Hilandera means “spinner”/”weaver” in Spanish.
This is a blog by H. I. Landera to reflect on whetherthe way we are weaving words leads us towards an equality network or rather a spider’s web. Because, as Celia Amorós said, we cannot make good policies without clear concepts.
It has two sections that you can follow through the section index, and uses tools from semantics and language pragmatics.
Velázquez painted the hilanderas who dutifully spun and then wove the clothes and tapestries they had to weave.
In mythology, spinnersspun destinies. The texts (from textus “woven”, “interwoven”) that others have spun before us condition the way we read the world. We cannot determine our destiny if we do not know how to read, spin, weave … and also, like Penelope, unweave.
Athena
Goddess of wisdom… and goddess of weaving looms. And Athena’s owl, the owl that only takes flight at sunset*. Why? Because reflection on what happens to us can only take place when the action is over. We cannot interpret what is happening today without the thoughts of yesterday: thoughts we find in texts. Those texts that now entire generations no longer want to read.
Little Red Riding Hood’s mother wants to fill her basket with texts and with the ability to spin, to help her find her own Ariadne’s thread towards responsible language… and towards dialogue with grandma.
And why so many fancy quotations from the classical past? the long-suffering reader will wonder at this point.
Celia Amorós used to say that developments in theory happening in the last century had already happened in the Hellenistic era, after classical Greece. Could it be that old is new… or that new is old?
I do not know if she is right or wrong, but just in case, it would not hurt for Little Red Riding Hood to know what has been thought before. Because full reflection on the goings on and the language of today cannot take place yet. And by time we think it all out it might be too late for her.
*This sentence heads philosopher Hegel’s preface to Outlines to the Philosophy of Rights