Latin American Decolonial Social Studies of Scientific Knowledge: Alliances and Tensions

Author(s): Sandra Harding

Source: Science, Technology, & Human Values , November 2016, Vol. 41, No. 6, Special
Issue: Resisting Power, Retooling Justice: Promises of Feminist Postcolonial
Technosciences (November 2016), pp. 1063-1087
Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.

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Article

Science, Technology, & Human Values

2016, Vol. 41(6) 1063-1087
© The Author(s) 2016
Latin American Reprints and permission:
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Decolonial Social DOI: ! 0.1177/0162243916656465
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Studies of Scientific i>SAGE

Knowledge: Alliances
and Tensions

Sandra Harding

Abstract
A distinctive form of anticolonial analysis has been emerging from Latin
America (LA) in recent decades. This decolonial theory argues that
important new insights about modernity, its politics, and epistemology
become visible if one starts off thinking about them from the experiences of
those colonized by the Spanish and Portuguese in the Americas. For the
decolonial theorists, European colonialism in the Americas, on the one
hand, and modernity and capitalism (and their sciences) in Europe, on the
other hand, coproduced and coconstituted each other. The effects of that
history persist today. Starting thought from these LA histories and current
realities enables envisioning new resources for social transformations.
These decolonial insights seem to receive only a passing recognition in the
Latin American social studies of science and technology projects that have
begun cosponsoring events and publications with northern equivalents. My
focus will be primarily on the decolonial theory and on just two of its

'University of California-Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Corresponding Author:
Sandra Harding, University of California-Los Angeles, Moore Hall 2123, 405 Hilgard Avenue,
Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA.
Email: sharding@gseis.uda.edu

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1064 Science, Technology, & Human Values 41(6)

themes. One is the critical resources it offers for creating m

and progressive northern philosophies and histories of scienc
social studies of science. The second is insights from Latin Am
inists that carry different impacts in the context of the decolo

Keywords
cultures and ethnicities, epistemology, ethics

Introduction: Histories of Coproduction Meth

A fundamental directive in the methodology of the social stu
tific knowledge (SSSK) has been to examine how sciences an
eties coproduce and coconstitute each other at particular times
Shapin and Schaffer (1985) articulated it as such in a historical
Sheila Jasanoff (2005) showed how it provided a way to under
temporary relations between varying standards for objective
national political cultures.
However, this principle had earlier emerged as a guide for res
1960's social justice movements that appeared around the glob
had been developed in order to inform research that was for
cally, politically, and socially vulnerable groups represented b
ments. In that context, it was not intended as a value- and in
description and analysis of relations between sciences and the
Rather, it was a guide to an activist research methodology that
to provide the more objective information and analyses that s
movements needed to change both society and its sciences. It
participatory action research that had been designed initially t
to poor people's interests. Other social justice movements took
civil rights movement examined how racist societies will tend
racist sciences that in tum legitimate and provide resources f
sexist societies. Womens' movements examined how sexist societies will
tend to produce sexist sciences that in tum legitimate and provide resources
for sexist societies. Such projects enabled vulnerable groups to design
alternative research projects that provided the information necessary to
advance their own values and interests instead of only those of elites. Often
these were intended to compel more reliable and socially progressive con
ceptual and methodological frameworks in the research disciplines (Ladner
1973; Harding 1987). So what became a fundamental SSSK principle

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 Harding 1065

already had a care

guard" (vs. "avant
the Portuguese po
(2004).
The earlier, social justice intention of this principle has appeared as a
central theme in Latin American SSSK. Here, attention will be on its epis
temological and ontological implications as, these appear in two additional
Latin American SSSK themes. One of these themes is the rejection of the
dissemination model not only of the travels of "European" scientific and
technological innovation but also of SSSK itself. For example, the editors of
a recent special issue of Science, Technology, & Human Values entitle the
issue "Voices from Within and Outside the South—Defying STS Epis
temologies, Boundaries, and Theories" (Rajao, Duque, and De' 2014). That
is, they refuse to be constrained by the northern science and technology
studies (STS) conceptual frameworks. The other theme delineates the dif
ferences in its "decolonial" concerns—including concerns about relations
between colonialism and modernity's European sciences and technolo
gies—from those that have been articulated in the postcolonial literature
(Mignolo and Escobar 2010; Morana, Dussel, and Jauregui 2008). Feminist
analyses have produced distinctive contributions both to the decolonial
analyses and to global feminisms. These distinctive foci have enabled the
decolonial theorists to become active participants in advancing progressive
directions in international SSSK.2
Latin American decolonial theory has been shaped by liberation theol
ogy, dependency theory, Paulo Freire's work, the distinctive history in
Latin America (LA) of development in the context of persisting underde
velopment, and by chaotic recent economic and political histories in many
of these countries. Different national histories have included different prac
tices of inequality. There is little solidarity among governments or peoples
across the region. Yet this decolonial theory attempts to counter a wide
range of self-congratulatory contrasts that the north persistently invokes
when observing the former Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the Amer
icas. And it tries to do so on behalf of the most economically and politically
vulnerable peoples who still suffer today from the continuing effects of the
Iberian coloniality, exacerbated by the recent complicity of the United
States with dictatorial regimes and by neoliberal economic and political
policies advanced by the United States especially. The project here is to
draw on this decolonial theory to begin to explore the effects of such self
congratulatory contrasts on northern philosophies and social studies of
science. That is, the intent is to "provincialize northern SSSK"

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1066 Science, Technology, & Human Values 41(6)

(Chakrabarty 2008). Here this project joins similar ones that have
resources of conventional postcolonial theory that was focused pri
the British colonization of India beginning in the mid-eighteenth
(Anderson 2002; Anderson and Adams 2008; Harding 2008, 201
2005; Seth 2009).
The next section briefly outlines the focus of the decoloniality
"modernity/coloniality" (MC) arguments that frame much of th
American SSSK.3 The third section turns to the alignments of th
with central northern SSSK themes. Finally, the fourth section
few of the productive tensions in the Latin American work.

The MC Argument
Decolonial theorists argue that modernity and coloniality are two
coin: they coproduced each other beginning in 1492, and modern
remain marked by central assumptions and practices of that copro
As Enrique Dussel (1995) put the point:

I argue that while modernity is undoubtedly a European occurrence,

originates in a dialectical relation with non-Europe. Modernity appears
Europe organizes the initial world-system and places itself at the cen
world history over against a periphery equally constitutive of modernit
When one conceives modernity as part of a center-periphery system in
of an independent European phenomenon, the meanings of modernit
origin, development, present crisis, and its postmodem antithesis c
(9-10, 11; my italics)4

Thus, the local characteristics—on both sides of the Atlantic

Spanish and Portuguese colonization of the Americas also played
icant role in the formation of modern social orders and, consequent
coproduction of their sciences and technologies. Of course, mode
orders were and remain distinctively sexed and gendered. Coloni
the Americas played a significant role in such processes.
However, the distinctive focus of reflection on that history in the
Dussel and others is not an attempt to enter a correction into st
histories of modernity and its sciences, thereby extending forwar
Eurocentric intellectual history. Rather, it is an attempt "to make
intervention into the very discursivity of the modem sciences in
craft another space for the production of knowledge ... What th
suggests is that an other thought, an other knowledge (and another

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 Harding 1067

the spirit of Port

(Escobar 2010, 33)

The MC program shou

to the great modemi
locates its own inquir
towards the possib
2010, 34)

I propose that there are significant tensions between, on the one hand, Latin
American SSSK's use of important features of this MC program and, on the
other hand, its desire to focus on the coproduction of knowledge and social
orders in Latin America. And I propose that these tensions create opportu
nities for new kinds of conversations about what "international SSSK"
should look like.
In addition to the work of Dussel, significant intellectual contribu
tions were made initially by the Argentinian literary theorist Walter D.
Mignolo (2000, 2011) and the Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano
(2000, 2007).5 These were soon joined by the Colombian anthropologist
Arturo Escobar (1995), the Puerto-Rico philosopher Nelson Maldonado
Torres (2012), the Portuguese legal theorist Boaventura de Sousa Santos
(2007, 2014), and the Uruguayan theorist Catherine Walsh (2010). The
work of Gloria Anzaldua (1987) has provided an influential framework
for these analyses (Saldivar 2010, 193-221). More recently, accounts by
Maria Lugones (2010a, b), alongside those of Walsh (2016) and Breny
Mendoza (2015), are raising potentially transformative issues about how
to counter the effects of the distinctive forms of rigid and hierarchical
gender, sexuality, and race introduced by the Spanish. Most of these
scholars published originally in Spanish or Portuguese. However, for the
last decade translations of the work, of these and others, and lively debates
have appeared in English (e.g., Mignolo and Escobar 2010; Morana, Dussel,
and Jauregui 2008).6

Decolonial Accounts and SSSK: Alignments and

Divergences
The decolonial accounts align with familiar SSSK understandings or prac
tices in a number of respects. Nevertheless, they also sometimes draw new
insights from them or use the latter for unfamiliar purposes.

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 1068 Science, Technology, & Human Values 41(6)

New Understandings of Science and Technology in the S

Century

During the sixteenth century, the Spanish and Portuguese crea

of science and technology institutes in both Iberia and the Ame
to train their travelers in the new challenges of navigation, c
oceanography, climatology, and engineering. These sciences, t
uted to the European scientific revolution (Canizares-Esgu
Furthermore, one source of the beginnings of modern so
appeared in the practices of Cortes. He routinely sought out i
about the social and religious beliefs and practices of indigene
encounter and about how they dealt with the challenging new
that he would have to travel through in his efforts to get to Mex
conquer the Aztecs (Gerbi [1975] 1985, 92-100; Todorov 198
Harris (1998) has argued that focusing on the scientific and tec
of the Spanish and Portuguese "long distance corporations" dra
to the fact that those sciences do not seem to follow Thomas Kuhn's model
of normal science followed by revolutionary paradigm shifts. These
sciences seem to advance only through normal science procedures. Focus
ing on these conditions for science and technology practice in Spanish and
Portuguese colonial projects emphasizes the familiar SSSK concern for
the importance of local conditions in shaping successful scientific and
technical work. Colonialisms encounter different challenges in their dif
ferent contexts.

Who Possesses Scientific and Technical Expertise?

Recently, the notion of scientific expertise has been democratized in a
number of ways. For one thing, the standard for scientific expertise has
been far too restricted. There are many nonprofessionals whose experiences
provide them with reliable expertise about nature's order (Evans and Col
lins 2007). Moreover, there are all the "civic science" and "citizen sci
ence" groups that have formed to pressure formal science policy to address
their issues. They often formulate new questions, advocate for funding,
collect initial data, and recruit professional scientists to their projects (Hess
2007). Aligned with these SSSK projects are the decolonial réévaluations of
what the colonizers came to know as well as what the indigenes of the
Americas knew both before and after 1492 (Denevan 1992; Mann 2005).
The European scientists again and again "discovered" what the indigenes
already knew about the natural world of the Americas by simply asking the

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 Harding 1069

latter what they

Moreover, indigen
are increasingly b
ronmental policy
land Buen Vivir
constitutions of E

Deeper and Mor

Decolonial perspe
unity of science
Kellert, Longino,
to unify the scie
impossible because
conditions and ne
other cultures. Th
"suturing" the ne
cal principles into
become meaningf
now underway, f
energy sources. M
ogies for producin
tion systems for
energy; ethical an
about damage to
panels; and so for
spread use of Asia
These cases also
systems as resour
em sciences and t
cultural values and social interests which are shared across research com
munities and often their larger historical eras (Harding 2015). Disunity and
pluralism ideals enable detection of such values and interests and also
appreciation of the desirability of new or nondominant alternatives. Scien
tific pluralism should be conceptualized on a global scale, not just within
modem Western sciences, as the authors in the collections edited by Galison
and Stump (1996) and by Kellert, Longino, and Waters (2006) seem to
presume.
The Latin American decolonial theorists also insist that scientific plur
alism should go "all the way down" to an appreciation of the value of

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1070 Science, Technology, & Human Values 41(6)

multiple ontologies and epistemologies. For conventional s

their philosophies of science such a stance can seem incom
This is especially the case when the other ontologies and
gies are infused with spiritual and religious elements. SS
such as Bruno Latour (2004) and John Law (2015) have be
in lively discussions about the desirability and possibilit
mological and ontological pluralisms. Ivan da Costa Marqu
shows how "ontological politics" establish what counts as
scientific and technological narratives. His example is th
worlds stabilized by nutritionists, social scientists, activist
of a local Brazilian nutritional innovation (Santos 2007, 2014;
Viveiros de Castro 2004).7

How Should Decolonial Scientific Pluralisms Work?

Raewyn Connell (2015) points to three forms of pluralism. One recognizes
the obvious fact of sociological and historical pluralism of global knowl
edge systems but insists that one and only one is valuable. In reaction to
this, critics have proposed a mosaic of different knowledge systems but with
little overlap or interaction between them. The older debates about relati
vism in anthropology tended to imagine such a mosaic. Yet the preferable
kind of pluralism to envision is where multiple knowledge traditions around
the globe, including the many modern Western sciences, engage with one
another in accordance with what different cultures perceive the context
requires. They will partially overlap and cohere with one another at any
particular historical/geographic/cultural site, yet also retain their own dis
tinctive characters elsewhere. They will resist forming one coherent global
knowledge system.
Decolonial theory also takes up a relatively new SSSK project, namely,
to make use in northern SSSK projects of ontological and epistemological
theory from the South. The familiar problem has been that northern theorists
tended to conceptualize the global history of modern Western sciences as a
one-way journey of dissemination from North to South. They have failed to
recognize how science and technology innovations have traveled from
South to North and South to South.8 Thus, the South is not just a source
of raw material and labor for the North or of only data to support northern
theory. It has its own distinctive resources for innovating in science and
technology practice, theory, and policy. It also has such resources for inno
vating in STS.

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 Harding 1071

How Do a Society
Coproduce Scien
Of course, there w
explorer scientists,
This purported ab
women, gender, an
dominant narrative
and it fails to chal
should count as rel
One valuable anal
gendered social rel
ies.9 In spite of th
structures, and me
thought. For exam
relations between t
servants in the Am
pharmacological text
was the servants w
testing, and descri
ties. This work was an extension of the "women's work" the servants did in
the Spanish missions, such as cooking, cleaning, washing, and otherwise
caring for the Jesuit priests and their households. Thus, the Jesuits recreated
in an all-male context the gendered domestic relations that were familiar to
European men.
Another link to SSSK is provided by studies of how sciences making
new assumptions about nature's order were created to legitimate the con
trol of women's labor and sexuality in colonial contexts. The colonizers
appropriated as much of the indigenes' labor as they could for their eco
nomic and political projects. But the labor that the colonizers were least
able to control was that of reproducing, provisioning, and caring for indi
genous children and other household members: reproducing the colonized
population and its household, its culture, practices, and support systems.
As had been noted about colonialisms in general, enslaving and otherwise
breaking up families, and thereby appropriating control of women's
domestic labor, reduced the power of indigenous men in their own eyes
and the eyes of their communities. Thus, households were the last sites of
resistance to the colonizers and slavers (Caulfield 1974). It was around
"the kitchen table" that slave revolts were organized in the United States
(Davis 1971).

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1072 Science, Technology, & Human Values 41(6)

Women's sexuality is the one part of colonized labor th

especially important to control if colonialism is to be maximall
Thus, sexual control of colonized women has been a central site
between colonizing and colonized men around the globe. The S
Portuguese introduced into the Americas a policy of miscegen
Iberians introduced complex and rigid, pre-Darwinian, raci
grounded in pre-Darwinian theory about blood purity. Thereb
ated elaborate hierarchical categories of social position (Lu
Mendoza 2015 ; Schiwy 2010; Walsh 2016).
Thus, new sciences established a different kind of natural fo
social order that entangled hierarchies of race, gender, sexualit
Moreover, these scientific hierarchies were coproduced with t
social order—not only in the Americas but also in the coloniz
in Europe. As one essay points out, such categories of degrees
gender purity were even overtly linked to degrees of epistem
efforts to establish Brazil as a modern nation-state (Rajao and
The point of these theorists is that it is impossible to understand
colonialism worked in the Americas and had its effects in Eur
grasping how its theories, policies, and practices entangled
gender, sexuality, and racial hierarchies. The still powerful res
entanglements make the elimination of such hierarchies excee
cult today—in LA, especially, but also in Europe and the Unit
Finally, modernization and its development theories, policie
tices, mentioned earlier, have always been masculinized (Felsk
1995). A major problem in international development thinking i
to recognize that the vast majority of poor people around the g
measure, are women and their dependents." And their impover
tend to persist unless its causes are directly addressed. "Tr
provision of resources to male heads of household ignores the
within households that insure women's continuing impoverish
women from the poorest groups are designing and managing
projects, and until poor women's needs are centered in such pro
poverty will persist. This is so not just for women, since wome
insures the poverty of their dependents such as children, the ag
and often their male partners. Here again, keeping research c
needs and perceptions of social justice movements is an impor
accomplish such goals. And achieving such goals requires deep
tions in prevailing conceptions of desirable masculinity and in
ness to punish and end violence against women in their house
public places. Clearly, specifically, feminist analyses are

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 Harding 1073

understand how sciences have been enlisted to make colonialisms maxi

mally effective.
This section has focused on alignments between the innovative and
illuminating Decolonial themes in Latin American SSSK and in the existing
northern SSSK projects. Yet such a strategy still leaves the northern SSSK
projects centered, and the Latin American ones peripheral, merely "align
ing" with the northern ones. It does not decenter the northern projects.
Central to this tension is the resistance of the northern sciences and SSSK
to the recognition that other ontologies of nature and social relations could
be as legitimate as those assumed in the North (Blaser 2013). This insight
will come into focus in some of the additional productive tensions in Latin
American SSSK.

Productive Tensions

Tensions in these Decolonial writings provide some of the most intriguing

and valuable sites for reflection on future directions in SSSK around the
globe.

Decolonial Intellectuals: Political Agendas or Social Identities?

Most of the Decolonial theorists advocate for attention to indigeneity and
indigenous knowledge, to the Latin American poor, and to "rear guard
theory" that stays close to the social justice movements. Yet none of these
intellectuals are themselves poor, and it is not apparent that any have
peasant or indigenous origins. Moreover, these days most of them hold
university positions in the United States (or Portugal) in addition to the
ones in LA. Do their elite locations in local and global hierarchical social
relations undermine the legitimacy and adequacy of their analyses? Worse,
if they are not legitimate representers of social justice movement goals, why
should we, who are often equally well located institutionally, be trusted to
represent the needs and desires of the most vulnerable social groups in our
environments (not to mention our own actual interests)?
The matter is complex. Certainly, it is important to center the experi
ences, voices, and authority of vulnerable groups in projects intended to
improve their situations. Those who have not experienced a particular form
of impoverishment or discrimination tend to lack sensitivity to its more
complex, deeper, and less obvious forms and to the nuanced ways in which
these are enacted. Furthermore, naming and conceptualizing one's own
conditions is a crucial step in achieving agency on behalf of oneself and

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 1074 Science, Technology, & Human Values 41(6)

one's peers and in organizing. Then, there is the problem that a fu

principle of the decolonial theorists is that they say they "speak w
stand," as Mignolo (2011) puts the matter. If they "stand" in elit
positions, how can their speech represent truly emancipatory inte
visions? Finally, how is Decolonial theory to avoid ushering in one
of "imperial eyes," as Mary Louise Pratt (2008) puts the point abo
nial scientists' attempts to achieve an "innocent" role in the prod
information?
Yet it is not fair for only the victims of discrimination to hav
responsibility for changing the dominant social order that has c
so much. Figuring out and changing the social order that has benef
maintaining and exploiting their vulnerability should be everyon
tion. Of course, their voices and knowledge about their lives
social relations more generally should have special weight in
cesses. Their active participation and leadership are crucial.
Moreover, restricting social transformation to the most vu
groups is not an effective strategy. Those who must do a double
labor to keep food on the table often do not have the time or resou
to go to meetings, let alone to ponder theory and policy. Furthe
groups restricted to "the kitchen," the farm, or the factory oft
actually detect from their daily activities just how the conditions
lives are created by elite structural projects which they have been
from designing. Finally, it is worth recollecting that most politic
tions have had significant participation by middle-class "traitors
class" or to their gender, race, or sexuality. These groups have had
the resources to help organize poor people's, civil rights, feminist,
social justice movements. In short, it was the political agendas
influential revolutionaries that were so powerful, not their indivi
identities. The same is true for us.

That said, it must always be important to examine critically how existing

approaches persist in retaining problematic political and economic commit
ments. And this is most fairly and effectively accomplished when theorists
and policy makers work with rear guard theory. The voices of the exploited
are most accurately heard through the social justice movements that they
have helped to create. This is not to say that everyone is well represented in
any such movement. Yet considering this issue illuminates the value of the
focus in this work on rear guard theory.
Finally, an important tension remains. On the one hand, there is the
fundamental scientific project of naming and giving order to natural and
social experiences that are otherwise disordered and confusing. On the other

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 Harding 1075

hand, such suppose

innocent: getting
2008). Regardless o
able resources for
situation calls for
ticular scientific p
2005).

The Reinvention of Positivism?

LA has a history of hope for, and then disappointment with, a positivist
philosophy of scientific research. Positivism arrived in LA from France in
the early nineteenth century (Gilson and Levinson 2013). Thus, it occurred
a century before the socially progressive positivism of the Vienna Circle
and the latter's subsequent transformation into a purportedly value and
interest-free logical positivism when it encountered McCarthyism and the
cold war in the United States of the 1950s (Reisch 2005). In recent decades,
this legacy of positivism has met with increasing skepticism with respect to
the natural sciences from the Vietnam war era on as well as robust skepti
cism in the social sciences (Steinmetz 2005). Although the two positivisms
have different intellectual sources and occurred in different historical eras,
they responded to similar social conditions and lost favor in part for similar
reasons, as one observer points out12 (Stehn 2013). My point here is that
important streams of science and technology development in LA today are
beginning to find new resources to reinvent positivism, one could say, in
ways that can avoid the problems with its earlier histories.
Here, too, the rise of the new social movements can have consequences
not immediately recognizable. As indicated earlier, some of the indigenous
social movements have garnered widespread popular support. Buen Vivir,
for example, has gotten its agendas into the new constitutions of Ecuador
and Bolivia. Nature has specific legal rights, in this agenda, which may be
litigated by its advocates13 (Gudynas 2011; de la Cadena 2010; Walsh
2010). Moreover, LA is the original and largely continuing site of the World
Social Forums. These bring together a "rainbow coalition" of progressive
social movements to protest the destructive policies and practices of the
World Bank, the G9 largest global economies, and transnational corpora
tions and financial institutions (Santos 2004). Latin American feminist
movements have been actively involved in these events, though getting
their concerns well represented has required ongoing struggle. Insofar as
it is Decolonial rear guard theory and methodology that directs scientific

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 1076 Science, Technology, & Human Values 41(6)

and technology work, one could see Latin Americans as reform

new positivism in which projects are directed not by the "cie
by the new social justice movements themselves.

Strategic Binaries?
Another source of anxiety focuses on how the various bin
contrast LA or parts of it with industrialized parts of the wor
misrepresent both sides of the contrast and the realities of the co
Typical targets of such anxiety are "first versus third world," "
South," "industrialized versus nonindustrialized," "develo
developing," and "modern versus premodern." Such bina
homogenize and often essentialize the contrasted groups. Ther
significant internal divisions in the groups contrasted, and th
are often organized hierarchically. The binaries also overemph
trast between the groups, thereby obscuring commonalities. A
aries frequently banish from sight other phenomena that ma
important. For example, focusing on contrasts between Europ
ism in India and in the Americas tends to obscure histories of Chinese and
Soviet Union colonialisms.
The purposes of a contrast are usually also suspect, as when northern
Europe claims modernity for itself to exalt its own purported achievements.
Moreover, such binaries tend to get further entrenched by the very discus
sions that criticize them (Rajao 2015). Finally, each of these binaries came
into existence in a particular historical and political context and tends to be
less useful in others. First versus third world was invented at the Bandung
Conference when the "unaligned nations" decided to take on the label of
"third world." North versus South was adopted by "the South" at the 1992
Rio de Janeiro United Nations environmental conference. These contrasts
are far less meaningful when used to refer to earlier times, and today both
have become less useful.
This is quite a litany of problems with the familiar global binaries. It can
seem hard to justify continuing to use them. Yet the entangled histories of
modernity, colonialism, and capitalism—whether at their origins in 1492 or
in the current forms of globalization—nevertheless produce two worlds, as
vulnerable groups see the matter: the enfranchised and the disenfranchised.
These worlds are epistemic as well as racial/ethnic:

... different groups have mobilized the myths of Northern ethnic and tech
noscientific purity in order to extend their dominance over time and space

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 Harding 1077

The connection betw

Brazil's history ha
intimately intertwi
foundation myths, a
(white) race also ma
promise for a better
liged peoples (whit
regions (Northern

Thus, it would seem

that such binaries
political agendas to
What is to be done?
When faced with a similar problem about gender binaries, Gayatri Spi
vak (1988) proposed "strategic essentialism." Feminists wanted to abandon
the masculine/feminine binary that has consistently been used to provide
resources for male supremacy. This binary shared all the faults of those used
about LA. Yet at the same time, feminists have wanted to speak on behalf of
women to gain access to the kinds of resources they have needed: legal
rights, education, health care, seats in Congress, and at the World Bank
Board Room. Strategic essentialism recognized that sometimes it is neces
sary to speak on behalf of the group on the exploited side of a binary, even
though at the same time the group is trying to dismantle the binary itself.
Similar challenges have been encountered by social justice projects on
behalf of the poor, and blacks, for instance. So "strategic binarism" could
be a way to conceptualize this valuable tension in the case of the Latin
American binaries. The binaries are used, but for another, nondiscrimina
tory goal.

Knowledge That Is "Otherwise"

That said, the Decolonial theorists have also opened the way to a different
strategy for disempowering such binaries. The notion of creating knowl
edge that is otherwise, or "another" knowledge, appears again and again in
Decolonial writings to contrast with the conventional modem Western con
ceptual and political frameworks and especially their reliance on binaries.
For example, otherwise is articulated as alternative to both neoliberal and
Marxian understandings of democracy, anticolonialism, modernity, tradi
tion, capitalism, ontology, epistemology, and positivism (Escobar 2010;
Mignolo 2011; Santos 2007). It is used to characterize a refusal of favored

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1078 Science, Technology, & Human Values 41(6)

northern binary categories of gender, sexuality, and race (W

Thus, these thinkers insist on engaging with, but moving thr
not just one kind of problematic way of thinking about know
world, but also its conventionally conceptualized alternative
These theorists resist the assumption that the conventional ch
the reasonable possibilities. Otherwise is to start from values
that are outside modem Western frameworks, while not hes
cate selective features of the older frameworks within the new ones. It is to
create a world in which other worlds exist. Conflicting realities are fre
quently at issue (Blaser 2013).
This is what Mignolo (2011) calls "the colonial difference." He adopted
this idea from Gloria Anzaldua's (1987) "borderlands" thinking (Mignolo
2011, 342). Anzaldua's thinking refuses to assimilate to existing categories
of thought (e.g., Mexican or United States), but it also refuses to "go
away." Borderlands thinking directs researchers to begin thought from their
everyday lives—from the liminal or intersectional spaces where they live.
"I think where I stand" is how Mignolo puts the point.
Otherwise and borderlands thought are thus projects with significant
alignments with a collection of research methodological strategies that
began to flourish in the social justice movements of the 1960s, although
they had older roots. All of them intended to create "sciences from below"
that articulated the conditions, needs, and desires of economically, politi
cally, and socially vulnerable groups. All of them "think where they stand"
from the places in the social order where vulnerable people's bodies and
thinking are located. All of them both used the existing conceptual frame
works to advance their projects, while criticizing them and trying out
"other" frameworks. One of the earliest and still widely used of these is
the participatory action research developed to give poor people a voice in
making the policies that governed their lives (Park et al. 1993). Feminist
and women's standpoint methodology has overtly insisted on the impor
tance of starting research from the daily lives of women to transform the
methodologies through which research disciplines produce their supposed
facts. Canadian sociologist, Dorothy Smith (1987, 92), had proposed that
"to begin from direct experience and to return to it as a constraint or 'test' of
the adequacy of a systematic knowledge is to begin from where we are located
bodily." Archaeology's more recent collaborative research, and the increas
ingly widespread citizen science, or civic science, provide yet other such
examples (Fortmann 2008; Hess 2007; Wylie 2015). These projects are all
characterized by a selective but paradoxical use of the available frameworks—
intellectual and institutional—to advance the demise of "the available."

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 Harding 1079

There are valuabl

focused on desirab
sive publication pro
Possible (2007), as
recommended "rear
that northern elite
Catherine Walsh (2
tioning beyond the
distinct desire and
It recognizes an "an
der's otherwise."

... [Bjefore the European invasion gender constructions in the Andes and
Mesoamerica were understood as dynamic, fluid, open, and nonhierarchical.
They were not based on anatomical distinctions but rather associated with
performance, with what people do, and their ways of being in the world, ways
that were not fixed but in constant movement, shift, modification, and fluid
equilibrium Gender duality implied an interpénétration of the masculine
and feminine, the existence of entities (real and supernatural) that incorpo
rated female and male characteristics; nuances of combinations and of a
continuum that easily moved between poles, (p. 8)

However, this is not only a phenomenon of the precolonial era, she

argues, but remains active and empowering at the peripheries of mod
ernity today.
Finally, Joanne Rappaport (2003) points out that a new class of indi
genous intellectuals has emerged in Colombia. They are not subordinated
but rather have a different political agenda. Born to rural indigenes, they
are cosmopolitan, sometimes hold doctorates, speak at the United Nations
and the World Bank, and have been elected by nonindigenous urban voters
to positions in the national Colombian House of Representatives (p. 338).
They constantly relocate Western science to within indigenous
worldviews:

Nasa linguists have appropriated their experience of translating the constitu

tion into Nasa Yuwe in their task of creating a Nasa research methodology. In
countless meetings as well as in publications, concepts from the dominant
society ranging from development and educational systems to science and
history are analyzed through their translation into Nasa Yuwe, thus creating a
Nasa hierarchy of knowledge, (p. 319)

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 1080 Science, Technology, & Human Values 41(6)

For example, "education" was translated "as nasa neesn'I, a

abstract qualities (neesn'i), including identity, history, and tr
serves as a basis for determining policy and for negotiating wi
(p. 320). Thus these "inappropriate others" make Colombians r
"indigeneity" means.

Conclusion: New Conversations

Whether or not the particular goals of the Decolonial and its otherwis
theorists are in fact achievable, this way of articulating the distinctiv
perceived needs and desires of Latin Americans clears space for new qu
tions about how we can and should live together in the world. Conventio
enlightenment conceptual frameworks for political and intellectual wo
have come to seem too tired and inadequate to enable productive politi
and analysis in today's world (Santos 2014; Mignolo 2011). The otherwis
discourses advance new ways of thinking and new questions at a mome
when the Enlightenment legacy has accumulated widespread critiques b
social justice movements around the globe. We live in information societ
these days, and so SSSK issues are and will remain central to these debat
The moral and political energies that continue to generate such discu
sions in LA are themselves productive for the rest of us. They have alre
proven contagious elsewhere around the globe, creating lively new
works of social justice intellectual, political, and SSSK activism.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the resea
authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article.

Notes

1. I focus here primarily on how social, cultural, economic, and political projects
"get inside" the results of scientific research. That is on social studies of
scientific knowledge (SSSK), rather than on the more general accounts of the
diverse social, cultural, economic, and political relations between sciences and
their societies, usually referred to as science and technology studies (STS).
2. The term "decolonial" has an increasingly wide use to highlight how coloni
alism's effects around the globe are by no means only confined to the past.

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 Harding 1081

However, the theor

legacy of thinking
and its relation to
capitalize the term
ular kind of account.

3. Of course, there is no homogeneity to Latin American history, geography,

peoples or cultures, or to approaches to science and technology in the region.
Yet, as we shall see, there are important overarching themes in the decolonial
analyses, since their focus is on particular European colonizers and colonized at
particular moments in history and on colonial engagements with distinctive
geographical challenges and with distinctive peoples and cultures. See Vessuri
(1987) and the introduction to Medina, Marques, and Holmes (2014) for over
views of Latin American STS. See Vessuri (2006) for an overview of twentieth
century Latin American academic science, and Saldana (2006) for histories of
particular (mostly modem) sciences in Latin America (LA).
4. In 1932, Boris Hessen (1970) had pointed out that Newton's projects turned out
to be just the ones that could advance the early development of capitalism in
Europe. It was not that Newton intended to contribute to such a project. Rather,
certain ideas and challenges were just "in the air" at that time and place.
5. Note that in this work "science and technology issues" include epistemological
and ontological concerns raised by decolonial scholars who are trained in phi
losophy and comparative literature in addition to those from the social sciences.
These philosophical issues have informed the Latin American SSSK analyses,
as the discussions and citations indicate in the two 2014 volumes published to
coincide with the Buenos Aires meetings of 4S and Etudes Social Ciencia y
Technologie (ESOCITE).
6. Mignolo and Escobar (2010) reprint English versions of a number of the early
essays as well as several useful overviews of the history and issues of "the
decolonial option." Rodriguez (2001) situates Latin American decolonial the
ory in the context of subaltem studies, and Grosfoguel, Maldonado-Torres, and
Saldivar (2005) do so with respect to world systems theory. Latin American
positivism is taken up in Gilson and Levinson (2013). Most of these authors also
have joint appointments in the United States, and many have from the begin
ning, so it can be misleading to think of this work as only "from" South and
Central America and the Caribbean.

7. See also discussions of "the secularist stance" in Levey and Modood (2009)
and Mendieta and VanAntwerpen (2011).
8. See many of the contributions to Medina, Marques, and Holmes (2014).
9. The issue here is homo social relations between men, whether or not women are
absent. It is not, at least in this literature, about sexual relations between men,

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1082 Science, Technology, & Human Values 41(6)

except in the perception of the more fluid preconquest sexualitie

genes (Lugones 2010a; Walsh 2016).
10. Whether the miscegenation was a practice of rape or consent is pr
meaningful distinction in the context of colonial inequalities.
11. For example, see the many analyses by influential economists in
et al. (2011).
12. Fundamentally, in each case, they lost the commitment to direct scientific and
technical work to the needs of the most vulnerable groups in society. In LA, in
the absence of robust middle classes, they also alienated elites (Calogero 2013.)
13. The argument here is similar to those routinely made on behalf of children and
the mentally disabled.

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Author Biograph
Sandra Harding is a
Education and Information Studies at UCLA. She is the author or editor of 17 books
on topics in feminist and postcolonial epistemology, methodology, and philosophy
of science. Her most recent books are Objectivity and Diversity: Another Logic of
Scientific Research (2015) and The Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies
Reader, ed. (2011). She co-edited Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society
2000-2005, and was the 2013 recipient of the John Desmond Bemal Prize for life
time achievement of the Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S).

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