The Abyssal Line Between Owning and Belonging

What impedes recognition is not ignorance but architecture. De Sousa Santos (2018) calls it the abyssal line: a cognitive demarcation that renders entire peoples, epistemologies, and ways of being nonexistent, not refuted or argued against but simply uncounted. The demarcation line is subtle and obtuse. It operates below awareness, organizing perception before perception knows it has been organized. As Francisco (2026) observed, this abyssal line “runs through depth psychology” itself: Indigenous peoples appear as illustrations and objects of analysis but never as agents whose knowledge constitutes knowledge.

What we value more is cognitive sovereignty: the conviction that the Western rational subject stands apart from the ecological web that formed it. De Sousa Santos (2018) identifies this conviction as inseparable from what he terms epistemicide, the systematic destruction of knowledges that do not conform to the monoculture of Western scientific validity. We exchange interdependence for independence, relation for abstraction, ecology for hierarchy. The trade is not even conscious. It is, as Francisco (2026) put it, “the cultural water we swim in but don’t realize we’re in.” We did not forget our ecological interdependence so much as we were taught to unsee it, one epistemicide at a time.

Francisco (2026) stated that non-Indigeneity is the distortion that we are “born Indigenous” and “have to deform something in ourselves or in our relationship to the land and cosmos, to silence our Indigenous bodies and souls.” If the vast majority of human history was lived in ecological interdependence, then what turned us against our own nature was not a single event but a long epistemicide: the killing of knowledges that knew us as belonging to the Earth rather than owning it.References

de Sousa Santos, B. (2018). The end of the cognitive empire: The coming of age of epistemologies of the South. Duke University Press.

Francisco, D. M. (2026). Module 1 lecture [Lecture transcript]. DJA 735: Indigenous Perspectives: Depth Psychology Beyond the West, Pacifica Graduate Institute.

References

de Sousa Santos, B. (2018). The end of the cognitive empire: The coming of age of epistemologies of the South. Duke University Press.