PDF Lincoln; Congress; and Emancipation (Perspective Hist of Congress 1801-1877) by From Ohio University Press in History

Description

Originally published in Mexico in 1970; Indigenous and Popular Thinking in América is the first book by the Argentine philosopher Rodolfo Kusch (1922–79) to be translated into English. At its core is a binary created by colonization and the devaluation of indigenous practices and cosmologies: an opposition between the technologies and rationalities of European modernity and the popular mode of thinking; which is deeply tied to Indian ways of knowing and being. Arguing that this binary cuts through América; Kusch seeks to identify and recover the indigenous and popular way of thinking; which he contends is dismissed or misunderstood by many urban Argentines; including leftist intellectuals.Indigenous and Popular Thinking in América is a record of Kusch's attempt to immerse himself in the indigenous ways of knowing and being. At first glance; his methodology resembles ethnography. He speaks with and observes indigenous people and mestizos in Peru; Bolivia; and Argentina. He questions them about their agricultural practices and economic decisions; he observes rituals; he asks women in the market the meaning of indigenous talismans; he interviews shamans; he describes the spatial arrangement and the contents of shrines; altars; and temples; and he reproduces diagrams of archaeological sites; which he then interprets at length. Yet he does not present a "them" to a putative "us." Instead; he offers an inroad to a way of thinking and being that does not follow the logic or fit into the categories of Western social science and philosophy. In his introduction; Walter D. Mignolo discusses Kusch's work and its relation to that of other twentieth-century intellectuals; Argentine history; and contemporary scholarship on the subaltern and decoloniality.