Leren door aandacht”: doden bezoeken en gedenken, bij de Aymara en in de Lage Landen,

The text sets out from a short comparative reflection –commemorating the dead in the Low Countries versus what indigenous groups do in “the Andes”- and gradually concentrates on visiting and commemorating practices among Bolivian Aymara families, in order to draw some philosophical-anthropological considerations about what social life might be, in its broadest sense. In a concrete way, we study how visiting, honoring and commemorating the dead (and in a certain way also being visited by them), can show us, more clearly than in our traditions, how “the social” always runs intimately entangled with “the ecological”. In order to show this, we analyze how the Aymara go along –“socialize”- in intense and attentive ways, not only with their guiding ancestors but also, in a very related way, with other inhabitants and elements of life, such as animals, sacred places and protecting mountains. This proposal also urges us to ask ourselves about the learning dynamics involved here: how people, through these visiting and commemorating practices, learn to cultivate and cherish “attention” for the interwovenness of all life processes and for how human life lines “correspond” with other lines of life. This “attention” is vital in many senses. Both questions, the entanglement of the social and the ecological and the education through attention-enhancing practices, can be asked about from other places, such as Flanders and the Netherlands, taking into account, the, different contexts, elaborations and accentuations.

Información de Publicación

Autores:

Koen De Munter

Institución: Universidad Alberto Hurtado
Facultad: Ciencias Sociales
Unidad: Antropología

Revista:

VOLKSKUNDE

Año:

2018

Mes:

Diciembre

Número:

2018: 119/1