Towards critical research from the South

I would like to comment on two articles published in the recent issue no. 62 of Revista Andina, edited by the Centro Bartolomé de las Casas (Peru), devoted to the dossier Towards critical research from the South. The articles are “Critical approaches and embodied methodologies: commitments for transformative research”, by Caroline Weill, and “Between centralism and the (absence) of critique: briefly discussing two tensions that traverse the Peruvian social sciences”, by Pável Aguilar Dueñas. Together, both texts lucidly examine the structural inequalities that shape the production of knowledge within Peruvian academia, while at the same time proposing methodological and analytical approaches aimed at enriching research practices in tune with the urgent realities experienced by broad sectors of society. Although their reflections stem from the Peruvian context, the authors also identify dynamics that resonate across other peripheral academies, similarly traversed by global asymmetries in the distribution of resources, recognition, and academic capital.

Caroline Weill is French, a doctoral scholar in anthropology in France, and, as she describes herself, Peruvian “by right, after naturalizing”. Her article proposes to depatriarchalize and decolonize research practices, questioning the Eurocentric paradigms that underpin “a certain separation between subject and object of study, between emotionality and rationality, and between theory and practice” (p. 44). Far from reproducing the ideal of “scientific neutrality”, Weill explicitly positions herself as a feminist and activist, advocating for a form of science committed to emancipation and social transformation. Her interest in mining and gender relations in southern Peru—she explains—did not arise from a purely academic concern, but from the intersection of her political activism and her experience working with high-Andean communities. She undertakes her academic work from a reflexive stance, recognizing and embracing her class privileges and her condition as a white woman in a context marked by profound historical inequalities.

Weill argues that colonial and Eurocentric structures continue to organize the global production of knowledge, shaping a scenario in which the North almost always studies the South. This logic, she warns, is internally reproduced in Peru through a form of “internal colonialism”, in which academic discourses emanate “from urban, mestizo-white, middle- or upper-class sectors” (p. 50). Within this web of power relations, Weill suggests, every interpretation is conditioned by the relationship established with the “object” of study: “the same topic can be approached in radically different ways depending on the relationship one has with the object of research” (p. 52). Hence, she contends that personal connection and activist commitment are not only ethical positions but also legitimate epistemic sources capable of opening new pathways in social research.

In this vein, Weill argues that the experience she shares with the rural women she works with—the “pain” of being a woman and the “anger” in the face of masculine violence—allows her to identify with them and establish a profound connection. This “intimate starting point” becomes a methodological force that shapes her way of approaching her “compañeras”; it is also a means of questioning power relations and the distance between subject and object of study: “maintaining a personal and affective relationship with the object of research is perhaps a starting point for breaking with these power logics” (pp. 54–55). Although she acknowledges that such identification and connection are necessarily incomplete due to the many racial and socioeconomic factors that separate her from her interlocutors, her approach seeks to participate with them in joint processes of meaning-making that can potentially have a transformative effect.

Weill’s argument is particularly thought-provoking. Her defense of engaged research not only challenges the universal fiction of objectivity but also invites us to rethink the very purpose of academic practice. Rather than aspiring to an impossible “neutrality”, her proposal calls for exploring “other angles” of reality and imagining more hybrid, porous, and permeable intellectual trajectories between the popular world and the university. However, this stance also opens up a series of ethically significant questions: how can militancy or close commitment be reconciled with findings that may contradict our own convictions?

Pável Aguilar’s essay dialogues with Weill’s by shedding light on the persistence of centralism and the reproduction of a “periphery of the periphery” (p. 100) within Peruvian academia. Aguilar argues that the center–periphery logic continues to constrain the development of the social sciences in the country and that university patronage stifles intellectual debate in regions located far from Lima, the capital. While he acknowledges the existence of regional efforts to cultivate critical thought, he warns that “it is quite difficult—though not impossible—to find in the regions the figure of the male or female researcher-professor” (p. 97). At this point, it would have been enriching for Aguilar to include a more personal reflection—following Weill’s approach—by considering his own academic trajectory from Trujillo to a prestigious university in the capital. Such an exercise would have provided an embodied perspective on the very tensions he analyzes.

Aguilar deepens his critique by pointing out the predominance of a "punitive approach" in Peruvian social analysis, which tends to reduce the complexity of problems to moral judgments of “good and bad” and to promote equally simplistic, immediate solutions. In contrast, he calls for a “politicizing perspective” that enables a contextualized and historically grounded approach, one capable of recognizing and untangling the relations of power and inequality that structure social phenomena. He illustrates this tendency with the case of artisanal mining in Madre de Dios, in the Peruvian Amazon, where the dominant narrative “reduces the analysis to the tax and environmental liabilities generated by these activities” (p. 103), thereby obscuring the structural inequalities, racism, and diversity of productive forms that characterize mining in that region.

As a researcher of these mining issues, I would add that there exists a genuine “punitive machinery”—with academic, political, and media tentacles—operating not only at the national but also at the global level, imposing hegemonic and moralizing interpretations on certain mining phenomena. In the case of artisanal mining, this machinery tends to promote, by default, a "dark extractivism", with “environmental” and “criminalizing” framings, leaving little room for dissenting voices or more nuanced perspectives. Interpretations that deviate from these frameworks are frequently subjected to scrutiny—whether in conferences, the media, or peer reviews in academic journals—for not emphasizing those dimensions sufficiently; meanwhile, those who reproduce the dominant narratives rarely face equivalent demands for complexity or self-critique.

In sum, Weill and Aguilar incisively examine the structural limitations of an academic system marked by precarity and centralism. Yet beyond the diagnosis, and without succumbing to a romanticization of the “precarity” that characterizes peripheral academies, it would be worth emphasizing, in future reflections, the methodological and creative innovations that researchers from the Global South develop precisely amid such adverse conditions. Perhaps it is there, in those interstices of scarcity and commitment, that the most genuinely decolonial forms of knowledge production are taking shape.

Luis Meléndez