Description:

Join us for a discussion of Indigenous Yucatec Maya epistemologies and world-building structures through an exploration of iknal, a Yucatec Maya or Maaya T’aan word meaning “being with” and “thinking with.” This talk explores how iknal engages an ethics of care and reciprocity outside the binary form through a careful contrasting of Western time with Yucatec Maya affect and territorial cycles. In this way, we might glean how iknal allows for the emergence a logic rooted in both shared presence and absence. Through a framework linking un-knowledges (desaberes), bodies, and forgetfulness, Prof. Castillo Cocom presents a critique of some avenues of decolonial thought by emphasizing the discarded rubble of knowledge production. From this fertile crevice, iknal allows us to visit with what has been discarded, presenting the possibility to remember and forget with dignity. Through iknal, forgetfulness is not loss, but instead a necessary readjustment just as cultural negotiation is not a concession, but instead a situated creation of meaning. Iknal sustains a philosophical approach that explores relationality without idealizing, undoes without destroying, and forgets without grasping.

Lunch will be served!