Orlando Fals Borda

Together with Father Camilo Torres Restrepo and other intellectuals and professionals, including Eduardo Umaña Luna, María Cristina Salazar, Virginia Gutiérrez de Pineda, Carlos Escalante, Darío Botero and Tomás Ducay, in 1959 he set up one of the first sociology faculty in Latin America at the National University of Colombia.

His perspective built a singular bond between science and politics that changed dramatically the relations between society and knowledge. He also played a key role of the foundation of CLACSO (Latin American Council of Social Sciences) at the end of the sixties. An essential part of his effort was centered on the construction of a perspective from the border and the periphery, focused on the subordination conditions of the Latin American societies. A polemic thinker and militant, Fals Borda developed an ethical conception of the subversion based on a particular method of analysis and a praxis called "positive subversion" through the idea of commitment. Fals Borda's perspective also contributed to develop some recent critical interpretations, such as postcolonialism linked to the analysis of the effects of modernity/coloniality on the South.

Quotations

• "Do not monopolise your knowledge nor impose arrogantly your technique, but respect and combine your skills with the knowledge of the researched or /grassroots communities, taking them as full partners and co-researchers. Do not trust elitist versions of history and science which respond to dominant interests, but be receptive to counter-narratives and try to recapture them. Do not depend solely on your culture to interpret facts, but recover local values, traits, beliefs, and arts for action by and with the research organisations. Do not impose your own ponderous scientific style for communicating results, but diffuse and share what you have learned together with the people, in a manner that is wholly understandable and even literary and pleasant, for science should not be necessarily a mystery nor a monopoly of experts and intellectuals."