The First Virtual Chapter of the Decolonial School of Caracas is being held through Friday, October 30, as a space to feel and think the fate of our world from the criticism against the “civilization model of modernity,” aiming to the need of building a pluriversal, pluricultural world focused on the reproduction of life in all its forms.
On its fourth day, researchers Maya-Kaqchikel, Aura Cumes (Guatemala) and academician of the Anthropology Center of the Venezuelan Institute for Scientific Research (IVIC), Meyby Ugueto-Ponce, were the panelists in charge of discussing the social dynamics and structural inequalities that have been aggravated by the COVID-19 pandemic, but that have been always imposed by the “civilization model of modernity” with racist, patriarchal, classist and anthropocentric violence.
In this regard, Cumes said that the world has experienced the materialization and structuring of the colonial culture in the last years, and that’s the reason why the original peoples have been staging constant uprisings and resistance.
In her opinion, Christianism and evangelization have been the main heirs to that model, and she urged to have a critical sense of the current society and its forms of relation.
In her lecture, she pointed out that “Europe built a patriarchy from the genocide of women (…) A hierarchical building on the peoples.”
Likewise, she referred to the historical importance of Popol Vuh, known as the “Book of Counsel” or “Book of the Mayan Community,” which recounts the mythology and history of the Kʼicheʼ people.
Cumes recalled that “there is no revolution without decolonization. There is no revolution without depatriarchalization and the end of capitalism.”
Academician Ugueto-Ponce discussed the internalized racism in Afro-descendant communities and racism as an historical pandemic.
Rethinking academics and science to build an Afro epistemology was another issue tackled during the video conference.
The First Virtual Chapter of the Decolonial School of Caracas also offered an overview of some of the reflections and experiences of the IVIC’s Anthropology Center through ethnography and ideas concerning the Cumbe, also known as Maroon societies, a form of coexistence that challenged and faced the regulations imposed by European slavers and their native descendants to colonize lives, knowledge, know-hows and power.