Epistemologies – interdisciplinary view on the multiple aspects of the insularity experience

Image author: Salvador Freitas

How to codify the multiple aspects of the experience of insularity? What forms of knowledge can be constructed around the insular? What variations, influenced by insularity and similar phenomena, are there between concepts shared by different types of knowledge?

Bringing together various fields of social sciences and humanities, as well as natural sciences, this category meets the ways in which the theme is addressed from the point of view of systematised knowledge. Divided into subcategories classified into scientific fields, it has entries defined by key concepts relevant to each of the fields represented.

With the introduction of a specialised subcategory, it also bears witness to the very disciplinary nature of island studies as a comparatist scientific field developed around the study of islands “on their own terms”, as referred to by anthropologist Grant McCall in the 1990s[1] .

The option to categorize by established disciplines was not unrelated to the permeability of their borders, and each categorization corresponds to the area of expertise of the authors of the entries. The aim is therefore to outline a reading plan that questions the operational ways in which concepts associated with islands and insularities are formed, according to the noetic particularities of each area of knowledge.

[1] McCALL, Grant. 1994. “Nissology: A Proposal for Consideration,” in Journal of the Pacific Society, Nos. 63-64 (Vol.17, Nos. 2-3). Tokyo: Pacific Society. 1-14.