Three Dimensions
Mining contention in Cebu occurs outside the context of leftist rebellion and Indigenous resistance against the state and corporate actors. Acknowledging Santos’ scholarship on epistemicide, the three dimensions of epistemological violence articulate an epistemology of violence particular to the extraction of natural resources. This results from the analysis of primary interviews with mining-affected residents, mining laws and other legal texts spanning from the Spanish, American, and Republic eras of the Philippines, and selected legal documents from civil case no. TCV-2018-510 in Naga City, Cebu. Focusing on civil case no. TCV-2018-510 in Naga City, three dimensions of epistemological violence make apparent how an epistemological framework for scholarship particular to the extraction of natural resources can be conceived.
The three dimensions of an epistemology of extraction emerge from the analysis of primary material collected during ethnographic work conducted on the island province of Cebu in central Visayas, including Naga City, Sibonga, and San Fernando, over several periods in 2019, 2022, and 2023. An epistemology of extraction provides a framework to study the rule of law as a site where epistemological violence characterizes mining-related contention. Specific examples from primary sources includes legal documents, which demonstrate instances of epistemological violence and their significance in making visible mining-related violence in Cebu involving residents, mining corporations, state actors, and the local political elite.
Dimension 1: Erasing Lived Experiences
The first form of epistemological violence focuses on how the rule of law makes lived experiences invisible. The failure to recognize lived experiences suppresses a Bisayan, relational, worldview thereby rendering epistemological complexity impossible. This encompasses three types of erasures.
Erasure 1. Experiences of Death and Bodily Injury
Erasure 2. Experiences of Dispossession and Relocation
Erasure 3. Intimidation and Coercion
Theoretical framing: Noun-Verb Paradigm
The noun-verb paradigm sharpens an epistemological conception of mining-related violence by applying linguistic conceptions to a positivist conception of the world. Adhering to a rational logic turns nature into a noun, therefore conceptualizing the mountains where residents reside into non-living things that are exploitable natural resources.
“During the excavation, people from Cemex were on watch, they were armed with huge weapons. They’d watch us along with the police from Naga on the adjacent side. What would that be called? Isn’t that harassment?"
Anonymous resident, Naga City (2019)
Dimension 2: Legal Categories as Fixed Boundaries of Knowledge
The second form of epistemological violence centers the way that legal texts close boundaries of knowledge and therefore adhere to hegemonic knowledges or logics. Given the Philippines’ colonial history from which its mining sector emerges, the country’s contemporary rule of law remains grounded in a positivist worldview where nature is a natural resource, a commodity, available for extraction and profit. In the rule of law, boundaries of knowledge adhere to a dominant positivist world view that does not allow for epistemological complexity, specifically other epistemologies that view nature and humans as reciprocal.
Various legal texts from the Spanish and American colonial periods and the contemporary sovereign period are cited to demonstrate the emergence of closed boundaries of knowledge.
Theoretical Framing: Sociology of Absences
Bouventura de Sousa Santos’ sociology of absences provides a theoretical framework as an attempt to clarify boundaries of knowledges and an attempt at epistemological complexity. As an “inquiry that aims to explain that what does not exist is actively produced as nonexistent”, it helps identify how knowledges that are put in the past are made obsolete while to make them present makes them relevant. An epistemological imagination is required to identify what is made absent in the judiciary (Santos 2014:164;171; 181). It is helpful to emphasize the ways that boundaries of knowledge make undesired epistemologies invisible and absent
Dimension 3: Manipulating Courts
The third and final dimension problematizes the politics of legal interpretation through the analysis of the civil case. The plaintiffs and defendant’s contestation around what ultimately is posited as contestation around legal interpretation decenters the causes of action submitted by the Plaintiffs in the first place.
In analyzing legal interpretation by centering the Court’s Order in context of the Plaintiffs’ ‘Complaint’, it becomes apparent that an epistemological turn occurred during the transition from the first judge, Assisting Judge Dennis C. Larrobis to Presiding Judge Generosa G. Labra and Acting Presiding Judge Ester M. Veloso who made the final decision to dismiss the civil case.
Theoretical Framing: Politics of Legal Interpretation
To sharpen the conception of the epistemological turn identified in civil case TCV-2018-510, it helps to situate the Court as a site where legal interpretation by the court is subsumed by the politicized fixed boundaries of the rule of law that manipulate fixed outcomes of the courts. In other words, whose stories are told and whose agenda is followed depends on the judicial process of legal interpretation.
Cover challenges the notion that constitutional violence “is always performed within institutional sanctioned limits” of others (Cover 1986: 1621;1629). A judges’ legal interpretation simultaneously imposes meaning on the institution and restructures it. In this sense, “the language act of practical understanding” is connected to the deeds that are organized and structured around it.
