Thinking with the Kogi:
A Week of Collaborative Philosophizing

This week, GloPhi welcomes Kogi Spiritual Leaders from the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in northern Colombia to Hildesheim. Their visit shapes our entire program, from a film screening and a close reading of Kogi sources to a workshop on thinking, knowledge, and language. It also marks the beginning of our new series “Collaborative Philosophizing in a Globalized World,” which opens with a session around the fire on Thursday, October 29.

The Kogi live on the slopes of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, an isolated massif that rises from the Caribbean coast of Colombia to snow-capped peaks of about 5,700 meters within roughly 45 kilometers of the sea. It is the highest coastal mountain range on Earth and contains nearly every climate zone of the tropics, from mangroves and rainforest to high-altitude páramo and glacier. The Kogi, together with the Arhuaco, Wiwa, and Kankuamo peoples, regard the Sierra as the Heart of the World: a living body whose health is bound up with the health of the planet as a whole.

Descendants of the pre-Columbian Tairona, the Kogi withdrew into the higher reaches of the mountains after the Spanish conquest and have maintained their social order, language, and spiritual practice with remarkable continuity ever since.

At the center of this order stand the Mamas, the spiritual leaders who are trained from early childhood to listen to and care for the world in its spiritual dimension. Their task is to maintain the balance between the human community, the natural world, and the order of origin – a responsibility they understand as extending to all of humanity.

In their own terms, the Kogi are the “Elder Brothers”; the rest of us, who have largely forgotten this responsibility, are called the “Younger Brothers.” In 1990, the Mamas broke their long silence toward the outside world with the BBC film “From the Heart of the World: The Elder Brothers’ Warning,” and in 2012 they followed up with “Aluna,” both made with filmmaker Alan Ereira. In “Aluna,” they address the Younger Brothers directly with an urgent message about the consequences of ecological destruction, based on the conviction that the world is connected and grounded in their own understanding of its origin.

A Week of Encounters

The week opens with our Fellows Forum, where we will watch “Aluna: An Ecological Warning by the Kogi People” and discuss it with anthropologist and GloPhi Fellow Falk Parra-Witte, whose long-term ethnographic work with the Kogi provides the foundation for this week’s program. The film shows the Mamas at work and lets them explain, in their own words and on their own terms, how they understand the connection between thought, land, water, and life.

In our “Sources of Philosophizing” work meeting, we then turn to Kogi sources themselves. At the center stands “The Law of Se – Part: Inward,” a Kogi text translated from Spanish. The Law of Se is the Kogi’s principle of origin: the order that precedes the material world and from which everything that exists derives its place and its meaning. Reading it with Falk Parra-Witte, we ask what it means to take such a text seriously as a source of and for philosophizing, rather than merely as an ethnographic document.

The highlight of the week is the opening session of our new series “Collaborative Philosophizing in a Globalized World,” a session around the fire with the Kogi Spiritual Leaders. We have deliberately chosen a setting that departs from the seminar room. Thought, for the Kogi, is not detached from place, body, and gathering, and the fire is where conversation and counsel traditionally take place. Rather than asking our guests to adapt to our formats, we want to learn what it means to think together under conditions that are, at least in part, theirs.

The week concludes with the workshop “Thinking, Knowledge and Language” with the Kogi Spiritual Leaders. Here we explore how thinking, knowing, and speaking relate to one another in the Kogi tradition, and what this might mean for our own philosophical vocabularies. What is knowledge if it is not primarily expressed written texts? What is thinking if it is understood as a form of listening? And what happens to our concepts when they are translated not only between languages, but between fundamentally different ways of relating to the world?

A Collaborative Reading Circle

To prepare for the week, our fellows and team members are working through four texts that approach the encounter from different directions.

1. “The Law of Se – Part: Inward” – a Kogi source, translated from Spanish. It lets the Kogi speak first, in a textual form that already raises the question of what a philosophical “source” is.
2. Falk Parra Witte, “The World Tree. Humans, Trees and Creation on the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta” – an ethnographic study of how the Kogi understand the relationship between human beings, trees, and the creation of the world.
3. Ernst Halbmayer, “Some Reflections on Principles of Isthmo-Colombian Amerindian Ontologies” – a comparative perspective that situates Kogi thought within the wider Isthmo-Colombian region and its distinctive ontologies.
4. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “From Mauss to Claude Lévi-Strauss” – a classic philosophical reflection on what anthropology has to teach philosophy.

The fourth text deserves a word of explanation, because it describes the attitude we hope to practice this week. Writing in 1959, Merleau-Ponty argued that ethnological experience changes what philosophy can mean by the universal. In place of an “overarching universal” reached by a purely objective method, he proposed a “lateral universal” that we acquire only through the incessant testing of ourselves by the other and of the other by ourselves. Philosophy, on this view, does not stand above the plurality of human worlds. It emerges between them through encounters.

About the Series

“Collaborative Philosophizing in a Globalized World” is GloPhi’s new discussion series for the winter semester 2026/27. Over the coming months, weekly sessions will bring together our fellows, team members, and invited guests to work on a shared question: What does philosophizing mean when it is practiced collaboratively across traditions, languages, and forms of knowledge?

The series is designed as a space for open, collaboratively developed discussions and controversial debates rather than for predetermined positions. Each session takes up a concrete case or a contested question and asks what it reveals about the conditions, possibilities, and limits of thinking together. The encounter with the Kogi makes collaborative philosophizing tangible as a conversation with a tradition that has its own account of thought, knowledge, and the order of the world.

Image: The Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta seen from the International Space Station, February 27, 2015. Photo: NASA (public domain).