Blogs

Ode to Social Constructions

Jasmine for you: Reading blog 6

We came, we saw, it was traditional af?

this is gonna be a long one … okay so we went and we did it. We went and experienced what was supposed to be potentially the most “indigenous” experience we are going to get during the course. Let’s run it back. At a totally not 9am SHARP, we all piled into 2 trusty vans […]

to my beloved compañeros (gluten-free inclusive)

Last blog post I started it off by basically saying “this isn’t my thing”. This blog post I’m starting off by saying this is 10000% my thing, in fact this is probably more my thing currently than anything else. My good friends will tell you I never shut up about how important shared food, as […]

Becoming Indian: Claiming Identity

“The reason why ‘Indians’ [are] dying,” explained a respected community leader, also condemned as a ‘witch-dogmatist,’ [is] because they no longer adore their malguis [ancestors] and guacas like their elders formerly did, which is why there used to be so many “Indians” who had more fields and clothing and who lived in greater tranquility” (Silverblatt […]

Why didn’t the flock scatter?

When I was reading “Deep Rivers”, I found the following quote, where the protagonist Ernesto observes the behaviour of the birds being shot at by the local townsfolk, to be a really apt metaphor for cultural survival, and existential assertion of identity amidst cultural loss. “Why didn’t the flock scatter? Why didn’t they take off at the sound of the explosions, when they saw the wounded falling all about them? Instead they stayed in the branches, screeching, clambering, hopping from one tree to another”   I see the birds’ refusal…read more

Mariátegui again because he (for the most part) spits bars

“And it is useless to try to convert it, for example, into a technical-agricultural problem for agronomists.” (Mariátegui, 1928, p. 51) Mariátegui writes this sentence near the beginning of the third chapter The Problem of Land. He is writing about how the Indigenous peoples of Peru will continue to be oppressed as long as the latifundium system […]

Failure of Imperial Teachings

Mixing the Sacred with the Profane