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Elisabeth Steffens

Department for Latin America
Köln University

Political and Religious Alterity as a Challenge for Hermeneutics: The Indigenous Peoples in Latin America 

Elisabeth Steffens studied Regional Sciences about Latin America at the University of Cologne. Studies abroad in Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador and Bolivia. Diploma Thesis about the Mexican Currency Crisis in 1994. Dissertation Project at the University of Bremen with the subject “Political and Religious Alterity as a Challenge for Hermeneutics: The Indigenous Peoples in Latin America”. Since 1997 assistant in the Latin American Department of the Institute of Missiology in Aachen. Since April 2006 research associate in the Post-Graduate Programme of the Humanism Project.

Dissertation    Publications   

Dissertation

Political and Religious Alterity as a Challenge for Hermeneutics: The Indigenous Peoples in Latin America

Around 1992 there was an important movement to rethink European discovery and colonisation in a very critical way. This rethinking was a key event for the indigenous peoples, it gave them a new role as political subjects mainly in Ecuador, Mexico and Bolivia. This development brings up some general questions: What is the secret behind this peoples which did not lose their identities over five hundred centuries of elimination and discrimination? How did European and Latin-American thinkers encounter the alterity of the first peoples in Abia Yala during the times of occupation and nation-building? How could be realised their petitions of recognition today?
Therefore the positions of non-indigenous thinkers will be examined from the perspective of intercultural philosophy (1. and 2. chapter). Taking into account the historical situations of non-understanding, contemporary juridical ways of recognition on the national and international level will be explored (3. chapter). Finally the recent phenomena of indigenous theologies, especially of the Maya-Quiches peoples in Central America, will be presented in order to show the possibilities and limits of this way of religious recognition (4. chapter).