Matricultural Eyes

Seeing with the eyes of women. What the world looks like from the standpoint of motherlines, human networks centered on the lifegivers, the ones who hold it all up, now mostly unseen, sidelined, structurally ignored, or worse, silenced. An important part of this is mapping out worlds of Indigenous Knowledge, drawing on orature and other ways of knowing, the emerging cultural recoveries and resurgences, and what they have to teach us. The legacies of Ancestors, the relations between peoples, to the Land, and among living beings. The web of life, and the cultural webs that either sustain and inspire us, or that capture us.

And that takes us to the study of systemic domination: patriarchy, conquest, slavery, class systems, colonization, and parasitical resource extraction. So we are looking for the nectar, but do not avert our gaze from the bitter truths we need to know in order to restore justice and balance.

But the inspiration, the medicine, is in recovering knowledge of matricultural treasures: the ancient figurines and painted ceramics; the weavings and basket patterns; the Round Dances, ceremony, and regalia; symbols and the cosmology, the natural philosophy behind them. Not least the awareness of animacy, as Robin Wall Kimmerer has reconceptualized the rigid objectifying term "animism" in old anthropological theory.)

All this wraps into the medicine women, seeresses, elders and wisewomen that we will also look into, starting with the Wu of China and the Makewana of Malawi. We'll delve into women in the extremely ancient (as in 12,000-2000 bce) rock art, a crucial and rarely discussed area of world history

This course is based on my ongoing research, so part of it is what comes over the transom: new archaeological finds, historical discoveries, revelations of from new genome studies and how those illuminate and interact with another repository of Deep History, historical linguistics.

But the heart of what you'll receive here are the treasures from the cultural record, with an international view: images of sculptures, paintings, petroglyphs, weavings; photos of medicine women, female movers and shakers, and those who rebel against oppression; historic and literary texts, but also oral traditions that come more directly from the common folk, especially those centering on women.

Find out where the women are, and what's been left out: cultural riches and a much more expansive vision of history and culture.