Without Practice there is no Discourse, without Body there is no Knowledge. On Legitimacies in Decolonizating Theories

Abstract

In every step of the epistemic revolution, as important as the assertion of epistemological and practical autonomy, is to acknowledge the locus of enunciation from which this is produced. A theory of decolonization drawn up from the observation of social movements is not similar to one produced from the social movement itself. In the first case, the de-colonial theory is not derived from or born to a practice. Walter Mignolo, for example, who defines his theoretical proposal as the “intervention of a de-colonial thinker,” writes precisely from that position. Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui –for whom proposals such as Mignolo’s have to do with another form of colonialism– considers that one cannot imagine the epistemic revolution without decolonizing practices. In this internal-external context, if one studiesthe Plurinational State through interventions such as Mignolo’s, one will tend to draw an ideal binarism not useful to the epistemic revolution, but rather to the rearticulation of Western thought. In turn, this idealization is denied by internal discourses that perceive in the Morales administration inconsistencies between discourse and practice. This article explores all cases acknowledging the mainstays of the Plurinational State in those theories born from the struggle and, in the tensions that exist among the powerful, that which obscures the importance of social movements.