Viveiros de Castro and Oswald de Andrade know Marx and Freud, the ethnographic and blind discourses of “the savage” created in the XIX Century, and the critical paradigms that have shaped the anthropology and the production of cultural artifacts in the West, and by extension, in Latin America. I want to highlight the time distance […]
Tupi Lição
As we read in Cannibal Metaphysics, the Tupinanbá anthropophagic ritual had the purpose of erasing the enemy’s alterity. Throughout the months or years that the captive would spend in the town of his captors, his otherness would disintegrate and he would become a husband, a brother, a friend. The movie Como era gustoso o meo […]
We Education
What are we going to do as students in the high prestige departments of Masters and Doctorate education in NYU to systematically change a high powered global institution from within, and how then will we share this with other universities in the United States, and ones imitating the US higher education system globally? For my […]
For Any Seat at Any Table for Every Student!
has me thinking about the spatial-material axis of learning. How is learning affected by proximity, and what shape does this proximity take? I couldn’t agree more with Davidson’s claim that “the lecture is broken, and so we must think of better ways to incorporate active learning into the classroom” (Davidson, 248). The hierarchy of the […]
Re-learning How to Learn, and American Problem?
First Idea: In the introduction to The New Education we read “In the last decade, it has become fashionable to say higher education would be more efficient and modern if were run as a business, treating students as “customers.” (pos. 230). The author accurately presents some of the historical roots of the “buisinefication” of higher […]
Sketch of a Pedagogical Eating-lecture
We set our pedagogical project on, at, with, and under the table. We see the table as a setting that, drawing on Paulo Freire, scripts relationality—and for Freire, a radical pedagogical project begins with dialogical relations. However, the table was not our initial point of departure; rather, we arrived at it through hours of dialoguing, […]
Past Tense, Future Perfect
“Past tense, future perfect” is a combination of words oft-used by author Zadie Smither in her 1999 novel White Teeth about immigrant identities and dehumanization in late 20th century London. Something between past and future is a desiring, unrepresented present. This gap is widened by the the physicality of “tense” versus the grammatical association of […]
Embodied Epistemology
The genocide understood as the systematic elimination of the bodies of the colonized people, brought with it the epistemicide proposed by Boaventura de Sousa Santos (92) consolidating by this the hegemonic of the Eurocentric Epistemology in the South Globe. The demand for the (Mignolo, 451) require disarticulated the notion of Totality imposed by the Western. In […]
A Una Epistemología ética (Susana)
“How can the exclusive, ethnocentric “we” be articulated with the inclusive “we”—a homeland for everyone—that envisions decolonization?” (Cusicanqui, 97) Sylvia Rivera Cusicanqui, in this question on how to be inclusive in decolonizing movements, brings forth her salient argument on how to practice indigenous hybridity in the colonizing hegemonic order in her writing of “Chi’ixianakax […]
Writing Papers, An “Epistemicide”?
My working group for this class has been reflecting on different ideas and doings dealing with constructive ways to think “epistemologies” and “alternative pedagogies”. In those discussions the paradox of bringing forward the limitations of western academic while being imbedded in the system of an American private university, was central. We kept thinking, what’s the […]