Blog Marcos L. Mucheroni Filosofia, Noosfera e cibercultura

The complexity of the so-called “colonial spirit” thought by Karl Polanyi, M. Mauss, and Michel Foucault, but with traits in many other authors helps to construct more appropriately what is capitalism today and what helps to unravel it without dogmatism.
What helps to demonstrate what is a philosophical, aesthetic, historical and cultural production of a given time, just as Karl Polanyi did in The Great Transformation; as well as Marcel Mauss, in the Essay, reveal that society is composed of a series of total benefits involving all social institutions, be they legal, economic, religious or aesthetic (Mauss 1999: 274).
Although the study of classical works leads us to recognize their importance in the complex context already mentioned, it is necessary to begin with a theoretical critique of the practices and experiences born in non-European societies, some from ancient traditions to understand the complexity of the world contemporary.
In this particular, Mauss’s work on decolonial criticism leads one to think of the relation between capitalism and colonization in previous centuries, but with roots still today, taking into account two aspects of the colonization process: from the inside out , both Eurocentrism always quoted and in Americanism not quoted, as from the outside in, denied and seen as “colonial” sometimes, but fundamental to understand the thought that Mauss called decolonial.
To recognize this means that part of the description of modernization is carried out from a European perspective, but there are also parts of this thinking that come from the “center” and can not be seen only as the “peripheries”.
The deocolonial thought conceptualized by Mauss is then the notions of both the center and the periphery that can finally, with a world view, be deconstructed and that has in its origins both the center and the margins of the world system, since they were the mechanisms of the center that helped the modern world to “colonize the life of the Center” and not only the thought of the periphery of the world system,
Part of the anti-utilitarian critique is enriched by decolonial criticism, insofar as the latter also seeks to associate with its thinking, on a sociological basis, the various cultural, traditional, religious, political, linguistic and ritual phenomena.

Thus the postcolonial critique, which denounces the unequal relations between center and periphery, actually allowed the expansion of theoretical critique to the fields of knowledge and practices situated on the periphery not always in fact liberating, and almost always of a negative self-assertion of cultural identity, since they can devalue the concepts of the moral and aesthetic identity of social life, which are decisive for the symbolic thinking in many peoples.

MAUSS, M. Sociology and Anthropology. Paris: PUF, 1999 (1924).