Science and the Other: An Inquiry Into the Geopolitics of Knowledge, Potiguara Ontology and the Hard Problem of Modern Science

Science and the Other is about the Great Divide between us, "moderns", and the subalternised "non-modern" Other, and the role scientific universalism has been playing in maintaining a colonial geopolitics of structural, onto-epistemic violence. Tracing back over a century in scientific meta-discourse, STS and anthropological constructions of the Other, the book shows how, albeit utterly unsustainable, Science self-declared truth monopoly has been functioning as an ideological machine of a fundamentally colonial world system. It has long been shown by feminist and decolonial science studies that scientific paradigms and practices are expressions of situated, Euro-, andro- and anthropocentric, modern/colonial metaphysics. The implicated dualism divides the world into dichotomous ontic categories like subjects and objects, culture and nature, humans and non-humans, "developed" and "underdeveloped" people and regions, thereby naturalising structural inequalities and legitimising the exploitation of both nature and a major part of humanity in the name of universalist models of progress and development. It is not difficult to see how this exploitative ratio led into the "catastrophic times" of the so-called "Anthropocene". Rather than bringing about sustainable solutions, the modern sciences tend to reproduce the causes of the multi-crises scenarios we are currently facing. A decolonized and ecologically sustainable science must, therefore, take Other ways of knowing seriously and enter into an equitable, pluriversal dialogue about the kind of knowledge we need in order to build the world(s) we would like to share. Science and the Other explores the possibility of bridging the onto-epistemological gap between modern science and Other ways of knowing to enable such a pluriversal dialogue. Based on a three years action research with the Potiguara in North-East Brazil, the book offers a comparative analysis of their cosmology and ontological models of mind and matter as discussed by scientists. Scientific evidence from quantum physics and neurosciences allows for a wide range of ontological interpretations, some of which seem to share ontological categories comparable to those suggested by Potiguara cosmology. In other words, scientific evidence does not disprove the existence of phenomena and entities that constitute the Potiguara s world, but to the contrary, rather describe a world made up by ontic referents with comparable properties, however, using radically different metaphors, thus painting a radically different picture of "reality". Accordingly, a dialogue between modern science and other, hitherto excluded knowledge cultures should not only be possible; looking through the Others lens might also help us find alternative solutions to old, recalcitrant problems (e.g. relativism or the mind-body-problem) and open our eyes for new horizons and alternative futures beyond the scope modern/colonial epistemologies.

This is an open access book.