The term epistemicide (Sousa do Santos-Carneiro) refers to the dismantling of an entire system of knowledge and practices that constructed worlds, technologies, ethics, ontologies, and ecologies, only to violently replace them with a system that claims to be hegemonic and superior. Epistemicides are processes specific to colonization and modernity.
They involve killing life in all its forms—and this is not a metaphor: it involves attacking the bodies, communities, and territories that sustain it, massacring and subjugating human beings, impoverishing the earth, stealing water, destroying landscapes, breaking the fabric that structures knowledge, and burning the connections with the invisible. It is also about erasing memory and accommodating knowledge by deactivating it through the creation of invented filiations, by appropriating what “serves” without ever referring to the subordinate subjects who embodied it.