*** Haus der Kulturen der Welt: Forum1 Archive *** ----------------------------------------------------------------------- [Date]: Tue, 12 Oct 1999 12:15:59 +0200 [From]: Ximena Narea [To]: Cultural Exchange via Internet [Subject]: Re: [forum1] Forum - one year of existence Dear members of the Forum, I want to congratulate you for the first year of the list. I haven't participated in the discussions yet but I hope I'll do it in the future. In other context I had written about the "Day of the Race" which we in Latin America use to celebrate with a day off, parades and other activities. I remember a song we learnt at school which say: "El 12 de octubre un mundo nos dio, el gran navegante Cristobal Col—n". The text says pretty much: the 12th october the great navigator Cristobal Col—n gave us a world. We can think the meaning in two different ways: 1. Columbus brought the "real" world to the American continent. 2. Columbus brought an other world to America, which indead did not exist in the semantic universe of the pre-american cultures. This two ways of interpreting the text of the song present two different ways of meeting the other. Unfortunately the first way of interpretation has dominated the debate until recent years. What the first intepretation says is that the pre-american cultures did not have a culture of their own but just existed in a space of nothing (The dicotomy culture vs no-culture in Tatu schools terms). Columbus wanted to learn to speak the pre-american cultures, not to learn to speak spanish. That is, if you do not speak the language of the dominant culture your don't can speak at all. The second way of interpreting the text is more "correct" in the sense that the European culture was in fact unknown in America before Columbus arrival. But as it's well known, Columbus and the people who went to the continent after him were not interested in learning to know the cultures they met but forcing them (in the most brutal way)into their own culture, the European. Latin America is then for Europeans, the result of a continuos missinterpretation of different cultures based on their own ways to interpret the world. O'Gorman wrotte that America was "invented" by Europe. Nevertheless, if we accept us as an "invention", we must realize that we must establish the limists of our own identity, different from Europe. My regards to all of you in this conflictive day, Ximena Narea Ximena Narea Lunds Universitet Institution f=F6r Konst och Musikvetenskap - Avd. f=F6r Kultursemiotik Box 117, 22100 Lund- Sweden Tel: +46 (46) 222 09 46 - Fax: +46 (46) 222 42 04 e-mail: ximena.narea@arthist.lu.se http://www.arthist.lu.se/kultsem/person/narea.html ________________________________________________________ *Heterog=E9nesis Revista de Artes Visuales - Tidskrift f=F6r Visuell Konst Box 760, 220 07 - Lund - Sweden Tel/Fax: +46 (46) 15 93 07 e-mail: heterogenesis.heterogenesis@lund.mail.telia.com http://welcome.to/heterogenesis