RELG 043B. Decolonizing Afro-Latin American Religion

Is scientific knowledge superior to ancestral wisdom or spirit revelation in its ability to apprehend and describe reality? This course interrogates the problem of coloniality as an imposition of power-knowledge that occurred as Iberians and their state-church institutions conquered indigenous Americans and enslaved indigenous Africans. We will free the subjugated knowledges of “Latin” America by encountering alternative narratives of history and sacred memory embedded within mythology and ritual. We will approach various streams of indigenous wisdom to discover philosophical-ethical outlooks on justice, reciprocity, and right living. Students will develop an account of how Euro-America’s scientific-rational knowledge has appropriated the ethnobotanical and other ecological perspectives of Africans and Native Americans contained within healing/wellness traditions.
Humanities.
1 credit.
Eligible for BLST
Catalog chapter: Religion
Department website: http://www.swarthmore.edu/religion

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