Abstract United States are demonstrating that either the margins are also in the center or (as Thiong'o expresses it) that knowledge and aesthetic norms are not universally established by a transcendent subject but are universally established by historical subjects in diverse cultural centers. Chicano writer Gloria Anzaldú a, for instance, has articulated a powerful alternative aesthetic and political hermeneutic by placing herself at the cross-road of three traditions (Spanish-American, Nahuatl, and Anglo-American) and by creating a locus of enunciation where different ways of knowing and individual and collective expressions mingle (Anzaldú a 1987). . . . My concern is to underscore the point that "colonial and postcolonial discourse" is not just a new field of study or a gold mine for extracting new riches but the condition of possibility for constructing new loci of enunciation as well as for reflecting that academic "knowledge and understanding" should be complemented with "learning from" those who are living in and thinking from colonial and postcolonial legacies, from Rigoberta Menchú to Angel Rama. Otherwise, we run the risk of promoting mimicry, exportation of theories, and internal (cultural) colonialism rather than promoting new forms of cultural critique and intellectual and political emancipations-of making colonial and postcolonial studies a field of study instead of a liminal and critical locus of enunciation. The "native point of view" also includes intellectuals. In the apportionment of scientific labor since World War II, which has been described well by Carl Pletsch (1981), the Third World produces not only "cultures" to be studied by anthropologists and ethnohistorians but also intellectuals who generate theories and reflect on their own culture and history. (Mignolo 1993a, 129-31) The situation is no different for natural scientists in Africa or Latin America, since intellectual achievements need material conditions, and satisfactory material conditions are related to the coloniality of power. "Thinking from" was an expression and an idea that kept on haunting me, and I discussed it in seminars and attempted to develop it in some of my published articles after that date (see, for instance, Mignolo 1994; 1996a). "Border thinking" was the second expression that began to gain a life of its own. Although "border" is an overused word (e.g., border writing, border culture, border matters), none of the discussions I read using the word dealt with knowledge and understanding, epistemology and hermeneutics, those two sides of the intellectual frontiers of European modernity. My own idea of INTRODUCTION On Gnosis and the Imaginary of the Modern/Colonial World System I In the sixteenth century, Spanish missionaries judged and ranked human intelligence and civilization by whether the people were in possession of alphabetic writing. This was an initial moment in the configuration of the colonial difference and the building of the Atlantic imaginary, which will become the imaginary of the modern/colonial world. Translation was the special tool to absorb the colonial difference previously established. Border thinking, as we shall see, works toward the restitution of the colonial difference that colonial translation (unidirectional, as today's globalization) attempted to erase. In the sixteenth century, the colonial difference was located in space. Toward the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, the measuring stick was history and no longer writing. "People without history" were located in a time "before" the "present." People with history could write the history of those people without. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Max Weber transformed this lack (of alphabetic writing, of history) into a celebration of the possession of true knowledge, an Occidental achievement of universal value. I have had this overall picture in mind during the process of writing this book, as I was conceiving subaltern knowledges and border thinking as the response to Weber from the end of the twentieth century. Weber never mentioned colonialism, was unaware of the colonial difference and did not reflect on the fact that he was providing such a celebratory picture at the highest moment of European expansion and capital accumulation in the history of the modern/colonial world system. I would like to remind the reader of the initial sentences of the introduction to Weber's Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism ([1904] 1992) that provoked the reflections evolving into the book the reader has in her hands: I N T R O D U C T I O N Only in the West does science exist at a stage of development which we recognize to-day as valid. . . . In short, knowledge and observation of great refinement have existed elsewhere, above all in India, China, Babylonia, Egypt. But in Babylonia and elsewhere astronomy lacked-which makes its development all the more astounding-the mathematical foundation which it first received from the Greeks. The Indian geometry had no rational proof. . . . The Indian natural sciences . . . lacked the method of experiment. (Weber [1904 (Weber [ ] 1992 Weber was blind to the colonial difference and to the subalternization of knowledge built into it. It is difficult to imagine at the end of the twentieth century a book or a master thought that would continue the tradition of Spanish missionaries in the sixteenth century, French and German philosophers after the Enlightenment, and European social scientists at the beginning of the twentieth century. Sociologist and political scientist Samuel Huntington has recognized that people from "other" civilizations and with "other" forms of knowledge are claiming a gnoseology that they have been taught to despise (this is the particular topic of chapter 7). Weber provoked in me a reflection on coloniality and epistemology, although I had no intention, initially, of writing such a book as this on the topic. This book, however, is not just a collection of articles, even though part of the material in each chapter has already been published. Each chapter has been substantially rewritten in view of the overall argument. Looking back, the seed of the book was actually planted in a debate published by Latin American Research Review in 1993, on colonial discourse, postcoloniality, and Latin America, prompted by a review article authored by historian Patricia Seed (Seed 1991) . I closed my response to the article with a long paragraph I would like to repeat here, this time in thematic parallel with Weber's assertion: I N T R O D U C T I O N When Barbadian poet Edward Kamau Brathwaite recounts the story of his search for a rhythm that would match his living experience in the Caribbean, he highlights the moment when skipping a pebble on the ocean gave him a rhythm that he could not find by reading John Milton. Brathwaite also highlights a second and subsequent moment when he perceived the parallels between the skipping of the pebble and Calypso music, a rhythm that he could not find in listening to Beethoven. I N T R O D U C T I O N 1 If Brathwaite found a voice and a form of knowledge at the intersection of the classical models he learned in a colonial school with his life experience in the Caribbean and consciousness of African people's history, his poetry is less a discourse of resistance than a discourse claiming its centrality. Similar claims could be found indirectly in the writings of Jamaican novelist and essayist Michelle Cliff, who states that one effect of British West Indian colonial discourse is "that you believe absolutely in the hegemony of the King's I N T R O D U C T I O N "border thinking," which I modeled on the Chicano/a experience, also owes much to the idea of "African gnosis" as it has been introduced by Valentin Mudimbe in his study on the invention of Africa (Mudimbe 1988) . Border thinking, as I conceive it here, is unthinkable without understanding the colonial difference. Furthermore, it is the recognition of the colonial difference from subaltern perspectives that demands border thinking. I N T R O D U C T I O N But let me add a few additional elements to explain what I have in mind and what this book is all about. Compare my initial quotation from Weber with the following quotation by Tu Wei-ming [1985] 1996): I N T R O D U C T I O N Historically, the emergence of individualism as a motivating force in Western society may have been intertwined with highly particularized political, economic, ethical, and religious traditions. It seems reasonable that one can endorse an insight into the self as a basis for equality and liberty without accepting Locke's idea of private property, Adam Smith's and Hobbes' idea of private interest, John Stuart Mill's idea of privacy, Kierkegaard's idea of loneliness, or the early Sartre's idea of freedom. ([1985] 1996, 78) Now, Tu Wei-ming's is not just another contribution along the lines of Fritjof Capra's Tao of Physics (1975) . Tao of Physics was and still is an important argument to show that the differences between "modern physics" and "Eastern mysticism" are historical and "superficial" rather than ontological. Beyond both of them we find a human capacity for logical articulation and sophisticated thinking, which failed to underline the colonial difference implied in the very naming of them. "Modern physics" retained in Capra's book the hegemonic weight of Western sciences, whereas "Eastern mysticism" retained the exotic connotations constructed by several centuries of Occidentalism. Tu Wei-ming defines himself as a Confucian practitioner, while Capra is a believer in the universality (nonhistorical) of the Western concept of reason. And what Tu Wei-ming is contributing to it is precisely to redress the balance between equal epistemological potentials that have been subordinated to each other by the coloniality of power and the articulation of the colonial epistemic difference. I N T R O D U C T I O N The two last sentences of Tu Wei-ming's introduction to his classic Confucian Thoughts (1985) reveal in an elegant way the epistemological limits of Western thought and its epistemological potential, as sustainable knowledge and not as a relic of the past to be "studied" and "fixed" from the perspective of Western disciplines. As sustainable knowledge, the epistemological potential of Confucian legacy dwells in the possibility of showing the limits of modern epistemology, in both its disciplinary and its area studies dimension. As such, there is no longer the possibility of looking at "translation" or "information" from "other cultures," by which it is implied that "other cultures" are not scientific and are knowable from the scientific approaches of Western epistemology. Tu Wei-ming is clear, in the preceding passage, in implying that a post-Occidental stage is being thought out and that such a stage is a point of no return and of the erasure of the colonial epistemic difference from the perspective of what has been a subaltern form of knowledge. On the other hand, Tu Wei-ming could be criticized from the perspective of Chinese leftist intellectuals for supporting the uses of Confucianism, in China, to counter the ideology of Western capitalism with an ideology of Eastern capitalism. Or he could also be criticized for using Weber's own logic to criticize Protestant ethics from the perspective of a Confucian ethics (Wang 1997, 64-78) . Both cases, however, enter a new player into the game, albeit not the ideal player for all the coaches involved. We could imagine similar scenarios, in the future, in which subaltern religions will take the place left empty by the historical collapse of socialism. And that they could be used to justify capitalist expansion beyond the West and to counter Christianity and the Protestant ethics upon which Western capitalism built its imaginary and its ideological force. This possibility does not prevent Confucianism and other forms of subaltern knowledge from being enacted with different purposes. Once "authenticities" are no longer an issue, what remains are the marks left by the colonial difference and the coloniality of power articulating both, the struggle for new forms of domination (e.g., Confucianism and capitalism) and struggles for new forms of liberation. I accentuate "liberation" because I am arguing here from the perspective of the external borders of the modern/colonial world system. And we all know that "emancipation" is the word used for the same purpose within the internal borders of the modern/colonial world system. I N T R O D U C T I O N In any case, the point I would like to make could be stressed by Tu Weiming's elegant and deadly sentence at the end of the introduction to Confucian Thought: I N T R O D U C T I O N The nine essays, written over a fairly long period of time for a variety of purposes, are in the kind words of Robert C. Neville, "attempts at transmission and interpretation, Confucius' own self-understanding." However, these attempts, far from transmitting and interpreting the Confucian conception of selfhood, suggest ways of exploring the rich resources within the Confucian tradition so that they can be brought to bear upon the difficult task of understanding Confucian selfhood as creative transformation. [1985] (1996, 16) If Confucianism offers the possibility of desubalternizing knowledges and expanding the horizon of human knowledge beyond the academy and beyond the Western concept of knowledge and rationality, this possibility is also open to forms of knowledge that were hit harder by the colonial tempest, including the knowledge of Amerindians and Native Americans. Vine Deloria Jr., as intellectual and activist has been insisting (since the 1970s) on the cracks (or the colonial difference) between Native American knowledge and the structure of power in the hands of Anglo-Americans. Deloria has been criticized for essentializing the difference by presenting it in dichotomous terms. I do not have the time here to dispel a form of criticism when it comes from a postmodern leftist position that is just blind to the colonial difference. Of course, America is not a two-sided struggle between Anglo and Native Americans. The force of the national ideology in scholarship and, as a consequence, the lack of comparative works (that will place Native Americans in the context of Amerindians in Latin America, Aborigines in New Zealand and Australia, but also in comparison with Islam and Hinduism) hide the fact that what really matters is the colonial difference. As Deloria (1978) argues, "world views in collision" have been a fact of the past five hundred years and they have been in collision in the sixteenth century and today. However, neither of the world views in collision remained the same and they were not just between Anglos and Native Americans. World views in collision have been many, at different times around the planet. That is precisely the geohistorical density of the modern/colonial world system and the diachronic contradictions of its internal (conflicts between empires within the same world view) and external borders (world views in collision). I N T R O D U C T I O N In chapter 7 I return to this topic by a different route: the future of a diverse planetary civilization beyond the universalisation of either Western neoliberalism or Western neo-Marxism. However, I need to state now that my references to Wei-ming and Deloria were not done with the intention of proposing that Confucianism or Native American religions are alternatives to Protestantism. They were made to suggest, quite to the contrary, that Protestant ethics was not necessarily an alternative to neither Confucianism or Native American religions (Deloria, 1999; Churchill 1997) , and, above all, to stress one of this book's main arguments. If nation-states are no longer conceived in their homogeneity, if production of commodity is no longer attached to one country (e.g., think of the many places involved in the car industry), then we should no longer conceive Confucian or Protestant ethics or Native American religions as homogeneous systems either. Therefore, the relationships between faith and knowledge, a distinction we owe to the modern and secular conception of epistemology, needs to be rethought. That is mainly the reason I compared Tu Wei-ming and Deloria with Weber. Although I would enroll myself among the second possibility if I had no other choice. The good news is that we have other choices, even the possibility of choosing to think in and from the borders, to engage in border thinking as a future epistemological breakthrough. Tu Wei-ming and Deloria are not interpreting, translating from the Western hegemonic perspective, or transmitting knowledge from the perspective of area studies. Their analytic and critical reflections (rather than "religious studies") are engaged in a powerful exercise of border thinking from the perspective of epistemological subalternity. Alternatives to modern epistemology can hardly come only from modern (Western) epistemology itself. II Let me explain my notion of border thinking by introducing "gnosis" as a term that would take us away from the confrontation-in Western epistemology, between epistemology and hermeneutics, between nomothetic and ideographic "sciences"-and open up the notion of "knowledge" beyond cultures of scholarships. Gnosis and gnoseology are not familiar words nowadays within cultures of scholarship. The familiar words are those like epistemology and hermeneutics, which are the foundations of the "two cultures," sciences and the humanities. Indeed, hermeneutics and epistemology are more familiar because they have been articulated in the culture of scholarship since the Enlightenment. Since then, hermeneutics has been recast in secular, rather than in biblical terms, and epistemology has also been recast and displaced from its original philosophical meaning (referring to true knowledge, episteme, as distinct from opinion, doxa, and located as a reflection on scientific knowledge). Hermeneutics was assigned the domain of meaning and human understanding. Thus, the two cultures discussed by Snow (Snow 1959) came into being as a reconversion of the field of knowledge in the second phase of modernity, located in northern Europe and developed in the three main languages of knowledge since then (English, French, German) . This frame is central to my discussion throughout this book. Gnosis was part of this semantic field, although it vanished from the Western configuration of knowledge once a certain idea of rationality began to be formed and distinguished from forms of knowledge that were considered dubious. Gnosis indeed was appropriated by the Gnostics (Jonas 1958), a religious and redemptive movement opposed to Christianity, from which comes the bad press received by "gnosticism" in the modern colonial world (from the Renaissance to the post-cold war). However, this is not the genealogy I am interested in. II Although the story is more complex, the following summary intends to map my use of gnosis and gnoseology. The verb gignosko (to know, to recognize) and epistemai (to know, to be acquainted with) suggest a different conceptualization of knowledge and knowing. The difference, in Plato's work, between doxa and episteme is well known, the first indicating a type of knowledge guided by common sense and the latter a more second-order knowledge, a systematic knowledge guided by explicit logical rules. Gnosis seems to have emerged as a response to the need to indicate a secret or hidden kind of knowledge. Greek philologists, however, recommend not to establish a rigid distinction between gnosis and episteme but to look at specific uses of them by specific authors. Now, the Oxford Companion of Philosophy links gnoseology with the Greek word for "knowledge" and, therefore, does not make a clear distinction with episteme. But here an important and modern distinction is introduced as far as gnoseology refers to a kind of knowledge that is not available to sense experience-knowledge either attained by mystic contemplation or by pure logical and mathematical reasoning. Interestingly enough, the Oxford Companion of Philosophy reveals its own location when it clarifies that gnoseology is an archaic term and has been superseded by epistemology, (in the modern, post-Cartesian sense of reason and knowledge), and by metaphysics, a form and conceptualization of knowledge that has become (in Heidegger and Gadamer, for instance) linked with meaning and hermeneutics. Thus, gnoseology in the early modern colonial world became a term to refer to knowledge in general, while epistemology became restricted to analytical philosophy and the philosophy of sciences (Rorty 1982) . In German the word Erkenntnistheori, in French théorie de la connaissance, and in Spanish teoría del conocimiento became expressions equivalent to gnoseology. Ferrater Mora ([1944] 1969) , for example, distinguished in Spanish "teoría del conocimiento" from "epistemología" by the fact that the latter refers to scientific knowledge while the former to knowledge in general. II It is interesting to note that Valentin Y. Mudimbe employed gnosis in the subtitle of his book The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge (1988) . This book emerged from a request to write a survey on African philosophy. How do you, indeed, write such a history without twisting the very concept of philosophy? Mudimbe states the discomfort he found himself in when he had to survey the history of philosophy as a disciplined kind of practice imposed by colonialism and, at the same time, to deal with other undisciplined forms of knowledge that were reduced to subaltern knowledge by colonial disciplined knowing practices called philosophy and related to epistemology. The "African traditional system of thought" was opposed to "philosophy" as the traditional was opposed to the modern: philosophy became, in other words, a tool for subalternizing forms of knowledge beyond its disciplined boundaries. Mudimbe introduced the word gnosis to capture a wide range of forms of knowledge that "philosophy" and "epistemology" contributed to cast away. To seize the complexity of knowledge about Africa, by those who lived there for centuries and by those who went to Westernize it, the knowledge produced by travelers in the past and by the media in the present, underlining at the same time the crucial relevance of the "African traditional system of thought," needed to conceptualize knowledge production beyond the two cultures. He noted that gnosis etymologically is related to gnosko, which in ancient Greek means "to know." But, more specifically, Mudimbe notes, it means "seeking to know, inquiry, methods of knowing, investigation, and even acquaintance with someone. Often the word is used in a more specialized sense, that of higher and esoteric knowledge" (Mudimbe 1988, ix) . Mudimbe is careful enough to specify that gnosis is not equivalent to either doxa or episteme. Episteme, Mudimbe clarifies, is understood as both science and intellectual configuration about systematic knowledge, while doxa is the kind of knowledge that the very conceptualization of episteme needs as its exterior: episteme is not only the conceptualization of systematic knowledge but is also the condition of possibility of doxa; it is not its opposite. II Following the previous configuration of the field of knowledge in Western memory, I will use gnoseology as the discourse about gnosis and I will understand by gnosis knowledge in general, including doxa and episteme. Border gnosis as knowledge from a subaltern perspective is knowledge conceived from the exterior borders of the modern/colonial world system, and border gnoseology as a discourse about colonial knowledge is conceived at the conflictive intersection of the knowledge produced from the perspective of modern colonialisms (rhetoric, philosophy, science) and knowledge produced from the perspective of colonial modernities in Asia, Africa, and the Americas/Caribbean. Border gnoseology is a critical reflection on knowledge production from both the interior borders of the modern/colonial world system (imperial conflicts, hegemonic languages, directionality of translations, etc.) and its exterior borders (imperial conflicts with cultures being colonized, as well as the subsequent stages of independence or decolonization). By interior borders I mean, for instance, the displacement of Spain from hegemonic position by England, in the seventeenth century, or the entry of the United States. in the concert of imperial nations in 1898. By exterior borders I mean the borders between Spain and the Islamic world, along with the Inca or Aztec people in the sixteenth century, or those between the British and the Indians in the nineteenth century, or the memories of slavery in the concert of imperial histories. Finally, border gnoseology could be contrasted with territorial gnoseology or epistemology, the philosophy of knowledge, as we know it today (from Descartes, to Kant, to Husserl and all its ramifications in analytic philosophy of languages and philosophy of science): a conception and a reflection on knowledge articulated in concert with the cohesion of national languages and the formation of the nationstate (see chapter 6). II " Gnosticism," said Hans Jonas (1958, 32) , was the name for numerous doctrines "within and around Christianity during its critical first century." The emphasis was on knowledge (gnosis) with salvation as the final goal. As for the kind of knowledge gnostic knowledge is, Jonas observes that the I N T R O D U C T I O N term by itself is a formal term that doesn't specify what is to be known or the subjective aspect of possessing knowledge. The difference with the gnostic context can be located in the concept of reason. I N T R O D U C T I O N As for what the knowledge is about, the associations of the term most familiar to the classically trained reader point to rational objects, and accordingly to natural reason as the organ for acquiring and possessing knowledge. In the gnostic context, however, "knowledge" has an emphatically religious or supranatural meaning and refers to objects which we nowadays should call those of faith rather than of reason. . . . Gnosis meant pre-eminently knowledge of God, and from what we have said about the radical transcendence of the deity it follows that "knowledge of God" is the knowledge of something naturally unknowable and therefore itself not a natural condition. . . . On the one hand it is closely bound up with revelationary experience, so that reception of the truth either through sacred and secret lore or through inner illumination replaces rational argument and theory. . . . on the other hand, being concerned with the secrets of salvation, "knowledge" is not just theoretical information about certain things but is itself, as a modification of the human condition, charged with performing a function in the bringing about of salvation. Thus gnostic "knowledge" has an eminently practical object. (Jonas 1958, 34) We are obviously no longer at the beginning of the Christian era and salvation is not a proper term to define the practicality of knowledge, and neither is its claim to truth. But we need to open up the space that epistemology took over from gnoseology, and aim it not at God but at the uncertainties of the borders. Our goals are not salvation but decolonization, and transformations of the rigidity of epistemic and territorial frontiers established and controlled by the coloniality of power in the process of building the modern/ colonial world system. I N T R O D U C T I O N But since my focus is on forms of knowledge produced by modern colonialism at the intersection with colonial modernities, border gnosis/gnoseology and border thinking will be used interchangeably to characterize a powerful and emergent gnoseology, absorbing and displacing hegemonic forms of knowledge into the perspective of the subaltern. This is not a new form of synchretism or hybridity, but an intense battlefield in the long history of colonial subalternization of knowledge and legitimation of the colonial difference. By "subalternization of knowledge" I intend, through this book, to do justice and expand on an early insight by the Brazilian "anthropologian" (as he called himself, instead of "anthropologist") Darcy Ribeiro. "Anthropologian" was indeed a marker of subalternization of knowledge: an anthropologist in the "Third World" (Ribeiro was writing at the end of the 1960s and in the middle of the cold war and the consolidation of area studies) is not the same as an anthropologist in the First World, since the former is in the location of the object of study, not in the location of the studying subject. It is in this precise tension that Darcy Ribeiro's observation acquires its density, a density between the situation being described and the location of the subject within the situation he or she is describing: I N T R O D U C T I O N In the same way that Europe carried a variety of techniques and inventions to the people included in its network of domination . . . it also introduced to them its equipment of concepts, preconcepts, and idiosyncrasy which referred at the same time to Europe itself and to the colonial people. I N T R O D U C T I O N The colonial people, deprived of their riches and of the fruit of their labor under colonial regimes, suffered, furthermore, the degradation of assuming as their proper image the image that was no more than the reflection of the European vision of the world, which considered colonial people racially inferior because they were black, Amerindians, or "mestizos." Even the brighter social strata of non-European people got used to seeing themselves and their communities as an infrahumanity whose destiny was to occupy a subaltern position because of the sheer fact that theirs was inferior to the European population. (Ribeiro 1968, 63) That colonial modernities, or "subaltern modernities" as Coronil (1997) prefers to label it, a period expanding from the late fifteenth century to the current stage of globalization, has built a frame and a conception of knowledge based on the distinction between epistemology and hermeneutics and, by so doing, has subalternized other kinds of knowledge is the main thesis of this book. That long process of subalternization of knowledge is being radically transformed by new forms of knowledge in which what has been subalternized and considered interesting only as object of study becomes articulated as new loci of enunciation. This is the second thesis of this book. The first is explored through a cultural critique of historical configurations; the second, by looking at the emergence of new loci of enunciation, by describing them as "border gnosis" and by arguing that "border gnosis" is the subaltern reason striving to bring to the foreground the force and creativity of knowledges subalternized during a long process of colonization of the planet, which was at the same time the process in which modernity and the modern Reason were constructed. I N T R O D U C T I O N By "colonial differences" I mean, through my argument (and I should perhaps say "the colonial difference"), the classification of the planet in the modern/colonial imaginary, by enacting coloniality of power, an energy and a machinery to transform differences into values. If racism is the matrix that permeates every domain of the imaginary of the modern/colonial world system, "Occidentalism" is the overarching metaphor around which colonial differences have been articulated and rearticulated through the changing hands in the history of capitalism (Arrighi 1994) and the changing ideologies motivated by imperial conflicts. The emergence of new areas of colonization that had to be articulated within the conflictive memory of the system (e.g., France's colonization of North Africa four hundred years after the Spanish expulsion of the Moors from the Iberian Peninsula). I N T R O D U C T I O N In my own intellectual history, a first formulation of border gnosis/gnoseology could be found in the notion of "colonial semiosis" and "pluritopic hermeneutics," which I introduced several years ago (Mignolo 1991) and which became two key notions in the argument and analysis of my previous book on coloniality in the early modern period (Mignolo 1995a). Colonial semiosis (which some readers found to be just more jargon, although the same readers would not find "colonial history" or "colonial economy" extravagant) was needed to account for a set of complex social and historical phenomena and to avoid the notion of "transculturation." Although I do not find anything wrong with the notion of transculturation, and while I endorse Ortiz's corrective of Malinowski's "acculturation," I was trying to avoid one of the meanings (indeed, the most common) attributed to the word: transculturation when it is attached to a biological/cultural mixture of people. When Ortiz suggested the term, he described Malinowski's acculturation as follows: I N T R O D U C T I O N Acculturation is used to describe the process of transition from one culture to another, and its manifold social repercussions. But transculturation is a more fitting term. I have chosen the word transculturation to express the highly varied phenomena that come about in Cuba as a result of the extremely complex transmutation of culture that has taken place here, and without a knowledge of which it is impossible to understand the evolution of the Cuban folk, either in the economic or in the institutional, legal, ethical, religious, artistic, linguistic, psychological, sexual or other aspects of its life. (Ortiz [1940 (Ortiz [ ] 1995 Ortiz conceived the entire history of Cuba as a long process of transculturation. And he summarized this idea in the following dictum: "The whole gamut of culture run by Europe in a span of more than four millenniums took place in Cuba in less than four centuries" (Ortiz [1940 (Ortiz [ ] 1995 . Ortiz was interested in defining a national feature of Cuban history. I am more interested in critically reflecting on coloniality and thinking from such an experience, than in identifying national (or subcontinental, e.g., "Latin American") distinctive features. This is the main reason why I prefer the term colonial semiosis to transculturation, which, in the first definition provided by Ortiz, maintains the shadows of "mestizaje." Colonial semiosis emphasized, instead, the conflicts engendered by coloniality at the level of social-semiotic interactions, and by that I mean, in the sphere of signs. In the sixteenth century, the conflict of writing systems related to religion, education, and conversion was a fundamental aspect of coloniality (Gruzinsky 1988; 1990; Mignolo 1995a) . Colonial semiosis attempted, although perhaps not entirely successfully, to dispel the notion of "culture." Why? Because culture is precisely a key word of colonial discourses classifying the planet, particularly since the second wave of colonial expansion, according to sign system (language, food, dress, religion, etc.) and ethnicity (skin color, geographical locations). Culture became, from the eighteenth century until 1950 approximately, a word between "nature" and "civilization." Lately, culture has become the other end of capital and financial interests. I N T R O D U C T I O N While Ortiz defined transculturation mainly in terms of contact between people, he suggested also that tobacco and sugar, beyond their interest for the study of Cuban economy and historical peculiarities, offer, in addition, certain curious and original instances of transculturation of the sort that are of great and current interest in contemporary sociological sciences (Ortiz [1940 (Ortiz [ ] 1995 . This kind of transculturation is closer to my own notion of colonial semiosis. Let's explore why. In the second part of the book, and after exploring in detail tobacco's features in comparison with sugar, Ortiz explores the historical aspects of both and observes: I N T R O D U C T I O N Tobacco reached the Christian world along with the revolutions of the Renaissance and the Reformation, when the Middle Ages were crumbling and the modern epoch, with its rationalism, was beginning. One might say that reason, starved and benumbed by theology, to revive and free itself, needed the help of some harmless stimulant that should not intoxicate it with enthusiasm and then stupefy it with illusions and bestiality, as happens with the old alcoholic drinks that lead to drunkenness. For this, to help sick reason, tobacco came from America. And with it chocolate. And from Abyssinia and Arabia, about the same time, came coffee. And tea made its appearance from the Far East. I N T R O D U C T I O N The coincidental appearance of these four exotic products in the Old World, all of them stimulants of the senses as well as of the spirit, is not without interests. It is as though they had been sent to Europe from the four corners of the earth by the devil to revive Europe when "the time came," when that continent was ready to save the spirituality of reason from burning itself out and give the senses their due once more. (Ortiz [1940 (Ortiz [ ] 1995 I am not interested in discussing here the historical validity of Ortiz's assertion but in looking at transculturation from the realm of signs, rather than from that of people's miscegenation, and in displacing it toward the understanding of border thinking and the colonial difference. When people's blood enters in the definition of transculturation, it is difficult to avoid the temptation to understand miscegenation and biological mixtures. It is not the blood or the color of your skin but the descriptions of blood mixture and skin color that are devised and enacted in and by the coloniality of power that counts. Blood mixture and skin color, as far as I can ascertain, do not have inscribed in them a genetic code that becomes translated into a cultural one. Rather, the descriptions made by those living organisms who can make descriptions of themselves and of their surroundings (Mignolo 1995a, 1-28) are the ones that establish an organization and a hierarchy of blood mixture and skin color. In this regard, the notion of transculturation is not relevant so much because it describes a given reality as it is because it changes previous descriptions made by living organisms making descriptions of themselves (and sometimes following "disciplinary" norms in order to get such descriptions "right"). Transculturation offers a different view of people interaction. It is, in other words, a principle to produce descriptions that changes the principle in which similar descriptions have been made up to the point of its introduction in cultures of scholarship's vocabulary. Instead, the encounter of exotic products coming into Europe from the four corners of the world to enter in a new social and gnoseological setting is a good image of transculturation without mestizaje. What is missing in Ortiz's analysis is coloniality, and it is missing because for Ortiz the main question is nationality. Thus, colonial semiosis frames the issue within but also beyond the nation in the sense that nation-states are firmly established in the horizon of coloniality: either you find a nation-state that becomes an empire (like Spain or England) or one undergoing uprisings and rebellions to become autonomous, working toward the foundation of a nation (e.g., the Americas at the end of eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries). I N T R O D U C T I O N Perhaps some of the resistance to colonial semiosis from people who will readily accept colonial history or economy is due to the fact that colonial semiosis goes together with pluritopic hermeneutics. And this, for sure, not only complicates the matter but also introduces more obscure jargon. Sometimes, however, jargon is necessary, for how would you change the terms, and not only the content, of the conversation without it? I needed the combination of these two notions to move away and not get trapped by the opposite danger: the platitude of colonial economy or colonial history starting from the surface of what is "seen" and avoiding the risks of looking for what Rolph-Trouillot called the "unthinkable" in the Haitian Revolution. Thus, it is not always the case that jargon is unnecessary, and often uncommon words show us the invisible. In any event, pluritopic hermeneutics was necessary to indicate that colonial semiosis "takes place" in between conflict of knowledges and structures of power. Anibal Quijano (1997) has developed the notion of "coloniality of power," a phenomenon I just described as a "conflict of knowledges and structures of power." My understanding of coloniality of power presupposes the colonial difference as its condition of possibility and as the legitimacy for the subalternization of knowledges and the subjugation of people. III Coloniality of power is a story that does not begin in Greece; or, if you wish, has two beginnings, one in Greece and the other in the less known memories of millions of people in the Caribbean and the Atlantic coast, and betterknown memories (although not as well known as the Greek legacies) in the Andes and in Mesoamerica. The extended moment of conflict between people whose brain and skin have been formed by different memories, sensibilities, and belief between 1492 and today is the crucial historical intersection where the coloniality of power in the Americas can be located and unraveled. Quijano identifies coloniality of power with capitalism and its consolidation in Europe from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Coloniality of power implies and constitutes itself, according to Quijano, through the following: III 1. The classification and reclassification of the planet populationthe concept of "culture" becomes crucial in this task of classifying and reclassifying. III 2. An institutional structure functional to articulate and manage such classifications (state apparatus, universities, church, etc.). III 3. The definition of spaces appropriate to such goals. III 4. An epistemological perspective from which to articulate the meaning and profile of the new matrix of power and from which the new production of knowledge could be channeled. This is, in a nutshell, what for Quijano constitutes the coloniality of power by way of which the entire planet, including its continental division (Africa, America, Europe), becomes articulated in such production of knowledge and classificatory apparatus. Eurocentrism becomes, therefore, a metaphor to describe the coloniality of power from the perspective of subalternity. From the epistemological perspective, European local knowledge and histories have been projected to global designs, from the dream of an Orbis Universalis Christianus to Hegel's belief in a universal history that could be narrated from a European (and therefore hegemonic) perspective. Colonial semiosis attempted to identify particular moments of tension in the conflict between two local histories and knowledges, one responding to the movement forward of a global design that intended to impose itself and those local histories and knowledges that are forced to accommodate themselves to such new realities. Thus, colonial semiosis requires a pluritopic hermeneutics since in the conflict, in the cracks and fissures where the conflict originates, a description of one side of the epistemological divide won't do. But that is not all, because while the first problem was to look into the spaces in between, the second was how to produce knowledge from such in-between spaces. Otherwise, it would not have been a pluritopic hermeneutics, but a monotopic one (i.e., a persepective of a homogenous knowing subject located in a universal no-man's-land), describing the conflict between people made of different knowledge and memories. "Border thinking" is the notion that I am introducing now with the intention of transcending hermeneutics and epistemology and the corresponding distinction between the knower and the known, in the epistemology of the second modernity. To describe in "reality" both sides of the border is not the problem. The problem is to do it from its exteriority (in Levinas's sense). The goal is to erase the distinction between the knower and the known, between a "hybrid" object (the borderland as the known) and a "pure" disciplinary or interdisciplinary subject (the knower), uncontaminated by the border matters he or she describes. To change the terms of the conversation it is necessary to overcome the distinction between subject and object, on the one hand, and between epistemology and hermeneutics on the other. Border thinking should be the space in which this new logic could be thought out. In chapter 1, I explore Abdelkebir Khatibi's concept of "an other thinking" as a response to this problem. In chapter 6 I explore the possibility of "an other tongue" following Alfred Arteaga's expression. IV This book came into existence when I realized that today's emergence of "border thinking" was a consequence of the modern world system, as originally described by Imannuel Wallerstein (1974), and expanded and complicated later on by Eric Wolf (1982), Janet L. Abu-Lughod (1989 ), Giovanni Arrighi (1996 , not to mention the debates on the very idea of "world system" that took place in the past twenty years, of which the journal Review (published by the Ferdinand Braudel Center at Binghamton) has been a visible medium (see Review 15, No. 4, [1992] , for instance). I began to piggyback on modern world system analysis and, in doing so, I followed the example of Edward Said on the one hand and the South Asian Subaltern Studies Group on the other. In both cases, there was piggybacking on Michel Foucault, first, and Karl Marx and Antonio Gramsci, second, whose debates on colonialism were located in a "universal" domain of discussion, promoting it from the more local and descriptive site it occupied until the 1980s. But then, why am I not piggybacking on South Asian subaltern studies, or on Said's Orientalism, or even on German critical theory or French post structuralism, which have more clout in cultural studies and postcolonial debates than modern world system theory? And why the modern world system model or metaphor that has been much criticized and looked at with suspicion by many within the social sciences, and went almost unnoticed within the humanities? IV One of the possible answers to this question is at the same time my justification to start with this paradigm: the modern world system model or metaphor has the sixteenth century as a crucial date of its constitution, while all the other possibilities I just mentioned (Said, Guha, critical theory, poststructuralism) have the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment as the chronological frontier of modernity. Since my feelings, education, and thinking are anchored on the colonial legacies of the Spanish and Portuguese empires in the Americas, to "begin" in the eighteenth century would be to put myself out of the game. This is also an answer to Valentin Mudimbe, who asked me once, "What do you have against the Enlightenment?" The Enlightenment comes second in my own experience of colonial histories. The second phase of modernity, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, was derivative in the history of Latin America and entered in the nineteenth century as the exteriority that needed to be incorporated in order to build the "republic" after independence from Spain and Portugal had been gained (see chapter 3). IV Border gnosis or border thinking is in this book in dialogue with the debate on the universal/particular, on the one hand, and with Michel Foucault's notion of "insurrection of subjugated knowledges," on the other. Furthermore, border thinking/gnosis could serve as a mediator between the two interrelated issues I am introducing here: subjugated knowledges and the universal/particular dilemma. A link between Foucault's notion of subjugated knowledges and Darcy Ribeiro's subaltern knowledges allows me to reframe the dilemma of the universal/particular through the colonial difference. IV In his inaugural lecture in the College of France (1976), Foucault introduced the expression "insurrection of subjugated knowledges" to describe an epistemological transformation he perceived at work in the fifteen years or so previous to his lecture. He devoted a couple of paragraphs to specify his understanding of subjugated knowledges: "By subjugated knowledges I mean two things. On the one hand, I am referring to the historical contents that have been buried and disguised in a functionalist of formal systematization" (81). By "historical content." Foucault was referring to something that has been buried "behind" the disciplines and the production of knowledge, that was neither the semiology of life nor the sociology of delinquency but the repression of the "immediate emergence of historical contents." IV His second approach to subjugated knowledges was expressed in the following terms: IV I believe that by subjugated knowledges one should understand something else, something which in a sense is altogether different, namely, a whole set of knowl-edge that has been disqualified as inadequate to its tasks or insufficiently elaborated: naïve knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition of scientificity. I also believe that it is through the re-emergence of these low-ranking knowledges, these unqualified knowledges (such as that of the psychiatric patient, of the ill person, of the doctor-parallel and marginal as they are to the knowledge of medicine-that of the delinquent, etc.) which involve what I would call a popular knowledge [le savoir des gens] though it is far from being a general common sense knowledge, but on the contrary a particular, local, regional knowledge, a differential knowledge incapable of unanimity and which owes its forces only to the harshness with which it is opposed by everything surrounding it-that is through the re-appearance of this knowledge, of these local popular knowledges, these disqualified knowledges, that criticism performs its work. (Foucault [1976 (Foucault [ ] 1980 emphasis added) Foucault was certainly aware of the disparity between the kinds of knowledges he was confronting, academic and disciplinary knowledge, on the one hand, and nonacademic and popular knowledge on the other. He was also aware that he was not attempting to oppose the "abstract unity of theory" to the "concrete multiplicity of facts" (83). Foucault was using the distinction between disciplinary and subjugated knowledges to question the very foundation of academic/disciplinary and expert knowledge without which the very notion of subjugated knowledge would not have sense. He called genealogy the union of "erudite knowledge and local memories" and specified that what genealogy really does
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