Dans le cadre des midis de l’éthique, Didier Zuniga, chercheur associé à la Chaire de recherche en éthique féministe du Canada, au GRÉEA et au CRÉ, nous offrira une présentation intitulée « Progress, technology, nature: Life and death in the Valley of Mexico ».

Pour y participer par Zoom, c’est ici. Meeting password: 706188.

Résumé

Recent debates in the ‘history of the Aztecs’ scholarship show how work that seems to align with anti-colonial and anti-imperialist objectives can nevertheless reproduce the view that Western science and technology are the primary means to improve human life. This paper exposes how domination and colonization are not accidental by-products of Western understandings and practices of ‘progress’ and ‘development’; rather, they are inherent to them. I argue that judging Mesoamerican worlds from the modern standpoint of ‘progress’ rests on flawed assumptions about ‘nature’ as self-evident, from which complete and unequivocal knowledge can be acquired linearly and neutrally. I contend that, in order to understand, compare, and contrast the technological differences between Mesoamericans and early-modern Spaniards, we must attend to the different ontological configurations that undergird their respective sociocultural renderings of ‘nature’.