Environmental complexity and epistemology in global and local socio-cultural processes

Abstract

We start with the idea of 'multiple modernities' as opposed to a central ethos of modern Western capitalist rationality which is produced within an enclosed system in itself. We propose that these multiple modernities enroll at the principle of emergency marked by several crises and possibilities of alternatives.One such crisis pointed out here has a representational order in which the idea of 'science' undergoes a fundamental criticism, both in their epistemological, methodological practices and in their production. The paradigm of complexity goes across different fields of human production and social interaction in natural systems, where conflicts emerge at the level of production of knowledge itself (scientific and unscientific, in a situation of potential dialogue), the global culture but also located and of alternate forms of appropriation of territories and spaces of political management of the commons.