ABSTRACT
The chapter, written by three authors, two sociologists and a social anthropologist from different continents, offers a reflection on the different forms, roots, and meanings of social love in different cultures. The first part explores crucial questions about the tensions created between the discourses of love and coloniality and emphasizes the universality of love as an expression of what it means to be human. The second part presents three cases that illustrate how love as a revolutionary force can reset colonial power disparities, define people’s relationships beyond consumption and exploitation, and show new love geographies: the practices of mutual social love along with the Amazonian communities of Kayapó people in Brazil; the African value of Ubuntu (I am because we are); and the Mesoamerican concept of In Lak’ech (you, the other me). In the conclusion, the authors propose the argument that we live in an unfinished world that is in the making, where love remains the most radical, permanent, and intellectually sound move for society, that can be utilized as a subversive typology for change and can help us imagine a different world of social relationships beyond the colonial models of exploitation and extraction by “generat[ing] an oppositional cosmopolitics,” as the underneath force behind a valid decolonial project.
