The genocide understood as the systematic elimination of the bodies of the colonized people, brought with it the epistemicide proposed by Boaventura de Sousa Santos “as the death of the knowledge of the subordinated culture” (92) consolidating by this the hegemonic of the Eurocentric Epistemology in the South Globe. The demand for the “the re-construction and the restitution of silenced histories, repressed subjectivities, subalternized knowledges and languages” (Mignolo, 451) require disarticulated the notion of Totality imposed by the Western. In this context, what it is the role that plays the body in the decolonization of our ways of knowing (epistemologies) and ways of being (ontologies)?
The Cartesian ontological dualism model where the mind “is of a different substance from the body” (Grosfoguel,75) is still predominant in the academy instruction, reproducing the dynamic subordination of colonial hierarchies. To Rivera Cusincanqui “There can be no discourse of decolonization, no theory of decolonization, without a decolonizing practice” (100); the challenge then is not only to delinking theoretically with the Western Epistemology but put into practice alternatives ways of knowledge and therefore ways of being in the world. The body then appears as a possibility of enacting the notions of pluri- modernity contained in each living practice avoid falling into the depoliticization of the discourse of alterity (Rivera Cusicanqui,102). The Mayan idea of O’tan/ heart that become Sp’ijilal O’tan as an integrated manner of “thinking, acting and being in the world” (López Intzín, 6) suggest the possibility of an embodied epistemology which incorporates the corporal experience condition to the decolonization and des-domestication of our existence.
As Rivera Cusicanqui states “The possibility of profound cultural reform in our society depends on the decolonization of our gestures and acts and the language with which we name the world” (105). I would say not only how we name the world, but also how we shape it. In other words, the body not only as a place where the language, stories, memories are contained but also a place where the knowledges contained in these practices are able to emerge and to reproduce itself.
López Intzín, Juan. "Sp'ijilal O'tan: Epistemologies of the Heart." 1 Jan 1970: Print.Mignolo, Walter D.. "Delinking: The rhetoric of modernity, the logic of coloniality and the grammar of de-coloniality." Cultural Studies 21. no. 2: 2007. Accessed 10 Oct 2018. Grosfoguel, Ramon. "The Structure of Knowledge in Westernized Universities: Epistemic Racism/Sexism and the Four Genocides/Epistemicides of the Long 16th Century." Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge 11. no. 1: 2013. 73-90. Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia. "Ch’ixinakax utxiwa: A Reflection on the Practices and Discourses of Decolonization." South Atlantic Quarterly 111. no. 1: 2012. Accessed 12 Oct 2018. de Sousa Santos, Boaventura. Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide. Abingdon & New York: Routledge, 2014.