PAST-FUTURES · Past Futures: Long-Time Thinking in South American “Living Well” Epistemologies

Past Futures: Long-Time Thinking in South American “Living Well” Epistemologies

What knowledge is needed in an age of climate breakdown and mass extinction? What is considered as knowledge beside western science and who is considered capable of producing it? The research in which I have engaged for the duration of this project starts from this question. Dominant societal models are anthropocentric in one fundamental way: human life, and its preservation, is imagined in isolation from the non-human world. This essential belief system relies on a short-time vision of temporality. How can human societies develop post-anthropocentric political imaginations and reconsider knowledge and action no longer through a human-centric approach to time but through a planetary vision of time? Exploring the socio-ecological knowledge systems of ‘Living Well’ (Buen Vivir), originating from the Quechua and Aymara speaking regions of South America, has the objective to expand the human-centric epistemic basis of politics. As the techno-green transition paradigm counts on an unprecedented acceleration of resource extraction, the dominant model of knowledge-making remains fundamentally unchallenged. The societal risks of a human-centric temporality as we look to building models of sustainability are very high. As long as the structure of human organised life remains based on principles of demarcation and exclusion, and the focus of reproduction is restricted to the human sphere, the planetary reproductive networks will continue to be broken down. From environmental experts to philosophers, from scientists to economists, there is a general consensus that technocratic solutions are not enough and that new stories need to be told about new forms of common wellbeing using new conceptual and methodological tools. This project brings for the first time indigenous eco-social concepts such as relational subjectivity, interspecies community, and pluriversality, into pressing debates on global environmental citizenship. The overall aim of a history of ‘Living Well’ is to contribute new proposals that are lacking in current global-north-centered environmental knowledge by drawing up imaginative ways of wordling that show us that anthropocentrism is not an inevitability. There is a philosophical and political urgency to reimagine the place of nonhuman life within societal organisation so that a just and sustainable future can be possible. However, there is still very limited room in current histories of knowledge for principles and values of relationality and interdependence. We can no longer ignore that environments are political and ecological at once. Through its publications and dissemination activities, the project’s most important objective has been to create porous conceptual spaces to spark discussions about the dangers of building the transition project while leaving the extractive foundations unchanged and on what alternative models of a good life can look like.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз