Blog de Sylvia Marcos

Taken from the Lips:  Gender and Eros in Mesoamerican Religions

Response from Karen Torjesen

The brilliance of this study lies in the problems posed, their origins in the genuine, open, untheorized encounter with a curandera, the willingness to listen, not just as anthropologist to ritual, but as a philosopher to the cosmology and theories of the body.  What Sylvia Marcos calls cognitive frameworks, “knowledge systems that organize the way we conceptualize the world around us.”  This is the ground from which the most radical, the most innovative and the most relevant scholarship comes, but it is a very difficult, painful, long and laborious process to give it birth, for it means learning to think against the grain, to question the fundamental epistemologies that shaped the entire academic enterprise.  It is also a lonely process, for it is work outside an established field, with known parameters and an established consensus.  It takes courage and tenacity.

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Sylvia Marcos’s Taken from the Lips as a Post-secular,

Transmodern, and Decolonial Methodology

Nelson Maldonado-Torres

It is no secret today that the scholarly study of religion in the West has been largely complicit with a long imperial history of evangelizing and allegedly civilizing non-Western peoples.[1] The study of religion has also been at the center of figuring out whether some of these non-Western subjects could be properly qualified as “other” or not, that is, whether they were in fact human. Having a religion for a long time was considered to be a fundamental component of any culture that deserved its characterization and recognition as properly human. So, absence of it indicated the possibility, if not justified the idea, that such culture was non-human or not entirely human.

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Madina Tlostanova

On Sylvia Marcos’s Journey along the spiral of Nahua Gender and Eros

Sylvia Marcos’s Taken from the Lips: Gender and Eros in Mesoamerican Religions strikes me not only as a fascinating anthropological study, but also as a contemplation on the future of anthropology as a discipline within the major rethinking of humanities and social sciences. I would call it a perfect example of de-colonial humanities as its author re-works the very mode of cognition at the base of anthropology when she defines her own method as “adaptive and creative resistance”, embodied in the Zapatistas’s project of the “re-appropriation of a spirituality rooted in their soil”. Lee el resto de esta entrada »