intercultural translation are the two
procedures by means of which the aforementioned horizon of capabilities and
possibilities will be expanded. (Santos, 2011: 18).

41

The ecology of knowledges is “an invitation to the promotion of nonrelativistic dialogues among knowledges, granting ‘equality of opportunities’ to the
different kinds of knowledge” (Santos, Nunes and Menses, 2007: xx). It re-places
the monoculture of science within the polyculture of knowledges as a step towards
the reinvention of social emancipation. It implies a decolonizing and democratizing
move that takes knowledge regarded as regulation, to knowledge regarded as
emancipation (Santos, Nunes and Meneses, 2007: li):
Knowledge-as-regulation knows through a trajectory that goes from
ignorance, regarded as disorder, to knowledge described as order, while
knowledge as emancipation knows through a trajectory that goes from
ignorance, conceived of as colonialism, to knowledge conceived of as
solidarity.
The principle that sustains the dialogue is that any form of knowledge is not
complete, autonomous or self-sufficient in itself. Therefore, “[a]ll ignorance is
ignorant of a certain knowledge, and all knowledge is the overcoming of a
particular ignorance” (Santos, Nunes and Meneses, 2007: xlvii). The idea of
prudence and humility underlies this principle, the recognition that there is more
than one form of knowledge, and therefore, of ignorance, in the way human beings
relate to each other and with nature, and that to learn from others does not imply to
reject your own knowledge (Santos, 2010: 44).
The aim of the ecology of knowledges is not to give equal validity to all
knowledges, but to look for “a pragmatic discussion of alternative criteria of
validity” (Santos, 2007a: xlix). After rejecting universalism, Santos’ proposal
ensures to avoid the trap of relativism. The criteria of validity are not the preestablished epistemological hierarchy of modern science, but a contextual,
pragmatic hierarchy, that is, depending on the specific case and purpose (Santos,
2007a: xlix).

42

The intercultural translation is the methodological and political procedure to
promote symmetric dialogues in order to create reciprocal intelligibilities between
the available and the possible experiences of the world (Santos, 2010: 46). As was
mentioned earlier, the aim of the intercultural translation is to turn
incommensurability into difference, and from difference, create intelligibilities that
enable cross-cultural communication (Santos, Nunes and Meneses, 2007: xl). The
intercultural

translation entails

the relations

between different

cultures,

knowledges, practices and cosmologies, and different social movements, their
actors and their practices. It identifies isomorphic concerns between cultures and
their responses to them. The relation of these knowledges and practices with the
hegemonic forms has to be taken into account. The task of translation is twofold.
On one side, a deconstructive one, since it must be considered that these
knowledges have undergone different processes of oppression, and they have
responded and resisted in different ways. On the other side, a reconstructive, nonregressive job of going beyond these Eurocentric remnants is needed in order to
revitalize their historic and cultural possibilities (Santos, 2010:46).
According to Santos (2010:46), the intercultural translation of knowledges
takes the form of a diatopical hermeneutics, in order to identify their concerns and
their responses. The term diatopical hermeneutics was coined by Raimon Panikkar
(1999) to refer to the promotion of the dialogue between cultures that do not have
direct links or historical contact. For Panikkar (1999:27), in order to reach mutual
intelligibilities, it is needed to overcome not only the spatial and temporal
distances, but also the cultural topoi, that is, the self-evident and naturalized
cultural premises on which each culture is founded. Therefore, Panikkar (1999:27)

43

asserts, “before anything else we have to forge the tools of understanding in the
encounter itself, for we cannot –should not– assume a priori a common language.”
As it has been mentioned earlier, Santos (2007: 48) starts from the basis that
every knowledge, culture, or experience of the world is incomplete, that they are
partial totalities, and they have lacks. Thus, they can be enriched by means of the
dialogue with others. However, the tendency is to see one’s experience, culture or
knowledge as a totality, a homogenous whole. As Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999: 30)
states,
The concept of totality assumes the possibility and the desirability of being
able to include absolutely all known knowledge into a coherent whole. In
order for this to happen, classification systems, rules of practice and
methods had to be developed to allow for knowledge to be selected and
included in what counts as history.
The role of the diatopical hermeneutics is to raise awareness of the
incompleteness, and to take it to its maximum point through a dialogue where one
keeps an eye on its own experience, and the other eye on the other experience. This
relativity of cultures and knowledges must not be confused with a relativist or
universalist position, since both consider difference as an insurmountable obstacle
and reject the possibility of relation and dialogue (Santos, 2010:65). In contrast,
cultural relativity implies the aforementioned incompleteness; it “(…) means that
every worldview and every assertion are relative to its contexts. Nobody has a
complete and absolute view of reality (…)” (Esteva, 2011: 575).
In sum, rather than transference of equivalents from a cosmovision to
another, the intercultural translation is a procedure for a collective construction of
knowledge through the identification of common concerns, commonalities between
different forms of resistant initiatives and experiences working towards the
recognition, redistribution and reconfiguration of knowledges (Santos, Nunes and
Meneses, 2007). Rather than difference as inequality, or as an obstacle, in the
44

meshwork of knowledges that attempts the proposal of the Epistemologies of the
South, difference is considered as a relational space to be inhabited. It is in this
space of encounters, where tensions, complementarities, interdependencies and
clashes take place, where a better understanding of the self and the other may
flourish.
1.4 Peaces
Within peace studies, from the University of Innsbruck, Wolfgang Dietrich
and Wolfgang Sutzl (1997), talk of “many peaces”, in plural, and situate current
peace research within postmodern. The modern understanding based on the eternal
truths of security, justice, development and reason took shape in a standardized and
mechanistic view of peace. The resulting disillusion and disbelief with modern
thinking opened the door to difference and to a plurality of understandings of
peace, linked in turn to a plural understanding of the world beyond the universal
aspirations of modern thought. Dietrich’s proposal to twist modernity and
postmodernity, Transrational Peaces, will be covered in the next chapter.
Vicent Martínez Guzmán (2001) from the UNESCO Chair of Philosophy for
Peace, uses the plural form of peace, peaces, to include the different possibilities to
make peace.
Martínez Guzmán (2001: 15) situates his proposal as Trans-modern, TransKantian, framed within a Western social cosmology. He (2001:16) asserts the
resolution of the discipline to renounce to the Western ethnocentric pride and to
turn it into responsibility and commitment with the excluded by the universalism of
European rationality.
Martínez Guzmán (2001:76) outlines the role of Western white, male science
and instrumental reason in imposing a particular worldview and a form of

45

producing knowledge in the conflation of modern science with colonialism. The
author (2001:76) emphasizes the critical function of Philosophy (for Peace) and its
commitment with human values. Thus, the author’s critique modern and positivist
science based on the notions of objectivity and neutrality is a central point in his
proposal. Martínez Guzmán (2001:112) proposes to shift the initial epistemological
foundation of Peace Studies conceived as how far or how close it is from the model
of natural sciences, to a broader concept of Epistemology, understood as the study
of the multiple and diverse human competences to make peace(s), transform
conflicts, undo violence, and to leave in peace.
The resulting Epistemological Turn allows disciplines and fields whose
scientificity had been denied, the recognition as science. The new paradigm
consists of fifteen tenets, however I will only cover the most relevant for this
chapter. Rather than objectivity, it emphasizes the intersubjective character of
science. The relation between subject and object turns into a relation between
subjects, persons, therefore, with the right to interlocution. The concept of nature as
a distant object to be dominated is to be replaced by resituating the human being as
an integral part of it. To overcome unilateral reasoning, the focus will be put on
reasons, emotions, sentiments, tenderness and care (Martínez Guzmán, 2001: 114116).
The Epistemological Turn could be framed within the internal plurality of
science. Its relation with other forms of knowledge and existence is mentioned
through the commitment to reconstruct “vernacular knowledges”1 (Martínez
Guzmán, 2001: 105). In his call for an interdisciplinary and intercultural approach
to search for peaceful ways to transform human relations and with nature, the

1

“saberes vernaculares” (own translation)

46

author warns against the dangers of imposing one form of knowledge over the
others The author highlights the need for an intercultural perspective that goes
beyond the mere acknowledgement of plurality, and that submits peace research to
a “richness of tensions and nuances (…)” (Martínez Guzmán 2009: 24). At the
same time, he warns against the ethnocentrism resulting from the assimilation of
human diversity within Western assumptions (Martínez Guzmán, 2001:25). The
author plays a central importance to dialogue for intercultural understanding. It is
through this dialogue “with other cultures that we can learn to unlearn what we
have forgotten along the way by not paying attention to the knowledges of the
others, and to be critical with our own proposals (…)”1 (Martínez Guzmán, 2001:
108; italics in the original).
Conclusions
According to the authors covered in last section, peace studies has opened the
door to different understandings of the world, and to other ways of making
peace(s). Nevertheless, interculturality, as Martínez Guzmán warned above about
the risks of assimilation, poses a challenge to Academia in general (McIntosh,
2012) and to a field linked to a European tradition.
As it has been briefly mentioned in this chapter, indigenous ways of
conceiving existence and producing knowledge do not fit the Cartesian ontological
model. Their connection of mind and body implies no separation between
knowledge and being in the world, practice and experience, where spirituality is
enmeshed in everyday practice. These forms of being in the world can shed light
into “deeper strata of reality that might permit us to go to the roots of our
problems” (Panikkar, 1979; in Esteva, 2011: 581), by bringing Western thought
1

“(…) con otras culturas donde aprendemos a desaprender lo que hemos olvidado en el camino por no
estar atentos a los saberes de las otras y los otros, y a ser críticos con nuestros planteamientos (…) (own
translation)

47

into contention if the West decides to examine its thought in light of non-Western
instead of the other way round.
If we take further the metaphor of the open doors, the necessary expansion of
the inner boundaries of science as proposed by Philosophy for Peace might still
find peace studies inside the comfort zone of the house waiting to welcome these
previously excluded voices to have a conversation in our own terms. Hospitality is
a must, but it might be necessary to go out to the forest presented in the
introduction, the forest we are a part of, and consider the variety of struggles that
creatively combine or resist against the monocultures imposed by the colonial,
imperialist and the global capitalist logic. To frame these other voices in peace
terms may imply to fall in the trap of orthopedic thinking. The statement of Raimon
Panikkar above in this chapter might be a starting point to build these necessary
bridges for “existential, intimate and concrete” (Panikkar 2000; quoted in Esteva,
2011: 573) dialogue.
Next chapter gets into that forest by analyzing four cases of how
interculturality has been dealt in peace studies.

48

Chapter II
Diversity in Peace
“You try to draw everything into the net of your faith, father, but you
can't steal all the virtues. Gentleness isn't Christian, self-sacrifice isn't
Christian, charity isn't, remorse isn't. I expect the caveman wept to see
another's tears. Haven't you even seen a dog weep? In the last cooling of the
world, when the emptiness of your belief is finally exposed, there'll always be
some bemused fool who'll cover another's body with his own to give it
warmth for an hour more of life.”
(Graham Greene, 1961: 67-68)
Introduction
Taking Martínez Guzmán’s proposal to expand the epistemological limits of
current peace research and recognition of the plurality of peace into consideration,
this chapter analyzes how human diversity has been dealt within peace studies, and
whether cultural recognition corresponds with epistemological and ontological
recognition. In sum, the aim is to look at the relation of peace studies with other
ways of producing knowledge and conceiving existence.
The main conceptual tool for the analysis will be what has been called
categorical violence drawing from the work of James Scott (1998). The author
refers by this to the procedures by which the modern state facilitates its functions
and increases its capacity by engaging in processes of simplification to make the
complexity of society and nature legible and more convenient for its administrative
functions. Among these measures the author includes the design of cities, nature,
and transportation systems, establishing homogeneous units of measure and
weights, creation of permanent last names and population registers, the
standardization of language, land tenure systems. This inventory of society and
nature simplified reality to the parts that were of interest for the state’s purposes,

49

making it more legible, easier to measure, and manipulate; for these measures
provided not only descriptions, but together with the state power they enabled to
remap and remake the depicted reality. According to Scott, the project to make
societies legible is carried out through processes of simplification that require a
narrowing of vision, to slice reality so that the observer can focus on those aspects
that interest him/her. The first step in this simplification process to make legible the
complex and diverse practices, processes, relations, “the infinite array of details”
(Scott, 1998:77) of a social landscape is to create a common unit of measure.
Thereon, to create labels, classifications and categories according to the unit of
measure is a consequent step in order to facilitate “summary descriptions,
comparisons, and aggregation (Scott, 1998: 77). In that sense, Santos (2003: 225)1
states that “maps distort reality to introduce orientation”. Scott (1998: 7) posits that
this argument could be transposed to certain kinds of reductive social science.
Therefore, the concept of categorical violence will be complemented with the
critique of modern science presented in the first chapter.
This chapter is organized thusly:
The first section analyzes the works of Wolfgang Dietrich “Interpretations of
Peace in History and Culture” (2012) and “Elicitive Conflict Transformation and
the Transrational Shift in Peace Politics” (2013). In both cases the focus will be
put on how the author draws on different traditions to sustain his theoretical
proposals. The five ‘families of peace’ and his depiction of shamanism as conflict
transformation will be analyzed.
The second section presents briefly Johan Galtung’s view of the
epistemological character of peace studies. Then, it moves to analyze mainly his

1

“Los mapas distorsionan la realidad para instituir la orientación” (my own translation).

50

hermeneutical exercise of the concept of peace carried out in the article “Social
Cosmology and the Concept of Peace” (1981). Other works like “Peace and
Buddhism” (1985) and “Peace by Peaceful Means” (1996) will be commented. The
work of Peter Lawler (1995) on Johan Galtung and his critique of Galtung’s
civilization theory will play a center role in this section.
The third section analyzes Douglas P. Fry calls for an objective. Thereon his
ethnographic portray of peace in La Paz, a Zapotec community, presented in his
article “Multiple Paths to Peace: The “La Paz” Zapotec of Mexico” will be then
analyzed. So it will be his exploration of peace among hunter gatherers as proposed
in his work “War, Peace and Human Nature” (2013).
The fourth section covers the work of the organization, Peaceful Societies
presented on the website, www.peacefulsocieties.org. The concept of peaceful
societies will be examined. Then, the analysis will focus on an entry of the
“Encyclopedia of Peaceful Societies”, the methodology based on ethnographic
research, and concretely the description of Semai people will be examined.
2.1 Transrational Peaces
Wolfgang Dietrich’s introduced the transrational peaces approach in his book
“Interpretations of Peace in History and Culture” (2012). The author departs from
the “many peaces” (Dietrich and Sützl, 1997) introduced in the previous chapter,
which try to avoid the violence of “the singular, strong and perpetual concept of
peace (…)” (Dietrich, 2012: 2). Therefore the author draws from different times
and cultures to organize the multiplicity of peaces, into five categories: energetic,
moral, modern, postmodern and transrational peaces. The aim is to call “for an
inquiry into the deeper meaning of the different perceptions of peace” (Dietrich,
2012: 8) by looking at “their narratives’ peace philosophical level on a general

51

level and to show the practical consequences deriving from them” (Dietrich,
2012:12). Methodologically, the author asserts the scientificity of his work
(Dietrich, 2012: 10) mainly based on inductive reasoning.
If peace will be considered in this chapter as the unit by which cultures,
traditions and societies will be measured and standardized, in this particular
section, the above mentioned five types or understandings of peace proposed by
the author constitute the categories in which reality will be schematized.
Energetic peaces are described by Dietrich (2012: 53-65) as those based on
the harmonious relation between nature, cosmos and society. They do not emerge
from an creator God or an absolute truth, but from the self, from the perception of
human existence “as embedded in the All-Oneness of all being and assume
connectivity of all with all (…), peace to them means the mutual harmony of
perceptible phenomena” (Dietrich, 2012: 273). To illustrate this, the author draws
on his interpretations of concepts like wu wei, hao ping, dharma, shanti and
ahimsa, being Taoist thought the epitome of energetic peaces. The author states
that development, modernization and progress dissolved the awareness of energetic
concepts (Dietrich, 2012: 53), although these are to be found in all times and
societies. Notwithstanding, the bulk of the samples derive from translations of what
the he calls “(…) Eastern wisdom into the enlightened scientific language of the socalled West” (Dietrich, 2012: 12).
For moral concepts of peace the energy lies on an external, creator God.
Moral peaces are based on an absolute norm, laws and codes, peace is a pact “that
legitimizes itself through its sheer existence and social power (…)” (Dietrich,
2012: 112). Peace is understood as related to justice. If energetic peaces are
expressed in the unification of opposites, exemplified in the Ying/Yang, the reliance

52

on an ultimate truth of moral images of peace implies the need for a dualistic
thinking that distinguishes true/false, good/bad. Examples of moral peaces can be
found in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Mahayana Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism
and Confucianism (Dietrich, 2012: 65-112).
Paraphrasing Ramachandra Guha (1989: 97), to categorize these cultures,
religions and traditions under the label of energetic or moral, appropriating,
fragmenting and reducing them into peace in a very selective reading responds to
the desire of presenting peace as an universal concern, and to the need to construct
a well-founded lineage of the discipline. Guha (1989: 98) posits that this
appropriation denies agency and reason and turns other cultures into raw material, a
vehicle for Western projections, independently of the intention of the researcher.
From the tension between moral and energetic concepts emerge the next
three families (Dietrich, 2012: 9). Modern concepts of peace rise from a rupture
with the holistic and organic worldviews of the previous categories to a
mechanistic one, where God is replaced by reason to explain and manipulate the
universe. This is reflected in the belief in reason –manifested in the form of
science, art, political and social theory, or law– as a universal vehicle to create
norms that regulate society and implement peace. The author illustrates the
variations of modern peaces in the divergences between Kant, Marx, Hobbes and
Rousseau’s thought, guided by the principles of hope, expectation, fear and doubt
respectively (Dietrich, 2012: 145-160).
As Dietrich points out, modernity is a contested and difficult to define term.
Here, the Eurocentric character manifests itself by oblivion rather than by
appropriation. As it was discussed in the previous chapter, Dietrich’s definition of
modernity is based exclusively on intra-European events and authors, without

53

considering the multiple modernities that emerge from the distinct interactions, and
also omitting colonialism as a constitutive element of modernity (Dussel, 2000).
This implies ignoring that the reason-based regulatory and emancipatory norms
applied in the metropolis took the form of violence in the colonies (Dussel, 2000;
Santos, Nunes and Meneses, 2007).
Postmodern peaces emerge from the doubt of the truth of modernity,
proposing an incomplete twist from moral and modern concepts of peace by means
of the same modern tool, reason. Postmodern peaces unite rationality with
relationality (Dietrich, 2012: 274). Peace is relational, contextual and vernacular.
Multiplicity is the key concept, therefore peace has to be thought in plural, “(…)
multiform and in need of definition within each context” (Dietrich, 2012: 274).
While I agree in the inherent violence of a singular, universal, uniform
concept of peace stated by the author, it could be asked whether the “plurality,
small, weak, flexible and relational” (Dietrich, 2012: 271) postmodern peaces do
maintain this form of violence. As it was mentioned in the previous chapter,
Martínez Guzmán warned against the risk of assimilation that these open doors
could entail. Peace(s) is still a universal concept according to which other forms of
knowing, existing and organizing will be measured, classified, given meaning and
validity.
For Dietrich, this four categories lead into the fifth one, transrational peaces.
If the twisting of modern and moral peaces was incomplete since postmodern
proposals were based on the same rational tools, transrational peaces attempts to
go beyond this limitation by incorporating elements from energetic and moral
peaces to the modern and postmodern, embracing them all; Harmony, Truth,
Justice and Security are the components of transrational peaces which aims to

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integrate the plural, the relational and the spiritual with the rational in search of a
dynamic equilibrium (Dietrich, 2012: 266). As Dietrich (2012: 257) states “The
interaction of the individual aspects beyond the exterior and beyond rationality is
the topic of transrational peace research”. To support this argument, Dietrich draws
on transpersonal psychology, systems theory, physics, Buddhism, yoga, Hinduism
and Sufism (Dietrich, 2012: 211- 269).
The Eurocentric and reductionist character of the transrational peaces
theoretical framework manifests itself in the assumption that there is only one
rationality, and it belongs exclusively to Western ideas. Other forms of conceiving
the world are labelled as energetic, spiritual, relational, harmonious, moral, holistic
or organic, when indeed are parts of other rationalities if not reduced into peace(s).
Paraphrasing Scott (1998:21), to isolate a single element of instrumental value, in
this case, peace, risks to dismember a set of complex and poorly understood set of
relations and processes.
As it was argued in the first chapter, the reification of modern Western
rationality was part of a series of political cultural and economic processes that
situated, as in this case, the white male at “the hubris of the zero point”, explaining,
ordering, classifying the world, and denying rationality to other ontologies and
epistemologies.
What Santos (2004) calls “metonymic reason”, the one which takes the part
for the whole, suits the case of transrational peaces. For the author, metonymic
reason is that which “claims to be the only form of rationality and therefore does
not exert itself to discover other kinds of rationality, or, if it does, it only does so to
turn them into raw material” (Santos, 2004: 162). Metonymic reason has a lazy and
arrogant character. Arrogant because it does not valorize other experiences, and

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does not find the need to confront itself with other rationalities through dialogue. It
has a lazy character too, since it imposes a particular experience as a universal one.
Rather than expanding the world, this leads to the shrinking of the present,
silencing those subjected to metonymic reason, and concealing existent ways of
thinking, producing, living, acting and knowing, with the consequent
impoverishment of reality and the waste of human experience (Aguiló, 2010;
Santos, 2004).
On his latest work, “Elicitive Conflict Transformation and the Transrational
Shift in Peace Politics” (Dietrich, 2013), the author elaborates on elicitive conflict
transformation as the practical application of the transrational peaces philosophy.
Elicitive conflict transformation, a term coined and developed by John Paul
Lederach, moves away from prescriptive approaches toward a systemic view of
conflict that understands the mediator as a part of it, and draws from local
knowledges and practices of the participants in order to construct changes in the
relationships. Dietrich finds the communicative and psychological methods that
elicitive conflict transformation requires to be in line with the interpersonal and
intrapersonal orientation of the transrational peaces theoretical framework
(Dietrich, 2013: 1-24). Thereafter the author collects, combines and interprets
different methods of elicitive conflict transformation drawing from human and
transpersonal psychology, systems theory, Western philosophy, and non-European
practices as diverse as shamanism, budo, aikido or vipassana, revealing “interesting
interrelations and similarities across disciplinary and cultural boundaries”
(Dietrich, 2013: 225).I will focus my analysis on the reductionist character of the
authors’ description of shamanism (Dietrich, 46-54).

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Shamanism falls in the category of breath-oriented approaches to elicitive
conflict transformation. The author outlines the importance of breath for a
relational understanding of conflict, and situates shamanistic breath techniques as
an important component of transpersonal psychology and consequently of
transrational peaces. The author argues concerning these techniques that their
“[s]hamanistic roots are often invisible”, therefore his concern is to make them
visible in order to facilitate the understanding of other methods (Dietrich, 2013:
15).
According to Dietrich (2013: 45), shamans exemplifies the peace and conflict
worker par excellence. In non-European societies, shamanistic techniques to
modify consciousness “represent institutionalized forms of healing, selfexploration, and consciousness expansion” (Dietrich, 2013: 45). For the author,
shamans belong to the energetic worldview described above since they work within
the relation between “nature, society and the supernature” (Dietrich, 2013: 47).
That makes them function as mediators between this world and the Otherworld
through rituals that deal with life, death, fertility, illness and social relations. The
therapeutic role and character of healing rituals –not understood as strict medicine
in the European sense– leads to the practice of elicitive conflict transformation,
therefore being suitable practices for peace work.
The author illustrates this with the medicine wheel employed by the Twisted
Hairs “symbolizing the philosophy, thinking, spirituality, and life of North
American indigenous peoples (…)” (Dietrich, 2013: 50). For this group, solutions
to conflict emerge from inner transformation. The author argues that the circle
shape of the medicine wheel symbolizes the cyclical nature of all beings and the
knowledge and orientation for action derived from it. Dietrich outlines the healing

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effect of the medicine wheel by its intrapersonal focus, and the unification of
dualities, “the relationship between chaos and harmony in the development of a
person” (Dietrich, 2013: 51), translates itself in balanced relations with oneself,
others, and the Universe. This method was adopted by psychotherapy, and it
underlies elicitive conflict transformation. Another form of dealing with conflict
based on the medicine wheel, Dietrich accounts, is the circle of law, which fosters
community participation in decision making process concerning political, social
and spiritual aspects. It allows governing and transforming conflicts without having
a normative character. Another shamanistic healing ritual based on the medicine
wheel accounted by the author is the sweat lodge, by which a community carries
out a cleansing practice of social, psychological and spiritual transformation.
(Dietrich, 2013: 46-54).
Dietrich acknowledges that shamanism cannot be limited to breath-oriented
methods, being this one of the many shamanistic tools employed for conflict
transformation. (Dietrich, 2013: 46). The same logic could be applied to the strict
association of the shaman to peace work or elicitive conflict transformation.
Scott (1998: 81) argues that the fore-mentioned simplifications product of the
process of legibility have a twofold meaning. First, they must provide a synoptic
view of the ensemble, thereby “facts must lose their particularity and reappear in
schematic or simplified form as a member of a class of facts” (Scott, 1998: 81);
second, and related to the first, this grouping of facts “entails collapsing or ignoring
distinctions that might otherwise be relevant” (Scott, 1998: 81). The author (Scott,
1998: 13-14) posits that it is through this narrowing vision that it is possible to
impose one’s logic on the observed reality. To look at shamanism through the lens
of peace follows this simplifying process that makes legible the diversity of

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contexts, functions, relations, ways of knowledge and of perceiving existence, and
enables to impose the researcher’s vision on them.
In the case of the so-called shamanism –a category questioned by Clifford
Geertz (1966; as quoted in Hultkrantz, 1998: 163) for “dissolving the individuality
of religious traditions”– besides dealing with social imbalances and conflicts, it
cannot be overlooked that the functions of the shaman, their rituals and practices,
are multiple. The shaman’s dealing with the magical, the religious, and the myth
works as a dynamic factor in cultural processes, changes and adaptations. It
validates and confirms specific cosmologies. Besides the religious aspect, an
intellectual and genealogical role is played since the shaman works as the store of
knowledge, and the memory of the community. They serve as timekeepers and
masters of the calendar. Shamanistic practices are ecologically significant; shamans
mediate with animals to assure enough hunting. They employ methods to heal
diseases, their causes and augur future. They function as a guide for the souls of the
death. The shaman is endowed with economic, social and political influence and
authority in the community (Ripinsky-Naxon, 1993: 9, 62-65).
These and other functions cannot be extracted from specific contexts,
epistemologies and ontologies. For Viveiros de Castro (2010: 40-41; 2005: 42),
from the Amerindian multinaturalist and perspectivist stance, the former stated in
the previous chapter, shamanism is a form of acting that implies a form of
knowing. The author argues that for modern science to know is to objectify, to
distinguish what is intrinsic to the object from what it has been projected on him by
the subject, whereas for the shaman to know means to personify, to take the point
of view of who is needed to be known, who instead of what because according to
their concept of personhood the Other is a subject and a person. For the author, the

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shaman unveils the inner human form hidden under the disguise of every species.
Perspectivism is the conception “according to which the world is inhabited by
different sorts of subjects or persons, human or non-human, which apprehend
reality from distinct points of view” (Viveiros de Castro, 1998; as quoted in Ingold,
2000: 424). As Ingold summises:
Thus to be a person is to assume a particular subject-position, and every
person, respectively in their own sphere, will perceive the world in the
same way – in the way that persons generally do. But what they see will
be different, depending on the form of life they have taken up (Ingold,
2000: 424).
Therefore, in this context, the concepts of personhood, the individual, nature,
society, supernature, reality, what is social, or political, differ from the objectivist
view that Dietrich’s inscribes onto the shaman. For perspectivism, “there are no
points of view on things – things and beings are points of view”. Therefore it deals not
with “how monkeys see the world but what sort of a world is described through
monkeys, what is the world of which they are the point of view” (Viveiros de Castro,
2005: 57; italics in the original).
The author (Viveiros de Castro, 2010: 54; 2005: 53) outlines the difference
between cultural relativism and the Amerindian perspectivist ontology, arguing that
the former offers diverse subjective representations of an objective and external
nature, whereas the latter is not a representation but a perspective, that implies a
representational unit, the soul, and a diversity of external and objective worlds. One
culture, and multiple natures. The representation is a property of the mind or spirit,
while the point of view is located in the body not separated from the mind.
The shaman from this epistemological and ontological stance could be
defined as
the manifest aptitude of certain individuals to deliberately cross
bodily boundaries and adopt the perspective of alo-specific

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subjectivities so as to manage the relations between these beings and
humans. Seeing non-human beings as these see themselves (as
humans), shamans are capable of playing the role of active
interlocutors in transspecific dialogues. (Viveiros de Castro, 2005:
42).
Dietrich (2013: 48) states that his reading of shamanism does not attempt at
romanticizing practices of forgotten people, but the importance of it lies in the
universal capability of “being present, discovering our personal center, the heart of
our personality”. However, a romanticized stance of the shamans’ worldviews,
rituals and functions pervades in his selective reading which projects onto this
instrumental shaman the researcher’s personal concerns. This is probably as a
consequence of the recognized influence on the author (Dietrich, 2013: 47-48) of
the so-called core-shamanism and neo-shamanism schools, revivalist adaptations of
shamanism healing techniques to the West initiated by anthropologist Michael
Harner.
These schools constructed a Western imaginary of shamanism as a universal
spiritual tradition that stresses the interconnectedness of all beings, re-connects
human beings to nature, overcomes dualities, accesses a spiritual reality through
altered states of consciousness, and focuses on individual inner healing and selftransformation/ help. Neo-shamanism and core-shamanism were presented in the
1960’s and 1970’s as an alternative to a certain public disenchanted with
consumerism, urban, modern life, the Judeo-Christian tradition, and Cartesian
dualism (Morris, 2006). This view, already overcome by anthropology, has
received criticisms that are in tune with the aims of this chapter, namely,
misappropriating and romanticizing indigenous knowledge, reification of cultural
primitivism, decontextualization and universalization, and an excessive focus on
the individual and the psychological (Wallis, 2003: 43).

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In sum, as in the case of the five categories of peace, to assimilate shamanism
to peace work and elicitive conflict transformation by means of a selective reading
that looks at it through a peace lens obeys to the "cannibalistic western logic that
readily constructs other cultural possibilities as resources for western needs and
actions" (Donna Haraway, 1989; as quoted in Lohman, 1993). Paraphrasing
Chakrabarty (2000: 29), shamanism, aikido, budo and vipassana flesh out a
theoretical skeleton that is substantially Europe, the producer of theoria. The
consequence of this Eurocentric stance, as it has been exposed in the previous
chapter and it will be extended along this one, is the maintenance of the imperialist
relation of epistemological domination which leads to the sedimentation of other
forms of conceiving knowledge and existence under, in this case, the transrational
peace or the elicitive conflict episteme.
2.2 Social Cosmology and the Concept of Peace
Johan Galtung’s prolific work, which spans over five decades and covers a
wide array of topics, has contributed to shape many of the debates of the field.
Among them, the epistemological and methodological character of peace research
has been one of the recurrent topics throughout his work. Galtung moved from his
early reliance on empiricism and orthodox social sciences as the basis of rigorous
knowledge (Lawler, 1995) towards a more comprehensive methodological
approach including data, theories and values (Galtung, 1985a, 1996; Lawler, 1995).
For the author, to promote peace and not only peace studies, “a non-positivistic
epistemology is indispensable” (Galtung, 1996: vii), therefore a critical approach
based on values has to be accompanied by a constructive one that confronts
theories with values to produce changes in realities, and not only in theories
(Galtung, 1996, 9-13).

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Parallel to his explorations of the cultural aspects of violence, he focused on
the elements in cultures that oppose cultural violence. For Galtung,

there is also much optimistic inspiration to be gained from a
civilizational perspective. The word peace translates into different
words in different languages, all of them having different
connotations, showing different facets of peace (1985a: 155).
In that statement peace remains a universal and totalizing reference according
to which other concepts will be fragmented. Galtung (1981: 194) disclaimsº that to
translate all the different concepts from different cultures into the English concept
of peace may be methodologically open to objection. He counter-argues that these
concepts are almost autotelic and that they represent some of the highest goals of
their traditions. However, the analysis that follows is based on the assumption that
the problem behind this reductionism is not a matter of semantics, but of power. A
symbolic power that endows a legitimacy that otherwise the concept of peace
would not have, to paraphrase Pierre Bourdieu (1991; quoted in Neoh, 2008: 1112). This symbolic power sustains relations of domination by concealing them.
Bourdieu outlines the role of language and representation in the construction of
reality, and the political significance of naming, which “imply a certain claim to
symbolic authority as the socially recognized power to impose a certain vision and
division on the social world” (Neoh, 2008: 12; italics in the original).
In the article, “Social Cosmology and the Concept of Peace” (Galtung, 1981),
the author set the basis for his subsequent civilization theory developed in “Peace
by Peaceful Means” (1996) which covers other aspects such as development. For
the scope of this chapter, I will mainly focus on the earlier paper unless otherwise
stated.

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Galtung carries out a hermeneutical exercise of the concept of peace across
civilizations by means of a taxonomic classification of cultures according to certain
aspects. A main distinction is first established contrasting what the author calls the
Occident with the Orient. If the core of the Occident is epitomized by Christianity,
the Orient is defined by Buddhism (Galtung, 1996: 81). The dualistic cartographic
division is sustained, according to Galtung, by the shared features of the social
cosmology of the different civilizations contained in the Occident and the Orient.
In his civilization theory, Galtung defines a social cosmology as the “(…)
collectively held subconscious ideas about what constitutes normal and natural
reality” (1996: 211; italics in the original). Edward Said would have much to say
about portraying these two separate entities as real:
the notion that there are geographical spaces with indigenous,
radically ‘different’ inhabitants who can be defined on the basis of
some religion, culture, or racial essence proper to that geographical
space is equally a highly debatable idea (1978: 322).
Galtung’s “impressionistic” (1996: 211) portray of civilizations is questioned
by Lawler (1995: 195) on the basis of his reductionist and objectified view of
cultures, civilizations and cosmologies, which verges on essentialism, by “isolating
out a definitive cosmological key (…) as an explanatory master category”. Indeed,
few evidences are provided to support his argument, except for the few and
selected references to the multi-faceted scriptural religious texts. No account is
provided of internal diversities, of complexities, interactions, or contradictions
within traditions and societies themselves. In a latter text, Galtung (1996: 212, 213)
lists what is left outside of his Occident-Orient spectrum, the rest consists of
African, Amerindian and Asia-Pacific indigenous cultures, as well as Viêt Namese
and Korean cultures.

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Occidental civilization lumps together the Hebrew, Islam, Christian, Roman,
Greek, Middle Age and the Modern Western traditions (Galtung, 1981: 183). This
questionable classification juxtaposes historical periods and civilizations, religious
traditions and cultures, under the label Occident. Galtung (1981) supports his
classification by the shared cosmology of these traditions that is reflected in their
concepts of peace which
(…) will tend to make a very clear distinction between in-group and
out-group, center and periphery, or however one might refer to a distinction
between 'us' and 'them'; and they will tend to be universalizing,
encompassing the whole (known) universe (Galtung, 1981: 184).
Consequently, peace is reserved for in-group, and war for out-group
relations. This idea pervades in Galtung’s view of peace in the Hebrew tradition,
Shâlôm, as defined by a vertical relation, a pact between God and the Chosen
People. The author extends the monotheist argument to Christianity and Islam to
attribute the same protective tendency towards the self, and aggressiveness towards
the others (Galtung, 1981: 184-185). In the case of Islam, Galtung (1981: 186;
italics in the original) distinguishes between “dar-al-Islam (the House of Islam, the
house of peace) and the dar-al-harb, the house of war” to further argue that jihad is
a principle to justify the latter. As Ishida (1969, in Lawler, 1995: 197) states, “the
so called bellicosity of Islam (…) is a biased Christian interpretation”. Moreover,
the concept of jihad, according to Rabbia Terri Harris (2007: 108), meaning
struggle or effort has a twofold component: a greater struggle that involves an
inward effort directed to confront “our lower nature”, and a lesser struggle,
outwards oriented against social injustice.
The pax romana, eirene, pax ecclesiae, from the Roman, Greek, and Middle
Age traditions respectively, are used by the author to confirm his hypothesis of the
Occident peace as exclusive and universalist (Galtung, 1981: 185-188). The Middle

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Age is described by Galtung (1981: 187) as “the Oriental time pocket in Occidental
history”. Edward Said (1978: 67) stated that “[t]o the Westerner, (…) the Oriental
was always like some aspect of the West.” Galtung follows here the inverse logic
although with the same result.
Galtung’s “cursory” description of the Orient (Lawler, 1995: 204) amalgams
heterogeneous categories such as Indian, Jainism, Buddhism, Gandhism, Chinese
and Japanese traditions, since their social cosmologies are characterized by a
shared inward orientation or introversion and inner harmony. This argument is
grounded on the hermeneutics of concepts like ahimsa, shanti, hop’ ing, and heiwa
(galtung, 1981: 191).
Lawler (1995: 209) criticizes that “[t]he connection between the abstracted
ideal and the historical reality is tenuous.” For instance, in the case of Chinese
peace, Galtung distinguishes during “the period of the hundred philosophers”
(1981: 192) between the existence of the Buddhist, the Daoist and the Confucian
trends, which he briefly proceeds to define. Tam Wai Lum (2007: 38-52) argues
that these traditions were only followed by a well-educated elite, whereas
grassroots Chinese people practiced different local traditions, religions and rituals.
Both spheres influenced each other’s practices.
Following the critique of the Occident and the presentation of the Oriental
peace concepts, Galtung (1985b, 1996) focuses on Buddhist civilization since it “is
the major system of belief that, to my mind, comes closest in its way of looking at
the world to the type of dynamic, highly complex peace theory (…)” (1985b: 3).
Lawler (1995: 211) argues that although Buddhism is not portrayed in such a brief
and passive way as the other civilizations, “the translatability of Buddhism into a
practical discourse of peace (…) rather than [the] exposition of its philosophical

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substance (…) differs little from the bulk of Western writing on Buddhist moral
philosophy that has largely been confined to the business of ‘simple descriptive
ethics’.”
Galtung relates Buddhist notions of dukkha (avoidance of suffering) and
sukha (bliss, joy) to the concepts of negative and positive peace respectively (1996:
2), as parts of the processes towards the “goal of the whole exercise in human
space” (Galtung, 1985b: 10): nirvana. “Nirvana is entropy, peace is entropy hence, in a certain sense peace is nirvana and nirvana is peace” (Galtung, 1985b:
11), an adventurous statement considering the amount of context that such a
concept, and the experience of Buddhahood require. Bibhuti S. Yadav (1977: 451)
outlines the silence surrounding the definition of nirvana in Buddhist texts: “[t]he
issue is clearly methodological, of showing that a Buddhist must reject
epistemology as the methodology of talking about Nirvana.” Yadav (1977: 451)
refers to the ancient Indian philosophers Chandrakirti and Nagarjuna rejection of
the is/is-not thinking, the former “equates the logic of 'is' and 'not-is' with suffering,
and argues that the Buddha's silence about Nirvana is a therapeutical proposal
tliberate mankind from either/or logic.”
Summing up, Galtung’s hermeneutic proposal is based on the abstraction of
certain features to define and contrast cultures according to peace. In line with the
categorical violence of the previous section, Claude Alvares, (1988: 36) states that
abstraction is accompanied by the other side of the coin, restriction: “[I]n the
process of abstraction, one restricts reality by abstracting certain features and
ignoring others.” Scott (1988: 77) posits that the broader the categories, the less
detailed and accurate, the more sketchy and schematic the information, the more

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useful the process of apprehending a complex reality is, since its purpose is to
simplify, to reduce the range of variations.
This goes hand in hand with the scientific reduction of diversity stated in the
previous chapter, since in its inability to reproduce it, science creates “more
simplified, mechanized designs instead” (Alvares, 1988: 44). The result is a
taxonomic and dichotomic proposal that presents a simplified and objectified
version of cultures not very conducive to the authors’ attempted dialogue between
cosmologies. In spite of his critical and value-charged approach, the pervasive
scientific attitude and empiricist character of the research is evident in Galtung’s
position as an external observer labelling, categorizing, and drawing quick
conclusions from a set of premises (Lawler, 1995).

2.3 The human potential for peace
A recurring thesis in Douglas P. Fry’s work (2007, 2005, 2013) is that the
assumptions of war as innate, universal, and the intrinsic tendency to violence of
human being are deeply rooted in Western cultural beliefs. For Fry (2007, 2013),
this naturalized view of human nature, that spans from Hesiod and Thucydides to
Hobbes, impregnates Western perceptions of the world and consequently biases
scientific practices and peace research. The author claims that to go beyond the
distortion produced by ingrained and unquestioned cultural beliefs, the
reinforcement of scientific objectivity in peace research is needed,
Rather than relax the striving for objectivity and adherence to the
canons of science, the way to address this serious problem, I suggest,
is to develop a greater awareness of the powerful grasp that cultural
beliefs have on research related to peace and war, strive for selfawareness of one’s own beliefs and biases regarding this topic, and
apply the rigors of well-practiced science to one’s own research and
to the assessment of the findings of others (Fry, 2013: 1).

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What Fry calls to overcome is what Bacon called the Idols of the Theatre in
his Four Idols doctrine, constraints that interfere between the world, human mind
and its understanding of the world; constraints which divert science from being
“seen as a faithful representation of the truth about the world, as a transcript of the
divine mind” (Bajaj, 1988: 29). Thomas Kuhn (1962) questioned the positivist
notion of objectivity arguing that the so-called objective reality is determined by
the influence of the prevailing scientific paradigms on the scientist. However,
Vandana Shiva considers Kuhn’s view as incomplete since “it failed to provide an
adequate epistemological framework for handling the violence of reductionist
science” (1988: 90). Kuhn limits his critique to the scientific world without
considering how social, political and economic interests determine scientific facts.
The call for the high standards of truth and objectivity might be in itself a
reflection of the cultural and disciplinary values which Fry calls to be alert of. As it
was covered in the previous chapter, the view of science as an objective authority
contrasts with the local, contextual consideration of other systems of knowledge.
The position of science as the only way to understand and interpret reality denies
the validity of other forms of knowledge, therefore it rejects the possibility of
articulation of different knowledges, reproducing and maintaining colonial
relations (Santos, 2007b, Scott, 1989).
Drawing on archaeology, cultural anthropology, paleontology and behavioral
ecology, Fry explores and compares the views of peace and war across different
times and cultures to provide evidences of a less violent view of humanity.
Fry calls “to learn from peaceful societies” (Fry, 2005) since societies “with
extremely low levels of expressed physical aggression offer insights for developing

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a culture of peace” (Fry, Bonta and Basarkiewicz, 2009: 20). The concept of
peaceful societies will be covered in the next section.
Based on ethnographic research, Fry identifies values, beliefs and behavioral
attitudes toward conflict, decision making processes, conflict management
procedures, social control mechanisms to prevent conflict, and socialization
processes that characterize these societies and are conducive to peaceful
coexistence. According to these parameters, and supported by data, he identifies
more than 60 cultures of peace, in their most, indigenous groups, which he places
on a non-violence / violence continuum (Fry, 2005: 152-167). However, Fry’s
writing reflects more a learn-about or learn-over approach than a learn-from one,
since it is the scientist who imposes the terms of the dialogue taking for granted
that his premises are accepted by the communities.
The author (Fry, 2005) compares two Zapotec communities, La Paz and San
Andrés, according to the parameters mentioned above to contrast their approaches
to conflict and peace. For Fry (2005), La Paz is a peaceful community, with low
levels of aggression, peace is based on respect for others, supported by a value
system that promotes cooperation, and creates an affective environment for
children to be socialized, whereas research conducted in San Andrés shows a
higher level of physical and verbal aggression.
From a categorical violence point of view, Fry isolates certain elements that
he considers relevant for the study of peace to make these two societies legible,
obtaining a schematic and static view of them, more convenient for his analysis. As
Scott (1998: 11) argues,
Certain forms of knowledge and control require a narrowing of vision. The
great advantage of such tunnel vision is that it brings into sharp focus certain
limited aspects of an otherwise far more complex and unwieldy reality. This
very simplification, in turn, makes the phenomenon at the center of the field of

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vision more legible and hence more susceptible to careful measurement and
calculation. Combined with similar observations, an overall, aggregate,
synoptic view of a selective reality is achieved, making possible a high degree
of schematic knowledge, control, and manipulation.

Scott (1998) points out that this process of categorization is not necessarily
harmful, it is in connection with the authority of science that enables manipulation
and control. As a sample of re-mapping and re-ordering reality, La Paz, whose
administrative or local name is not mentioned, receives its academic name from
anthropologist Carl W. O’Nell, whose fieldwork in the 1960’s in the Valley of
Oaxaca outlined the peacefulness of the community (Fry, 2005: 60). Following
Scott’s line of argument, Joshuah Neoh (2008: 11) calls for not to underrate the
importance of naming and labelling since they “play a vital role in determining
identities, cultural affiliations, and histories; they can help fracture or unify groups of
people.”
The intricacy and complexity of Zapotec reality is simplified, presented in a
frozen, ahistorical way, and assimilated into a grid which codifies observed elements
like the value of respect, the frequency of physical fights, swearing, child and wifebeatings, the self-image of the community, the homicide rate, the response to child
misconduct, and the level of obedience of children in both communities. Vandana
Shiva (1988: 89) denounces a threefold exclusion derived from this methodology,
(i) ontological, in that other properties are not taken note of; (ii)
epistemological, in that other ways of perceiving and knowing are
not recognized; and (iii) sociological, in that the non-expert is
deprived of the right both of access to knowledge and of judging the
claims of knowledge.
Among the “psychocultural mechanisms” identified to prevent conflict and deter
aggression in La Paz, Fry (2005: 67-69) outlines fear of illness and of witchcraft.

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Concerning illness, Fry (2005: 69) states that Zapotec from La Paz believe that
coraje and bilis can cause aggression, these exempts the patients from being judged.
He concludes that “[t]he key point is that by interpreting anger and aggression as
resulting from an illness, La Pazians deny the existence of hostility” (Fry, 2005: 69).
The author (Fry, 2005: 69) posits that people from La Paz belief that the experience
of aggression can be frightening and that causes fright sickness or susto. Fry (2005:
69) states that “[b]eliefs that violence can cause susto in oneself or others provide
another psychocultural check on aggression.”
Fry analyzes illness and conflict from his own ontological standpoint, regardless of
the ontological and epistemological conceptions of the Zapotecs of La Paz, who are
positioned as a “theoretical patient” (Viveiros de Castro, 2010: 70) rather than as an
agent. The dichotomy between interior mental states and external behavioral
responses underlies Fry’s analysis which places coraje, susto and bilis as products of
the human psyche. Paraphrasing Ingold (2000: 95), for Lapazians, aggression causes
susto because they experience it as such, whereas for the scientist susto is a
construction of the people’s mind.
By this move, (…) [Lapazian] metaphysics appear to pose no challenge to
our own ontological certainties. Turning our backs on what (…) people say,
we continue to insist that ‘real’ reality is given independently of human
experience, and that understanding its nature is a problem for science.
(Ingold, 2000: 95)
The studied communities’ conceptions of being and knowing, their cosmologies
and “ontological self-determination” (Viveiros de Castro, 2010: 18)1 do not prevail
over “(…) the reduction of human (and non-human) thought to a device of

1

“autodeterminación ontológica”, own translation.

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recognition: classification, prediction, judgment, representation (…)” (Viveiros de
Castro, 2010: 18)1.
The researcher has defined the terms in which these two communities will be put
into relation. These terms mirror the values, beliefs and intellectual concerns of the
society that carries out the study rather than that which is studied. Since Fry’s
intention was to learn from other cultures, by projecting the self onto the other, the
opportunity to surprise ourselves by reflecting an image where we do not recognize
ourselves is missed (Viveiros de Castro, 2010: 15).
A similar analysis could be made from Fry’s work on nomadic forager societies
which occupy a central place in his research (Fry, 2005, 2007, 2013). For the author,
the two million years of existence of this lifestyle allows to obtain insights about the
past and the peacefulness of human nature (Fry, 2013: 6-12).
From the position of the explicative subject, and with the synoptic view that
science provides (Scott, 1998), the author engages in a taxonomic exercise that
classifies forager societies into simple and complex hunter-gatherers through the
isolation of certain features. The former includes nomadic bands with small, simple,
egalitarian and non-hierarchical forms of social organization. The latter consists of
horse-dependent or sedentary groups with higher population density, a hierarchical
political system with class distinctions, and the use of slaves.
A subsequent step places simple and complex hunter gatherers as parts of a
classificatory grid which uses peace and war –according to the above mentioned
parameters– as a unit of measure to distinguish between warring and non-warring
societies. The synoptic facts that it provides allows to conclude that “social

1

“(…) la reducción del pensamiento humano (y no humano) a un dispositivo de reconocimiento:
clasificación, predicción, juicio, representación…(…)”, own translation.

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complexity and adoption of the horse go along with warfare” (Fry, 2007: 78),
whereas nomadic bands tend to be more peaceful (Fry, 2007: 77-80).
Consequent with his schema, on a latter work, he focuses his research on the
nomadic bands since their simple organization and their peaceful nature allow “to
draw inferences about the past” (Fry, 2013: 9). An evolutionist point of view that
places the researchers’ Time as the reference, and situates these groups as
contemporary relics, an example of the denial of coevalness (Fabian, 1983) discussed
in the previous chapter.
As in the case of the Zapotec analyzed above, his study presents several specific
cases of nomadic forager bands drawing on ethnographic research where the rate of
homicide, the values and attitudes towards violence, the causes of conflict and the
mechanisms for its resolution are examined (Fry, 2013). These serve as processes of
simplification and standardization to make hunter-gatherer’s realities legible,
comparable, and classifiable. The author assumes that these units of measure are
accepted by the rest, and therefore they define the terms of the conversation. This
way of abstracting peace by isolation of certain elements in hunter-gatherers societies
silences the way they apprehend the world, not based on detachment and mental
representation, but on engagement, “not of making a view of the world but of taking
up a view in it” (Ingold 2000: 42). The author states concerning hunter-gatherers that,
(…) knowledge does not lie in the accumulation of mental content. It
is not by representing it in the mind that they get to know the world,
but rather by moving around in their environment, whether in dreams
or waking life, by watching, listening and feeling, actively seeking
out the signs by which it is revealed. Experience, here, amounts to a
kind of sensory participation, a coupling of the movement of one’s
own awareness to the movement of aspects of the world. And the
kind of knowledge it yields is not propositional, in the form of
hypothetical statements or ‘beliefs’ about the nature of reality, but
personal – consisting of an intimate sensitivity to other ways of
being, to the particular movements, habits and temperaments that
reveal each for what it is (Ingold, 2000: 99).

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2.5 Peaceful Societies
The organization Peaceful Societies is dedicated to the study of social groups
with low levels of internal violence and absence of external warfare. It publishes
its work on the website www.peacefulsocieties.org which was started in 2005 by
Bruce Bonta, inspired by the work of Elise Boulding, and it is maintained by the
contributions of a group of peace researchers, among them Douglas P. Fry, whose
work, introduced in the previous section, shares many similarities with this
project.
The website contains the Encyclopedia of Peaceful Societies which compiles
descriptions of 25 societies that “promote harmony, gentleness, and kindness
toward others as much as they devalue conflict, aggressiveness, and violence”, in
order to “inspire —and challenge—anyone interested in the processes of peace
building” (Peaceful Societies, 2014).
Although the authors state that their intention is not to dichotomize between
peaceful and non-peaceful societies, but to situate them in a peace-violence
continuum (Peaceful Societies, 2014), it has a twofold exclusionary character
since the abyssal thinking (Santos, 2007c) referred to in the first chapter,
structures the whole theory of peaceful societies.
On one side, paraphrasing Guha (1989), the positivist category of peaceful
societies, which is used to label certain social groups based on observation and
abstraction of selected features, constitutes a romantic and positive Other, “a body
wholly separate and alien” (Guha, 1989: 97) from the self, and defined by a
peaceful essence. Concerning the dangers of creating categories that lead to us/
them distinctions, Edward Said asks,

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Can one divide human reality, as indeed human reality seems to be
genuinely divided, into clearly different cultures, histories, traditions,
societies, even races, and survive the consequences humanly? (Said, 1978:
45).
On the other side, whether peaceful or not, it is the hegemonic subject of the
scientist who decides and classifies societies, “[i]n the field of knowledge, abyssal
thinking consists in granting to modern science the monopoly of the universal
distinction between true and false (…)” (Santos, 2007c: 47). This is made explicit
by the authors of the website in their “criteria for inclusion” (Peaceful Societies,
2014) for the Encyclopedia: (i) they have to be described by an anthropologist or a
sociologist as peaceful or nonviolent, (ii) the scientist must provide “convincing
evidence” about the peacefulness of the society, in case of contradictory evidences
the society will be excluded, (iii) the existence of “enough scholarly literature
about the society to allow a reasonably well-formed picture to emerge about their
social, psychological, and cultural makeup” (Peaceful Societies, 2014).
Paul Robbins (2012: 125) argues that, considering the exclusive and arbitrary
character of any classification and categorization, the main difference between
science and other forms of knowledge is not accuracy but the political and social
power linked to the former. He then draws on Foucault to ask,
when we establish a considered classification, when we say that a cat and a
dog resemble each other less than two greyhounds do, even if both are tame
or embalmed, even if both are frenzied, even if both have just broken the
water pitcher, what is the ground on which we are able to establish the
validity of this classification with complete certainty? On what “table,”
according to what grid of identities, similitudes, analogies, have we become
accustomed to sort out so many different and similar things? (Foucault,
1977; quoted in Robbins, 2012: 125)
Santos (2007c: 68) explains the contrast between the progressive increase of the
recognition of cultural diversity during the last decades and the lack of recognition
of the epistemological diversity, relying on the distinction between beliefs and
ideas as posited by Ortega y Gasset. Whereas beliefs are an integral part of our

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identity, they come from the absence of doubt, ideas, that is, science and
philosophy, are exterior to us, their origin lies in uncertainties and remain
associated with them. This implies a distinction between being and having, “we
are what we belief but we have ideas” (Santos, 2007c: 68). Modern science
belongs to both, ideas and beliefs. “Belief in science greatly exceeds anything
scientific ideas enables us to realize” (Santos, 2007c: 68). The critique of science
during the second half of the twentieth century contrasted with an increasing
popular belief in science. As Santos comtends “The relationship between beliefs
and ideas as related to science is no longer a relationship between two distinct
entities but rather a relationship between two ways of socially experiencing
science” (Santos, 2007c: 68). This duality is what separates cultural from
epistemological recognition of diversity.
Back to the Encyclopedia of Peaceful Societies, the ehtnogrpahic present tense
used to describe these societies, as in the previous section, represents them as
frozen, timeless, with few accounts of historical changes, political struggles or
responses to the interactions with modernity in economic, social and cultural
terms. For anthropologist Renato Rosaldo (1993: 31), these are characteristics of
the first ethnographic writings, whose complicity with colonial practices was
mentioned in the previous chapter. The portrait of colonized cultures as
harmonious, homogeneous and unchanging fostered the civilizational mission, the
idea that these societies need to progress in economic, cultural and moral terms.
The view of the anthropologist as the detached observer that objectifies and
extracts raw material to be processed later has been overcome by the discipline
(Rosaldo, 1993).

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Moreover, this way of presenting them as static, almost isolated strongholds of
nonviolence reveals a tendency to romanticize these societies, in spite of the
authors’ disclaimer against a utopic, idealist portrayal of these groups, arguing
that descriptions are supported by scholar evidences (Peaceful Societies, 2014).
Every entry of the Encyclopedia is described according to sections that briefly
present information about the geographical location and economic activity, beliefs
that foster peacefulness, forms of avoiding and resolving conflict, gender
relations, socialization of children, social practices, sense of the self, moral values,
and a conclusion (Peaceful societies, 2014).
Rosaldo (1993: 26) warns against the imposition of categories and the tendency
of trying to understand other forms of life in Western terms. To analyze 25
different social groups by the same grid risks falling into orthopedic thinking,
which results in silencing and denying theoretical imagination to these groups. As
it was argued in the previous section, this form of analyzing peace as a category
product of the summation of separate aspects and indicators added together may
not coincide with the way these societies perceive peace, in case they have a
separate objetified concept of peace. The authors attempt to identify and compare
psychological, cultural, social, ethical and religious structures of these groups to
explain peace, reflects their own assumptions, As Alastair McIntosh

puts

forward,
(…) the reductionist worldview is blind to alternative ways of knowing such
as aesthetic sensibility, inner vision, intuition and mystical experience
(which can be empirically studied). It has canonised reason alone, but a
dwarfed reason that rattles around in the vacuum of its own echo chamber,
imagining itself to have trumped the divine mystery (McIntosh, 2012: 43).
To illustrate this, Semai people, a group of Orang Asli, Malaysian Aborigines,
included in the Encyclopedia of Peaceful Societies, do not conceive peace as a
separate category, “(…) equality, sustainability and peace, rather than existing as
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three separate cultural ideals or attributes, are intertwined and interconnected”
(Gomes, 2012: 1062).
Although I will not extend on the details, anthropologist Alberto Gomes (2012)
explains how Semai knowledge is connected with nature and embedded in
cultural and religious practices and beliefs. These reveal an eco-centric
perspective which is translated in a respectful relation with nature. Spiritual
practices underpin physical reality –there is no separation between the sacred and
the secular– and shapes ecological knowledge. The centrality of nature as part of
Semai identity is manifested in their relation with the past, since history is
expressed through the place where an event took place rather than temporalized.
Concerning practices that foster social cohesion, Semai people are organized
through a consensual political system that promotes inclusion and discourages the
imposition of power. Sharing and reciprocity are generalized practices that have a
moral and economic component, they serve to balance possible inequalities and
avoid accumulation. In that sense, cooperation and interdependence is not at odds
with individual autonomy, understood as social flexibility rather than
individualism. Land ownership is another cohesive aspect of Semai people since it
is not held privately but through a communal system that assures access to land
and resources on an equal basis. The communal ownership entails not only
humans but spirits too, to whom permission has to be asked for before working
the land.
These tenets, beliefs and practices are conducive to peace. Conflicts are avoided
and when they arise, strategies for resolving conflicts in a nonviolent way are
employed.

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Gomes (unpublished work) accounts of the implications on Semai lives of the
increasing contact with modernity and capitalism. Commoditization, privatization
and over-exploitation of resources result in the impoverishment of their lives in
economic, social and cultural ways and the displacement of their traditional
knowledges, values, perceptions and practices.
Semai, as other indigenous groups referred to in the previous chapter, do not
suit Cartesian ontology, their knowledge is interconnected with their everyday
practices. Nature, economy, relations with the past and other social and religious
practices are interconnected. Therefore, to isolate and objectify peace from these
practices assimilating Semai worldviews to Western concepts denies validity to
Semai knowledge and subjectivity. As it was argued in the previous chapter, this
is a manifestation of the imposition by modern science of the conception of
knowledge-as-regulation, rather than knowledge-as-emancipation, the former
conceives knowledge as order, the latter, as solidarity (Santos, 2007b). In that
sense, scholars from different disciplines (Gomes, 2012; McIntosh, 2012; Santos,
2010, 2007b) call to learn from and with these discarded epistemologies instead of
learning about them:
“[W]e can learn to seek unity less by attempting to recruit others as
subcontractors to build our own utopias, or by trying to find a
monolithic "truth of nature" to impose on the world, and more
through solidarity with subordinate groups pursuing, on different
terrains, purposes that may be related to our own. That solidarity
requires that even our most cherished dichotomies be challenged by
the stories other societies tell” (Lohman, 1993).

Conclusions
The four cases analyzed in this chapter evidence the unequal relations between
different forms of knowledge. Despite the existent proposals to expand the

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epistemological limits of the discipline, a narrow view of science characterized by
a positivist epistemology pervades peace studies.
The hegemonic subject of the scientist conditions and defines the premises of
the conversation, labelling, ordering, classifying, and imposing his/her own views
on other realities through a narrow vision that discriminates and ignores what
he/she considers not to be convenient for the re-ordering of the world. Therefore,
in these examples, the attempted intercultural dialogue covered in the previous
chapter turns into a dialogue between peace researchers.
Through this Western lens, peace, either singular or plural, is conceived as an
unquestioned universal concept to which other cultures will be brought into –
mainly through appropriation or assimilation– turned into raw material for the
production of theory and presented in an objectified form. Inscribing Western
concerns and conceptual tools onto other people strange to them is what has been
called orthopedic thinking.
The consequence of these orthopedic peaces is the exclusion and devaluation of
other forms of knowledge and practices, discarding, silencing and removing other
people from their ways of experiencing the world, thereby maintaining imperialist
relations of epistemological domination, a reflection of economic, social and
political relations.
Next chapter proposes what Santos (2010) called “sociology of absences” and a
move to knowledge-as-solidarity. It proposes to look at Fulani worldviews and
practices, and attempts to establish dialogues with Heimatkunde from Germanic
tradition, and with Aymara cosmologies.

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82

Chapter III
Fulani Cosmology
Introduction
To overcome the metonymic reason –the one that asserts to be the only form of
rationality– that characterizes the four cases analyzed in the previous chapter, De
Sousa Santos (2007a, 2007b, 2009) proposes “the sociology of absences”, a
procedure oriented to reveal that the non-existent has been actively produced as noexistent. As it was discussed in the first chapter, according to Santos there are five
major forces that lead to the production of non-existence: the monoculture of
knowledge, the monoculture of linear time, the monoculture of the naturalization of
the difference, the monoculture of the dominant scale and the monoculture of the
productivist logic. To question the monoculture of knowledge, which this thesis is
focused upon, Santos (2007c) formulates the necessity of an “ecology of
knowledges” that identifies and puts into dialogue forms of knowledges, values,
practices, beliefs, and other criteria of rigor that seek a global cognitive justice, since,
as it has been contended, forms knowledge and of existence cannot be delinked from
politics.
In a similar vein, Gomes (2012) calls for the recovery of marginalized
indigenous knowledges, for the ecologically sensitive values and principles that
sustain them may contribute to question and shift current economic and ecologic
paradigms. Recovery is not meant as a look to the past in the search for idyllic and
romanticized lifestyles, but as a look to currently existing and resisting perspectives
of people that creatively combine their lifestyle with the forces of modernity. As
Leonhard Praeg (2014: 14) posits, the point is not to tell the “world about lost, ancient

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civilizations because they are interesting, but because every act of recollection is an
act of struggle that seeks to make a point.”
In accordance with that, this chapter focuses on certain facets of Fulani,
concretely of Wodaabe Fulani nomadic herders from Niger, knowledge, practices,
and beliefs. To this effect, I draw on ethnographic and linguistic accounts, and on
initiatory tales and mythological texts from Fulani oral tradition.
This chapter is organized in four sections. The first section briefly situates
Fulani and Wodaabe, and defines my position concerning ethnicity. The second
section covers Fulani cosmology, specifically the role of the cow and the milk in their
economic, social, spiritual and cultural practices. The third section focuses on the
moral code of Fulani and presents a case of conflict resolution by means of its
application. The fourth section proposes first, a look into Fulani relations with the
environment, their conceptions of place and their connection to the land; and second,
a comparison with other traditions that share similar concerns, namely Heimatkunde
from the German speaking tradition, and Aymara cosmology through the work of
Rodolfo Kusch and his philosophy of estar.
3. 1 Introductory considerations
Fulani people, with a population of circa 15 million, live scattered in more than
a dozen countries, from the Senegal to the Nile rivers, being only a majority in
Guinea Conakry (Fig. 1).

The disparity of political, social, economic and

environmental contexts, and the derived interactions, shape their activities, and
worldviews in different ways. Consequently, and following feminist approaches that
consider identity as multiple, and their formation dynamic, contextual, negotiated and
tied to their historical and political contexts (Loftsdottir, 2001, 2007), it would be too

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adventurous to provide any general statement about Fulani identity as a monolithic
and homogenous ethnic group in spite that, as some scholars (Gordon, 2000; Sow,
2005) posit, their sense of identity and kinship transcends national boundaries.

Fig. 1

As Terence Ranger (1999; quoted in Lotftsdotti, 2007: 67) argues, concepts like
tribe and ethnicity have been associated with African societies in an essentialist
manner. Therefore, since I am going to prioritize ethnicity, certain aspects have to be
considered, for ethnonyms, as the term Fulani, risk of being assigned with a single
reference (Amselle, 1998: 46). Some anthropologists (Barth, 1969; Wimmer, 2013)
stress the role of boundary making, and social closure expressed “along ethnic lines”
(Wimmer, 2013: 14), rather than shared, objective, defined cultural traits to establish
ethnic distinctions in a society.

Thereby, “two ethnic groups should differ in

worldviews and values only if the boundary between them is marked by high levels
of exclusion and closure” (Wimmer, 2013: 14). Thus, the focus on ethnicity is not
understood as objectively defined cultures, but as the subjective forms in which social
groups define the boundaries “by pointing to specific diacritics that distinguished
them from ethnic others” (Wimmer, 2008: 23).

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Another aspect not to be overlooked is the colonial influence on identity
formation and the reification on ethnicity. Jean Loup Amselle (1998: xiii) puts
forward that the colonial administrators’ rigid attempt to organize and define human
diversity transformed existing “chains of societies”, flexible and interconnected, into
different institutionalized ethnic groups. The author illustrates this by questioning the
concept of Fulani in itself. In that sense, anthropologists (Amselle, 1998; Breedveld
and De Bruijn, 1996) argue that the construction of Fulani ethnic group is linked to
nineteenth and early twentieth century historiography and anthropology. The idea of
racial struggle transposed to West Africa by historians placed different races as
conqueror and conquered, and situated a fantasized Fulani origin outside of the Black
African context. Inquiry on their origin and the quest for a Fulani essence continues
today focusing on the construction of Fulani herders as a “self-sufficient enclave”
(Amselle, 1998: 46) independent of their context. On the contrary, Fulani as an entity
is the result of continuous modifications of political and religious formations
(Amselle, 1998: 49). However, Breedveld and De Brujin (1996) differ with Amselle
arguing that it is not that Fulani did not exist before colonization, but the colonial and
the postcolonial states altered and reinforced ethnicity.
Without denying the importance of colonial and postcolonial powers in shaping
and stiffening ethnic categories, to overemphasize this angle of ethnicity might
simplify and reduce to colonial constructions the complexity of ethnic boundary
making.

This might be at odds with the idea of the fluidity and contextuality of

identities, for it completely displaces Fulani agency on colonial and postcolonial
states, and ignores “the embodied experience of cultural understandings of the world”
(Loftsdottir, 2001: 282) which provide meaning to belonging to a specific group
(Loftsdottir, 2007: 82-83; 2001: 281-282). The latter point is particularly significant

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since, as it will be broaden in this section, Fulani sense of identity is understood as
closely linked to their conceptualization of the environment, coming their cosmology
and organization of the world from their everyday physical experience with the
environment and animals (Loftsdottir, 2001; Sow, 2005, 2006).

In that sense,

following Anthony Smith (1999: quoted in Loftsdottir, 2007: 67), “earlier ethnic ties
and memories” have to be taken into account without ignoring that these ties and
memories can acquire different meaning in a continuous changing process of meaning
construction, and can be used differently depending on the context and the individual.
The dynamic conception of life and identity is expressed in the Fulani proverb, “A
man has not been completely created until his death” (Sow, 2001: 557)1.
Fulani recognized themselves originally by their language, Fulfulde, and by
their economic activity, the transhumant bovine livestock breeding. This identity trait
was broaden by their incorporation of Islam and its territorial expansion in which they
actively participated; later, with French colonialism they were established within the
limits of the current nation-states. Fulani traditionally distinguished between Ful’be
na’i (cow fulbe), nomadic herders; Ful’be diina (book fulbe), linked to Islam teaching
and Koranic schools; and Ful’be tube (drum fulbe), who held power in big territories
and ancient states (Sow, 2006: 2-3).
Today, Fulani differentiate between Fui’be si’iire (town fulbe) and Ful’be na’i.
The latter can be found in a variety of settings and occupations; some may live as
sedentary combining agriculture and shepherding, others have a semi-nomadic
lifestyle although living in agricultural areas from where they organize their
displacements, whereas certain groups, like Wodaabe, carry a nomadic transhumant
life.
1

“Tant que l'homme n'est pas mort, il n'a pas fini d'etre cree” (Sow, 2001: 557 my translation).

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Fulbe’si’iire, which constitute the majority of Fulani population, participate in
the activities of the big city and modern life with no direct relation to pastoral
practices, although anchored to the bush and their villages of origin by their family
ties to whom they entrust their cattle (Sow, 2001: 557, 2006: 2). This strong link to
the family and the place of origin is maintained from Senegal until the West side of
Niger, where the four initial Fulani clannish surnames are still functional (Sow,
2006). Besides the clannish link, Fulani sense of kinship is illustrated by the concept
dyokkèrè endan, meaning to “follow the sap of the tree” (Gordon, 2000: 314), a
metaphor which calls to maintain family, in-laws, and community ties and bonds of
solidarity. Moreover, the instrumental use of ethnicity in certain postcolonial West
African countries contributes to maintain the sense of ethnic affiliation (Gordon,
2000: 314-315).
Wodaabe Fulani live mainly in the southeastern side of Niger, bordering with
Chad and Nigeria (see Fig. 2). They are transhumant herders that live in mobile
communities, whose size depends on the season, that cover the Sahelian range in a
planned way. This area is characterized by dry heat, and low rain rates, fluctuating
from year to year. The region soil is classified as sub-arid, not very fertile and with
sparely distributed trees (Loftsdottir, 2001).

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Fig. 2

Migrations, despite the existing certain household autonomy, are planned by a
council of men of the community. During the rainy season, from May to June, shortdistance mobility is constant and groups remain closer, whereas during the dry season
they settle dispersedly next to wells and pastures closer to sedentary and agricultural
populations, thereby reducing interactions within the community, and increasing them
with members of other ethnic and social groups. These interactions are significant for
economic exchanges take place, mainly millet for milk, the two main tenets of
Wodaabe nourishment (Loftsdottir, 2001; Schareika, 2010).
3. 2 The cow and the milk
The cow plays a central role not only in the economic life, but in the symbolic
too. Fulani herders society revolves around the cow and its needs, it is considered as
a gift of God, therefore a relation of cooperation and reciprocity is established, taking
care of each other (Loftsdottir, 2001). The strong presence of the cow dates back to
their origin myth: two siblings suddenly started to speak an unknown language,
scared, their parents rejected them, the children wandered through the bush until they
reached the shore of a lake where they lit a fire. Cows started to emerge slowly from

89

the water, the children became herders and the cows their herd. Isolated because of
the language the two siblings ended up getting married. Their offspring, the Fulani,
inherited a herd and a language (Sow, 2006:1-2).
The cow in Wodaabe Fulani society exemplifies the symbolic, social and
economic role of the animals (Sow, 2006, 2005; Riesman, 1977; Loftsdottir, 2001).
It provides milk and transforms shrubs for human production in the Sahelian
environment. Moreover, it is integrated and an active participant in the social system.
They assist and attend to life transitions ceremonies like birth, death and marriage. It
is part of the habana’i, a system of distribution of cattle through loans and gifts that
helps to reduce risks and inequalities within communities, and contributes to establish
social relationships. Woodabe Fulani raise, among others, a particular breed of cows,
the Mbororo, linked to their identity as a group. This cow is characterized by having
a close bind to the breeder to whom it obeys and responds, but does not cooperate
with strangers making them very difficult to steal. The Mbororo are known for being
independent and fierce, and are considered by the Woodabe as semi- domesticated
animals, and having djikku or character, a quality that Fulani associate with humans.
As it will broaden throughout the next sections, to lose self-control is considered as a
negative quality in humans (Riesmann, 1977: 226), therefore to associate djikku to
cows, conceived as animals with independent personalities, puts them at the same
level than humans. Another sign of the intimacy with the cow is that, in contrast to
other animals, cows carry the same name as their mothers in a systematic way. This
matrilineal system creates a link of continuity with the past, since different animals
carry the same name that their forebears’. Thus the relation with the cow is not only
based on reason and instrumental uses, but these are inseparably linked with emotions
like affection. Since the wellbeing of the cow implies the wellbeing of the people, the

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relation established is not one of dominance but of reciprocity and equality. Sibiiru is
another practice that exemplifies the bond between people, land and cattle. After a
child is born, his/her umbilical cord is buried next to the wood pieces that hold the
calf rope for milking. This links birth to the land. The twofold meaning of sibiiru,
navel and umbilical cord, shows a sense of continuity, the nourishing bond is not cut
after birth. The fact of digging it in a symbolic place next to another rope which
represents livestock and nourishment reinforces this sense of continuity associating
the womb to cattle –their form of nourishment– , and to the land of origin. As it will
be argued in the following sections, cows play an important role in Wodabee
conceptualization of the environment; they function as mediators between the bush
and the village (Loftsdottir, 2001; Riesman, 1977). What is nature and what is
society is flexible for Wodabee, sometimes dichotomized, others not, and cows play a
key role in it (Loftsdottir, 2001: 287-289).
Milk is another fundamental element in Fulani society for nourishing, economic
and symbolic reasons.

According to Fulani mythology, the universe created by

Gueno sprang from a drop of milk containing the four cardinal points, and from it
emerged an hermaphrodite bovine, symbol of the universe. Gueno entrusted the
cattle to Tyanaba, a mythical snake who took them out of the waters, from the ocean
to the Débo Lake, assisted by a herder and his wife, Koumen and Foroforoundou.
This couple was in charge of unveiling the initiatory secrets of shepherding to those
who want to dedicate their lives to it (Ba and Dieterlen, 1961: 199).

Fulani

descriptions of paradise portray a garden where rivers of milk flow, it is the reward of
pure souls. The religious component of milk appears in everyday practices, taboos,
and ceremonies like baptism or marriage (Sow, 2005: 439).

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Therefore, milk is one of the vital energies of the camp. It has a strong identity
component, almost narcissistic; it is offered and shared with any guest or member of
the community as part of the pulaaku code of conduct to which I will refer later.
Drinking it is associated with physical and moral wellbeing and beauty.
Since cows are rarely sold and never sacrificed for intensive butchery or to feed
the family, milk represents the main nourishing and economic source that the cattle
provide (Sow, 2005: 425). The two mentioned elements, the cow and the milk,
determine the division of tasks within the family. While men are in charge of the
cattle management, surveillance and displacement, women’s tasks cover everything
related to milk management: collection, transformation, commercialization, and
medical and aesthetic uses. “Milk belongs to women” (Sow, 2006: 4)1, says the
Fulani proverb. The role of women is important for the transmission of all the
knowledges and practices related to these processes (Sow, 2006: 3).
If the cow is considered as a gift of god, milk is the raison d’être of the Fulani
herder. When it is abundant, it is consumed in every meal as a drink or as the main
ingredient of the dish. Therefore, Fulani practices and knowledges revolve around
obtaining milk, not only about obtaining quantity but also quality. These entail the
knowledge about the bush, selection and management of pastures, the caring and
selection of the cattle, the production of a variety of products for different, and their
storage, conservation and commercialization (Sow, 2005).
Concerning the property of cattle, it belongs first to the family, and then, at a
symbolic level, to the whole community. Each member of the couple contributes to
the family cattle with their own cows, and children receive a cow as a present when

1

“Aux femmes appartient le lait” (my translation).

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born or after certain initiatory rituals (Sow, 2006:3). In spite of the autonomy and
flexibility of the familial unit, Fulani herders tend to assemble in higher forms of
social integration.

Cooperation is needed for migration, protection of the cattle,

information sharing and efficient occupation of the pastureland, cohabitation and
political alliances (Schreika, 2010:4). This familial and individual autonomy, which
suits more easily the transhumant lifestyle, is not at odds with a community sense.
This is explained by

Eduard Spranger (1952, in Kockel, 2012: 61) with the

ecologically based concept of individuality as “existential connectedness”, rather than
to the egocentric and insular concept of individualism. This point will be covered
later in detail.
Fulani lifestyle, like that of other transhumant people, has been labeled as
stagnant and traditionalist, and their economy, precariously self-sufficient,
contemplative and technically retarded (Puillon, 1990; Khazhanov, 2001). This is, to
certain extent, a paradox considering the mobility, dynamism, and the adaptive
solutions found in face of the challenges of their political and environmental contexts.
This discourse, recurrent among state officers and development agents, is rooted in
the construction of the image of nomads as culturally isolated, archaic societies, to
which coeval is denied (Fabian, 1983), and serves to legitimize paternalist, external
development interventions in order to break with this archaic heritage (Pouillon,
1990).
François Pouillon (1990: 175) proposes to replace the triad isolationspecialization-stagnation that sustains the afore-mentioned discourse, by another
model based on flexibility-relation-multiple resources, which adjusts better to
economic practices of Fulani herders.

For, all along history organic relations have

been established with markets, neighboring agricultural communities, villages, and

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states. The author enhances (Pouillon, 1990: 176) that Fulani idiosyncrasy appears at
its best when having to negotiate the validity of their strategies with forces that
surpass them.
Nevertheless, from a political ecology perspective, isolation would not be
removed from the model but translated into marginalization, which may not be
incompatible with relation, but derived from certain relations.

In other words,

marginalization is produced by contact with dominant groups –in this case, colonial
and postcolonial states, and international aid (Pouillon, 1990)–, making “otherwise
environmentally innocuous production systems undergo transition to overexploitation
of natural resources on which they depend” (Robbins, 2004: 159). The author posits
that this contact leads to the cycle of poverty and environmental degradation, which is
often attributed to the practices (and ignorances) of traditional, subsistence
communities (Robbins, 2004: 117, 159).
Fulani mobility patterns are usually structured according to the season. During
the rainy season, the aim is to settle the camp next to a pond, and from there to seek
for pasturelands in the nearby. During the dry season the priority is to find water, so
the cattle is drawn back next to agricultural communities where reciprocity relations,
not exempt of tension, and economic exchanges are possible (Pouillo, 1990; Sow,
2005; Loftsdottir, 2001).
Pouillon (1999: 179-184) accounts how colonial administrators attempt to
activate remote, unexploited pasturelands without permanent water ponds.

The

exploitation of underground water would permit to nourish the cattle during the dry
season and to settle and regroup herders within a specific land. The aim was to solve
a structural problem derived from the increasing space provided for agriculture,

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reducing pastureland. The initial success led to a reduction of mobility as expected,
but at mid- term it brought a lot of imbalances that showed the inefficacy of the
settlements provoked an increasing self-subsistence economy. The contract between
sedentary and nomadic populations was broken, interrupting the economic flow, and
impending temporaries combination of agriculture and shepherding.

The

characteristics of arid zones with low rains, unequal distribution of pasturelands and
periodic droughts demand mobility along bigger areas. Instead of concentration,
colonial measures provoked the dissemination of Fulani herders. To that it must be
added that the appearance of new sicknesses stemming from underground waters
reduced livestock and increased the dependency on veterinary. Therefore, Fulani
herders engaged in what they call perol, among the different word used to refer to
mobility, this is associated to out of the ordinary migrations for adaptive purposes in
case of political and ecological difficulties, being forced to abandon gari, or the area
of attachment.
The postcolonial state and international development projects oriented to
intensify production to strengthen and integrate Fulani herders into an expanding
meat market – restructuring cattle breeding methods–

have sharpened Fulani

strategies to respond and correct imbalances. Pouillon (1990: 188-189) posits that
Fulani logic concerning these proposals presented as progress does not fully respond
to the dichotomy tradition/modernity, for there are as many convergences as
divergences between Fulani societies and development actors.
Due to the marginalization derived from the state policies and the periodic
severe droughts which result in the loss of livestock, Fulani herders diversify their
economic activities ranging from agriculture to urban migration in order to obtain
income to reestablish the cattle. Hence, Wodaabe migrate to big cities to engage

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mainly in craft selling to tourists. This has led to an increasing interest on Wodaabe
people in the West, portraying them as a traditional, exotic people that live outside of
history and time.
imbalances.

Therefore, relations with Westerns are framed within power

Westerns, from their privileged position, seek authenticity in the

increasing poverty of Fulani herders, whereas the latter resort to the commodification
of their culture as a subsistence strategy (Loftsdottir, 2001: 11-13).
3. 3 Pulaaku
The person, Neddo, is thought to be composed by multiple persons, Neddaaku.
According to Iba Fall (2010: 140-142), this reflects the different aspects of the
container, Neddo, which veils more realities than what it shows. It is not only through
the social aspect the Neddo finds equilibrium, but through an inner work that orders,
balances, and masters this concentric and superimposed inner multiplicity. I will focus
in this section on the social aspect of the Fulani person.
Pulaaku is a moral code that guides Fulani conduct and interpersonal relations
within a community of herders (Sow, 2006; Loftsdottir, 2001; Riesman, 1977).
Amselle (1998: 44) posits these values are not exclusive to Fulani, since similar codes
exist in neighboring societies. The author’s assertion is with in line with his deconstructive attempt of Fulani identity, the latter consider Pulaaku as one of their
distinctive identity traits. Whether distinctive or not, these shared values may explain
why Pulaaku can be used, and accepted as a social institution that shapes relations
with other ethnic and social groups outside of the community (Riesman, 1977).
Paul Riesman (1977: 124) translates the term as “the qualities appropriation to
the Fulani” and also refers to it as the group of people possessing these qualities. For

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Fulani linguist, Salamatou Sow (2006), it has the twofold meaning of moral code and
community.
Pulaaku entails conventional rules of politeness and the moral qualities of an
ideal behavior in social life, whose central element is the mastery of needs, impulses
and discomforts. (Breedveld and De Bruijn, 1996: 802; Riesman, 1977).

This

contributes to social cohesion since pulaaku does not emerge from the individual but
on the necessary presence of others, who will examine the acts of the individual in the
light of this ideal. At the same time, not following pulaaku risks dismembering a
group; an individual who lacks pulaaku is considered as not being who he/she claims
to be, therefore it may become the object of criticism, ostracism or ridicule (Riesman,
1977: 138).
The moral aspect consists of four tenets: hakkillo, understood as wisdom,
common sense, prudence; seemtende, shame, reserve, self-control; munyal, resilience,
patience; and teddengal, respect. This code of conduct is used for conflict resolution
and mutual agreement since it allows to preserve the autonomy of the community by
avoiding to resort to legal or political institutions (Schareika, 2010; Riesman, 1977;
Breedveld and Mirjam De Bruijn, 1996).
Pulaaku is the reference that frames the mediation and negotiation processes of
two conflicting sides. Pulaaku is used in political discourses and can shape political
events depending on its strategic use. This not only occurs by means of its moral
values, but the term itself is appealed to as a rhetoric resource during negotiations. Its
conflict resolution significance is outlined when the situation of Fulani herders
requires dealing with internal conflict without resorting to state authorities
(Schareika, 2010).

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Wodaabee political organization rests mainly on the leadership of male elders
of every household, integrated in bigger social units, wuro which result from kinship,
co-residence, joint migration, pastoral cooperation, political alliances and
intermarriage.

These are ruled by a traditional leader, lamiido, who, in its turn, is

subordinated to a traditional regional leader.

The state makes itself present in

pastoral communities by means of the social association of the traditional regional
leaders to state officers. The former have a limited influence on daily economic,
social and juridical life of wuro, being their function reduced to tax-collecting and “a
generally accepted yet loose leadership role in lineage and clan affairs” (Schareika,
2010: 209). Wodaabee ,and other nomadic groups, reliance on the state is rare even
when protection of the cattle or access to public wells is needed. This is due to the
reluctance and disdain of the state towards nomads, and the mistrust on the uncertain
and arbitrary outcomes of state interventions. (Schareika, 2010: 209-210).
Nicholaus Schareika (2010: 215- 217) documents an episode of mediation by a
Lamiido and the elders of two Wodaabee families in conflict because of a wife
stealing accusation. Right from the beginning of their statement the accusing party
argued that pulaaku had been abandoned. This implied that the agreement that the
basic agreement had been broken and the doors were opened for the state laws
intervention. The consequences of this would result in the loss of autonomy of the
community, and economic fines that had to be paid with cattle. The speaker referred
to the loss of the track of the cattle – one of the two images to evoke the pulaaku– to
summarize the situation in the community.
The intervention of the other conflicting part alluded to the other image of the
pulaaku, the rope of the cattle, to present his view of the situation, arguing that the
track had not been lost, but the rope had thinned. In this way he turned the argument

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of the other part maintaining pulaaku as a valid framework, and at the same time he
touched the sensitive point of the inconvenience of community separation. In that
sense Schareika (2010: 216-217) posits,
the duty of the assembled Wodaabe was to retie the rope of pulaaku,
[which] emerges when humans master conflicts by sticking to the
personal virtue of pulaaku, which is self-control, reserve, and the
ability to endure duress instead of seeking confrontation.
At that point, the Lamiido called for the “shameful reserve” (Schareika, 2010:
217) as the practical expression of Pulaaku and as a way of resolving the conflict by
mutual agreement instead of retaliation or resorting to the law. His speech condenses
the core of the pulaaku as community and moral code (Schareika, 2010: 217):
Community of Fulbe [Pulaaku], wherever you hear the word of
pulaaku, does that mean that one seizes a person in order to give him
a dressing-down? When Bammoowo [from the Muuse] slapped your
son's face, Ardo Kaaďo [from the Jiijiiru], [and] you kept him away
from retaliating the blow, did not Bammoowo feel ashamed? Didn't
he do as one does when feeling ashamed? You see, this is pulaaku,
only this. When you hear "they mock at us, they do this or that
against us, let's take them to court," then there is not a grain of
pulaaku in that, or am I not telling the truth? When the bad talk
makes enemies of you, then give it up. This is pulaaku. You
understand?
To show reserve to the culprit provokes his embarrassment and enhances his
own previous abandonment of pulaaku. Moreover, it reaffirms the moral code as an
“alternative political order” (Schareika, 2010: 217) which maintains the autonomy
and self-control of the community away from the state authorities. For involving the
state would imply the reduction of property in the community (cattle), and would
define the frame for their future interactions.
Ostracism is the sanction for the lack of pulaaku; the culprit is not expelled
from the community but it is temporary excluded from social intercourse by not
speaking to him. The ceremony of reincorporation consists of asking for forgiveness

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to the elders, and offering millet and milk to the community. However, as in the case
accounted here, this resource does not work when the conflicting parts represent a big
number of the community. In this case, the mention of the separation represents a
first warning before adopting harsher measures in case of a recurrent abandon of
pulaaku. In light of the receding access to pastures the need for unity, not only within
Wodaabe communities but with other nomadic herders, turns pulaaku into a political
resistant resource in order to try to balance the weight of the state (Schareika, 2010:
220-222).
Another resource employed to relief tensions, mainly with members of other
ethnic group, are the joking relationships (Riesman, 1977:124), consisting in
bantering, cursing and teasing. Cousinage à plaisanterie is a practice promoted by
the Nigerien state, and celebrated as a cultural trait that fosters peaceful cohabitation
between the different ethnic groups of the country (Barké, 2008). This is related to
what Gomes (2012: 1069) calls “sly civility” to refer to the “form of civility which
conceals or evades the true feelings of a person to avoid reprisals, humiliation or
oppression.” The author posits that the unequal status may determine the use of this
strategy oriented to avoid a bigger conflict.
3. 4 The place where people sit down
The relation of the Fulani herders with the environment is based on values of
integration, respect and protection. Mamadou Dia (1975; quoted in Fall, 2010: 41)1
refers to it as a friendship relationship:

1

“La nature, loin de s’opposer à l’homme, lui assure sa vie, son efficacité, sa protection. Il suffit de ne
pas la blesser, de respecter les liens qui l’unissent à l’homme (…). Il n’est donc pas la question, dans le
cadre de cette mentalité, d’une lutte entre la nature et l’homme, mais d’une communion constante, et
tout l’activité de l’homme tend à maintenir cette harmonie dont la ruptura ne peut engendrer des
catastrophes. ” (my translation)

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“Nature, far from being the opposite of the human being, it assures
its life, efficacy and protection. It just requires not hurt it. (…).
Thereby, this relation does not consist of a struggle between humans
and nature, but a constant communion; all human activity tends to
maintain this harmony whose rupture can only engender
catastrophes. ”
This statement is in tune with Fulani oral tradition. After the creation, whose myth
was mentioned above, Gueno created Neddo, the human being, as a synthesis of all the
elements of the universe, both positive and negative, without bestowing him/her the
supremacy over the rest of the creation. The only difference between humans and the
rest is that Neddo was bestowed with a partial knowledge, not the totality of it, which
gave him the competence and the mission to act as a caretaker of the universe.
Therefore, the role of Neddo, was to protect and to manage nature (Amougou, 2007:
11).
The importance of a harmonic relation with each other and with nature is exemplified
in Fulani mythology by the tale of the country of Heli et Yoyo: an idyllic place created
by Gueno where harmony, happiness, life and abundance reigned, and where humans
were supposed to be the caretakers of nature. This contract between Gueno and Neddo
which allowed them to obtain from nature what was strictly necessary was broken when
the inhabitants of the country started to abuse of nature and to behave greedily to each
other. Njeddo Dewal, the sorcerer who brought sickness, poverty, natural catastrophes,
and death of animals, represents the disruption of the interdependence and natural
harmony caused by humans. The arrival of Bâ Wam’ndé, personifying the initial moral
virtues of humans, helped to reestablish the contract (Amougou, 2007:12-13). Thus, in
Fulani traditional thought the relation between humans and nature is of interdependence
and respect, and the knowledge of humans is at the service of a harmonious and
balanced relation with the environment.

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On a physical level, the conceptualization of the environment and the relation with it
is a core element of Fulani sense of identity.

Although expressed in seemingly

contradictory ways, their conceptualization of the environment is complex and
contextual. In the context of their relations with sedentary populations, Wodaabee
Fulani called themselves “people of the bush” outlining their social and economic links
with the environment and considering the town and the bush as oppositions, positioning
themselves as part of the bush (Loftsdottir, 2001: 281). However, within the context of
the bush and the animals, they see themselves as separated from nature, differentiating
between the non-socialized and socialized space, ladde (bush) and wuro respectively,
the latter translated as home (Loftsdottir, 2001), or community (Riesman, 1977).
Wuro, as it was stated earlier, is not merely a house, but a temporary assembly of
social and political mobile organizations joined by kinship, political and neighborhood
ties (Riesman, 1977: 30). From the perspective of wuro, Wodaabe place themselves as
a part of the bush, although differentiated from the rest of the surrounding bush. Wuro
is a place of safety and cooperation in contrast to ladde. There are several different
concepts of ladde according to level of intimate knowledge that people has of it. Ladde
wati is an overpopulated bush, with agricultural fields, no wild animals, and cut down
trees. In contrast, ladde hurram is a space without human population, wells or water
ponds (Loftsdottir, 2001: 285). This is considered unsafe and dangerous, and occupied
by ginnol, evil spirits, that stay away from wuro and normally appear when travelling
alone in the bush. Thus, ginnol functions as a cohesive element and outlines the
importance of social networking, since ginnol can affect wuro as a “moral reminder of
solidarity” (Loftsdottir, 2001: 292), when a wealthy herder does not engage in habana’i,
or cattle distribution practices.

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Thus, the more intimate the knowledge of ladde, the more secure it becomes. In that
sense, the cow, considered a semi-domesticated animal, is believed to be sensitive to
both the bush and the herder; therefore it plays the roles of mediators between ladde and
wuro, to turn the space into place (Riesman, 1977: 255).
When herders enter the bush to take care of the cow, new and different relationships
with nature are established.

Concerning land utilization, migrations, and resource

management, Fulani use the concept gari, underlining human settlements integrated in
the bush. Gari shares with wuro similar connotations of safety, coexistence, reciprocity
and cooperation. This is reinforced mainly during the dry season, when camps are
separated by bigger distances, settled around a pastureland with permanent wells, and
coexisting with other social groups increases, this “area of attachment” or gari, is
referred to by Fulani as “the place where people sit down” (Lofstsottir, 2001: 285).
What I want to outline from this account is not the connection of place with Fulani
identity, or their position towards a nature/society distinction, but the cultural
connections with place and the environment, which are embedded in their knowledge
and their practices, and has significant implications at different levels (Kockel, 2012;
Basso, 1996; Ingold, 2011).
For Keith Basso (1996: xiv), senses of place reach deep other cultural spheres since
they are an active part of “shared bodies of local knowledge”. Thereby gari, wuro and
ladde as deep involvements with social and the natural environment are practices that
construct knowledge out of the combination of the ecologic, the economic, the social
and the spiritual. These experiences apprehend the world by actively sensing a place
through dwelling, through “lived relationships” (Basso, 1996: 106) with and within the
place. Fulani knowledge suits what Ingold (2000: 25) calls sentient ecology:

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(…) the kind of knowledge people have of their environments (…). It
is knowledge not of a formal, authorized kind, transmissible in contexts
outside those of its practical application. On the contrary, it is based in
feeling, consisting in the skills, sensitivities and orientations that have
developed through long experience of conducting one’s life in a
particular environment.
Ingold (2011: 158-161) distinguishes between the genealogical model and the
storied model of knowledge transmission.

The former goes together with the

transmission of a conceptual and explicative knowledge that vertically places
elements on slots regardless of their context, relations, precedents or continuations,
since these are not necessary to know what things are. The latter departs from these
relations to identify and position the elements, “stories (…) draw together what
classifications split apart” (Ingold, 2011: 160), it involves a finer sensitivity to
perceive and respond to signs in the environment. Sentience ecology and the storied
model go hand in hand with what the author calls an “ontology of dwelling” (Ingold,
2000: 42), referred to in the previous chapter, a way of apprehending the world out
of engagement rather than building and representation.

Ingold (2011: 162)

concludes:
Thus knowing is relating the world around you, and the better you
know, the greater the clarity and depth of your perception. To tell, in
short, is not to represent the world but to trace a path through it that
others can follow.
“Wisdom sits in places places”, assert the Apache (Basso, 1996: 124). Similar
concerns to the concepts of wuro, ladde and gari as active relations to places of
belonging through dwelling and deep knowledge of them, are expressed, among others,
in the German speaking tradition by the controversial concepts Heimat and
Heimatkunde, which scholars (Kockel, 2012; Daum, 2007) call to revisit and reclaim.
Nineteenth century Heimatkunde was based on Volkskunde –a German discipline
focused on the study of people and traditions– and included on school curricula as the

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sensory and experiential study and appreciation of Heimat – “the place where we come
from” (Kockel, 2012: 59) –within a larger world, by moving from the familiar to the
unfamiliar (Kockel, 2012, 2010). Its ideological use by romantic regionalists first, and
the misappropriation by Nazis later, led to a vilification of the concept, and its
association with parochialism, territorialism and intolerance. Hence its consequent
replacement after WWII as a school subject first by Sachkunde (knowledge of things)
material oriented and with a cosmopolitan approach, and later by the more objectifying
and detached Umweltkunde, the study of the environment (Kockel, 2009).
Ullrich Kockel (2012: 57) draws on the work of philosopher Eduard Spranger to
propose a revision of Heimat that fosters a better understanding of the self and the other
by considering them all as a part of a common local household, which expands the
concept of Heimat to the place where we are from or towards. Hence, Heitmakunde is
defined as

the careful appreciation of the connectedness of human beings in all
their natural and spiritual life-relationships with a particular place on
earth, which is their native place or at least a place of permanent
dwelling (Kockel, 2012: 59).
Spranger (1952; in Kockel, 2012: 59-60) outlines the grounded sense of Heimat, and
the deep experiential connections of oneself with the elements of the place, human, nonhuman, past, present and future, needed to develop it. This is not necessarily created by
being born in a place, but by “living oneself into a place” (Kockel, 2010: 105), either of
birth or far away from it.
To the above stated criticism received by this position for its similitudes with Nazi
terminology and its emphasis on the local and the connectivity, it must be added that
ecological basis of it was considered as an eccentric obstacle to progress in post-war

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Germany (Daum, 2007; Kockel, 2012). Thus, departing from Spranger, Kockel argues
that a reestablishment of Heimat is needed, beyond

parochial, melancholic and

romanticized stances, since globalization and environmental crisis affect the material
and spiritual aspects of place, leading to is disappearance, turning Heimat into an
abstraction rather than an experience (Kockel, 2012; 62).
The author introduces a related German concept, Hiesige, “from-here-ness” (Kockel,
2012: 62), to distinguish it from being native. Hiesige is about the encompassing
encounter of the self and the other rather. Constructing Heimat leads to become Hiesig,
from here, a comprehensive, inclusive and ecologically grounded anchor which differs
from being native in that the latter does not necessarily entail “the recognition of
concrete cultural-ecological networks and their everyday actuality” (Kockel, 2009: 152)
of the experience of Heimat.

Therefore, being from here is not so much about

nationality, ethnicity or religion, but about being defined in active relation to a
particular place of dwelling which may even include movement” (Kockel, 2012: 66;
italics in the original). This movement from A to B, in the light of being from here,
becomes being now here, not understood as detachment and displacement, unconcerned
by the connectedness of the individual with the past left behind in A for a indeterminate
future in B, discarding both. It is not about “seeking out the next horizon, finding Eden
in some other locale and ultimately in glory above” (Kockel, 2010: 166).
Being now here is regarded as homecoming, a circular cyclical movement, which
“grounds the now deeply in the past and future; it is about at-tachment and replacement” (Kockel, 2012: 65; italics in the original). It is understood as turning the
world into Heimat by achieving “a very clear intuition of what it means to live with
integrity right where they are” (Kockel, 2010: 166). Thereby, Heimatkunde proposes a
different view of the world by “investing a particular world version with patterns of

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meaning generating authentic belonging” (Kockel, 2010: 166) that aspires to create a
sense of community which departures and goes beyond the individual.
Heimatkunde, is based on three main premises, (i) the world is an organic whole, our
knowledge of the world is also organic and interconnected, (iii) the human being is a
part “of these organic relationships of life and truth” (Kockel, 2012: 68). The author
(Kockel, 2012: 68) contends that connectedness has been widely discussed in and
outside academia, therefore, his ecological reading of Spranger puts the emphasis on the
engagement with truth and the sacred.

Truth, in German, Wahrheit, coming from

wahren, meaning to keep safe, to preserve, is hence understood “as a function of
ecological relationships” (Kockel, 2012: 68).
A third element I would like to bring into this discussion aimed at establishing
cultural homologies is the Aymara cosmology as expressed in the thought of
Argentinian philosopher and ethnographer Rodolfo Kusch.
Kusch’s work with Andean indigenous populations as well as with peasants, workers
and mestizo populations from rural areas of Bolivia and Argentina seeks not a
“scientific exhumation” of people’s thought, but to “ reinscribe and rescue” (Mignolo,
2010: xxxiv; italics in the original) a way of thinking, and to think from it, not about it.
His rejection of a scientific approach is understood as a de-colonizing act towards the
emancipation of being and knowing. This could not be accomplished if these people
had to be “authorized by Western epistemology as something to be studied” rather than
being considered as “a source, an energy, and a way of thinking” (Mignolo, 2010:
xxxiv). Therefore Kusch distances himself from disciplinary categories of thought and
social sciences descriptions that were shaped and gave shape to the imperial and
colonial world. His personal ethnographic method aims not to represent, translate or

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reinterpret indigenous thought, positioning them as objects to be ethnographically
explained, but to accompany this thought by attempting “to dwell on the questions,
paths and possibilities” (Lugones and Price, 2010: lxvii) of the Andean cosmos. The
author does not attempt to contribute to abstract knowledge either, since this knowledge
is at the same time a way of thinking, being, feeling, and living engaged with the
material world which shape their everyday practices (Mignolo, 2010; Lugones and
Price, 2010; Kusch, 2010).
An aspect I do not share with Kusch’s work is his attempt to present it as a radical
rupture with Western tradition by seeking for a differentiated thought rooted deeply in, a
silenced part of what he calls, América, posited as completely antagonist to a monolithic
West (Kusch, 2010: lxxiii). Although my intention is far away from denying the
subaltern position, the resistant character, and the emancipatory potential of indigenous
and Andean populations thought in relation to the imposition of Western epistemes –as
it was covered in the first chapter of the thesis–, Kusch’s epistemic de-linking approach,
in line with other Latin American authors –also mentioned in chapter one – may not be
in tune with the spirit of this thesis. Notwithstanding, Kusch’s (2010) explicit aim does
not impend that aspects of his work can be profitable for this chapter and used in a more
conducive to dialogue manner. For the aim of this thesis is to look for shared concerns,
commonalities, and legibilities, basically to try to gather together rather than to disjoint
silenced epistemologies, and these can be found in the West too, as in the case of
Heimatkunde.
For the topic that concerns this section, I am going to focus on a central aspect of
Kusch’s work, the notion of estar in opposition to ser as two “irreconcilable ways of
situating oneself in the world” (Lugones and Price, 2010: lv). Both Spanish verbs can
be translated in English as the verb to be. Ser comes from the Latin sedere, to be sitting

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down, and it is used to define and to attribute essences and fixed qualities, in a
subordinated relation to the subject, that set the basis to define it. Estar, from the Latin
stare, to stand up, does not convey inherent qualities of the subject, it informs about
place, duration, mood or purpose. It has a transitory and restless character that does not
change the subject.

Estar “points directly to the world” (Kusch, 2010: 159), the

conditions, circumstances or accidents in which the subject is immersed (Kusch, 2010:
159; Von Matushcka, 1994).
For Kusch (2010), Aymara verb utcatha characterizes indigenous sensibility, which is
closer to estar. Utcathata means estar, and also, and paradoxically, to be sitting down,
and to dwell. The root Uta meaning house is also associated to womb, shelter and
germination (Kusch, 2010: 5). It indicates passivity, understood as the lack of one
particular kind of activity: enterprise. It is a non-instrumental approach to the world,
rather than objectifying and controlling it as a separate external reality. “Estar (…)
situates one within the world, where one senses its volatility, its mutability, its
instability, its bearing fruit” (Lugones, 2010: lvi).
Instability is a key notion in Aymara conception of the world.

Kuty or vuelco

designates the possibility of a turn, “from the auspicious to the inauspicious” (Kusch,
2010: 44), which is always present, hence for the subject to estar bien (estar well)
he/she must be embedded in a community, plaza, nayru or amu, that is, a “place of
equilibrium in an unstable world” (Lugones, 2010: lvii).

This communal sense

balances and compensates a instability that cannot completely disappear. The link
subject-community-world is inseparable for Aymara.

Their conception of cosmos

oscillates between two extremes, growth and disintegration.

This alternation is

perceived by the individual by affectively sensing the “favorable or unfavorable tonality
(…) of this movement” (Kusch, 2010: 41), derived from the inseparability of the

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individual from the world, rather than from an external understanding of the world.
The relation of the person to the community and the world has to be dealt at an
individual level too. Therefore, uk’u, human interiority, “is an opening to affectivity”
(Lugones, 2010: lvii), the place to look for solutions to these unfavorable turns without
resorting to external interventions. Hence, Utcathata is dwelling among these cosmic
elements, some of which are hostile forces, in the search of stability. The response to
hostility, instead of action, lies in identification with the environment, with the habitat
of the here and now (pacha), with the communal (Lugones, 2010; Kusch, 2010). Mere
estar is a vegetal quality, it implies a way of installing oneself in life, an inner
movement that uproots from the ground and inserts the individual in a reality (Von
Matuschka, 1994: 142-143).
Thus the possibility of kuty, the overturn, is integrated in utcathata, hence its meaning
of seed and source. Ritual’s role is to germinate the seed of life by entering into
oneself, inhabiting and contemplating the world from there (Lugones, 2010: liv). The
Aymara cosmos, consists of two levels, the guauque or the visible, nameable, and
tactile, and the unnamable. Both levels are inseparable dimensions of the concrete
Estar, which, in a dialectic manner, results in a third one, guaque which is a “visible
presence of the divine, the tactile, physical plane of the sacred object” (Lugones, 2010:
liv). Utcathata is to inhabit at the intersection of the guauque, and at the same time,
inwardly accessing to the other levels through the knowledge of ritual that gives “the
community its possibility of pulling toward germination, life, metamorphosis”
(Lugones, 2010: lv). Estar places oneself at the intersection of the visual horizon of
things and a vertical line of mystery. From this balancing of the cosmos springs the
constant re-creation of community by ritual, and at the same time, the possibility of
estar bien through estar con (estar with), that is, through community and solidarity.

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This does not occur at the level of abstraction, but at the level of practices that
determine everyday life activities (Lugone, 2010; Kusch, 2010: 164).
Kusch (2010: 9- 16) accounts of an episode during a visit to a village, when some of
his students proposed an Aymara old man to install a hydraulic bump in order to better
irrigate the dry fields of the Andean plateau. The old man withdrew into himself and
became more silent and distant. His son, to relief the uncomfortableness of the silence,
reluctantly affirmed that they were already thinking about it. After that, the silence
continued and they left.

For Kusch, his students (and himself) represent the ser

understanding of the world. To look for the solution in the outside means to conceive
reality as populated by obejcts, etymologically from ob-jacio, to place in front (Kusch,
2010: 11).
For the old man, the pump had no meaning since he relied on his own resources and
rituals to balance the situation, rather than to force an external intervention in order to
“enter reality impetuously, (…) to foreground the will in his sense of life” (Kusch,
2010: 12). This reality is conceived not as composed by fixed objects, but by intense
movements, which need to be affectively sensed in order to respond to “the auspicious
or ominous sign of each and every movement” (Kusch, 2010:11). This is regarded as
ignorance and passivity from the perspective of the city dweller and their understanding
of life based on ser alguien (to be someone) characterized by modifying an external
reality based on the logic of causes and effects. Hence, Kusch (2010) reflects on the
sense of alienation and dispossession of the city dweller in América in its rejection of
the logic of the mere estar, since for the author, to be able to ser it is first necessary to
estar, to dwell, to be rooted in a environment, to inhabit with others.

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The aim of this section was to present neglected forms knowledge and existing with
similar concerns as a step for a further search of commonalities and differences that
allow to creatively work together against these common threats. From the three ontoepistemologies presented, the focus has been put on the relations of the individual and
the community with the environment, and the importance of the connection with place,
rather than space, and the multiple relationships that from there emerge, in order to
situate oneself in the world. Martínez Guzmán (2005: 38) outlines the importance of
place in contrast to the abstract and homogenizing space, since the former allows
empowerment and recognition of the different identities and the implications derived
from them. The three cases covered enhance the deep knowledge of the environment
and the sense of belonging as embedded with different aspects of life, since it pervades
personal economic, spiritual, and ecological relations.

This knowledge is not

instrumental, classificatory and objectifying, but experiential, sensitive and affective;
they enhance the role of the sacred through bodily and material spirituality that
reconnects with nature. As Kusch and Kockel in this section, other authors (Williams,
Roberts, and McIntosh, 2012) warn against the sense of alienation, dispossession and
dislocation of the contemporary human condition amidst ecological and economic
current threats.
Without ignoring the social, political, economic and environmental contextual factors
that determine these conceptions and practices, to draw practical lessons from them it
would be more appropriate to look at the ideals and values and values that sustain them
(Gomes, 2012: 1070).
A main difference between these perspectives is the role of the individual in forming
a community. For Heimatkunde it is the individual who makes the community –
although distinguishing between individuality and individualism–, in the case of Fulani

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and Aymara is the other way round. In these two cases, the role of the unknown, ladde
for Fulani, and the possibility of kuty for Aymara, and their association with insecurity
play a different role than the concept of Fremde in contrast to Heimat. For Fulani and
Aymara, the unknown and the accident are an integral part of a symbiotic relation with
the environment, and it is this deep sensitive knowledge and the practices derived from
it that contribute to reduce unsafety and imbalance, although acknowledging the
impossibility of a complete overcome.
From a more anthropocentric stance, Martínez Guzmán (2005: 18) reflects on the
need to recognize the fragility, humility and earthly nature of the human being in
opposition to the self-sufficiency of Western approaches to life. For the author, from
the awareness of the fragility of human relations, understood as “the difficulty to foresee
the result of what we do to one another” (Martínez Guzmán, 2005: 28), can spring
cooperation and reciprocity which leads into politics rather than into violence.
Conclusion
The aim of this chapter was to present several aspects of Fulani nomadic
herders knowledge and conceptions of existence in relation with the environment.
These show the importance of the cattle, not only as an economic resource, but also
reveal an affective relation with it. The cow shapes and participates actively or
symbolically different social practices. It is embedded in their moral code, social
organization, ritual practices and in their sensitive and ecological understanding of
the environment. In their oral texts this is conceived as something to be respected
and preserved, which is reflected in respectful and efficient resource management
practices.

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Despite the mobility of Fulani herders lifestyle, the sense of belonging to the
land is established through rituals, sensitive knowledge of it, and the intermediary
role of the cattle who contributes to turn the space, which reflects the unknown, the
unsafe, the fragility of human condition, into a place of cohabitation, cooperation
with ecologically sensitive attitude towards it.
Similar concerns regarding the sense of belonging, the importance of place, and
a deep sensuous knowledge of the environment are present in other traditions, as it
has been shown in this chapter with the comparative examples of Aymara cosmology
from Rodolfo Kusch’s work, and in the German Heimatkunde. These concerns are
neither alien to peace studies as it is revealed in some aspects of the work of Martínez
Guzmán (2005) which enhance the importance of place, the need to recognize
fragility, and in the ecological dimension of his peace philosophy which departs from
an earthly understanding of human beings.
The parallelism that derives from these epistemological homologies opens the
door for further understandings of traditions whose beliefs, values and practices
creatively coexist, with the tensions that it implies, with the alienating, individualist,
and the linear logic of growth of development and neoliberal epistemes. It is through
these resistant and neglected practices and values that lessons can be drawn in the
need to face common threats.

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General Conclusions
“Nada más hago
que escucharte y
atender. Estoy
preparado para
no sé qué.”
(Antonio Rigo, 2014)
This research departed from two main premises. On one side, from the spirit of
the UNESCO Chair of Philosophy for Peace in its commitment to relieve the
suffering in the between humans and with nature, and, on the other side, from De
Sousa Santos’ (2007b) tenet that there is no social justice without cognitive justice.
In other words, this thesis departed from the premise that unequal epistemic
relations, namely the hegemonic position of modern science, undergird economic,
social, political and ecologic relations between humans and with nature, discarding
certain groups of people from experiencing the world on their own terms.
Furthermore, the consequent impoverishment of the diversity of conceptions,
knowledges and practices by dominant narratives of modernity has deprived the
world from the creative responses through which these groups of people face
economic, social and ecologic threats that, without ignoring contextual, specific
differences and privilege positions, are shared by humanity.
Whence, the general objective of this thesis was to inquire on the relation of
peace studies with other forms of producing knowledge. Therefore three specific
objectives were established:
1) To analyze how epistemological and ontological diversity has been dealt in
peace Studies.

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2) To situate, problematize and promote the debate on the unequal relations
between different forms of knowledge within the frame of the UNESCO Chair
of Philosophy for Peace and peace studies in general.
3) To explore how peace studies can engage in equal dialogues with other
understandings of peace beyond the dominant scientific paradigm
To achieve these main objectives, I organized this work in three chapters which
I proceed to summarize.
The first chapter, which served as a theoretical framework, explored the
processes that conduced to the reification of modern scientific rationality. The first
section presented modern Western rationality as departing from the contributions of
Descartes, Newton, Hobbes and Bacon. Following what Apfel-Marglin (1996) called
“the ontological cleft”, it was argued that the work of these authors led to othering of
nature as a step before the t othering of humans and cultures during colonialism and
imperialism. Cartesian distinctions of body and mind, reason and matter was
expressed mathematically by Newton mechanistic formulation of the universe,
together with Bacon’s methodological proposal set the foundations for the detached,
value-free and rigorous model of natural sciences, which in its turn, was followed by
social sciences.
In the second section I contended, following post-colonial scholars such as
Enrique Dussel (2000), that this dominant Eurocentered narrative of modernity
should not be delinked from the economic, political and military processes and events
of colonialism. Therefore, the rupture of modernity through reason and rationality had
its counterpoint in the colonies by means of violence. Thus it is through irrationality
and violence that a constructed and Europe situated itself in a centered explicative

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position and scientific reason sustained its claims for universality. The modern
dichotomies that separated subject and object, mind and body, man from the rest,
what Santiago Castro-Gomes (Mignolo, 2009: 1) called “the hubris of the zeropoint”, were narrowed down to separate hierarchically the European, white male from
the rest.
Hence, from the epistemological and ontological superiority of the white male
emerged the figure of the other, the savage, who had to be liberated by means of
civilization, evangelization, modernization, and now development. Thereof, I drew
on the terms worlding and epistemic violence from Gayatri Spivak (1988) to refer to
the construction of the other by processes through which European morals, religion,
time, knowledge, history and institutions became the reference and the authority, and
were inscribed onto a world conceived as an empty space.
In disagreement with certain scholars (Nandy, 1998; Shiva, 1998; Castro-Gómez;
2000) that enhance the inherent violence of modern science. I relied on other thinkers
(Santos, 2007c; Mudimbe, 1998; Stoler, 2008; Grovogui, 2006) who contend that it
was in conjunction with the dominant ideology of the society that scientific
disciplines like history, anthropology, biology or linguistics – sheltered behind the
supposedly detached, rigorous and value-free approach–, set the basis for the colonial
and imperialist projects. The consequence of this was the reordering, reshaping and
reinforcement of previous constructions representation of other cultures, assigning
them their place in civilization.
If the second section covered the “conditions of possibility” (Mudimbe, 1988)
that led to the reification of modern scientific rationality, the next section dealt with
the reconstructive attempts to subvert this unequal relation. I focused on two authors,

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namely Walter Mignolo, and De Sousa Santos. Mignolo (2003, 2009), departs from
the coloniality of power of Anibal Quijano (2000) to propose an epistemic rupture,
de-linking from Western knowledge. In that sense I argued, relying on Santos (2007a)
and McLennam (2013), that his proposal was based on geographic determinism,
moreover the rupturist character was in itself a modern deflection.
Santos (2007a; 2007b; 2010) argues that colonial arrogance has not only
imposed science as the valid form of knowledge with the consequent impoverishment
of the lives of the colonized, but it has also impeded the West to learn from other
traditions. The author proposes to de-monumentalize modern science and critical
theory by outlining its exhaustion and its loss of contact with reality. In a few
sentences, he proposes to identify forms of knowledge and experiencing reality that
have been silenced, to include modern science in a broader context as a part of a nonhierarchical ecology of knowledges, and to engage in dialogic translations – where
the West does not set the premises and the terms of the discussion– between resistant
forms of knowledge that share similar concerns.
In the last section of this chapter I finally attempted to situate the UNESCO
Chair of Philosophy for Peace within the debate. Martínez Guzmán (2001) talks about
peace in plural. In his epistemological shift, the author proposes a revision of the
epistemological statute of the discipline not by taking modern science as the
reference,

but, “on the contrary, (…) [by] question[ing] the capacities or

competences that we human beings have in order to be able to affirm that we have
competencies or capabilities to make peace” (Martínez Guzmán, 2009: 39). The
proposed paradigm consists of fifteen tenets which mainly deal with the inner limits
of science. The most relevant for this thesis is his position towards including “the

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outlook of the "people from the South” (Martínez Guzmán, 2009: 34), and his
commitment to reconstruct vernacular knowledges.
Regarding interculturality, the author (Martínez Guzmán, 2009) warns against
the risk of assimilation of human diversity by dominant Western assumptions and
values, and calls for an intercultural perspective –beyond the mere acknowledgment
of plurality– which can enrich and put into question our assumptions. To that effect,
Martínez Guzmán contends that a dialogic approach is needed that allows us to be
critical with ourselves and learn from others.
The second chapter took as a reference Martínez Guzmán’s above-mentioned
considerations, to analyze four case studies of how the intercultural approach has
been dealt in

peace studies. To this effect, the concept “categorical violence”

employed by James C. Scott (1998) turned to be a useful tool. Scott analyzes the
simplification processes by which the modern state facilitate its functions by making
a complex reality legible, and thereby measure, categorize, compare, manipulate and
remake reality. As the author indicates, this could also be applied to certain
reductionist approaches of modern science. To that, it was added the theoretical
framework established in the first chapter, and the contributions of scholars like
Edward Said (1978), Vandana Shiva (1988) and anthropologists such as Eduardo
Viveiros de Castro (2010), Tim Ingold (2000) and Alberto Gomes (2012).
The first section covered the treatment of interculturality in two Wolfgang
Dietrich (2012, 2013) works. From “Interpretations of Peace in History and Culture”
(2012), the focus was put on the author’s five categories of peace which served him
to classify the different understanding of peace throughout time and cultures and his
transrational peaces approach. The transrational proposal draws on the four previous

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categories in order to put forward a complete twisting of modern and postmodern
understandings of peace by incorporating aspects from the energetic and moral
categories of peace. I contended that in the whole theoretical framework, and
concretely in the concept of transrationality, a Eurocentric stance pervades. This
concept takes the part for the whole by assuming the existence of a single rationality,
which is Western. This does not differ from the colonial logic. Whereas, derived from
the reductionist approach that assimilates other rationalities into peace, these are
narrowed down to the energetic, moral, spiritual, holistic, organic or relational, which
are only aspects of them.
From the work “Elicitive conflict Transformation and the Transrational Shift in
Peace Politics” (Dietrich, 2013), I focused my analysis in the categorization of
shamanism as a breath-oriented method for elicitive conflict transformation.
Following Viveiros de Castro (2010), I have argued that, besides the peace and the
healing (not only understood as Western medicine) shamanic practices, the shaman
carries out different functions in the society which functions are linked to specific
epistemological and ontological approaches. Therefore to associate shamanism as
elicitive conflict transformation by only looking at it from a peace angle, veils the
shaman’s “ontological self-determination”. Moreover, a romanticized view of the
shaman was detected by Dietrich’s drawing on core-shamanism, an adaptation of
shamanic practices to a Western audience, widely criticized by anthropologists
(Wallis, 2003) for misappropriation and romaticization of indigenous knowledges. I
concluded that the passive portrayal of interculturality in both works analyzed here
obeys to what Donna Haraway (1989; as quoted in Lohman, 1993) called a
“cannibalistic logic” that uses other cultures for Western purposes.

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The second section covered the hermeneutic work of Johan Galtung (1981,
1985, 1996) on the different concepts of peace across different civilizations.
Previously, the author’s epistemological proposal for peace studies was briefly
presented. In contrast to his own epistemological formulation, Galtung positioned
himself as an external observer in order to establish a taxonomic classification of
cultures on the basis of isolating certain essential defining features of these cultures
and ignoring others. This is reflected by the division he establishes of the world
according to their understanding of peace, the occident and the orient. Following
Edward Said I contend that this classification, that juxtaposes religions, periods of
time, currents of thought, states and empires, borders essentialism. I put forward,
sustained by the arguments of Peter Lawler (1995) and Edward Said (1978), that
Galtung conveyed a simplified, objectified, and sometimes Orientalist, view of
cultures through their reduction to their concepts of peace.
Finally his reading of peace in Buddhism (Galtung, 1985b, 1996) is briefly
analyzed. He equates Buddhist concepts such as dukkha and sukha to his positive and
negative peace concepts, and the concept of Nirvana to entropy, and therefore to
peace. According to ancient Indian philosophers Chandrakirti and Nagarjuna, quoted
in (Yadav, 1977), defining Nirvana betrays the logic of the concept itself which
entails a rejection of the is/is-not type of thinking. Following Ramachandra Guha
(1989: 94), I argued that coupling peace studies with ancient Eastern traditions might
respond to the attempt to universalize and to “construct an authentic lineage” of the
discipline.
The third section covered the work of Douglas P. Fry (2005, 2007, 2013) which
revolves around indigenous forms of peace, and the inherently peaceful nature of the
human being. After having situated the author’s work methodologically and

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epistemologically in the positivist tradition, I focused on his ethnographic research on
peacebuilding in La Paz, a Zapotec community. Following James Scott (1998) I
contended that the author makes Zapotec complex reality legible by isolating a series
of categories which, in his opinion, lead to the study of peace in that community. This
approach, for Vandana Shiva (1988), implies a threefold exclusion: epistemological,
ontological and sociological. Moreover, sustained by the work of anthropologists
Ingold (2000) and Viveiros de Castro (2010), I posited that the authors’ psychological
reading of Zapotec beliefs on witchcraft and illnesses such as susto and bilis,
separating interior mental states from external behaviors, responds to his own
ontological and epistemological certainties and assumptions rather than to Zapotec
experience of the world. These are positioned as a “theoretical patient” (Viveiros de
Castro, 2010: 70) rather than as agents;

thereby reducing their cosmology and

“ontological self-determination” (Viveiros de Castro, 2010: 18).
Finally I proceeded to analyze Fry’s (2013) study of nomadic forager societies,
which is carried out in a similar vein as the Zapotec. The author expresses his interest
on these groups since they allow “to draw inferences about the past” (Fry, 2013: 9)
concerning the peaceful nature of human being. My main argument in that sense is
based on what Johannes Fabian (1983) called “the denial of coevalness”, by which
the scientific imposes his own linear and evolutionist view of Time and treats the
object of study as a contemporary relic.
The last section covered the work of the organization Peaceful Societies and the
online

Encyclopedia

of

Peaceful

Societies,

available

at

the

website

www.peacefulsocieties.org. Before delving into the study case I presented the
methodological requirements and the criteria of inclusion in order for a society to be
labelled as peaceful. I argued that both, the criteria of inclusion and the concept of

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peaceful societies itself, are exclusionary. The former for it reasserts the hegemonic
position of science as the valid form of knowledge. My position concerning the latter
was that, following Guha (1989) and Said (1978), the concept of peaceful societies is
a positivist category that creates a romanticized and positive ‘Other’ by means of the
abstraction of certain features that reveal a peaceful essence.
Thereon, I analyzed one entry of the encyclopedia, namely the ethnographic
account on the Semai people from Malaysia which is carried out following an
ethnographic approach, in a similar vein as Douglas Fry work. This society is
presented as frozen, static, without historical changes, political struggles or
resistances derived from their interaction with modernity and the state. According to
Renato Rosaldo (1993) this ethnographic paradigm where the anthropologist is a
detached observer that extracts raw material to be processed later has already been
overcome by anthropology. I relied on Alberto Gomes (2012: 1062) work on Semai
knowledge. The author posits that for the Semai peace is not conceptualized as a
separate category, but “intertwined and interconnected” with equality and
sustainability ideals and practices. The author accounts that these practices and beliefs
are being displaced by the increasing contact with capitalism, modernity,
commodification, privatization and over-exploitation of their resources.
As a departing tenet for the next chapter I concluded this section with Santos
(2007b)

distinction

between

knowledge-as-regulation

and

knowledge-as-

emancipation. The former conceives knowledge as order and ignorance as disorder,
whereas the latter conceives knowledge as solidarity and ignorance as colonialism.
From the four study cases, the main conclusions can be summarized thusly:

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

These examples show the unequal relation between different forms of
knowledge. A narrow, positivist view of science pervades, where the
scientist is the hegemonic subject who orders, labels, categorizes, defines the
terms of the conversation, and imposes his views on other realities.
Therefore, cultural recognition does not go hand in hand with
epistemological recognition.



These examples reflect the rigidity of orthopedic thinking, that is, when
Western concerns and conceptual tools are used to analyze other cultures
(Santos, 2009).



Knowledge-as-order prevails over knowledge-as-emancipation.



The proposed intercultural dialogue is turned into a dialogue among peace
researchers.



Peace, singular or plural, is conceived as a universal concept to which other
cultures will be brought into by assimilation or appropriation.



There is a twofold example of “metonymic reason” (Santos, 2004), the type
of reason that takes the part for the whole, (i) to take science as the only
valid form of knowledge, (ii) to conceive peace as a universal category that
can be isolated and objectified.



Interculturality is used as raw material to be extracted for the production of
theory. This denies other cultures agency and reason, positioning them as
theoretical patients (Guha, 1989; Chakrabarty, 2000; Viveiros de Castro,
2010).



The consequence of this is the exclusion and devaluation of other forms of
knowledges, silencing and depriving other cultures from the way they
experience the world.

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

Different knowledges, practices and ways of being in the world rise different
questions and propose different and unexpected answers. It is through these
unexpected dialogues that our own assumptions and certainties can be
challenged, so that it can be learnt from others.



I retake certain scholars (Santos, 2010, 2007b, 2007c; McIntosh, 2012;
Pannikar, 1999) assertion that tools and spaces for dialogue need to be
opened up re-integrating science as a part of a broader context of
knowledges.

The last chapter proposed to change the mood and to engage in what certain
scholars have called “a pedagogy of hope” (McIntosh et al., 2012). It departs from
what Santos (2010) called “sociology of absences, a look at forms of knowledge,
practices, experiences, and beliefs that have been neglected and made look as nonexistent. It is not a romanticized recovery of lost practices and idyllic lifestyles, but a
look at the knowledge and practices of people who suffer. Therefore, I endeavored to
explore certain aspects of Fulani people, concretely Wodaabe Fulani, cosmology,
knowledge, beliefs, values and practices. To that effect, I have relied on
anthropological and linguistic accounts, and on texts from Fulani oral tradition,
initiatory tales and mythologies.
Wodaabe Fulani inhabit the Southeastern regions of Niger, a Sahelian region
characterized for low rain rates, inconsistent from year to year, a semi-arid soil, and
spare vegetation. They are mainly nomadic herders although during severe droughts
certain groups combine shepherding with agricultural activities, whereas others can
be found in big cities as migrant workers. During the rainy season, from May to June,
migrations are intensified, becoming more frequent but covering short distances,
therefore communities stay closer. During the dry season, long distance migrations
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take place to normally settle around a well next to agricultural populations. At that
time, communities are more dispersed and interactions with sedentary social groups
increase, having a significant economic component.
The second section of this chapter presented some aspects of Fulani cosmology
related to the two main elements of their interwoven economic, social, political and
religious life, the cow and the milk. Besides providing milk, their main source of
income and nourishment, the relation with the cow is a based on reason as it is on
emotion. Human qualities are attributed to the cow. It implies a relation with the past
and the bond to the land through rituals, it is a part of cohesive distributive practices
in the community, and is a central element of their moral code. Similarly, milk
occupies a central place in Fulani society, as expressed in their mythology and
practices. Fulani knowledge and social organization revolve around obtaining,
processing and commercializing milk.
In this section I focused on the relations of nomadic herders with the state and
development agencies. Certain scholars (Pouillo, 1990) argument that nomadic
people employ an isolation strategy that leads to stagnant and retarded economies
(Khazanov, 2001). However, following a political ecology approach (Robbins, 2012),
rather this isolation could be considered as marginalization, which is derived from
unequal power relations rather than from the absence of contact. Cooperative
relations are established with neighboring populations as well as within the
community (Loftsdottir, 2001). I accounted how several state and development
projects to settle Fulani herders and to engage them in the intensive exploitation for
meat market have found unexpected responses and resistances from Fulani part, not
because of an obstinate traditionalism, but because their diverse strategies for
resource management have revealed to suit better to the context (Pouillon, 1990).

126

The third section covered Fulani herders social organization and focused on
their moral code, pulaaku, which is used to avoid conflict, as a tool for conflict
resolution, and it has a political character too since it is employed as a cohesive tool
to avoid the intervention of authorizes which, in the context of the tensions with the
state, would affect the community negatively, in economic terms and the level of
autonomy (Schareika, 2010).
The last section focused upon how Wodaabe Fulani relations with the
environment, connection with the land, and their conceptualization of place are
embedded in their everyday activities. In Fulani oral tradition it is enhanced the
importance of an harmonious and respectful relation with the environment. The
human being as a part of nature does not occupy a dominant position but plays the
role of caretaker. To that effect the human being has been bestowed with a partial
knowledge, not the totality (Amogou, 2007). As it has been argued throughout this
chapter, the cattle, through their participation in rituals and by their own qualities,
play an intermediary role in many aspects of Fulani life, such as the relations with the
past, with birth and death, and with the land. In that sense, they act as a mediators
between what is considered the unknown and the unsafe, laddu, and gari, “the place
where people sit” (Loftsdottird, 2001) that not consist in a stop-over of a nomadic
life, but places grounded on multiple relations, that spring from an intimate, sentient
knowledge, which is linked to a way of being in the world (Ingold, 2011). Thereon, I
established a comparison with other neglected tradition, namely the German
Heimatkunde and Aymara cosmology that share similar concerns concerning the
intimacy of the connection to the land.
I drew on ethnologists Ullrich Kockel (2012, 2010) call for a revision and the
reestablishment of Heimatkunde, the deep knowledge of a place “by living oneself

127

into it”, a concept that once was part of the school curricula, to be later vilified after
being appropriated and misused by regionalists and the Nazis. Kockel proposes a
political and ecological reconceptualization of Heimat, the place where we come from
or towards, and Hiesige, from-here-ness, out of an inclusive ecological
understanding, beyond ethnicity, nationality or religion.
Aymara cosmology was brought into this chapter through the work of
Argentinian philosopher and ethnographer Rodolfo Kusch (2010). Although in the
core of the author’s work lies an epistemological de-linking approach, in tune with
other Latin American post-colonial scholars discussed in the first chapter such as
Walter Mignolo, I contended that some aspects of his work can be used to establish
dialogic relations rather than absolute ruptures. The author compares the two Spanish
verbs ser and estar, to contrast between the Latin American city dweller and the
indigenous way of situating oneself in the world. For the author the verb estar is
closer to Aymara sensitivity represented by the verb utchata, associated with home,
womb, germination and shelter. This implies a non-instrumental approach to the
world, not conceived as an external reality, but a sensitive understanding of the it that
includes the constant instability (kuty) of the here and now of existence (pacha), and
responds to it inwardly, at an individual and a communal level, rather than by
imposing oneself over the external reality.
Finally I related these concerns to peace studies as expressed by Martínez
Guzmán (2001, 2009) epistemological turn. From his relational understanding of
peace, he emphasizes the importance of place in contrast to the abstract, empty and
homogenizing space, for the intersection of human relations allows to recognize the
multiplicity of identities. Furthermore, the author stresses the earthly, fragile
condition of the human being as an integral part of nature. Guzmán outlines the

128

central role of the relationships between humans and with nature, rather than between
subjects and objects.
To conclude this chapter, I do not contend that Fulani practices, Aymara or
Heimatkunde conceptions can be transposed from one context to another. However,
as Gomes (2012) states, if we look at the level of values, these challenge dominant
economic and ecologic narratives. These forms of being in the world, of connecting
to the land, of relating to the mode of production, of sensing the fragility of the
human condition and its environment, outline a sense of togetherness that contrasts
with the values of competition and alienation in which we are imbued.
Concerning unequal epistemic relations, and following Santos (2011) following
Santos (2010) line, in contrast to the positivist attitude that freezes the other, the fact
of recognizing that these absent experiences produce knowledge, a knowledge that
allows them to actively inquire back the dominant position, a knowledge that can
gather these experiences together around similar, shared concerns, has already
implications for the displacement of these and other imbalanced relations.
Limitations
This study presents certain limitations. The four case analyzed in the second
chapter may not be a large enough sample to represent the situation of the discipline
concerning interculturality. Although I tried to reflect the interdisciplinary character
of peace studies, an analysis of interculturality from the contributions of religion
studies could have been included. Time constraints impeded to carry out a content
analysis of peace journals. By analyzing the presence and absence of non-Western
forms of peace, and their epistemological treatment, in current peace research, a

129

better view would have been obtained of the dominant concepts of peace and
epistemological currents of the discipline.
The chapter on Wodaabe Fulani was focused on nomadic herders, who
constitute a vast majority of the group, mentioning only other economic strategies
that they employ, among them, urban migration. To broaden the research by means of
an intersectional approach that provides more and deeper accounts of urban migrants’
perspectives would have shed light on other realities.
Concluding Remarks
In the introduction, I quoted McIntosh’s (2012) assertion that indigenous
knowledge challenge the compartmentalized assumptions and paradigms of academic
knowledge. However, the challenge is twofold. On one side, it challenges our
epistemological and ontological imagination, on the other side, and closely related to
it, there is a political challenge, a call for recognition as producers of valid
knowledge, an assertion for presence as a part of the conversation, rather than apart
from it (Praeg, 2014).
As it has been discussed, Western traditions have concealed their ethnospecificity behind claims for objectivity, neutrality, detachment, rigor and
universality, values which have been contested by several epistemological revisions
proposed within peace studies (Martínez Guzmán, 2001; Galtung, 1996).
The epistemological debate, albeit rich and enriching, has mostly revolved
around the different forms of doing science. This may definitely have consequences
in the relation of the discipline with other forms of producing knowledge, but in my
opinion, it demands another debate. The work of Martínez Guzmán in that sense,
expressing the commitment with vernacular knowledges, the importance of
130

interculturality, the need for dialogue in order to learn from others so that we can put
into question our assumptions, and warning against assimilation may represent a
starting point.
The four case studies analyzed, although a small sample, may indicate that
more steps may be needed so that the intercultural dialogue can happen. If dialogue is
based on listening, as much as on talking, a first step would be to rethink the frame,
the terms of the dialogue, so that the parts can express themselves on their own terms.
In those four cases, what defined the terms of the conversation was peace,
assumed as the a priori common language. As Praeg (2014: 13), observes,
historically marginalized traditions have had no choice but to depart from the
recognition of their thought as ethno-specific, “which is the very condition, the sine
qua non, upon which a conversation between equals who are not yet equals must be
premised.”
If, as it was contended, to ask what peace is, is a Western question, with all that
it involves and conceals, and if different experiences raise different questions and
different answers, the first step would imply to look for new questions and to listen to
different and unexpected answers. How to look for new questions may involve to
engage in a critical and introspective analysis that leads to overcome the cultural
topoi (Panikkar, 1999:27), the dominant and naturalized premises of the discipline,
which impend from listening and hearing what the others are saying.
. Further research
Since dialogue is a never-ending practice and process, this thesis represents a
mere foundation from which it can be departed in different directions:

131

•

Considering the limitations of this study, a more in-depth analysis of

interculturality in peace studies, with a larger sample and a content analysis could be
carried out. In it, some development texts and theoretical proposals could be included.
As it was stated in the limitations, an intersectional approach that focuses on Fulani
migrant workers community, alongside with a deeper reading of oral tradition and
literature in general.
•

Similar explorations of human diversity could be carried out inquiring on

concepts like Asabyyah, and worldviews such as Ubuntu, or Sumak Kawasay, that
not only have ontological and ethical, but also have politicallly emancipatory
implications.
•

In order to move from theory to practice, it can be interesting to analyze

how might the university, as the hegemonic institution of knowledge, re-think its
role in subverting asymmetrical epistemic relations, beyond individual research,
to actively promote intercultural dialogues, translations, and spaces of
encounters. To that effect, the Popular University of Social Movements in Brazil
could be a starting point of the analysis.

132

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