ABSTRACT
The clarity and level-headedness of Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s prose and vision – even in translation – makes for a pleasurable experience of enlightenment, but given his topic, it must bear a ballast of paradox. The characteristic which distinguishes de Sousa Santos’s work from Said’s, in fact, seems to lie in the relation of thought to action, or, theory to practice which is one of the main themes of this essay, and which is not unrelated to the question of precision and clarity in de Sousa Santos’s work in general. The process of ‘diatopical hermeneutics’ refers to an interpretation of two or more cultures or practices together such that points of similarity and those for debate can be identified. So, on the cultural hand, de Sousa Santos has proposed an exercise in examining, comparing and transplanting concepts of human dignity found in the Western concept of human rights, the Islamic concept of ummai and the Hindu concept of dharma.
