The Observatory on Latin America invites you to the lecture: COLONIZED TEMPORALITIES, by Bolivian Anthropologist and Researcher from the Freie Universität Berlin, Carmen Ibáñez Cueto.

Lecture:

Carmen Ibáñez Cueto - Anthropologist, Researcher, Freie Universität Berlin 

Comments:

Ann Stoler - Professor of Anthropology, The New School for Social Research

Welcome:

Michael Cohen - Director OLA, The New School 

Moderator: 

Juan Manuel González Scobie - Senior Fellow, OLA, The New School 

Many historical accounts of the Spanish conquest of the Americas depict this as the clash of different cultures. Professor Ibáñez will further deepen this characterization by using as an entry point the matter of temporalities, looking specifically at the high Andean region of South America. She argues that this contact between colonizers and colonized, in this case Aymara and Quechua peoples, brought together two forms of conceiving time that were very different. The result of this encounter was what she calls a chrono-structural mismatch, with important consequences that should be unveiled and understood.

Many analysts have suggested that the way people experience time is subjective, and that time is a social – cultural construct. Time for the Indians mentioned above is conceived as a moving spiral, whereas the Spanish introduced a linear and progressive notion of time.

She cites an Aymara proverb which affirms that people should walk in the present looking at the past, carrying the future on their backs. For them the future is a continuous return to the past. In contrast for Europeans the future is a continuous breaking with and overcoming the past. These different temporal imaginaries brought forth a challenging situation: a hybrid coexistence of temporalities in which colonizers sought to domesticate the notion and experience of time of the colonized, and the latter resisted the imposition of the Spanish imaginary.

Professor Ibáñez argues that this is not only a significant historical line of inquiry: it poses an important question for the present, which has guided her research for some years. How can a mixed society (“mestizo”), composed of people who still hold different temporal imaginaries, co- exist and project a common future? Do these visions collide, complement each other, or deny one another?

February 27

University Center, Room 105

63 5th Avenue

6PM - 8PM

If you have any questions about this event, please contact lizac194@newschool.edu.

*This is an in-person event. Please RSVP by clicking on the red register button.