Our first session of the year will take place on Friday, 9 October, from 15:00 to 18:00 in OMHP D1.18B.

Text read: 

Sztutman, Renato. 2020. “Perspectivism Against the State,” Revista de Antropologia 63 (1): 185–213 (translation).

Cosmologies Group

The Cosmologies workgroup organizes events and a monthly reading group. You can find new calls for both the reading and events on the ASCA website.

“For us, politics is something else…” Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa’s call for a cosmopolitics has guided the Cosmologies research group since its beginning. Problematizing the modern cosmology, its ontology (i.e. epistemology), and perspective (i.e. anthropocentric), we have been moving across different fields and their theories, which make, to use the words of Alfred North Whitehead, thinking in cosmology possible.

The concerns have ranged from those in the environmental ecology, notably the bifurcation of nature and its ramifications for bodies of nature and nonhuman entities, to the mental ecology, notably questions on the spiritual and its different apparitions in shape of ghosts, spectres, and spirits, and in between the social ecology, with questions of power, relations, and more widely peoples. We have constantly asked how these concerns inflect back into the approaches and methods of anthropology, philosophy, and cultural studies that we study with. Moreover, how do the studies of technology (cosmotechnics) and the arts (cosmopoetics) make a difference for thinking non-Eurocentric, and non-anthropocentric?

Having focussed in the previous years on the expanded fields of the Americas with minor ventures onto others such as those of Africa and Australia, this year we aim to open further onto cosmologies not yet explored in depth.

Researchers involved: Erica Biolchini (McGill University), Halbe Kuipers (UvA), Riley Gold (USC), Jasmijn Leeuwenkamp (UvA), Xinyi Zheng (UvA), Matthias de Groof (UA / UvA), Jie Shen (UvA), Diego Cagüeñas Rozo (UvA), Brian Trinanda Kusuma Adi (UvA), Sara Gelao (UvA), Martina Griessing Valsecchi (UvA)

The Cosmologies workgroup organizes events and a monthly reading group. You can find new calls for both the reading and events on the ASCA events list. To participate, contact: h.h.kuipers@uva.nl.