THE SOUTH WIND

TOWARDS NEW COSMOLOGIES

Abstract

As the title of the paper suggests, we are invited to listen to the wind. More especially to the wind from the South: the South as the third world, as the civilizations of Asia, Africa and Latin America; the South as the voices and wisdoms of women.

The paper first looks at the third world: at its subjugation by a world view that was european, western; at its subsumation by a world order that destroyed its different rhythms, denied its roots. In the name of "universelism, ^ð ' the west exported its theoretical models, its development and its science, its wars and its weapons to the third world, colonizing its economics, determining its political processes, suffocating its cultures, silencing its civilizations.

Next, -the paper turns to look at women, who in the dominant world view are unknowable, invisible; the categories and concepts do npt fr)clude women; all of history excludes them. The "universal" mode strengthened the existing institutions, developing new ideologies which defined and confined woman to her place in a patriarchal world. Every civilization, every system of knowledge, came to be defined by this paradigm. Concepts of gender have been deeply woven into the fabric of this cosmology.