Description
Book SynopsisAn influential work originally published in Mexico in 1970; the Argentine philosopher Rodolfo Kusch seeks to identify and recover indigenous and popular ways of thinking devalued since colonization.
Trade Review“[I]ndispensable reading for all scholars and students of the question of cultural encounters, the construction and deployment of the other, the struggle and constitution of different and competing epistemologies, and the setting up of the coloniality of power/knowledge. . . . [E]xtensively
researched and carefully thought out . . . make[s] an enormous contribution
to our knowledge and understanding of the Andean post-colonial world and
the processes of subject formation that ensued from the conquest to this day.”
- Sara Castro-Klarén,
MLN“This translation of one of Rodolfo Kusch’s most important works marks a significant step in the energetic conversation that has emerged over the last decade among postcolonial, indigenous, and Latin American studies. A translation of Kusch’s work has been sorely needed, both to complement the writing of scholars including Walter D. Mignolo, who have drawn from and discussed Kusch, and to stand alongside translations of books by other Latin American and Caribbean intellectuals including Édouard Glissant, Fernando Ortiz, and Enrique Dussel.”—
Michael Hames-García, author of
Fugitive Thought: Prison Movements, Race, and the Meaning of Justice“Indigenous and Popular Thinking in América is a superior work by Rodolfo Kusch, and María Lugones’s and Joshua M. Price’s superb translation is a major contribution to English-language philosophy. Kusch’s book operates on many levels, as a post-Heideggerian phenomenology of culture, an existential analysis, and a sustained reflection on Otherness.”—
Mario Sáenz, author of
The Identity of Liberation in Latin American Thought“[I]ndispensable reading for all scholars and students of the question of cultural encounters, the construction and deployment of the other, the struggle and constitution of different and competing epistemologies, and the setting up of the coloniality of power/knowledge. . . . [E]xtensively researched and carefully thought out . . . make[s] an enormous contribution to our knowledge and understanding of the Andean post-colonial world and the processes of subject formation that ensued from the conquest to this day.” -- Sara Castro-Klarén * MLN *
Table of ContentsIllustrations xi
Introduction: Immigrant Consciousness / Walter D. Mignolo xiii
Translators' Introduction lv
Prologue to the Third Edition lxxi
Prologue to the First Edition lxxv
1. Américan Thinking 1
2. Understanding 8
3. Limit 15
4. Knowledge 26
5. Ritual 34
6. The Theory of the Turn 41
7. Divine Teaching 52
8. Indigenous Logic 70
9. Symmetry and Truth 81
10. Salvation and Economy 89
11. Salvation and Solution 102
12. Popular Thinking 115
13. Seminal Thinking 124
14. Seminal Economy 135
15. Infantile Seminality 144
16. Thinking the
"Así" 151
17. The Crossroads of Mere
Estar 158
18. Recovering the Absolute 165
Notes 173
Bibliography 195
Index 203
