From the socioeconomic formation of territorial formation: the epistemological claims of the global south as a methodological need for social analysis

Abstract

The analysis of formations, within the scope of the human sciences, is confronted with a complex social dynamic, which requires constant operational redefinitions to diagnose the insurgent practices that comprise it. In this sense, it becomes pertinent to investigate the epistemological formulation of territorial formation, with emphasis on the operational advantages that guided its constitution as a category of geographic analysis capable of embracing a wide range of meanings in the field of political practice. Methodologically, our point is that the resource of the idea of formation consists of an epistemological thread that allows us to systematize the refinement of the territory as a social category of analysis since it offers a historical synthesis of its operationality as such. Thus, the text offers a bibliographical review that starts from the theory of socioeconomic formation that, permeated by socio-spatial formation, has been refined as a key category for the investigation of the contradictions implied in social reality. It is the idea of formation and the totality of uses that conform to it, a resource that allows us to add to the category of territory the epistemological advances of critical theory. Nevertheless, nourished by insurgent political practices, the territory offers studies of formations and critical and propositional alternatives that start from situated re-existences, responsible for the emergence of another spatial order centered on the reproduction of life in its broadest sense.