The Nature of Space in the Americas: realizing a non-Eurocentric and non-anthropocentric theory or theories for architecture and urbanism

• In Event: Theorizing Space of Nuestra América

Abstract

“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Almost 40 years ago Audre Lorde (a mixed race, lesbian poet and essayist) offered this challenge to her fellow feminist scholars. In the decades since, Lorde’s provocation that “this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master's house as their only source of support,” has inspired scholars in a wide range of disciplines to examine the integrity of their ideologies, to rethink their own tools as they seek to build more inclusive intellectual frameworks. While architecture theory has received its fair share of critical scrutiny, this particular master’s house—a Eurocentric construct--remains the discipline’s exclusive source of support.

My contribution to this conversation about a non-Eurocentric theory (or theories) of space in the Americas assumes that we must step outside the discipline and its canonical ideas, at least temporarily, until we are capable of thinking otherwise. According to Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “somewhere along the line…the West got everything wrong, positing substances, individuals, separations, and oppositions wherever all other societies/cultures rightly see relations, totalities, connections, and embeddednesses.” (The Relative Native: Essays on Indigenous Conceptual Worlds, pg. 210) Viveiros de Castro’s condemnation stems, in part, from his work with Amerindians and non-Western concepts of nature. I think the relationship between humans and the rest of the natural world must be fundamental to any non-Eurocentric theory of space in the Americas. We need to borrow tools from anthropology, ecology, and ethnobiology to help us build it.

Author

• Clare Cardinal-Pett, Iowa State University