The primacy of knowledge in the making of shifting modern global imaginaries

摘要

Reading Isaac Kamola's Making the World Global: U. S. Universities and the Production of the Global Imaginary (2019) provoked the long-standing questions of the relationship between knowledge and reality (as an imaginary) and indeed between institutions and intellectual/ideological productions. Some understood this question of 'epistemology-ontology' as a sort of chicken-egg dialectic because even though knowledge actively creates domains of politics, economy, and society (defined here as epistemic creations), it is also shaped by politics, economy, and knowledge. Increasingly, scholars such as Boaventura de Sousa as well as Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh are underscoring how epistemology frames ontology. For example, Santos (2018, p. 27) posited that 'social scientific knowledge invented much of what it described as existing; such an invention became part of social reality as it got embedded in the ways people behave and perceive social life.' The same logic is expressed by Mignolo and Walsh (2018, p. 35) who openly state that 'Ontology is made of epistemology' and elaborated that 'It is knowledge weaved around concepts such as politics and economy that is crucial for decolonial thinking, and not politics and economy as transcendental entities.'