Wednesday, December 14, 2022

Native American philosophy (seen on Twitter)

Esther Gabara:

When Aníbal Quijano elaborated his critique of coloniality in collaboration with Immanuel Wallerstein, the two argued that the continent's history of violence against and resistance by indigenous peoples made it possible to 'speak of Americanity as a concept' that structured global modernity. Here this study has been influenced by methods and insights of long-standing research in decolonial thought led by distinct groups of theorists in the Americas, including, but not limited to, Ramón Grosfoguel (Puerto Rico/continental United States), María Lugones (Argentina/United States), Walter Mignolo (Argentina/United States), Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (Bolivia), and Catherine Walsh (United States/Ecuador). All these thinkers recognize the influence of decolonization struggles in the 1960s and 1970s in Africa, Asia,Latin America, and the Caribbean on their current research that seeks to decolonize thought and life practices. Even so, they differentiate epistemological decolonization from that political process.

Research into Amerindian thought permeated theories of American negation in the generation of the 1960s and 1970s, in and beyond Acha's and Gullar's prefixes. The Argentine Rodolfo Kusch founded an interdiscipline he called antropología filosófica americana (American philosophical anthropology) in his landmark book La negación en el pensamiento popular (Negation in Popular Thought, 1975). Amerindian epistemological, spiritual, and affective imaginaries helped Kusch to comprehend the importance and shape of American negation and led him to break with Claude Lévi-Strauss's influential structuralist anthropology for its failure to comprehend the universality of indigenous thought...

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Kusch thus identifies the limits of the European tradition he calls conocimiento (knowledge), which myopically focuses on objectivity and so produces knowledge that is ultimately univocal. Instead, he embraces the popular thought that he terms comprensión (comprehension), which values subjective emotions and opinion, and so creates forms of understanding that provide multiple answers to the same question.

Non-literary Fiction: Art of the Americas Under Neoliberalism, Esther Gabara (University of Chicago Press, 2022)

flower

"In the late 1880s, around the time when the Lake Mohonk gang was advocating for a dramatic expansion of the residential school system, a Paiute man named Wovoka had a vision. He said that the Creator had come to him with a new dance, one that would bring about a better world without white settlers and their endless expansionist wars. The dead would reunite with the living, and the buffalo killed by settlers would roam the plains again. It’s not difficult to understand why this message would be profoundly moving for people who had lost so much in the Indian Wars and whose children were being taken away for reeducation by the US government. It was a story about a hopeful future, where Indigenous culture flourished and the land came back to its original caretakers. Oceti Sakowin (Great Sioux Nation) historian Nick Estes, author of Our History Is the Future, writes that the government had outlawed Indigenous dancing at that time, and therefore ‘the Ghost Dance was fundamentally oppositional in spirit.’”
Annalee Newitz, Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind. W. W. Norton, 2024. Chapter 2: A Fake Frontier.

Great Inuit movie called Atanarjuat; not exactly the area you’re asking for but it’s really cool

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— Eric Hirsch🥥🌴 (@ehirsch.bsky.social) Jul 31, 2024 at 11:09 PM

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