viasophia
English

Authors

The voices we listen to — in alphabetical order.

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  • Gilles Deleuze

    1925-1995 · philosophie occidentale

    French philosopher, professor first at Vincennes and later at Paris-VIII. He reads Bergson, Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Hume as conceptual laboratories rather than doctrines. His collaboration with psychoanalyst Félix Guattari (*Anti-Oedipus*, 1972; *A Thousand Plateaus*, 1980) yields a thought of desire as production and of the multiple as constitution. *Difference and Repetition* (1968) lays out its ontological foundation.

  • Luis Dunu Jiménez Dësi

    contemporain · matses

    Hunter and healer of the Matsés people in the Ibama community, in the Amazon rainforest between the Pardo and Yavarí rivers, on the Brazilian side of the border with Peru. "My name is Dunu," he says; he doesn’t know his exact age—perhaps 65—as he was young when the Summer Institute of Linguistics missionaries made contact with the Matsés in 1969. His mother, Dësi, captured from the Dëmushbo tribe, was a shaman, as were his grandfather Dunu and his uncle Uaqui, the finest healer of his time, who taught him over a thousand medicinal plants. From this knowledge and the energy passed down to him, he heals his people. He entrusted the Matsés’ vision of the world—its layers, its spirits, its masters of trees and waters, and the energy (*sinan*, *dayac*) that flows from one body to another—to the collection *El ojo verde. Cosmovisiones amazónicas* (FORMABIAP/AIDESEP), whose illustrations he drew with his grandson Dunu Daniel. A voice from within: a Matsés man speaking of the Matsés world.

  • Vinciane Despret

    1959 · contemporain

    Vinciane Despret, born in 1959 in Brussels, is a Belgian philosopher and psychologist of science. She teaches at the University of Liège and the Université libre de Bruxelles.

  • Dōgen (from *Shōbōgenzo Treasury of the True Dharma Eye*, trans. Tanahashi)

    Bio to be completed.

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  • Vine Deloria Jr.

    1933-2005 · dakota

    A Sioux jurist, theologian, and historian from Standing Rock, of Yankton Dakota descent, one of the most influential Indigenous thinkers in the United States. Former director of the National Congress of American Indians, he became the voice of a generation with *Custer Died for Your Sins* (1969), later a professor of Native American studies (Arizona, Colorado). In *God Is Red* (1973), he contrasts the Western religion of time—history unfolding from an origin toward a destiny—with a religion of space: for many First Nations, the sacred resides in specific places, and every part of the land carries the stories that shaped the people. It was he who named this “<em>sacred geography</em>.” A voice from within, in English, his language of writing; he speaks of many nations, but one says “according to Deloria,” never “the Sioux say.”

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  • Eusebio Laos Ríos

    contemporain · ashaninka

    Born in the San Carlos range in the central jungle of Peru, he is an Asháninka specialist who lives in the community of San Pablo Tres Unidos, in the district of Puerto Bermúdez (Oxapampa). His Asháninka name, Oshipiyo Ararooshi Iriooshi, means "song of the known relative of the sun"; his father was a *sheripiari*, a tobacco healer who communicated with the beings of nature. In *El ojo verde. Cosmovisiones amazónicas* (FORMABIAP/AIDESEP), a collection where named Amazonians themselves present the thought of their people, he entrusted the Asháninka vision of the world—the living Sun of which men are particles, the water that is its breath, the air that is the spirit of water. A voice from within: an Asháninka who speaks of the Asháninka world.

  • Jean-Jacques Rousseau

    1712-1778 · philosophie occidentale

    Born in Geneva, self-taught, writer, musician, and philosopher. *Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men* (1755), written in response to a competition held by the Academy of Dijon, distinguishes natural inequality (age, strength, health) from moral or political inequality, established by convention and property. Rousseau introduces a method here: starting from a hypothetical state of nature—never historical—to measure what society has added or corrupted in man.

  • Manuel Mibeco Ruiz

    contemporain · bora

    In the community of Brillo Nuevo, on the río Yaguasyacu—a tributary of the upper Peruvian Amazon (Loreto)—he serves as *curaca*, authority and guardian of tradition. He inherited the role from his father and now leads the clans of the Aguaje and the Pijuayo under his guidance. His *bóóraá* name is Lliíhyo, "heart of the aguaje palm." Alongside Gerardo del Águila Miveco (Íjkú Nuubúmu, "joyful paucar"), he presented his people’s worldview in *El ojo verde. Cosmovisiones amazónicas* (FORMABIAP/AIDESEP): the world as a representation of the Creator Píívyéji Niimúhe, rooted in all things He made, whose hair is the roots by which He holds the world and through which men communicate with Him; the earth emerging as the womb of a woman, food flowing from her nipple Mújpañe; the *maloca* built in the image of the Creator. A voice from within: a *Bóóraá* who speaks, in the first person, of his people’s world.

  • Jalal al-Din Rumi

    Bio to be completed.

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  • Nils-Aslak Valkeapää

    1943–2001 · sami

    Poet, joiker, and Sámi artist, born in Enontekiö (Finland), a Finnish citizen but living on the Norwegian side of Sápmi. The first Sámi recipient of the Nordic Council Literature Prize (1991, for *Beaivi, áhčážan / The Sun, my Father*), he brought the joik—the song that accompanies a being rather than describes it—into written poetry, in Northern Sámi. His collections *Trekways of the Wind* (1994) and *The Sun, my Father* (1997) hold the land of Sápmi not as a backdrop but as something whose nature shifts depending on whether it has been lived—traversed, passed down by ancestors. An inner voice, in Sámi.

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  • Davi Kopenawa Yanomami

    Bio to be completed.

  • Chiri Yukie

    1903-1922 · ainu

    Young Ainu woman from Horobetsu (Hokkaidō), niece of the storyteller Imekanu and trained by her grandmother in her people’s oral songs. Encouraged by the linguist Kyōsuke Kindaichi, she became the first Ainu to transcribe in the Latin alphabet—and to translate herself—the *yukar*, the songs in which the *kamuy* speak in the first person. She completed the manuscript of the *Ainu shin’yōshū* the night before her death at nineteen, from heart failure. The collection was published in 1923: a monument of Ainu literature, written from within.

  • Tyson Yunkaporta

    contemporain · apalech

    Academic, artist, and traditional toolmaker, a member of the Apalech clan—on the west coast of the Cape York Peninsula, in northeastern Australia, where Wik-Mungkan is spoken. Of Nungar/Koori Aboriginal descent, he was adopted long ago under Aboriginal Law, which grants him this name alone. A doctor, he publishes his research on Aboriginal ways of knowing; to teach, he draws lines in the sand. *Sand Talk* (2019) examines the major issues of our time through this knowledge: understanding as relationship, not possession. An insider’s voice, in English; the pronoun *ngal*, “we-two,” asserts that one never thinks alone.

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