**5. Recovering ancestral knowledges: Latin America**

In Latin America, social studies of knowledge production have been constructed in opposition to its distinctive history of primarily Spanish and Portuguese colonialism.1 The very modernity that was co-constituted with European sciences is itself both a product of and a contributor to colonialism. Yet the Latin American opposition to its colonial history is articulated also as an opposition to the postcolonial theory with which the North has reevaluated its mostly British colonial history with Asia (e.g., [12]). A significant group of these theorists has named themselves the modernity/colonial/decolonial group, or Decolonial for short (e.g., [13–15]).

Decolonial analyses occur in significantly different historical contexts than those in which the more familiar postcolonial accounts were generated. First, there are important chronological differences marked especially by the MCD scholars. Colonial relations in the Americas began in 1492—more than two and a half centuries before the British began to establish their colonies in India and the Middle East. For the Decolonial scholars, it is no accident that the so-called discovery of the Americas coincides with the emergence of modernity in Europe, though standard Northern histories tend not to link these two phenomena. "Modernity appears when Europe organizes the initial world-system and places itself at the center of world history over against a periphery equally constitutive of modernity" ([16], pp. 9–10). So, for Latin American theorists, modernity and Iberian colonialism co-produce and co-constitute each other. This not only shifts the beginning of modernity to a much earlier date but also inserts Iberian colonialism centrally into the history of modernity, which is something that has been largely denied by North Atlantic scholars.

Another chronological difference is that formal independence from European rule began much earlier in the Spanish, Portuguese, and French colonies in the

<sup>1</sup> Earlier versions of Section 5 have appeared in [8–11].

### *Strong Objectivity for New Social Movements DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.99973*

Americas than in the British colonies (except for the United States). Most of the other colonies in the Americas achieved formal independence from Spain, Portugal, and France by 1830, except Cuba, which gained independence in 1898.2 Moreover, for the anti-colonial scholars, 1492 is the starting date of anti-colonial thinking. The Amerindians whom Cortes encountered, as well as Nahua and Quechua intellectuals in the early sixteenth century, clearly resisted both the idea and the reality of Iberian colonization [17, 18]. Anti-colonial thought has a longer and different history in Latin America than the familiar British postcolonial accounts.

Second, the origins of the Scientific Revolution are broader than assumed in conventional philosophies and histories of science, and they have roots in colonialism. Colonization of the Americas required that the conquerors interact effectively with physical worlds different from those familiar to them. Yet they lacked astronomy of the Southern hemisphere with which to navigate back to Europe across the South Atlantic. The cartography of the South Atlantic and their environments in the Americas had to be created. They also needed climatology, oceanography, and better engineering to secure the safe travels of their crews and their precious cargoes. In the Americas, they needed knowledge of the unfamiliar geographies and flora and fauna that they encountered. They needed better geology, mining, and engineering, even though they soon appropriated from the Amerindians sophisticated forms of these technologies which they improved to extract the gold and silver that they found in Mexico and Peru. In 1492, the Europeans were behind the Amerindians in these kinds of scientific and technical knowledge: they were the backward ones. Europe's colonial projects in the Americas turned a huge part of the globe into a laboratory for European sciences [19, 20].

Third, in addition to the scientific and technical needs created by the different chronologies and geographies, the Iberian colonizers lived in social worlds different from those that shaped the coloniality of the British Empire. For the Europeans, the "discovery" of new lands across the Atlantic appeared as a solution to some of their most vexing social problems. Europeans welcomed the thought of being able to leave behind the economic and political challenges of the continual religious and political wars, as well as of overpopulation and famines. The Europeans imagined that they could start over in the "Garden of Eden" that had been "discovered" across the Atlantic.

Fourth, yet those peoples that the Spanish and Portuguese colonized were culturally different from those the British colonized centuries later. For the Amerindians, the arrival of the Europeans was a cataclysmic event. It meant the destruction of their cultural and physical worlds, the loss of sovereignty over their lands, the loss of their freedom, and the destruction and devaluation of their forms of knowledge and spirituality.

It is only relatively recently that demographic, historical, and environmental research undermined long-held assumptions that the Americas were only sparsely inhabited in 1491, and that those inhabitants were at a much more primitive stage of social and scientific development than were Europeans. In 1491, there were probably more people living in the Americas than in Europe (e.g., [21, 22]). Estimations of the actual numbers in the Americas vary hugely, from 10 million to over 100 million. Some of the world's largest cities at the time were in the Americas [22]. Inca, Aztec, and Mayan architecture, engineering, and road systems were among the most advanced of ancient civilizations, and in some respects superior to those of the Europeans. Amerindians had extensive agricultural techniques, such as

<sup>2</sup> However, some would argue that Puerto Rico remains a colony of the United States: residents of Puerto Rico are residents of the United States, but they are not citizens of the United States. They cannot vote in national elections.

controlled fires to clear the land and increase the nutrients in the soil, and were able to preserve food that could last for years through processes of freezing, dehydration, and rehydration.

What did the Amerindians know in 1491 in addition to their agricultural, environmental, and spiritual-philosophical knowledge? The Nahua effectively mined silver and gold, as indicated, and drained the swamps, and then engineered the hanging gardens of the town that became Mexico City. Moreover, the Europeans had no way to project dates into BC eras, and no precise way to measure a solar year. The Nahua, Mayans, and Incas could do both. Amerindians also learned that they could locate their calendars on the European Christian calendars; Aztec and Inca events could be celebrated to coincide with Christian events, unbeknownst to the Europeans. And there was more knowledge production in the realm of medicine, pharmacopeia, and botany. Today indigenous knowledges are being reconstructed and are experiencing a boom perhaps never seen since the conquest.

Indigenous philosophies appeared dormant or invisible to the non-indigenous outsider until very recently and are still largely unknown to Anglo academics. Yet they have existed underground and persisted throughout the centuries inside indigenous communities. Today, indigenous peoples see as their task not only to reconstruct ancestral knowledges for their own survival but also for the survival of the rest of humanity that seems unable to halt the most pernicious aspects of modernity such as infinite economic growth, the destruction of the planet or "Pachamama"—the earth mother, and modern science and technology at the service of profit and constant wars [23]. What is especially remarkable about this process is that for the first time in colonial history, indigenous women's voices can now be heard. Indigenous women had in the pre-intrusion era occupied important social and political positions that were undermined with colonization. Equally important was the place women occupied in indigenous cosmogonies and ontologies. These positioned women in a parallel, but not always equal position with men. It is this last point that not only defines the particularity of indigenous epistemologies, cosmogonies, and ontologies but also gives rise to one of the most contentious points in today's feminist debates around gender.

The recuperation of ancestral knowledges is necessarily a contested terrain. The difficulty of recovering them lies not only in their fragmented and dispersed state after centuries of colonization; they also have fused with Western, Christian elements which have altered not only the collective memory but also their existence in the present. It is not always clear what remains of the past and what is a recent invention. To complicate matters, the process of recuperation is often manipulated by present-day political interests of both indigenous and mestizo men, but also of women.

Yet no matter how important it is to keep in mind these contradictions in the process of recuperation of ancestral knowledges, such knowledges do pose serious challenges to Western totalitarian knowledge that sees itself as the only valid knowledge. It is perhaps in the discussions about gender where the disparities seem to be the greatest. Gender permeates the entire recomposition of indigenous cosmovisions.

### **6. Indigenous conceptions of gender/sexuality**

Indigenous conceptions of gender in both the Mesoamerican and Andean regions are based on a cosmic vision of life that is entirely different from the West.3 Cartesian dichotomies that separate mind and body, humans and nature, nature

<sup>3</sup> An extended version of Section 6 appears in [11].

### *Strong Objectivity for New Social Movements DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.99973*

and society are foreign in these cultures. In their cosmic vision, all of these elements are interdependent; they must maintain an equilibrium for a harmonious existence. There is a fluidity that runs through the earth, heavens, water, wind, and the humans and non-humans that fuses them together. The cosmos is itself constituted by dualistic forces that are fluid, but not hierarchical as in Cartesian precepts, nor gendered. Thus, the feminine and masculine forces are complementary, of equal importance to the cosmos, and must maintain an equilibrium to guarantee the perpetuity of life.

Sociologically, this gendered division of the cosmos translates into gender complementarity, gender parallelism, or what the Aymara call *chachawarmi*. Man-woman constituted a unit of pairs. A married couple of man and woman were the basic unit of the community. Their work in tandem, although differentiated, was of equal worth. Women were not economically dependent on men. In gender parallel structures women constituted a lineage where inheritance was passed down to their daughters.

And yet, historically we can see those elements of gender hierarchies were present. Gender differentiation increased as empire and state-building advanced both among the Mexicas and the Incas [24, 25]. Men as soldiers and warriors had a public face that women lacked. Men were the representatives of the community before the ruler. While noble women had the class privilege and could occasionally occupy positions of power, the highest positions of power were still reserved for men. War, although understood to be as important as women's power of child birthing, constituted the center of power of indigenous *realpolitik*.

But it is the elements of complementarity, parallelism, and reciprocity between the genders that many indigenous men and women and their mestizo/criollo allies want to claim as either still existent or in need of resurrection. This position encounters many criticisms. Perhaps most important is the fact that this gender regime did not survive colonialism intact. Colonialism itself involved a social pact between colonized and colonizer men based on the acceptance of the subordination of indigenous women to their men in exchange for limited access for colonized men to power inside the community. Indigenous men while emasculated in the public sphere were granted the control of women, children, and the elderly in the household and the community. These gender colonial norms have in time installed gender violence, something that was unknown to them in the era of pre-intrusion. As Argentinean anthropologist Rita Segato has maintained, the separation of the public and private spheres not only privatized and minoritized indigenous women; it had lethal consequences for them [26]. More recent experiences of genocide, such as the one in Guatemala where the state forced indigenous men to rape, kill, and mutilate indigenous women, have increased violence against indigenous women dramatically, and thereby led to some of the highest femicide rates in the world.
