PHILOSOPHY AND KNOWLEDGE IN EXPRESSIONS OF ART AND CULTURE OF THE INDIGENOUS PEOPLES OF THE AMERICAS
The symposium aims to foster interdisciplinary dialogue with archaeology, ethnohistory, art history, ethnography and sociology. From their respective fields of study, these disciplines have investigated different cultural expressions of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, focusing attention both on oral tradition and native languages and on the multifaceted representations of their systems of record-keeping. These systems, materialized on various media such as stone, ceramics, bone, shell, textiles and paper, constitute cores that condense millennia-old knowledge from deep and diverse social traditions.
In this context, knowledge is understood as accumulated learning about inhabited spaces, reflecting multiple views on ways of knowing, occupying, respecting and understanding the world. Notable is the conception of space-time as an ontological category proper to indigenous peoples—an inseparable binomial that orders and classifies the inhabited world within the cultural expressions of the indigenous peoples of the Americas.
Through its study we can approach the diversity and plurality of indigenous peoples and understand ways of knowing and thinking, which are found fragmentarily in different expressions of the past, in the collective memory of societies, and in present-day traditions. Thus, the convergence of theoretical and methodological tools from the social sciences allows us to draw a fuller picture of the philosophy and intellectual richness of the peoples of the Americas.
