The Spanish-Mapuche parliaments in the colonial period

an exercise in historical interpretation in the light of cosmohistory and cosmopolitics

Abstract

This article seeks to explore the potential of the concepts of cosmohistory and cosmopolitics to promote a writing of colonial American history that is attentive to the silences imposed by Western modernity. We start from the hypothesis that the cosmohistorical regime of historicity, proposed by Mexican historian Federico Navarrete Linares, in dialogue with the cosmopolitical proposal of Belgian philosopher Isabelle Stengers, provides a theoretical-methodological alternative for thinking about the existence of other historical narratives and giving agency to commonly invisible ontologies, including Amerindian ones. To make this possible, our argument will be divided into two parts. In the first, based on a brief case study of the Spanish-Mapuche parliaments in the colonial period, we will carry out an exercise in historical interpretation in the light of cosmohistory and cosmopolitics, in order to prove that the flow of interaction between Spanish colonizers and Mapuche indigenous people transcends the unidirectional relationship of domination. In the second, we will present the heuristic advantages of the cosmohistorical and cosmopolitical perspective, as well as its ability to promote more dialogical and symmetrical relations between different historical worlds.