phipps, alison - other worlds are possible an interview with boaventura de sousa santos

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PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE This article was downloaded by: [University of Aveiro] On: 29 October 2009 Access details: Access Details: [subscription number 904078591] Publisher Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Language and Intercultural Communication Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t794297827 Other Worlds are Possible: An Interview with Boaventura de Sousa Santos Alison Phipps a a Graduate School of Education, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland, UK Online Publication Date: 15 February 2007 To cite this Article Phipps, Alison(2007)'Other Worlds are Possible: An Interview with Boaventura de Sousa Santos',Language and Intercultural Communication,7:1,91 — 101 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.2167/laic262.0 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.2167/laic262.0 Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.

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  • PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

    This article was downloaded by: [University of Aveiro]On: 29 October 2009Access details: Access Details: [subscription number 904078591]Publisher RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House,37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

    Language and Intercultural CommunicationPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t794297827

    Other Worlds are Possible: An Interview with Boaventura de Sousa SantosAlison Phipps aa Graduate School of Education, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland, UK

    Online Publication Date: 15 February 2007

    To cite this Article Phipps, Alison(2007)'Other Worlds are Possible: An Interview with Boaventura de Sousa Santos',Language andIntercultural Communication,7:1,91 101To link to this Article: DOI: 10.2167/laic262.0URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.2167/laic262.0

    Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf

    This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial orsystematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply ordistribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden.

    The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contentswill be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug dosesshould be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss,actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directlyor indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.

  • Other Worlds are Possible: An Interviewwith Boaventura de Sousa Santos

    Alison PhippsGraduate School of Education, University of Glasgow, Glasgow,Scotland, UK

    Professor Boaventura de Sousa Santos is Professor of Sociology at the University ofCoimbra, where he is the director of the internationally renowned Centro de EstudosSociais. He is also Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA. His research interests are in Political Sociology, Sociology of Lawand in questions of epistemology. His research has embraced the struggles ofcolonial and postcolonial contexts in Brazil, Colombia, India, South Africa andMozambique amongst others and he is a leading exponent of theories of Portugueseidentity. In recent years his intellectual attention and political engagement hasturned to the World Social Forum as a site of what he calls counter hegemonicglobalisation and resistance (see www.forumsocialmundial.org.br).His work draws upon rich linguistic and intercultural contexts, refusing to seek outsimple technicist or positivist solutions to the vast array of complexities inherent inthe localised globalisms and globalised localisms the terms he uses to describedifferent relationships and positions within neoliberal hegemonic globalisation.In the relatively new field of interdisciplinary research, the aspects of power,resistance, complexity and hegemony take time to theorise. The work of ProfessorSantos offers a rich vein of theoretical reflection and translation for language(s) andintercultural communication.The following interview is an edited version of a dialogue that took place on 27 April2006 in the Centro de Estudos Sociais, Universidade de Coimbra, Portugal.

    doi: 10.2167/laic262.0

    Beginnings: Intercultural AutobiographyAP: Boaventura, your work in Sociology and in the Sociology of Law has

    consistently tackled broad questions of justice between North andSouth in the colonial and postcolonial contexts of the contemporaryperiod. What triggered and then sustained this intellectual interest? Inparticular, how did your work in Brazil, and in other contexts of theSouth, move your thinking along in these particular directions?

    BdSS: My intellectual autobiography follows a complex trajectory. I studiedLaw in the 1960s and then Philosophy at the Freie Universitat Berlin.This was at the time of the Portuguese dictatorship and the heightof the Cold War and Marxism was an important influence at thattime. My status as a foreigner, at that time and in that context,brought about a confrontation of the self with the stereotypes ofcolonial power and a sense of connection between different contexts.By denouncing the massacres in Mozambique, for instance, at astudent political meeting in Berlin, I was no longer seen as a

    1470-8477/07/01 091-11 $20.00/0 2007 A. PhippsLanguage and Intercultural Communication Vol. 7, No. 1, 2007

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  • Portuguese inheritor of colonialism, but as having a sense ofIconnection between the different contexts.I studied for my PhD at Yale. It was at the height of the civil rightsstruggle in the USA. Here too, a deepening of the Marxist traditionwas very important in my training in the Philosophy of Law and inPolitical Philosophy. However, it was through my fieldwork in Brazilthat I came to discover a more radical Sociology. At this timestructural functionalism had all but destroyed sociology. Statisticalmethods were all important but my own field site was the favelas ofBrazil, living as a Portuguese and as an ethnographer with thepopular classes. This experience, and the specific questions that thoseI encountered asked me, radicalised me, and my work, in methodo-logical terms. I think being a Portuguese helped me to a certain extentas I had to reflect on what it meant to do field work, not as anAmerican and not as a normal sociologist. Fundamental to the successof the fieldwork was my own opposition to the dictatorship. It tooktime for me to create a sense of credibility and to understand thatmuch of what is knowledge remains hidden and disqualified. I thinkit was in the favelas , in Brazil, through the radicalising of mymethodology, that I began to develop work on the ecologies ofknowledges and also a sociology of absences.

    Let me explain this a little more fully. At that time all theories ofanthropology and sociology concerned life in settlements. Settle-ments, such as the favelas , were considered either to be hell, nests ofviolence, or to be romanticised as an alternative heaven, the locus ofthe happy poor. What I discovered was that the scales andperspectives which prevented me from seeing, were the mostenriching. From building shacks, to understanding narrow lanes inthe favelas I came to see that high-level theories of argument, and ofLaw as argument rather than as apodictic thinking (i.e. thinkingbased on incontrovertible evidence) could work very well for so-called high contexts but would not fit for low contexts. Such gapsbetween contexts can be bridged by activism in education, by openingup new spaces, working with different traditions, by masteringdifferent disciplinary traditions such as Law, or Rhetoric, orPhilosophy, or Sociology, in order to know the extent of their powerand of their blindness. Dewey is powerful here when he says that thebest way to value Science is to respect its limits and know its force. Forme positivism was often the most violent way of taking and gainingknowledge, involved as it is in forms of epistemicide in the killing ofother knowledges in order to monopolise the whys of understandingthe world in narrow ways.

    LanguageAP: In all your work, but perhaps most explicitly in the highly innovative

    methodology chapter of Towards a New Common Sense (Routledge,1995), you explore metaphorical aspects of sociological method,

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  • breaking with the form of the standard sociological outline andpresenting your autobiographical journey, as a subjective account,and one which strains towards humanities modes of writing andrepresenting. Language and Intercultural Communication is a journalwhich sits in the interstices between social scientific and humanitiesapproaches to questions of language and intercultural communica-tion. Can you talk a little about the different writing styles you adoptand the rich metaphoricity of the language you bring into Sociology?In short: what is it about the power of metaphor and rhetorical style inlanguage that you find necessary to your project of creating andreflecting upon the possibilities of other worlds?

    BdSS: Let me tell you of a traumatic experience which happened during myfieldwork. It happened when I used the word investigacao to describemy research activities in the favelas . It could have cost me my life.When I used this word to describe my work an angry mob reached fortheir guns and I ran for my life. But then a woman helped me,translated for me, gave me language instructions. To use the wordinvestigacao wasnt just to use the wrong word. For me to do it meantthat this was a word spoken by a Portuguese. This meant that I as aPortuguese came to embody, through this one word, all the activitiesof the police. My language disrupted any chance of conversation,through my ignorance. It placed me as someone seeking notconversation with others, but conversion of their lives to the ways oftheir oppressors. If we are not vigilant, as researchers, then we findourselves involved in the cargo-cult of language.

    Our discourses as researchers have to do with conceptions of time,urgency, the long term, the short term, clock time. Cyclical time, eventtime, these are the conceptions which operate in the favelas , I found. Sothis means we have to be vigilante towards language. If we arepresent at events, then we are punctual, not if we arrive on time.When we resort to applying foreign concepts of time we find that weare encountered with silence as, in our terms, other worlds are literallyunpronounceable. So in my work in O Potumayo and with the TikunaIndigenous Peoples I found myself resorting to concepts which wereforeign, such as botanical gardens or 18th century colonialism andI was met with silence as such foreign cultural aspirations are quiteliterally unpronounceable. In order to reinvent a language forconversation, not conversion, I needed to start learning languageagain. Language is strategic. It has a hidden power structure. Themeanings are in the interstices, in the rhythms and silences andpartners in conversation. This is what I needed to learn.

    This is also what we discovered when working in Columbia. Oilwas discovered by US prospectors. The land, not the subsoil, belongedto the indigenous people, the Uwas. For the indigenous peoples thiswas sacred territory and the potential sale of the land was deeply feltand expressed by their statement: oil for you is a natural resource, forus it is the blood of the earth. What I realised was that this statementwas not at all metaphorical, it is just that we were not making a deep

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  • connection, one which we are just beginning to understand as literally,not metaphorically important, as we stand at the edge of theecological cliff from which we may potentially commit collectivesuicide. The oil company, however, saw this as a metaphor, not as real,and tried to negotiate with the indigenous peoples in this vein.

    In the West, in conversation and in such legal dealings, we tend tobe linear and management led, aiming at conversion of others to ourown point of view. Consultation becomes a pretence at conversationwhen all the time it is actually converting. For instance when theMinister of Environment visited the indigenous territories to talk tothe local leaders he was working to his clock time, was frustrated bythe silences and absences and lengthy pauses in conversation whichoperated to a resistant cyclical time. After a long explanation of theadvantages for the Uwas deriving from oil exploration, he asked for areaction, a response. His request was met by a long silence. We need aquick decision about the land, he said We have to get back to Bogota,and we cannot fly at night by helicopter, You are leaders and youhave to decide. After another long silence one of the leaders said: Wehave to consult our ancestors. When can you consult? asked thenervous minister. It depends on the moon, he was told, if the moonis favourable we can do it tonight. You are crazy was the impatient,clock-timed reply, Helicopters cannot fly at night. I cannot wait forthe moon.

    AP: Related to the question above, in your article in Theory, Culture &Society, Nuestra America: Recognition and Redistribution, youhighlight three key metaphors in your work for a postcolonial critiqueof celebratory postmodernity: Frontier, Baroque, South. In particularyou aim: To learn that the South exists (but always relative); to learnhow to go to the south; to learn from and with the South. How mightwe, as linguistics and interculturalists, know when this aim is beingfulfilled? What are the signs of its fulfilment?

    BdSS: It strikes me, reflecting on this incident in Columbia, and othersuch incidents, that metaphor is the best instrument we have to bridgethe old and the new. My strategy, in all my writing, has been todevelop new knowledge beyond disciplines (which are instrumentsto literalise metaphors) by recuperating the life of metaphor. Meta-phors such as Frontier, Baroque, South provoke new kinds ofknowledge and of understandings, but they are not precise. This isdeliberate, for I believe, in the world at this juncture, we cannot affordto be precise. We have to find ways of creating surprise and newperspectives in language Joy, says de Andrade (1990: 51), iscounter proof. This means that our work with language has to bepoetic work, a work of poetic activism, and it is for this reason thatI work, as a poet, to enrich Science, not to replace it. We need to beable to move beyond the epistemology of blindness to an epistemol-ogy of seeing. In the favela I discovered the dangers in what Pascalspeaks of as the disembodiment of knowledge. Knowledge is neverseparate from the body and in the favela emotions are contextualised

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  • in different ways. This is why I would say that innovation begins inthe gut.

    World Social Forum as Intercultural Activism and CitizenshipAP: It is hard to conceive of situations, in the present age, which would not

    in someway be characterisable as intercultural. The influence of othercultures is intensified through both neoliberal hegemonic globalisa-tion and through counter-hegemonic globalisations. Be it, as CindiKatz describes it, the context of Growing up Global in the Sudan surrounded by international aid projects and the impoverishments ofglobal capitalism and global trade rules, or be it in the heart ofnational institutions such as universities or hospitals, we find people,material objects, languages, ideas circulating that have grow in othercontexts and for other purposes but which have now travelled andinfluence our lives in ways which we are only just beginning torecognise.

    In your more recent work you have been developing your own theoryof translation to explain the ways of working and the coalitions andcultures which loosely come together to resist various and oftencontradictory manifestations of global capitalism. You tease out thepluralities and complexities of these movements by referring to them asglobalisations with localising globalisms and globalising localisms.In this you signal a shift away from the broad brush sociology of bothBeck (Risk Society) and Bauman (Liquid Modernity) and other varietiesof postmodernism and poststructuralist celebration, but you continueto work within the scepticisms which are the philosophical mood of theage maintaining that the movements of counter-hegemonic globalisa-tion are negatively united through what they are against, through asense of common enemy. Translation, for you, becomes the modusvivendi of the intercultural communications that seek common purposeand common ground. Unlike other social theorists your work andtheorising is grounded in the context of the World Social Forum (WSF)and it is this that has given rise to your theory of translation. Could youtalk a little about your encounter and journey with the WSF and itsinfluence on your intellectual work?

    BdSS: The World Social Forum represents, for me, the beginning of a newconversation. As such the intellectual and the linguistic aspects arevery important. The World Social Forum involves emotions of allkinds, different rhythms, sociabilities, symbolic universes. All theseare involved in the points of connection which are often emotional, notprimarily rational. I have found in this context that the divide betweenthe rational and analytic can be bridged by metaphor; that metaphorunites. This is where I see the power of the performative in languageand what I would term the warm current and the cold current at playin the beginnings of the WSF. The warm current is the will toovercome, the cold current, the knowledge of the obstacles in our way.In itself the WSF represents an inexhaustible interculturality and the

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  • opportunity to live through the surprise and shock of it withoutsuffering it. It offers a way of living the incompleteness of my ownbeing. To be curious in this sense and in the face of the inexhaustibleinterculturality is to have a sense of having, and of waiting, as Elliotputs it, without hope.

    AP: In your work analysing the World Social Forum as both movementand organisation you are keen to celebrate a new place of encounter,politics and potential for action. To what extent do you believe thatthe practices evolving in the WSF can contribute to new formulationsof intercultural citizenship? Do you see global citizenship andintercultural citizenship as one and the same thing? Where, in short,is the role of intercultural citizenship in your sociological andepistemological project?

    BdSS: Capitalism is playing with insecurity and creating a politics of risk fortoday. In this fascism of insecurity and as we enter a society of higherand higher risk we have to ask, Why are they teaching people to besimple-minded; why is the autonomy to deal with risks being takenaway from people? A citizen of risk is a global citizen who is capableof being up to the challenges of risk. At present there is a disjuncturebetween the horizon of risks and the human scale. That is to say ourability to affect and imagine risk is taken into scales which are beyondour human abilities. What the WSF allows us to do, together, is toreturn the human scale to risk and to our horizons, rather than takingit out of our hands. This then helps diminish the cynical, post-criticalattitudes in the face of debilitating imaginings of risk. The WSF allowsfor the recuperation of the human scale of risk. In the world ofneoliberal capitalism we have been miniaturised. Sources of socialagency are disarmed and therefore we are in a situation where wecannot be tricked we can see through the problems, but we cannottrick either.

    AP: Another World is possible . . . ., taken from Arundhati Roys addressto the WSF in Porto Alegre, and the Brazilian folk song, is also atthe heart of your present project and theorising around legalities,human rights, cosmopolitanism and epistemology. How, in thecontexts of neoliberal hegemonic globalisation and regulation is itpossible (1) to imagine other worlds, (2) to recognise the presence ofsuch worlds and (3) to inhabit these worlds with those of otherlanguages, cultures and faiths in ways which are redistributive?

    BdSS: In the context of discussions of human rights and of trust, in the West,we find our frameworks are very legislative. In the WSF there is nolegislation. We find that the establishment of human rights hassilenced hundreds of movements and that the concept of humanrights has itself oppressed. The framework of human rights istherefore not adequate for such radical interculturality as we find inthe WSF. Further, I can only be curious if I have no framework, if I amcurious to listen to what does not fit with my own vocabulary, ifI struggle with difference, respect it and envisage another world aspossible, now. We have become impatient with expectations of the

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  • world that have lost their glamour and in the context of the WorldSocial Forum we are working to try and find ways of creating modest,but real utopias.

    TranslationAP: Central to your notion of sociology of absences is the notion that social

    experience is made up of social inexperience. The dominant classestake their experience of suffering the ignorance of the dominated asgiven. Absent is their own inexperience of suffering, imposed asexperience upon the dominated peoples. This imposition is, we mightsay, a form of intercultural communication. Your suggestion is that asociology of absences is what endows counter-hegemonic struggleswith cosmopolitanism, that is, openness towards the other andincreased knowledge (Nuestra America, pp. 191192).

    To achieve openness towards others you propose the procedureof translation. Your theory of translation seeks translation as aprocedure that allows for mutual intelligibility [. . .] identifyingwhat unites and is common to entities that are separate[d] by theirreciprocal differences. This theory of translation is abstracted bothfrom the material origins of the word and the sense of the rendering ofone language in another. As such it is a metaphor twice removed.What is the place of language and languages in your theory oftranslation? What is the place of material and embodiment in yourtheory of translation?

    BdSS: Language plays an important part in my theory of translation to theextent that I believe we need to re-metaphorise language. Linguistichospitality, such as Ricoeur speaks of, requires ontological risks thatwill enable us to work beyond the negativity of translation. Transla-tion is not just about the joy of contrasting different aspects oftranslation as a problem, in a postcolonial world. To use translation asa tool and praxis is to use it as a kind of ruin. For translation is indeedan imperial instrument. It reduces diversity by reducing cultures toone language, and we are indeed talking of a reduction in the work ofcolonial translation. The 16th-century Jesuit Portuguese translated thecatechism into Tupi. In so doing they transformed it, rendering itinfantile. Concepts and knowledge came to seem aggressive and as anact of indoctrination.

    AP: Your own work has been cast in the Portuguese and English language,more recently also in Spanish. You yourself speak several languages.Many of your own theoretical coinages and concepts have Latinateroots which, like the Universal Human Rights deconstructed in yourown work, are bound into a Western (Classical, Judeo-Christian)intellectual situation. I wonder how your conception of translationenables you to break with this tradition and find the openness whichyou accord the procedure? In particular, in your work on translationand human rights (alluded to above) you take the concept of humandignity (Development 2005: The Future of the World Social Forum:

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  • The Work of Translation) and you show the partial and situatednature of its Western conceptualization as human rights (legality)when compared to the Islamic concept of umma (community) and theHindu concept of dharma (cosmic harmony involving human and allother beings). You are keen to explore the work of hermeneuticswhich occurs when knowledges are translated in the contact zoneof the WSF. As a linguist and anthropologist I see two difficultieswith your understanding of the work of translation here: you do nottake the power relations and self-interests of translation practicesinto account, or the difficult positions inhabited, traditionally, bytranslators neither betwixt nor between, tricksters, fraudsters,magicians, anonymous women. Who does the work of translation inthe contexts you speak of? Is there a voluntarism at work, or languageapartheid? Whose interests are served by this work of translation?

    BdSS: As I mentioned before, translation is a ruin. It is part of a globalimposition of language and hegemony. So, I can discard it in order toachieve emancipation, or I can re-shape it from the beginning. Thehistorical record on translation is very bad but at the same timetranslation can serve, signposting the rich points by using anexpanded case method. The contradictions of translation, in the ruinof translation are those as I discovered in the favelas of a muchwider social field. So, I ask myself, what is our task? And what is ourtask when we do this work in the WSF? It is to increase mutualintelligibility, it is to be reciprocal. And this is the first transgression,for no single concepts are unanimous. This is how we come in to anexpanding circle of reciprocity. And since you and I speak differentlanguages there is already an openness to the idea of conversation.

    AP: A rich vein in your work on translation, for me, comes precisely fromyour work as a sociologist, rather than as linguist or anthropologist.This allows you to assert against the grain of translation theory inthe past decades that (utopian) translation and mutual intelligibilityare possible and that translation, far from being a problem to besolved is at the root of other possible worlds. As such, you areadvancing a view of translation as linguistic hospitality, not dissimilarto that of Paul Ricoeur. Would you care to elaborate on this,particularly with regard to your work with the WSF? If other worldsare possible, is translation also possible and desirable?

    BdSS: Even if translation is a ruin, translation is still desirable and necessaryif and when it is about community and about the common tasks, thehard common tasks at hand. This is, I think, where my novelty comesin vis a` vis Ricoeurs theory of translation as a form of linguistichospitality. When we are engaged in hard common tasks languagewill intervene when we need the details. It enables denser formsof encounter and it shows us that we have to know the other andthe others language. If we do not know the others language andthe other then we are taking unwarranted risks and not havingconversation around difficulties such as decolonisation, liberation,emancipation.

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  • AP: No culture is complete. How does this statement of yours articulatewith the procedure of translation as (1) potential for mutual intellig-ibility, and (2) as a colonising move to render other cultures complete(or better replete?) or controllable. Much of the translation industrytoday, for instance, is (Cronin, 2003) centred on oiling the wheels ofprecisely the neoliberal hegemonic globalisations you are so passio-nately against.

    BdSS: Translation takes time, but not mechanic time, rather the time ofpersons, of bodily rhythms. It has a rhythm to it that is not the rhythmof machinery. In order to accept anothers formulation this time andrhythm for translation has to be respected. And this respect is alsoabout dialogue and the trust necessary for this to occur, as we see inexamples such as the South African Truth and ReconciliationCommission. Developing trust is not about disarming the other,through translation, but about developing a circle of reciprocity adone which goes beyond the dialogical individualisms of Habermas, orBuber or even Heideggerean Mittsein . Just as no culture is complete,we might also say that no translation is ever complete.

    Writing ColonialismAP: Largely, as you point out (Luso-Brazilian Review 39), the history of

    colonialism has been written in English, not Portuguese. How do yousee language as perpetuating what you describe as a subalterncolonialism within a Europe which is bureaucratically committed tomulti- and plurilingualism and within the WSF, and how does thisaccord with your utopian theory of translation?

    BdSS: Much attention has been paid to the interiority of language, but weare not talking about a revolution in the Freudian sense, in the sense ofintroversion, we are talking about an exterior, extroverted revolution, arelease from the prison house of language which has been a centralpoststructuralist concern. We need this because whatever suffering is,it is coming home. Terror shows us what Benjamin had alreadydemonstrated, that the other is inside us and is not a foreigner, so weneed to develop new strategies of trust and reciprocity in this context.But we cannot arrive at a politics of recognition, and a politics ofequality, from a politics of difference by way of an interior route, itwill require extraversion with translation not as theory but as trust.

    In the context of the WSF and anti-hegemonic action these raiseontological questions about a type of political action that is as globalas globalisation itself. The oppressed do not need to negate the past inthe way the colonisers do, but they do need to learn how to resist andto be resisters. One of the ways this can occur is by learning a differenttype of conversation, a conversation not among the same, but amongthe different. The unifying point of the WSF is One no, manyYeses, and this in and of itself opens a space for rich newconversations. In discussions on human rights and in the SouthSouthSouth dialogues I have been involved with, I have seen how

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  • plurifunctional encounters are. I have discovered that, in the context ofattempting the kinds of translations Im proposing here, that time,leisure time away from the formal agenda, is as important as theagenda itself, giving time for translation to be worked at and workedout again, anew, with the understanding that everything is reversible.Discussion, debate, argument, together, in the context of a translationof trust can bring people to take risks with ideas, concepts, withlanguage and to come towards a common language.

    In such encounters misunderstanding will always be present as apossibility and as a felt aspect of the translation, but it may lead also toleaps forward, epistemologically, through risk and through new waysof seeing the world.

    So my sense of utopia and the utopias possible through languageand translation is a pragmatic one. Alone I cannot change theworld. Together we can.

    Acknowledgements

    I am indebted to Manuela Guilherme and the Biblioteca Norte-Sul, Centrode Estudos Sociais, Universidade de Coimbra for their help and advice withthe preparation of materials and bibliography for this interview.

    Correspondence

    Any correspondence should be directed to Alison Phipps who is Directorof Graduate Development for Arts, Humanities and Education at theUniversity of Glasgow and associate researcher at the Centro de EstudosSociais, Coimbra, Portugal ([email protected]).

    References

    Bauman, Z. (2000) Liquid Modernity. Oxford: Polity.Beck, U. (1992) Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage.Cronin, M. (2003) Translation and Globalization. London: Routledge.de Andrade, O. (1990) A utopia antropofagica. Sao Paulo: Globo.Katz, C. (2004) Growing Up Global: Economic Restructuring and Childrens Everyday Lives.

    Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.Ricoeur, P. (2004) Sur la Traduction. Paris: Bayard.

    Select bibliography of writings by Boaventura de Sousa SantosSantos, B. de S. (1994) Pela Mao de Alice: O Social e O Poltico No Pos-Modernidade. Porto:

    Edicoes Afrontamento.Santos, B. de S. (1995) Towards a New Common Sense: Law, Science and Politics in the

    Paradigimatic Transition. London: Routledge.Santos, B. de S. (1998) Time, Baroque codes and canonization. In S. Lash, A. Quick and

    R. Roberts (eds) Time and Value (pp. 245262). Oxford: Blackwell.Santos, B. de S. (2000) Universalismo, Contextualizacion cultural y cosmoplitismo. In

    H.C.S. Gorski (ed.) Identitdades comunitarias y democracia. Madrid: Editorial Trotta.Santos, B. de S. (2001) Toward an epistemology of blindness. Why the new forms of

    ceremonial adequacy neither regulate nor emancipate. European Journal of SocialTheory 4 (3), 251279.

    Santos, B. de S. (2001) Nuestra America: Reinventing a subaltern paradigm ofrecognition and redistribution. Theory, Culture and Society 18 (23), 185217.

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  • Santos, B. de S. (2002) Between Prospero and Caliban: Colonialism, postcolonialism,and inter-identity. Luso-Brazilian Review 39 (2), 944.

    Santos, B. de S. (2003) Conhecimento Prudente Para uma Vida Decente: Um Discurso sobre asCiencias Revisitado. Porto: Edicoes Afrontamente.

    Santos, B. de S. (2004) A critique of lazy reason: Against the waste of experience. InI. Wallerstein (ed.) The Modern World-System in the Longue Duree (pp. 157197).

    Santos, B. de S. and Rodrguez-Garavito, C.A. (2005) Law and Globalization from Below:Towards a Cosmopolitan Legality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Santos, B. de S. (2005) The future of the World Social Forum: The work of translation.Development 48 (2), 1522.

    Santos, B. de S. (2005) Globalizacion contrahegemonica y diversa. Diversidades 1, 1124.Santos, B. de S. (2006) The Rise of the Global Left: The World Social Forum and Beyond.

    London: Zed Books.

    For a full bibliography see: http://www.ces.uc.ptbssindex.htm

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