Seminar
Women’s things are not small things: the struggles of indigenous women of the Amazon
Jennifer Simpson dos Santos
José Manuel Mendes
Maurício Hashizume
Teresa Cunha
March 8, 2016, 17h00
Room 2, CES-Coimbra
Abstract
This seminar, organised by the project ALICE – Strange Mirrors, Unsuspected Lessons: Leading Europe to a new way of sharing the world experiences intends to celebrate and honour the Women's International Day.
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Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ Epistemologies of the South, central core of the ALICE project, invert the victimising narratives of a forever poor, forever ignorant, forever obscure South, picturing it as a loom woven with a formidable vital energy where invention and strength are composed of other premises.
The documentary ‘Lutas artesanais: mulheres indígenas no Amazonas’ (51’) by Jenniffer Simpson dos Santos gives body, sound and colour to the Epistemologies of the South through a postcolonial feminist perspective.
From crafts, indigenous women articulate know-how inspired by their cultural references and continually reworked depending on their current needs; simultaneously they question canonical intellectual property and the hegemonic govern of the economic system. Thus, these artisans mobilise resistances that are only insignificant when viewed from afar and reveal ways of life that just are not apparent because ignored.
Because women things are not little things, and not only women things, this seminar aims to enable reflection and a feminist debate where men have much to say.
