Sámi children as thought herders: philosophy of death and storytelling as radical hope in early childhood education

This article follows a story played out by children at a Sámi early childhood centre in north Sweden. It does so by reflecting on the children’s story as a form of Critical Indigenous Philosophy. In particular it explores what it could mean for a child to be a philosopher in a Sámi context by developing the concept of jurddavázzi, or thought herder, in conversation with Wittgenstein’s method of ‘leading’, and Cavell’s of ‘shepherding’, ‘words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use’. The children’s play story – involving themes of death, struggles with natural surroundings, and interconnectivity through seeing life in nature – is read in relation to questions about traditional stories raised in the poetry of the Sámi poet, artist and philosopher, Nils-Aslak Valkeapää, or Áillohaš. The article ends by discussing how the children’s invitation to follow their story can be seen as a decolonizing pedagogical gesture of the child that requires a particular kind of philosophical listening by the teacher or adult. The article is in its style an attempt to demonstrate a form of philosophical storytelling the children are engaged in.

Ubuntu as a spirituality of liberation for black theology of liberation

This article aims to respond to Vuyani Vellem’s challenge to black theology of liberation (BTL) to ‘think beyond rethinking and repeating its tried and tested ways of responding to black pain caused by racism and colonialism’. Vellem argued that ‘BTL needs to unthink the west by focusing on and retaining African spirituality as a cognitive spirituality’ for the liberation of black people in South Africa. This article argues that Ubuntu is the spirituality of liberation that BTL needs to advance as one of its interlocutors. This research work will consult the literature emerging from African philosophy, ethics, spirituality and BTL arguing that Ubuntu is an indigenous philosophy, spirituality that continues to exist in the languages and culture of the Abantu (Bantu) speaking people. This article is dedicated to the memory of Vellem as a BTL scholar and a faithful believer of the liberative paradigms of BTL.Contribution: The scholarly contribution of this article is its focus on the systematic and practical reflection, within a paradigm in which the intersection of religious studies, social sciences and humanities generate an interdisciplinary contested discourse.

Rewilding policy futures: Maori whakapapa and the ecology of the subject

The world is changing, but political and educational institutions appears to be stuck in the 19th century. Modern policy and education are both premised on an Enlightenment assumption of the human, rational, individual subject. Increasingly, elements of these philosophical premises are being interrogated. The critique emerges from the environmental interest in collapsing the dualism between subject and object, and reintegrating the human with/in our ecological context. Indigenous philosophy is important for rethinking the integration of the dualism between humanity and ecology. Maori philosophy is a vital counterpoint to the anthropomorphic position of modern policy and education. Taking Maori concepts to inform contemporary philosophy generates a substantive shift in world view that does not lose sight of the solipsist, phenomenological parameters of human sense making, but enables us to make deeper ethical decisions, and transform the basis of education and policy.

Observaciones a El hombre primitivo como filósofo de Paul Radin

ResumenEl antropólogo Paul Radin publicó en 1956 el libro Primitive man as philosopher, por la editorial Dover Publication Inc., Nueva York. Para el presente análisis tomaremos la edición de 1968, publicada por la Editorial Universitaria de Buenos Aires-Rivadavia 1571/1/73 Sociedad de Economía Mixta, impresa en Argentina. Paul Radin, después de haber realizado investigaciones decampo, tras largos años de investigación vivencial, sostuvo que el hombre primitivo ya se había comportado como filósofo; apreciación que fue muy elogiada por muchos antropólogos y algunos filósofos y recibida con cierta duda por otros filósofos. Como se anuncia por el título de la presente ponencia, nuestra apreciación discrepa con la del autor, toda vez que la filosofía no es un discurso mítico-religioso. Palabras clave: Filosofía, filosofía indígena, filosofía, primitiva, cosmovisión. AbstractIn 1956, the anthropologist Paul Radin published the book Primitive man as philosopher, by the publishing house Dover Publication Inc., New York. For this analysis, we will take the edition from 1968 published by the University Press of Buenos Aires - Rivadavia 1571/1/73 Mixed Economy Society. Printed in Argentina After having conducted field research and after long years of experiential research, Paul Radin claims that the primitive man had already behaved like a philosopher. This perception was highly praised by many anthropologists and some philosophers,as well as received with some doubt by other philosophers. Being already announced in the title of this paper, our assessment disagrees with the one from the author, since philosophy is not amythical-religious discourse.Keywords: Philosophy, indigenous philosophy, primitive, philosophy, worldview.

Metaphorical and Literal Groundings

Accounts of grounded normativity in Indigenous philosophy can be used to challenge the groundlessness of Western environmental ethical approaches such as Aldo Leopold’s land ethic. Attempts to ground normativity in mainstream Western ethical theory deploy a metaphorical grounding that covers up the literal grounded normativity of Indigenous philosophical practices. Furthermore, Leopold’s land ethic functions as a form of settler philosophical guardianship that works to erase, assimilate, and effectively silence localized Indigenous knowledges through a delocalized ethical standard. Finally, grounded normativ­ity challenges settlers to question their desire for groundless normative theory and practice as reflective of their evasion of ethical responsibility for the destruction and genocide of Indigenous communities.

Theatre in Search of the Myth: Antonin Artaud and Miguel Ángel Asturias

Two tendencies define one of the “master -currents” (Ch. Innes) in the XXth century drama, epitomized by Antonin Artaud’s “theatre of cruelty”: revival of ritual practices and search for a “new myth”. Artaud perceives the Myth both as the end and the means: by creating a new myth, theatre reveals and heals illnesses of modernity; by reviving the ancient, theatre conducts the primitive, metaphysical “forces” of the “great cultures”. Particularly attracted to the Mesoamerican world, Artaud intended to stage “The Conquest of Mexico” (1933), a drama in four acts, to inaugurate his new theatre. Considering this, a special relevance should be given to the fact that M.A. Asturias’s article –manifesto “Reflections on the Possibility of an American Theatre in Indian spirit” was published in November 1930, anticipating Artaud’s conception of theatre based on myth. The ideas stated in the manifesto will be put into practice in “Cuculcán” play, the last piece of the “Legends of Guatemala”, second edition (1948). Settled in Paris since 1924, Asturias received the same aesthetic impulses as Artaud did: surrealism, avant -garde cinematography, “Ballets russes”, primitivism in all its forms. However, their preferences were not thoroughly the same. A parallel reading of the manifesto and the chronicles reveals how Asturias’s ideas on theatre correspond to the cultural context. It can be affirmed that many of Asturias’s and Artaud’s principles are isomorphic: accentuation of colour and disproportion in decorations, abolition of stage, use of masks, formalized movements, rejection of rhetoric and declamation, revelation of word’s religious force. Yet the ways Asturias and Artaud work with myth differ: it is in a playful, not tragic and ritualistic mode that myths are being actualized in Asturias’s theatre, and not only by means of “mise en scène”. Asturias considers the Myth as an inherited language, that is why the action in “Cuculcán” is determined by speech and what he calls “the Word’s value”, in accordance with indigenous philosophy.

Indigenous Reflections on Identity, Trauma, and Healing: Navigating Belonging and Power

Indigenous people are survivors of what some scholars have called the nexus of bio–psycho–social–cultural–spiritual intergenerational trauma. The effects of these multi-plex traumas brought on by European colonialism(s) reverberate into the present and affect Indigenous peoples at various scales, from local interpersonal relations to larger macro scales of geo-regional displacement. Indigenous peoples, however, have also survived the traumas of displacement, genocide, racism, surveillance, and incarceration by sustaining systems of ancestral and contemporary healing practices that contribute to individual and collective survivance. In this essay, I explore intergenerational rememberings of Indigenous identity, trauma, and healing based on personal, family, and community memory. Through rememberings, I seek to deconstruct the Western constructs of identity and trauma, arguing that these conceptions create trappings based on the exclusions of membership that support power hierarchies that perpetuate the dehumanization of Native peoples. By exposing these trappings, I will engage in my own decolonizing healing process by reclaiming, reconnecting, rewriting and rerighting histories. Finally, through an I/We Indigenous philosophy of belonging, I will argue that emotion can be an important saber (knowing) to help understand Indigenous identities as connected, collective, and ancestral ways of knowing and being that re/humanize Indigenous collective relational understandings.

Confronted by Indigenous Metaphysics in the Academy: Educating against the Tide

Discussions about indigenous philosophy are always difficult because of identities, chief among these being: what is the primary assumption that coalesces the varied philosophies of indigenous groups that then entitles me to talk about a single “indigenous” philosophy? Although I don’t make this the focus of my paper, I take as a uniting thought the holism which defines metaphysics for several indigenous groups (see e.g. Deloria, 2001; Mika, 2017; Smith, 2012). For this article, I centre on the implications of indigenous holism for both indigenous and non-indigenous students and the indigenous teacher of metaphysics in the academy. This paper often takes a turn for the anecdotal as I consider my experiences in the New Zealand context as a Maori lecturer in philosophy of education who teaches Maori metaphysics to Maori and non-indigenous students. There are difficulties that exist for me as an educator in this area and also for the students, although I have observed that non-indigenous and Maori students encounter Maori metaphysics in quite unique ways. A common feature in both cases, though, is that there is a lack of appropriate language to draw on to describe Maori metaphysics. I conclude this article by suggesting ways that philosophising can take place in correspondence with a Maori metaphysics of things as world-constituted.