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- Title
Relativizando la historicidad. Memoria social, cosmología y tiempo en los Andes.
- Authors
Cavalcanti-Schiel, Ricardo
- Abstract
In the Tarabuco region of the southern Bolivian Andes, the historical memory of native Quechua-speaking people goes no farther back than what living generations remember. The time of the ancestors belongs to another world and is not of the same nature as that of the present world. However, recognition of the continuity of existence is framed by a pattern, not that of factual causality or historical transformation, but the permanent renewal of agreements between the powers of the many agents of the cosmos. Textual regimes that express this kind of memory are organized according to the same formal logic: the complementarity of asymmetric halves. According to this syntax, the past is complementary to the present, and this world is complementary to the world of the ancestors. Both are contemporary and coextensive, and it is the consortium of their powers that makes possible the reproduction of life. What this Andean cosmology suggests in conceptual terms is that historicity as a universal way of knowing is displaced by a more general concept of memory, of which historicity is only one of its possible modes.
- Publication
Quaderns de l'Institut Català d'Antropologia, 2015, Issue 31, p85
- ISSN
0211-5557
- Publication type
Article