This is an invitation to sink into the embeddedness of our current trouble. To encounter the liminal, the hinge, the horror, the potential. To be called into the rupture and find that which calls you into deeper relationality.

decolonising the self

ABOUT THIS COURSE

Revealing and shedding the layers of unconscious acculturation and indoctrination to a dying worldstory. 

What happens if we destabilize the already given? If we peel back  the deeply rooted layers we don’t always know we have, and are hard to see.

The stories, the metaphors of how we explain the world to ourselves, weave worlds into being. Today we are witnessing the crumbling of a long world story. A story that has historically been threaded together by the stories of separation, materialism, progress, extraction, disenchantment, and imperialism. This ending is humbly calling us to return to our embedded place in the flow of life. 

Trained as Anthropologists, JD Kelley and Carla Ramos wish to take anthropological methods to learn how to relate to an-other through decolonial application, critique and praxis as an integrative tool to reach a deeper understanding of how to build ethical relation.  

This project emerges out of a desire to crack open the stability of a dying story. This process requires a decolonization of thought, action, experience, relation, and definitions of self.  A peeling back the layers of inoculated acculturation and indoctrination that still hold us in the world-stories of our current apocalypse. How do we discover a method for shedding our inherited, deeply rooted and subconscious patternings that inadvertently re-create our problematic world? How implicit are we?

“What if the way we respond to the crisis, is part of the crisis?”

- Bayo Akomolafe 

The stories, the metaphors that we use everyday, are the stuff that weave worlds. We are a multidimensional collection of legacies, ancestries and cultural ideas. They form intellectual paintings we hold in our minds that alter our actions, color our ways of rationalizing the world to ourselves, and create the multiplicities we embody in our everyday life. Today we are coming to the end of a long world-story characterized by separation, materialism, progress, extraction, disenchantment, and imperialism, but what are the ways these threads are still holding us in their web? 

Navigating apocalypse requires us to heal intellectually, ancestrally, spiritually, and emotionally our relation with one-an-other. We must gently begin the journey of coming back to all life.  

But rarely do we begin this journey by questioning our collective, our cultural, or ‘ethno-centric’, limitations. And, rarely still do we  begin to investigate the net in which we find ourselves ‘thinking-with’ to realize that its limits arise from the thrust of history we are implicated in. Colonial histories have effectively stomped out the ability to recognize, respect and engage in other ways of thinking, seeing and being with the world, both currently and historically. 

Most of  us only know how to engage with the ‘other’ through relations of extraction, leading to appropriation, an exclusive emphasis on products of thought, or the reproduction of current power dynamics. Threads of thought rooted in colonial ways of being have denied us an understanding of our inherent interrelatedness and made us blind to the responsibilities of our full humanity. We are always in relation, whether we realize it or not. Dive in with us to  consciously nurture the decaying transformations that are embedded in life’s ongoingness. 

“Anthropology is ready to fully assume its new mission of being the theory/practice of the permanent decolonization of thought.”

-  Eduardo Viveros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics

Anthropology is fundamentally a science in learning how to relate to others very different from ourselves. Out of its fraught colonial history, we believe its poison to also be the medicine to provide tools for taking seriously, and respecting other lifeways. We seek to make anthropology wyrd, for it to twist and weave loops to speak horizontally with outside cultural thinkers, magicians, philosophers, artists, poets, the Earth, our ancestors, the more-than human and each other. 

This project aims not to be a lecture by dead academic ‘experts’, but instead a process of sparking new inquiry together. To begin to map the topographies of thought and thinking-with. How can we arrive at a new way of thinking? A new perspective that triggers a new mode of  relationality, and hence experience? We wish to explore such questions through expanding the intellectual import of anthropological, magical and decolonial/ postcolonial thought, to become applied wisdom to form new stories that recenter the space between relations as places of deep encounter.

This is an invitation to sink into the embeddedness of our current trouble. To encounter the liminal, the hinge, the horror, the potential. To be called into the rupture and find that which calls you into deeper relationality.

FEE

Suggested fees are outlined below:

• $100, fully-employed and well-earning

• $60, fully-employed

• $20, underemployed, bohemian, or student

COURSE DELIVERY

A series of four live classes with JD Kelley and Carla Ramos to be held over consecutive weeks on Tuesdays from 5:00-7:30 pm GMT, starting on March 30th.

Duration: 30 Mar to 20 Apr

Relevant materials will be sent to you after each week session, along with the recording of the class.

COURSE OUTLINE

The Westernization Process

“For a long time now, we have been unable to remember our former closeness with Earth.”- Paul Devereux

• Decolonial versus postcolonial thought

• Defining the westernization process

• How are we recreating apocalypse  

• Obstacles to a new understanding

• Anthropology’s offering 

Metaphors that Shape the World

"You have to live the patterns of your place if you want to tap into this kind of genius."- Tyson Yunkaporta 

“New ideas are new imaginative visions…”- Mary Midgely

• Historical lineages 

• Language, story, metaphor and indoctrination

• Machine metaphors

  • Closed linear system and Why things are dead

• Ways to thinking versus products of thought

  • Open complex, relational systems and Why things are alive

Encountering the Others

“Respect, Connect, Reflect, Direct” -Mama Doris

• Recognizing Personhood 

• Horizontal Listening

• Shedding nested ‘-centrisms’

• Learning to inhabit the edge

• Transformations through encounters

“This work aims toward the decolonisation of our mind, hearts, bodies, and spirits, in order to revitalize healthy cultural traditions, whilst also creating new traditions, and new ways to thrive in those places we presently live…”- Amba J. Sepie