Epistemicide

Episteme — knowledge, science

Cide — killing

Epistemicide — coined in 1998 by Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos — The killing, silencing, erasure, annihilation or devaluing of a knowledge system.

It is a deliberate tactic of colonisation and supremacy.

We are shaped by our environment just as we shape the environment we inhabit. There is no separation, only awareness and choice of how we partner and respond.

Imagine having your entire language, intergenerational knowledge, customs, culture, art, spiritual practice, music, and dance separated from you. Then erased.

Take your time. Imagine this. (Some of you do not need to imagine, you already know.)

When we have our cultural identity ripped from us, when the generational skills and knowledge are forgotten, there is a question of who we are and how we respond to the strange world we find ourselves in. We are a beginner, a toddler, lost in cultures that are foreign to our being, yet asked to integrate as if integration is as easy as walking.

In a world that is beginning to understand trauma and its cellular imprint, this kind of epistemic erasure and its effects on our biology and spirit must be considered.

The imperial impulse is not concerned with the side effects of epistemicide. This impulse wants total erasure, not just cultural. It wants broken. Subjugated. Enslaved.

In this year, 2025, we humans are still playing at this cruel game. An adjunct to ecocide and genocide, born from the unhinged idea that some of us are somehow superior.

If I had a magical wand and could make one change without personal consequences, it would be to have every human receive a unique to them Pavlovian type shock — enough to bring us to our knees spiritually, metaphorically or physically — every single time a thought of superiority arose within us. Not a single one of us would be immune, for the disease of superiority and supremacy affects us all. But to learn the cadence and frequency of this impulse as they arise within us, to become witness to it, and with awareness, choose to stop the play, would hopefully lead us to stop the rot of this disease and its terrible contagion.

Would this lead to a more benevolent, kinder world, where a word like epistemicide can become an archaeological relic?

That is the more beautiful world I hope for.

Photo Taken December 27th 2024, Article written December 27th 2024

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