ABSTRACT
“Science is science,” maintain its propagators, affirming the project of modern science (“natural” or “social”) with tautologies like these; as do all those others, professionals and lay persons alike, who share their deep faith in modern systems of knowledge or epistemologies deemed “scientific.” A central part of their reiterations of such tautological statements is to perform the modern radical surgery emphasizing that there has occurred a historical paradigm shift in concepts, processes and products associated with the production of modern knowledge systems; contrasting these from the ideas, practices, processes and products associated with indigenous or traditional systems of knowledge. In condescension, the latter continue to be called both “pre-modern” and “wonscience”: in other words, intrinsically defined not by what they are, but by what they are not; by what they cannot be.
