ARC Invited Talk with Victor Cova, Post-doctoral Researcher (University of Groningen)
| When: | Mo 09-09-2024 15:00 - 17:00 |
| Where: | Room 1312.0013, Harmonie building |
An invited talk at the Americas Research Collective
From 'Weltanschauung' through 'cosmovisión' to 'cosmovision': Latin American history of a contentious concept
Indigenous Peoples of the Americas have had since 2016 a right to their 'cosmovision', with broad impacts in heritage management, land ownership, and Indigenous activism. "Cosmovision" anglicises the Latin American Spanish term "cosmovisión", which is one of a set of accepted translations of the German concept "Weltanschauung". Unlike the more common English translation, "worldview", "cosmovision" is almost exclusively attached to Indigenous Peoples and their spiritual lives. In this presentation, I trace out the history of the concept "cosmovisión" from its emergence among German migrants to Argentina in the 1920s through its rise to prominence in Nahua studies in the 1950s and Latin American theology in the 1960s to its centrality in interdisciplinary research on Meso-America in the 1990s and its dissemination in legal activism and UN agencies. This history brings to the fore aspects of the concept that are often implied today, such as its relation to vitalism, democratization, nation-building, and anti-Imperialism.
About the speaker
Victor Cova is a post-doctoral researcher at the Faculty of Religion, Culture and Society of the University of Groningen.