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Elísio Macamo
University of Basel
Elísio Macamo is a Sociology and African Studies professor at the University of Basel in Switzerland. He is Mozambican. He studied in
Mozambique, England, and Germany. His main research interests are risk and technology, knowledge, religion, labor, politics, development and methods. His geographical focus is Africa, particularly Portuguese-speaking countries and Southern Africa, but he has research projects in Mali, Burkina Faso, Zambia, South Africa, and Brazil. In the last four years, he has been working on the challenges of academic training
in Africa (in collaboration with Professor Mamadou Diawara in the context of a project funded by Gerda Henkel, "Pilot Postgraduate
Academy of African Studies in Bamako") and also on the translation of concepts that have been applied/or emerged in Africa to research
in Europe (in the context of a SINERGIA project funded by the Swiss National Fund "Reversing the Gaze"). Among his most recent publications is 2022: Social Analysis for Lay People. Ethale. Maputo (in Portuguese).
Talk Information:
Translation as Theory from Within
November 10, 2023 | 9:00 AM
The place of enunciation has always posed a significant challenge for scholars defined by their non-Western origin. They have an ambivalent relationship with the conceptual vocabulary they deploy both to air their
discomfort with how science represents their culture and their position in the world and to look for ways of transcending it. To what extent can they rely on the use of this conceptual vocabulary to render their discomfort legitimate and intelligible? How critical can one be when
the language with which critique is voiced is the language of the “oppressor”? In this lecture, I want to discuss the meaning of these questions to the very possibility of Southern Epistemologies and suggest that salvation may rest with how we consciously engage in the work of translation to produce new ideas to organize the facts which help us make sense of the world.