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From below and to the left: the revolutionary law of indigenous women and the decolonial cosmovision

Presentation and discussion with Sylvia Marcos and Ovidiu Țichindeleanu

From below and to the left: the revolutionary law of indigenous women and the decolonial cosmovision

Presentation and discussion with Sylvia Marcos and Ovidiu Țichindeleanu, on the occasion of the launch of the new book collection PLURITOPIC at IDEA Publishing House, with the book of Sylvia Marcos, “Femeile indigene și cosmoviziunea decolonială”.

Monday, 6 October 2014, 7 pm
tranzit.ro/ București, Str. Gazelei nr. 44, sector 4

The theologian Raimon Panikkar has proposed the concept of “diatopical hermeneutics”: a necessary framework for “the distance to overcome ...between two or more cultures, which have independently developed in different spaces their own methods of philosophizing and ways of reaching intelligibility”. The term was conferring dignity to the “wretched of the Earth” from an earlier vision, but the hierarchy between cultures remained implicit in the historical context of the Western triumph after the fall of the Iron Curtain. In 1995, in the context of social movements propelling Latin America in a divergent historical direction, the Argentinian theorist Walter Mignolo proposed the term “pluritopical hermeneutics”: a necessary frame for self-standing intellectual gestures within a convergence of liberations.

One of the duties of philosophy in the 21st century is liberating critical thought from Eurocentrism and situating it in a world where the hopes are related to the insurrection of subjugated knowledges. Cultural Eurocentrism has been an extension of longue durée military, economical and political dominations, and continues to project Western universalism as a totality above all spaces of the world and fields of knowledge, obstructing the affirmation of differences and direct comparison between peripheries of modernity. In the cultural history of the postcommunist transition, “Romania” related in a positive epistemic manner only to Europe and the Western world, and less so or not at all to other peripheries from its own region, or to Latin America, Africa, Asia or the Global South. PLURITOPIC – published by IDEA and coordinated by Ovidiu Tichindeleanu is the first book collection dedicated exclusively to radical Non-Western thought, proposing a direct connection to experiences, resistances and visions opposing the European totality, and thus opening other bridges for the East-European road of the liberation from transition.

Sylvia Marcos is an internationally renowned academic researcher, promoting an anti-hegemonic vision in the feminist critical epistemology, the study of religion and Mesoamerican ethno-history and rights of women in the indigenous movements. She has been Visiting Professor at Universities such as UNAM Mexico, Amherst, Claremont, Columbia, Drew, Harvard, Ljubljana etc. Director of the Centre for Psycho-ethnological Researches, Cuernavaca, Mexico, founder of the Permanent Seminar on Gender and Anthropology at the Institute for Anthropological Research at UNAM Mexico, member of the board of directors of the Latin-American Association for the Study of Religions, she participated to and organized many meetings with indigenous women in Mexico and South America. She is the author of volumes such as: Enciclopedia Iberoamericana de Religiones, Vol.III: Religión y Genero (2004), Taken from the Lips: Gender and Eros in Mesoamerica (2006), Women in Indigenous Religions (2010), Cruzando fronteras: mujeres indígenas y feminismos abajo y a la izquierda (2010), Mujeres, Indígenas, Rebeldes, Zapatistas (2011).

Ovidiu Tichindeleanu is a philosopher, culture theorist and translator living in Chişinău, Moldova, writing on critical social theory, decolonial thought, internationalism, alternative epistemologies, and the cultural history of postcommunism. PhD in Philosophy (Binghamton University) with a thesis on monolinguism, modern media and the archeology of knowledge at 1900, forthcoming in English. Editor of IDEA arts + society (www.ideamagazine.ro); collection coordinator at IDEA publishing house (www.ideaeditura.ro). Co-founding member of the independent platforms Philosophy&Stuff (1997), Indymedia Romania (2004), CriticAtac (2010), LeftEast (2012). Editor, with Konrad Petrovszky, of Romanian Revolution Televised. Contributions to the Cultural History of Media (Cluj: IDEA 2009, 2011). Forthcoming book: The Postcommunist Colonization and Liberation. A Critical History of the Culture of Transition.


Within the programme of tranzit.ro/ București, the meeting follows the line of events and projects organized under the title “/ Natural”.







 

IDEA Publishing House