Acceso usuarios
Walter Mignolo
The main thrust of the article is to argue that the notion of “cultural differences” is of little use we do not take into account that the real issue is the “colonial difference”—and for two reasons: cultural differences are not what they are in themselves, but have been categorized and ranked through the logic of the "colonial difference". The colonial difference is the privilege of hegemonic discourses, not only to name what is different, but mainly to rank what is different within a scale that paces the norm along the line of values defined and articulated through imperial discourse. The bottom line, then, is not “inter-cultural’ but “inter-epistemic” communication. A world in which many worlds would coexist, as the Zapatistas dictum goes, cannot be a world of many cultures, yet dominated by one epistemology, but has to be inter-epistemic dialogue among categories of thought in other mayor languages.
