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AntiAtlas of Epistemicide

AntiAtlas des épistémicides

AntiAtlas de epistemicidios

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Published on Tuesday, March 15, 2022

Abstract

AntiAtlas of Epistemicide is a collaborative artistic and scientific project that brings together notices and synthetic articles on epistemicides, past or present, anywhere on the planet. The articles collected in this book will be accompanied by a map designed specifically for each example of an epistemicide. The question being as singular as it is unfathomable, this project does not have an encyclopedic aim, but to the contrary, to establish a non-exhaustive and subjective atlas, assumed to be both a scientific work and an artistic catalogue. As all disciplinary fields are concerned by this question, antiAtlas of Epistemicide is opening its call for contributions to a authors of all disciplinary affiliations.

Announcement

General presentation

antiAtlas of Epistemicide is a collaborative artistic and scientific project that brings together notices and synthetic articles on epistemicides, past or present, anywhere on the planet. The articles collected in this book will be accompanied by a map designed specifically for each example of an epistemicide.

The question being as singular as it is unfathomable, this project does not have an encyclopedic aim, but to the contrary, to establish a non-exhaustive and subjective atlas, assumed to be both a scientific work and an artistic catalogue.

As all disciplinary fields are concerned by this question, antiAtlas of Epistemicide is opening its call for contributions to a authors of all disciplinary affiliations.

Submission procedure and schedule

Step 1:

Proposals for articles (about 500 words), ideas, suggestions and intuitions should be sent by 14 April 2022 to antiatlasdesepistemicides@gmail.com

Step 2:

When about ten proposals are collected and mapped, a pre-model of the antiAtlas of Epistemicides project will be proposed to selected editors and funding bodies.

Step 3:

Once the choice of publisher has been finalized and the budget has been agreed upon (including the remuneration of authors and artists), a second call for articles will be launched.

The final article may take the form of a notice or, preferably, a more detailed article, but not exceeding 2000 words. It will be accompanied by a map produced in close collaboration with the author, depending on the nature of the article.

Proposals may also be submitted by an artist/author duo, provided that the proposed work falls within the broad vocabulary of cartography. Finally, contributions from authors-mappers-artists are also welcome.

The articles will be reviewed by a committee which, if necessary, will propose remarks and corrections. The information provided will be rigorous and referenced by a precise bibliography which will be shared at the end of the book.

The maps produced will not be conceived as illustrations of the articles and may take any form, from drawings to photographs to installations, etc.

Structure of the book and initial research directions

I. Introduction (Anna Guilló)

  1. Although the articles and images in the book form a constellation, this constellation is nevertheless organised according to different categories and thematic, historical, geographical conceptual, etc. entries. Beyond the title of the book, the aim is to distinguish between examples of destroyed, confiscated and/or hidden knowledge, bearing in mind that these categories are often porous.
  2. What is an atlas?
  3. What is an epistemicide?
  4. Presentation of the sections of the book:
  5. a) Destroyed knowledge
  6. b) Confiscated knowledge
  7. c) Occulted knowledge
  8. General spirit and methodology of the project

This artistic project originates in a practice of extended cartographic drawing aimed at graphically compiling invisible practices. The somewhat hackneyed paradox of the representation of the invisible quickly gave way to the need to document this project scientifically and to open it up to epistemicides. The term epistemicide originates in the field of sociology (Boaventura de Sousa Santos, 2016), but is relevant to all disciplinary fields throughout the world.

The initial initiative was organised around a call for contributions to establish a preview of the project in which analyses of destroyed, confiscated or occulted knowledges would have an emergent, processual quality governed by curiosity and the pleasure of bringing another way of thinking about the world rather than be governed by a logic of productivity and outputs. It is in this spirit that we would like to produce the first volume of the antiAtlas of Epistemicide as an object from which different forms can emerge: exhibitions, seminars, meetings, programs, etc. Thus, where books generally come to restore experiences and research paths, this one would rather come to provoke them since its contents, not fixed, will require an extension in the public debate and undoubtedly the advent of other volumes.

II. Destroyed knowledge (epistemicides)

Etymologically, an epistemicide is the killing of a science understood in its proper sense as knowledge. The term is attributed to the Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos, who in 2014 published Epistemologies of the South. Justice against Epistemicide, translated into French as Épistémologies du Sud. Mouvements citoyens et polémique sur les sciences, a subtitle in which the term “epistemicide” disappeared. Since 1994, the term has been defined as follows in his work:

Modern science is based on a practice of professional and social technical division of labour and on the infinite technological development of the productive forces, of which capitalism is today the only example. Alternative social practices generate alternative forms of knowledge. Not to recognise these forms of knowledge implies delegitimising the social practices that support them and, in this sense, promoting the social exclusion of those who promote them. The genocide that so often characterises European expansion was also epistemicide: strange peoples were eliminated because they also had strange forms of knowledge, and these strange forms of knowledge were eliminated because they were based on strange social practices and strange peoples. But epistemicide has been much more widespread than genocide because it has always claimed to subalternise, subordinate, marginalise or illegalise social practices and groups that might pose a threat to capitalist expansion, or for much of our century to communist expansion (in this respect as modern as capitalism), and also because it happened in the peripheral and extra-North American space of the world system as well as in the central European and North American space, against workers, indigenous people, black people, women and minorities in general (ethnic, religious, sexual).

The new paradigm considers epistemicide as one of the great crimes against humanity.

This first part will bring together articles on practices and knowledge that have been definitively destroyed, lost forever.

For example, the context of the four great epistemicides of the sixteenth century listed by Ramón Grosfoguel may be considered:

1) The conquest of Al Andalus and its genocide/epistemicide of Jews and Muslims. (Burning of the library of Cordoba as well as those of Seville and Granada (1 million books destroyed in all)

2) The conquest of America and the killing of the Amerindians

3) The enslavement of Africans

4) Women (witchcraft)

But this part will not be limited to the effects of colonisation in the 16th century. It will also be open to any epistemicide listed from prehistory to the present day, depending on the thematic entry chosen by the authors. For example, one could think of the disappearance of languages and, with them, proper and common names, such as toponyms. The question of translation in the broad sense of the term also arises here.

These destructions are linked to the annulment of pantheons and religious cults of all kinds; epistemicides are also spiriticides. One can also think of all sorts of vernacular knowledge replaced by others deemed more efficient (cartography and, more generally, the practice of orientation, are a good example).

Generally speaking, it is the whole range of epistemicides throughout history and the world that is being questioned here, well beyond what are known as the epistemologies of the South.

To be completed according to the authors good ideas!

III. Confiscated knowledge

Confiscated knowledge is often associated with destroyed knowledge, since it is the result of the action of a dominant on a dominated person, which means, in a way, dispossessing the latter of knowledge when it is not simply a matter of eliminating it.

In this sense, all genocide implies epistemicide. But confiscated knowledge is not, strictly speaking, destroyed, but rather displaced, reused and interpreted (even if it can sometimes be destroyed by omission or lack of mastery of know-how).

In this respect, the history of knowledge of medicinal plants is particularly eloquent.

See, for example, Samir Boumediene, La Colonisation du Savoir : Une histoire des plantes médicinales du « Nouveau Monde » (1492-1750), Vaulx-en-Velin, Les éditions des mondes à faire, 2019.

In line with the issues related to herbalism, there is the issue of medicine and its practices and the various opposing thoughts, between prevention, healing, care etc.

We can think of the supremacy of the agroindustry supported by governments, which prevents, for example, farmers from resowing their own crops or prohibits the cultivation of certain fruits and vegetables, just as it imposes the administration of antibiotics on livestock. (See the manifesto of the 1052 outlawed farmers).

These various confiscations give rise to clandestine, outlaw practices, which could be discussed in the conclusion.

To be completed according to the authors good ideas!

IV. Hidden knowledge

If knowledge can be destroyed or confiscated, it is also concealed (which can, in the long run, precipitate its oblivion and hence its destruction if it is not preserved).

School textbooks and, more generally, the pedagogies used across the world speak for themselves. For example, parts of history that are not taught or outright denied, organs that are not represented (see the example of the rehabilitation of the representation of the clitoris), authors who are censored etc. We are thinking here in particular of women who are hidden, unmentioned or simply dispossessed of their own discoveries or inventions in the history of art, science and politics.

More generally, we will think of censorship which, at times, has resulted in the real loss of knowledge when the hidden works and documents have not been preserved.

To be completed according to the authors good ideas!

V. Post-face as a conclusion? Towards mutant knowledge

Some knowledge is resistant knowledge, as shown for example by abortifacient plants used in situations of slavery so as not to provide the masters with additional labour).

antiAtlas of Epistemicide will escape the dominant/dominated duality to show, also, how knowledge is not necessarily conserved or destroyed but also mutated, osmotic.

Bibliography

Some bibliographical references (french version)

APPADURAI Arjun : Après le colonialisme : les conséquences culturelles de la globalisation, (trad.

Françoise Bouillot), Paris, Payot, « Petite Bilbiothèque », 2015.

BENJAMIN Walter : « L’auteur comme producteur », trad. par Philippe Ivernel, Essais sur Brecht, Paris, La Fabrique, 2003.

—, « Expérience et pauvreté », trad. Pierre Rusch, in Œuvres, tome 2, Paris, Gallimard, « Folio essais », 2000.

BOUMEDIENE Samir : La Colonisation du savoir. Une histoire des plantes médicinales du « Nouveau Monde » (1492-1750), Vaulx-en-Velin, Les éditions des mondes à faire, 2019.

BUREAU D’ÉTUDES : Atlas of Agendas. Mapping the Power, Mapping the Commons, Londres, éd.

Onomatopee, 2015.

CASAS-CORTES Maribel et COBARRUBIAS Sebastian : « Drawing Escape Tunnels through Borders. Cartographic Research Experiments by European Social Movements », Atlas of Radical Geography, Los Angeles, Journal of Æsthetics and Protest Press, 2008.

COMITÉ INVISIBLE : À nos amis, Paris, La Fabrique, 2014.

CRAWFORD Matthew B. : Éloge du carburateur. Essai sur le sens et la valeur du travail, trad. (Etats-Unis) Marc Saint-Upéry, Paris, La Découverte, 2010.

CRISTOFOL Jean et GUILLÓ Anna : « Cartographies alternatives », in antiAtlas Journal n°4, 2020, https://www.antiatlas-journal.net/04-cartographies-alternatives

DEUTINGER Théo : Handbook of Tiranny, Zürich, Lars Müller Publishers, 2017

FEDERICI Silvia : Une guerre mondiale contre les femmes. Des chasses aux sorcières au féminicide,

Paris, éd. La Fabrique, 2021

—, Le Capitalisme patriarcal, Paris, éd. La Fabrique, 2019

—, Caliban et la sorcière. Femmes, corps et accumulation primitive, Paris/Genève/Marseille, éd. Entremonde/Senonevero, 2014.

FEYERABEND Paul : Contre la méthode. Esquisse d’une théorie anarchiste de la connaissance, trad. (anglais) par Baudoin Jurdant et Agnès Schlumberger, Paris, éd. du Seuil, coll. « Sciences », 1979.

HABERMAS Jürgen : Connaissance et intérêt, Paris, Gallimard, « Tel », 1979.

MAUVAISE TROUPE (collectif) : Constellations. Trajectoires révolutionnaires du jeune 21 e siècle, Paris, éd. de l’éclat, « premiers secours », 2014.

MIGNOLO, Walter : La Désobéissance épistémique : Rhétorique de la modernité, logique de la colonialité et grammaire de la décolonialité, Berne, Peter Lang, « Critique sociale et pensée juridique », 2015.

LUSTE BOULBINA Seloua : Les miroirs vagabonds ou la décolonisation des savoirs (arts, littérature, philosophie), Paris/Dijon, éd. Les Presses du réel, coll. « Figures », 2018.

MEZZADRA Sandro et NEILSON Brett : « Fabrica mundi : Dessiner des frontières et produire le monde », in Kantuta Quirós et Aliocha Imhoff (dir.), Geo-Esthétique – le peuple qui manque), coéd. Parc Saint Léger et École Supérieure d’Art de Clermont Métropole, 2012.

MOGEL Lize et BHAGAT Alexis : « Mapping Ghosts », Visible collective talks to Trevor Paglen, in Lize Mogel et Alexis Bhagat, An Atlas of Radical Geography, Los Angeles, Journal of Æsthetics and Protest Press, 2008.

O’ROURKE Karen : Walking and Mapping. Artists as Cartographers, MIT Press, coll. « Leonardo », 2013

—, « Cartes participatives, cartes collaboratives : La cartographie comme maïeutique », Le Monde des Cartes. Revue du Comité Français de Cartographie, n°205, 49-60.

QUIRÓS Kantuta et IMHOFF Aliocha (dir.) : Geo-Esthétique – le peuple qui manque), coéd. Parc Saint Léger et École Supérieure d’Art de Clermont Métropole, 2012.

PAGLEN Trevor : « Experimental Geography: From Cultural Production to the Production of Space », in catalogue d’exposition Experimental Geography. Radical Approaches to Landscape, Cartography and Urbanism, NY, Nato Thompson and Independent Curators International, Melvillehouse, 2008.

ROESKENS Till : Vidéocartographies : Aïda, Palestine (2009), vidéo et livret comportant des photos, des cartes et des textes de Jean-Pierre Rehm, Nicolas Feodoroff, Till Roeskens DVD édition Lowave / Batoutos 2011.

SANABRIA Emilia : Plastic Bodies. Sex Hormones and Menstrual Supression in Brazil, Durham, Duke, University Press, 2016.

SANTOS Boaventura de Sousa : Épistémologies du Sud. Mouvements citoyens et polémique sur les sciences, trad. de l’anglais au français par Alain Montalvão Lantoine, Séverine Laffon et Alexis-Michel Gauvrit. Traduction remaniée et adaptée par Aline Chabot et Jean-Louis Laville, Paris, éd. Desclée de Brouwer, coll. « Solidarité et société », 2016.

SPIVAK Gayatri C. : Les subalternes peuvent-elles parler ? trad. de l’anglais par Jérôme Vidal, Paris, éd. Amsterdam, 2006

Liens vers quelques articles scientifiques et généralistes

COLLIGNON Béatrice : « Que sait-on des savoirs géographiques vernaculaires ? » https://www.persee.fr/doc/bagf_0004-5322_2005_num_82_3_2467

COUTURE Charles : « La bibliothèque est en feu » (au sujet de l’ouvrage de L.-X Polastron, Livres en feu.

Histoire de la destruction sans fin des bibliothèques, Paris, éd. Gallimard, coll. « Folio essais », 2009). https://www.fabula.org/revue/document5427.php

DELL’OMODARME Marco Renzo : « Pour une épistémologie des savoirs situés : de l’épistémologie génétique de Jean Piaget aux savoirs critiques » (Thèse) https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-01233068/

GOURGUES Jean-Michel : « Les manuels scolaires : courroie de transmission des connaissances de la colonialité dans les pays périphérisés ». https://www.researchgate.net/publication/287206803_Analyse_Les_manuels_scolaires_courroie_de_transmission_des_connaissances_de_la_colonialite_dans_les_pays_peripherises

GROSFOGUEL (Ramón) : « Un dialogue décolonial sur les savoirs critiques entre Frantz Fanon

et Boaventura de Sousa Santos » https://www.cairn.info/revue-mouvements-2012-4-page-42.htm

LANGDON, Esther Jean : The Performance of Diversity : Shamanism as a Performative Mode https://scholar.google.fr/scholar_url?url=https://www.revistas.usp.br/gis/article/download/116460/114057/0&hl=en&sa=X&ei=HXIKYvDUC7OSy9YPyOOPwAw&scisig=AAGBfm0mqt_V9_SBppE21i4wonuDpTtozg&oi=scholarr

LEFEBVRE (Camille) et SURUN (Isabelle) : « Exploration et transferts de savoir : deux cartes produites par des Africains au début du XIX e siècle ». https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00682112

LEFEBVRE (Camille) : « Itinéraires de sable : Paroles, gestes et écrits au Soudan Central au XIXe siècle. » https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00676325/

RENOULT Yann : « L’éthnomathématique, un outil de lutte contre les épistémicides » https://pedaradicale.hypotheses.org/2375

Sitographie

https://www.antiatlas.net/

http://www.antiatlas-journal.net/

https://thefunambulist.net

https://decolonialatlas.wordpress.com/

http://reseaudecolonial.org/

https://bureaudetudes.org

http://fermedelamhotte.fr/bureau.html

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_de_biblioth%C3%A8ques_d%C3%A9truites

Scientific Committee

Denis Chartier, PR en géographie environnementale, Université de Paris, (LADYSS),

Jean Cristofol, philosophe, ancien enseignant à l’ESA-Aix Félix Ciccolini, membre fondateur de l’antiAtlas des frontières,

Jean-Michel Durafour, PR en Esthétique et théorie du cinéma, AMU (LESA),

Aurélia Dusserre, MCF en histoire contemporaine, Aix-Marseille Université, (IREMAM),

Thierry Fournier, artiste, commissaire d’exposition indépendant, directeur artistique de l’antiAtlas des frontières,

Anna Guilló, artiste, PR en arts plastiques et sciences de l’art, Aix-Marseille, Université (LESA), membre de l’antiAtlas des frontières,

Magali Nachtergael, PR en littérature française et arts, Université de Bordeaux Montaigne (Plurielles),

Cedric Parizot, anthropologue, CNRS, Aix-Marseille Université (IREMAM), membre fondateur de l’antiAtlas des frontières,

Émilia Sanabria, anthropologue, CNRS / Université de Paris, EHESS, (Inserm).

Places

  • Marseille, France (13)

Date(s)

  • Thursday, April 14, 2022

Keywords

  • epistemicide, atlas, art, cartographie, pensée décoloniale

Contact(s)

  • Anna Guilló
    courriel : anna [dot] guillo [at] univ-amu [dot] fr

Information source

  • Anna Guilló
    courriel : anna [dot] guillo [at] univ-amu [dot] fr

License

CC0-1.0 This announcement is licensed under the terms of Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal.

To cite this announcement

« AntiAtlas of Epistemicide », Call for papers, Calenda, Published on Tuesday, March 15, 2022, https://doi.org/10.58079/18g6

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