The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Lilies, the Devil, and Rainbow Colors A Brief History of Our Sacred Symbols Vuk Bačanović Sarajevo’s first Pride march in which took place on 8 September 2019. Participants are marching under the slogan “Ponosno zajedno” (Proudly Together). Photo credit: Antonio Balic This year’s Sarajevo Pride produced exactly what contemporary politics increasingly specializes in: a symbolic scandal. A participant dressed as the Devil marched at the front of the parade, another wrapped Bosnia’s medieval lily emblem in rainbow symbolism, and within hours social media was flooded with warnings about sacrilege, national humiliation, and moral catastrophe. In a country that has survived war, ethnic cleansing, state capture, mass corruption, deindustrialization, and the systematic looting of public wealth, it was apparently a young man with a rainbow flag who finally crossed the red line. Let us set aside, for a moment, the fact that the struggle against discrimination based on whom people share the...

  The Case for Indigenous Ways of Knowing Finding a middle ground Written by Jonathan Salem-Wiseman. The reception to claims about an Indigenous “way of knowing” tends to be determined by our political tribe. On the left, the very idea of a distinct, non-Western way of knowing is accepted as an obvious truth, if not an unimpeachable piety. Indigenous peoples, it is argued, live in harmony with nature and are thus uniquely attuned to the “interconnections between all things.” On the right, such a claim is often met with derision, and is dismissed as the latest iteration of faddish, “noble savage” mysticism. I think both these positions are wrong and misleading, and they overlook a much more interesting story. An Indigenous “way of knowing” is a real phenomenon, but it falls short of exaggerated claims about an epistemic access to the world that is just as rigorous as the natural sciences. I want to argue that an Indigenous way of knowing, properly understood, is explained by global ...