Conference Opening and Keynote Lecture
Conference Opening by Peter Aronsson, Vice Chancellor and Professor of History, and Stefan Amirell: Professor of Global History
Quick Input: Presentation Summer School
Keynote Lecture I:
Fe Navarrete (Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas): “Cosmohistories, the multiplicity of worlds and their histories“
This lecture will present the concept of cosmohistory as an alternative tool for
understanding the interaction between different historical worlds in the arena of what
we usually call global history. It rejects the conception of world history as a singular
process, a common history of the human species, a conception which frequently reflects
the ethnocentric conceptions of Western societies and falls into teleological and tauto-
logical traps. According to this cosmohistorical perspective different human communi-
ties with their respective life worlds can coexist, collide, interact, even dominate each
other without being fully absorbed into a single process or into a singular causal chain.
The principles of relativity can be used to understand the interactions between different
temporalities and cosmopolitical perspectives. The example of the interaction between
Indigenous, Afrodiasporic and Western histories in the Americas will show how
cosmohistory can lead to better understandings of processes such as colonialism,
genocide and the so-called anthropocene, than traditional evolutionary unilinear
frameworks.