Reflections on contemporary challenges and other horizons of cosmoperceptive meaning in relational contexts with water

Abstract

This work is linked to a research project about instituting statements about water and their implications in this relational universe. In this essay, we will present possible approaches and dialogues with ideas and theoretical-conceptual elements potentially capable of contributing to the contextualization and development of research, emphasizing educational processes, especially environmental education. The global climate crisis, the water crisis and the threat of planetary environmental collapse are some of the central situations that challenge contemporary times, but whose genesis goes back to colonial logic (the underlying indolent rationality), which constitutes one of the driving forces of Western capitalist modernity. The metaphysics of money and neoliberal globalization (RAMOSE, 2010), which are some of the most visible and current expressions of coloniality, have become one of the pillars of the planetary ecosystem fraying and social inequality – a historical wound that once again plagues the world and impacts exponentially the Global South. In his investigation into the colonial heritage in Yorubaland, Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí (2002) uncovered categories socially constructed by the Eurocentric colonial project that are based on a hierarchical “bio-logic” (ideology of biological determinism) – which attributes social differentiations, establishes hierarchies, as well such as functions, privileges and discrimination based on skin pigmentation, phenotype, morphology, sex [genitalia] and other bodily attributes –, such as the categories of gender and race, historically imposed by colonialism on non-Western territories and peoples. Based on this observation, Oyěwùmí establishes an important distinction between the Western [and Westernizing] worldview and other worldviews that value the set of senses, providing a global and interconnected apprehension of reality in its multiple dimensions – encompassing nuances of existence and the various worlds, physical and metaphysical intertwined. It is hoped that, against the deadly logic of money and colonial burden, these other horizons of meaning (knowledge and ontologies), especially of Afro-Amerindian origin, can fertilize educational processes of environmental education related to water in the La Plata Basin – the second largest hydrographic basin of transboundary waters in South America and subcontinental territory as a reference for the socio-historical experience derived from the project of Western modernity that has coloniality as its constitutive counterface – as well as contributing to the broadening of the horizons of emancipation and liberation of peoples, especially those who have not yet freed themselves from the burdens of coloniality.