Weaving dignity in indigenous philosophies : future roads for dignity
(2023)
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- Authors
- Supervisors
- Maesschalck, Marc
- Abstract
- Amid the worst planetary environmental crisis ever recorded in human history, this thesis deals with two topics that have been neglected in environmental and legal philosophy for a long time: the dignity of nature and the concept of dignity seen from Indigenous perspectives. Yet, while it is lesser complex to enunciate the dignity of nature than to carry out an exercise with Western philosophical tools about the contents of nature's dignity, Indigenous ethical epistemologies provide a delicate thread to initiate a conversation with one the most puzzling legal entanglements of modern thinking: human dignity and the postponed dialogues for the dignity and rights of the more-than-human. To dust off western conceptual tools of justice with a revision that aligns with the times that humanity and life in general are facing, this thesis opens roads that allow to navigate in the contents of dignity for the-more-than-human, which is not nature from the perspectives of Indigenous philosophies. Nature and dignity seen from indigenous critical perspectives are very complex grounds for a philosophical enquiry, hence landing the concept of dignity on Earth is one of the objectives that this work undertakes in the multiple dialogues with Indigenous epistemologies and the coloniality of nature and being. Modern concepts like nature and dignity are loaded with colonialisms, racial injustices, and epistemic vacuums that this thesis endeavors to unveil. Elaborating from a hermeneutics of suspicion, the thesis contends that neither the western category of nature exists in Indigenous ethical and knowledge systems, nor does a profoundly anthropocentric value like dignity scape Indigenous critical gaze. Yet, Indigenous people invoke nature and dignity but when they do, an epistemic shift happens in the translations that Indigenous worlds give to these western concepts from their perspectives and out of the Eurocentric conceptual blanket. This thesis proposes to understand the idea of dignity and nature from the Indigenous perspective as translations for which it is essential to transit the roads of epistemic locality, namely knowing ‘through’ and ‘for’ the land. It is there where dignity can land on Earth to let the silences scape the modern cage with the whispers of the land that give new hope for future roads for dignity.
- Affiliations
UCLouvain SSH/ISP - Institut supérieur de philosophie
Citations
Sanchez, C. (2023). Weaving dignity in indigenous philosophies : future roads for dignity. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/104566