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Category: Conviviality and Inequality

This series features selected publications from the MECILA Working Papers that address questions concerning conviviality and inequality from Latin American perspectives. The series collects interdisciplinary contributions from MECILA fellows and alumni and other members of the network connected to the centre. The Maria Sibylla Merian Centre Conviviality-Inequality in Latin America (MECILA) focuses on processes of negotiation, legitimation, contestation, and transformation of existing hierarchies as they take place in everyday interactions and within institutions. The historical, environmental, economic, social, and political contexts in which these interactions occur, as well as their representations, are of central relevance.

The Porous and the Pure: An Artifactual History of Ties Between Asia, Europe, and Latin America

By Ajay Gandhi. This essay uses three kinds of artifacts to frame connections between Asia, Europe, and Latin America, between the 1500s and the present. These items – simultaneously tangible things and symbolic projections – plot a method and chronology of entanglement. The first are precious-metal decorations made in Goa, on India’s western coast, for Portuguese patrons. A second is a 17th-century painting of a young slave from India taken to the Netherlands. The third artifact is the spider’s web, and the Caribbean folk figure of the Anansi spider. Such artifacts can be read through purity and silence, as well as porosity and convergence. In this itinerary of artifacts, we begin with a social imaginary that is determined and untainted, and move to conditions that are fluid and open-ended.