The XIII
World Congress of Rural Sociology: “The New Rural World: from Crises to
Opportunities” was held in Lisbon (Portugal) between 29 July
and 4 August 2012. The general
theme of the congress was the crisis threatening rural livelihoods and the
agri-food system, and emerging paradigms for change. About a thousand students, scholars and
researchers contributed to the conference and its working groups.
One highlight
was the plenary lecture given by Prof. Sousa Santos from Coimbra University. He
discussed knowledge production and “knowledges
of struggles” produced as people contest each other’s knowledge and concept
of time, which is commonly and popularly taught to lead towards modernisation
and globalisation. In addition, the western conception of time implies that the
arrow of time proceeds linearly forward and that the core countries of the
world system are at the head of progress. According to Prof.
Sousa Santos, the western scholarly approaches rest on western worldviews. He
stressed that academia would benefit from the use of the indigenous and
non-western instruments and alternative approaches to science. Researchers
should engage in new kinds of transdisciplinary project.
De Sousa
Santos also emphasised “ecology of
knowledges” based on indigenous and personal knowledge. Here, for Santos, ecology
means an arena where different practices are exercised and hopefully sustainable
interactions take place among different entities (people/animal/societies, etc.).
The “ecology of knowledges” would
allow the pragmatic discussion of alternative criteria of validity and
alternative scholarly avenues to policy advice. A good example of this is the difficulty
with developing alternative solutions in the European crisis that is currently
emerging in many countries. According to Santos, Europe is becoming
underdeveloped, partly because of colonial antagonism. Antagonism is still
strong in Europe, and hinders the Europeans from perceiving workable solutions
to their problems.
De Sousa
Santos also encouraged us to apply “a
global form of learning” and incorporate the social movements that are emerging
in the Fourth World into policy making. For Santos, many indigenous communities
and Thmovements are considered non-existent by western scientists. He called this
invisibility the “sociology of absences”. If sociology usually gives different critical perspectives to the
structures, agencies and functionings of the world, for Santos, sociology represents
issues to be constructed against hegemonic social science and upon
epistemological presuppositions. It is through this process, when entities of “sociology of absences” start working, that
monocultures will be replaced by alternative ecologies.
Indeed, new
developments in visibility are taking shape, for instance in Latin America. For
the first time, the new constitution in Bolivia has been translated into the
country’s indigenous languages. Indigenous people now have an opportunity to
become more involved in local politics and influence how relevant knowledge is
produced and signified.
Therefore, one
might wonder about the applicability of the concept of the “sociology of absences” in Finnish wolf
policy. It seems that some of the local views are going unrecognised in the current
wolf discourse. The state regulations designed by the dominant state
institutions might have hidden the viewpoints of local people and local “ecology of knowledges” within management practices. Hence, it is actually more
demanding because the public is expecting to find alternative managerial solutions
for the grey wolf issues in south-western Finland.
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