Sirûş. Revelation.

A quote from Foucault on our ahistorical views about monarchy and law...something I thought was interesting that I reread recently to prepare for a new class: "There is, perhaps, a historical reason for this. The great institutions of power that developed in the Middle Ages- monarchy, the state with its apparatus-rose up on the basis of a multiplicity of prior powers, and to a certain extent in opposition to them: dense, entangled, conflicting powers, powers tied to the direct or indirect dominion over the land, to the possession of arms, to serfdom, to bonds of suzerainty and vassalage. If these institutions were able to implant themselves, if, by profiting from a whole series of tactical alliances, they were able to gain acceptance, this was because they presented themselves as agencies of regulation, arbitra- tion, and demarcation, as a way of introducing order in the midst of these powers, of establishing a principle that would temper them and distribute them according to b...

The palimpsestic commentary-like  pieces of writing that I am sharing here on Elena, as a process in itself, show me how generative her whole life seems to be for so many people. It's so much the case, that with only a few mentions of her name, her story, or a blog post, people start to bring their own ideas, comments, their memories of her, or connections they have made to traditional knowledge systems that parallel my experiences with Elena. I feel the need to keep underlining that this has all been about relationship. Elena always emphasized that working with a genuine curandera was cocreative work, something very personal and relational. This was also what she pointed out as an element of modern biomedicine that had mostly died out. So, it fascinates me that even at a meta level, as I go about working through this material years after her death, her life story tends to magnetize a great deal of interpersonal exchange and relationship building. That's unsurprising,...