Knowing with the Heart: Relational Ontologies

Relational ontologies have a very different logic than modernism/coloniality. Not only are there other ways of imagining the world, there are also alternative ways of knowing and experiencing the world (epistemologies) that are not easily translated into modernist categories. Sometimes these felt ways of knowing are called epistemologies of the heart. That would mean being somatically present and engaged with every part of the environment including humans, non-humans, and other-than-humans (or what might be called environmental intelligences.) For people educated in modernism/coloniality, the process of understanding relational epistemologies may take time; simple translations of relevant concepts and terms can lead to equivocations, distortions or only partial understandings. In many instances language is an insufficient mode of communication for ways of knowing across decoloniality and modernist paradigms. Nevertheless, we are hopeful that it is possible to relearn this way of being in the world. All people alive today descend from communities with relational ontologies, some many generations in the past, others with living relatives.

Resource: Thinking and Feeling With the Earth by Arturo Escobar;

Columbus and Other Cannibals by Jack D. Forbes