#ethnoknowledges

Wynter's project is to uncouple the concept of Man from the one of Human, in order to show that this concept is full with an imperial will to objectivity and truth, while in fact, 'human', and 'truth' for that matter - do not exist.

Katherine McKittrick (from the introduction):

[W. Mignolo sees that] Sylvia Wynter’s project itself is situated outside our present order of knowledge. Wynter’s perspective and therefore her reading practices, he suggests, are decolonial scientia in that she situates herself beyond the crass body politics of colonial knowledge in order to foster adjoined human needs. (P.4)

Wynter's intellectual disobedience emerges on the intersection of decoloniality (C.L.R.James) and neurobiological cognition (H.Maturana).

Wynter is 'decolonial' because she

is not looking to change or supersede epistemic categories and established knowledge, but rather seeks to undo the systems through which knowledge and knowing are constituted.

she engages in epistemic disobedience. Decolonial option for Mignolo is

a practice of rethinking and unraveling dominant worldviews that have been opened up by Indigenous and black and Caribbean thinkers since the sixteenth century in América (with accent) and the Caribbean.

she draws on the insights on autopiesis of H.Maturana, who sees interconnection between 'seeing' the world and 'knowing' the world - the idea that what living organism 'sees' are in fact images fabricated by its neurological processing of information.

  To study "humanities" means to explore the narratives using the instruments they have been created with - which is in essence, mere reproduction, acceptance of the rules in which therory should be studies, that wouldn't lead us to understanding how else it would be seen otherwise.

Wynter's work unveils this belief system that naturalizes

the principles and rules of knowing - that calcify a commitment to an epistemological tract that profits from replicating itself. (P. 108)

The epistemologies of les damnes do not seek to arrive at any 'true' definition of Human for there is no 'Human' apart from the Western Imperial 'Man'.

Vitruvian Man was build based on the Greco-Roman concept of the human figure, and served as an ideal  instrument to exclude Indians and Africans from being Human.

We all are born equal, however, 

The discourse that “we are all born equal” is inflected with practices of inequity that shape how we live in the world differentially. (P.109)

1492 - the arrival of Columbus to America - was a key moment for unifying concepts of Man and Human, and also for their understanding in realtion to Race and racism.

At that moment, each separately existing civilisation had their own way to write history. Western history included the Bible, and this mix of sacred and secular pronounced by Hegel helped to set the stage for the belief that facts narrated are ontologically independent from history itself. (I don't understand this, p.110).

In 1492, there is a bifurcation of history - Indians and blacks are cast as inferiors, and at the same time 'global linear thinking' links to the creation of international law.

1492 is a turning point in history of Europe vs the South, Central America and the Caribbean - expulsion from Paradise, beginning of colonial world order, invention of modern/colonial Other.

  P.113 - pieza as a Portuguese measure in slave trace (a man of 25 yo)

Wynter suggests that in the “Jamesian system, the pieza becomes an ever- more general category of value, establishing equivalences between a wider variety of oppressed labor power.”

what you see and feel from different and differential colonial places is the colonial matrix of power of which the economy is only one component: domination precedes accumulation, and domination needs a cultural model or a colonial matrix that legitimizes and naturalizes exploitation. (P.115)

Thus Wynter says that while economic organisation that the Marxist analysis explores, there is a pieza frame, the colonial matrix in the game, that employs the European cultural model to override the perspective of those it marginalises.

F. Fanon's sociogenesis

“Beside phylogeny and ontogeny stands sociogeny”— F.Fanon (P.115). You are only as white as your command of French language.

Fanon's decolonial scientia (a Renaissance term for science):

the sociogenic principle reveals what the ontogenesis principle hides: that race is not in the body but rather is built in the social imaginary grounded on colonial differences.

Wynter follows this thinking to say that sociogenesis

introduces the perspective of the subject that ontogenesis classifies as object

Mignolo imagines decolonia scientia in the following ways:

1) Spatially. expanding globally in connection with English language

2) Chronologically. Non-linear, in contrast to imperial scientia that would see conenctions through time in linear fashion.

3) Subjectively. Detach themselves from imperial knowledge -  being categorized as racially subordinate by imperial subject.

Tasks of decolonial scientia:

1) reimagines rather than denies the links between geo- history and knowledge and between biography and knowledge

2) explores the consequences that Western expansion (today called “globalization”) had and continues to have for the population and the environment (exploitation of natural resources)

3) generates knowledge to build communities in which life (in general) has priority over economic gains, economic growth, and economic development

  To Wynter, there are two types of histories: one is biological - the history of emergence and spread of living organisms and the other is social - creation of "Man-as-Human". Importantly, Wynter shifts the perspective of looking at history and rehistoricizes what it means to be human from within sociogenesis.

Wynter's truth-for connect these two types of histories:

“every form of life, every living species would now be able to know its reality only in terms of its specific truth- for.” (p. 121)

From her standpoint, the imperial concept of Man/Human is no longer sustainable. It is the stance taken globally in the academia and schools, and thus we are led to imagine ourselves as Man and live through its history as if it was a history-for the human itself.

She sees Columbus, Copernicus and Darwin as key figures in colonization of geography, astronomy and biology (before them, they were ethno-knowledges).

  “Towards the Human, after Man.” (S. Wynter, Unsettling the Coloniality of Being, 257–337).

  Source: Walter Mignolo. What it is to be human? in Sylvia Wynter: on being human as praxis Ed. Katherine McKittrick, P. 106