Walter Mignolo (1941- ) はアルゼンチン生まれの記号学者・歴史家・思想家。Local Histories / Global Designs : Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking, 2000において、「境界のグノーシス（border ）」を提唱している。

図書の解説によると「帝国／植民地の国境地において住まうことによる感じとられ、そして 知りえること」が、この境界のグノーシスということだ。

"Local Histories/Global Designs is an extended argument about the "coloniality" of power by one of the most innovative Latin American and Latino scholars. In a shrinking world where sharp dichotomies, such as East/West and developing/developed, blur and shift, Walter Mignolo points to the inadequacy of current practices in the social sciences and area studies. He explores the crucial notion of "colonial difference" in the study of the modern colonial world and traces the emergence of an epistemic shift, which he calls "border thinking." Further, he expands the horizons of those debates already under way in postcolonial studies of Asia and Africa by dwelling in the genealogy of thoughts of South/Central America, the Caribbean, and Latino/as in the United States. His concept of "border gnosis," or sensing and knowing by dwelling in imperial/colonial borderlands, counters the tendency of occidentalist perspectives to manage, and thus limit, understanding. In a new preface that discusses Local Histories/Global Designs as a dialogue with Hegel's Philosophy of History, Mignolo connects his argument with the unfolding of history in the first decade of the twenty-first century. "

”Explores the crucial notion of "colonial difference" in the study of the modern colonial world and traces the emergence of an epistemic shift, which author calls "border thinking". This title expands the horizons of debates under way in postcolonial studies of Asia and Africa by dwelling in the genealogy of thoughts of South/Central America.”

同書では、境界のグノーシス学／境界のグノーシス（ボーダー・グノセオロジー／ボーダー・グノーシス）を定義して次のようにいう。


".., I will use gnoseology as the discourse about gnosis and I will understand by gnosis knowledge in general, including doxa and episteme. Border gnosis as knowledge from a subaltern perspective is knowledge conceived from the exterior borders of the modern/colonial world system, and border gnoseology as a discourse about colonial knowledge is conceived at the conflictive intersection of the knowledge produced from the perspective of modern colonialisms (rhetoric, philosophy, science) and knowledge produced from the perspective of colonial modernities in Asia, Africa, and the Americas/Caribbean. Border gnoseology is a critical reflection on knowledge production from both the interior borders of the modern/colonial world system (imperial conflicts, hegemonic languages, directionality of translations, etc) and its exterior borders (imperial conflicts with cultures being colonized, as well as the subsequent stages of independence or decolonization)." (Mignolo 2000:11)

このグノーシスのアイディアは、最初、バレンティン・ムディンベ（1988）"The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Oder of Knowledge,"による「アフリカン・グノーシス（African gnosis）」から得られたことを、序文の６ページで示唆している（ミグノーロの本書の序文はインターネットで公開されている）。

"Mudimbe introduced the word gnosis to capture a wide range of forms of knowledge that “philosophy” and “epistemology” contributed to cast away. To seize the complexity of knowledge about Africa, by those who lived there for centuries and by those who went to Westernize it, the knowledge produced by travelers in the past and by the media in the present, underlining at the same time the crucial relevance of the “African traditional system of thought,” needed to conceptualize knowledge production beyond the two cultures" (pp.10-11).

ここでの２つの文化とは、謂うまでもないが西洋とアフリカの２つの文化的対立のことを指 している。しかし同様に、C.P.スノーの人文系と（自然）科学系の２つの学問領域の対 立の寓意をひいており、西洋の思考様式がつねに自己と他者峻別し、みずからの権力装置を経由して、そのような境界を警邏する（サイードのオリエンタリズム を想起されたい）ように他者表象するものとして描いている。

また、グノーシスの原義に遡り、ミグノーロは、ハンス・ヨナスのグノーシス研究を紐解き、その独特の知識の位置（とりわけ神学的＝道徳的な側面）に着目している (Mignolo 2000:11-12)。

グノーシスとは、そのような他者（＝西洋にとっての自己）と自己（＝西洋にとっての他 者）のとの間のボーダーからうまれる（人文学とも自然科学とも尽き難い「非西洋」的な）知恵の系譜である。

書肆紹介による章立ては次のようになっている。

• Preface and Acknowledgments
  
• Introduction On Gnosis and the Imaginary of the Modern/Colonial World System
  
• PART ONE: IN SEARCH OF AN OTHER LOGIC
  
• Border Thinking and the Colonial Difference
  
• PART TWO: I AM WHERE I THINK: THE GEOPOLITICS OF KNOWLEDGE AND COLONIAL EPISTEMIC DIFFERENCES
  
• Post-Occidental Reason: The Crisis of Occidentalism and the Emergenc(y)e of Border Thinking
  
• Human Understanding and Local Interests: Occidentalism and the (Latin) American Argument Are Subaltern Studies Postmodern or Postcolonial?
  
• The Politics and Sensibilities of Geohistorical Locations
  
• PART THREE: SUBALTERNITY AND THE COLONIAL DIFFERENCE: LANGUAGES, LITERATURES, AND KNOWLEDGES
  
• "An Other Tongue": Linguistics Maps, Literary Geographies, Cultural Landscapes
  
• Bilanguaging Love: Thinking in between Languages
  
• Globalization/Mundializacion: Civilizing Processes and the Relocation of Languages and Knowledges
• Afterword An Other Tongue, An Other Thinking, An Other Logic
  
• Bibliography
  
• Index
  

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リンク

• コンタクト・ゾーン／／／／／／／／／／／／
  

文献

• Local histories/global designs : coloniality, subaltern knowledges, and border thinking / Walter D. Mignolo, Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press , c2000. - (Princeton studies in culture/power/history)
  

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