Symposium Description

How we as human persons understand and relate to the world has long been fodder for contention. 

In the pursuit of absolute, universal truths, the occidental philosophical canon has found itself in a rigid dogmatism that casts out the roles of spirituality, land, and the-more-than-human-world in the formation of our understanding of reality. With this dogmatic commitment to the exclusion of the spiritual, the embodied and the particular–sharpened and spread through violent conquest–the space to offer and have taken seriously other non-western frameworks for knowing and being in the world has been severely reduced. 

Ontological and epistemic frameworks cultivated by those subjected to settler colonialism become mere “folk understandings”, loose “cosmologies”, or “alternate philosophies”. These non western frameworks for knowing find themselves always measured against settler colonial logics that inevitably place them as secondary, partial, in comparison to the grand totalitizing projects of western philosophy. 

What this symposium aims to accomplish, is a demonstration of the merit and stand alone importance of Indigenous Philosophies across the Americas. This gathering of scholarship celebrates the ontological and epistemic frameworks produced by Indigenous peoples not as mere “alternate philosophies”, but as themselves structures and questions that map to the realities of how human persons know and be in the world in ways western hegemonic Philosophy continuously fails to. 

Speakers:

Natalie Avalos University of Colorado, Boulder

Zenón Depaz Toledo Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos

Getty Lustila Northeastern University

James Maffie (unaffiliated)

James Maffie is Senior Lecturer, Emeritus, Department of History, University of Maryland.

Title: A Mexica Metaphysics of Transformative Becoming

Abstract: The Mexica cosmos exhibits three patterns of transformative becoming and change: olin, malinalli, and nepantla. After defining these, I focus upon one kind of malinalli-defined transformation: what I call comestible transformation or the transformation that occurs in one person when they consume life-energies of another person. After briefly discussing the nature of maize, I examine the transformation that occurs in human beings consequent upon their consuming maize. 

Getty L. Lustila is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Philosophy and Religion and Associate Director of the Humanities Center.

Title: TBA

Natalie Avalos is an Assistant Professor in the Ethnic Studies Department at the University of Colorado, Boulder. 

Title: Restoring the Sacred: The Ethical Ground of Land as Kin

Abstract: Settler colonialism has produced a de-sacralized world; one devoid of any coherent morality, where only material life and its consumption matters. Western materialism and its attendant derision of the immaterial, not just in spiritual power but in all forms of respect for the numinous, has made Native peoples vulnerable to existential estrangement from the land and one another. Native peoples in the Americas generally understand the universe as alive and sentient—all phenomena in it are understood to be a distinct expression of life force, or spirit. Human and other-than-human persons, such as plants, animals, rivers, winds and mountains, are material expressions of spirit. In this sense, material life is not inert, it is teeming with life, conscious awareness and thus, intersubjective. This is why decolonization has been described as a shift in worldview, or rather a return to an Indigenous one (Deloria 1994). In this sense, liberation is both material and metaphysical, necessitates a transformed experience and comprehension of oneself in relation to a greater reality. In this talk, I draw on ethnographic research with Native and Chicano peoples as well as Indigenous and decolonial theory to illustrate how the regeneration of relations to land as kin restores an embodied sense of the sacred, which can be understood as an Indigenous ontology. It is through these reciprocal relations that land-based ethics become apparent, not as ideas in the abstract, but as living commitments to care for the inhabitants of land as extensions of oneself.

Zenón Depaz Toledo is Professor and Chair in the Department of Philosophy at Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Peru.

Title: The Waka’s Merciful Silence

Abstract: Based on a passage from the ancient Quechua Huarochirí Manuscript in which an Andean deity confronts the questioning of a convert to Christianity, I will propose some reflections on ancestral Andean sacredness—its connections to the diversity, relationality, and contingency that characterize life—as well as its continued relevance and projection in a late modern era burdened by nihilism and fundamentalisms (intertwined phenomena) of a monotheistic matrix.

Register here: RSVP | Indigenous Philosophy across the Americas: Epistemologies and Ontologies outside the Settler Colonial Hegemony

Symposium website here: Symposium – QUECHUA AT PENN