Chapter 2: Epistemologies of mastery
The Thin Ice of Civilization on JSTOR
Hands Off Mother Earth! Manifesto Against Geoengineering
<aside> 💡 I would like to draw attention to a few concepts introduced in this week’s readings and how it relates back to Western and Indigenous concepts introduced during Module I. In Adelman’s “Epistemologies of Mastery”, he references Santos when he writes “how modern science grants itself epistemological privilege by destroying alternative knowledges that might question it through a process of ‘epistemicide’...The ecology of knowledges is a learned struggle against ignorant ignorance in which epistemologies of blindness must be confronted with an epistemology of seeing that ‘aspires to an expanded form of realism that includes suppressed, silenced or marginalized realities, as well as emergent and imagined realities.’ Could colonial legacy, in terms of the Anthropocene, be partially defined as a historical account of epistemicides? How does the notion of epistemologies of blindness versus seeing relate to concepts of the noosphere versus Place-Thought?
Additionally, in Bowden’s “The Thin Ice of Civilization”, there are references to terrorism, meteors, and nuclear weapons as perceived threats to civilizations and the counting down of the Doomsday Clock to mark the end of civilization. It’s interesting that these perceived threats are visualized “bad actors”, but the “bad actors” of the climate crisis (colonial powers and rapid industrialization) feel the need to tackle the issue. How are these concepts of time and what defines a threat juxtaposed with Indigenous histories that tell the story of many apocalypses?
In both readings, I noticed that they both describe the story of civilization as “humankind’s capacity to conquer nature” and “fantasies of the total domination of nature”. I wonder if the next phase of ecological domination and mastery of the environment has moved onto other spheres away from the immediate land/air/water we can experience (e.g. BECCS) and is looking into outer space as the next frontier to “conquer” despite centuries of Indigenous knowledge of our planetary systems?
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