Epistemic colonialism is the use of Power to force a System of thought, often an Ideology, onto an area of thought and a population of thinkers that have every right to organise and be organised differently to deal adequately with their specific experiential context.
Epistemic colonialism is violent in two different, but related ways:
- It forces thinkers to adopt a foreign system of thinking.
- It sacrifices experiential and empirical adequacy on the altar of dogmatism.
If not convinced by the former, Western thinkers should at least be moved by the latter, if they want to be true to their espoused values of Rationality.
A specific, intra-scientific form of epistemic colonialism is economics imperialism, where non-economic aspects of life are analysed and assessed in economic terms.