Knolwdge, Participation and Heart

Feminist Revolt and Sentipensar of the Minervas

Abstract

This article presents the practices of the feminist collective Minervas in Montevideo, Uruguay. It explores how participation is lived and shaped from their perspective and how knowledge is produced beyond a Cartesian logic. My particular focus on the role of gender in participation is based on the assumption that participation processes are always gendered. The article also raises the question of how participation and its limits also affect our own research. The article argues for producing vulnerable, responsible, and engaged anthropologies in the form of embodied anthropology. To this end, it proposes the concept of sentipensar, which describes a process in which we bring together thoughts and feelings, ultimately fusing them into an act of knowing and doing. Furthermore, the study explores the question of whether the collective, activist participatory experiences of the Minervas and the resulting transformational processes can also be made fruitful for cultural anthropology.