Date/Time: Thursday 17th May 2018, 4:00-5:00pm

Venue: Old Library Building 6.02

Catherine Whittaker, University of Edinburgh will be joining us as part of the CLACS visiting speakers series. Catherine's talk is titled Dialogical Cosmopolitics: Rethinking violence, gender, and indigeneity in Highland Mexico

Abstract:

With an estimated seven femicides every day, Mexico is often considered one of the most dangerous countries in the world to be a woman. As descendants of the “bloodthirsty” Aztecs, the people of Milpa Alta, Mexico City, are often stereotyped as being particularly “backward” and “violent”. Do Milpaltense women need saving from “cultural violence”? This research challenges common assumptions about violence, victimhood, and indigeneity by focusing on an oft-neglected side of violence against indigenous women: the social, symbolic, and spiritual context. I will show that the issue of cultural violence is linked to spiritual violence.

Milpa Alta is highly divided with respect to the issue of women's rights. Building on de la Cadena’s definition of cosmopolitics and Arendt’s notion of radical dialogue, the present paper introduces dialogical cosmopolitics as a methodological device for mapping complex, factionalised research contexts. The concept of cosmopolitics is designed to make multiple realities, or “worlds”, available for analysis, without privileging one world over others. Because many Milpaltense women style themselves as “fighters” in a communal struggle, linked to a sense of cosmic interwovenness with nature, indigenous women's rights cannot be separated from spiritual justice. I suggest that supporting indigenous women’s struggles requires epistemological openness, including taking spiritual worlds seriously