our sensory perceptions. At all times, we are immersed in a knowledge system that organizes the way we conceptualize the material world around us. When we confront popular and traditional medicines, we can discernif we are perceptive enoughthat underlying them is a knowledge system intimately bound to cosmology. (1)As she puts it in the context of her reflections on the work of curanderas:Conceptually, traditional medicine is like a woven fabric of which we have intriguing fragments, but not the overall pattern. Recovering it requires a kind of anamnesis which systematizes a conceptual weave. A way of achieving this is by interviewing curanderas who are deeply rooted in their traditions or who have received a spiritual and mystical initiation, and then compare these interviews with the oldest available testimonies.... It is only gradually that, for the patient researcher, some patterns begin to emerge from elements that, at first glance, seem diffuse, disconnected, bereft of interrelationship. (4)Marcos conducts interviews, but doing interviews by itself does not mark the radicality of her approach. That is why Taken from the Lips does not read like an ethnographical work, but rather like a conceptual historical-philosophical and anthropological treatise. In Taken from the Lips Marcos appears less as a professional anthropologist or interviewer, and more like an active participant in a conversation that involves practices, rituals, and concepts. She tries both to understand logics with which she is not familiar and to translate them to herself and others. This could very well be why, as she reports in the book, she is frequently asked by indigenous women movements to participate in their encounters.It is using this methodology that Marcos informs us of Mesoamerican ideas of the body that differ from classical Western and enlightened ideas about embodiment, and that seem to provide elements for a more radical affirmation of our own humanity as corporeal beings. She also finds an episteme of gender equilibrium as fundamental to Mesoamerican thought. While some ideas of her characterization of gender can be challenged (see Maria Lugoness review in this issue), the identification of issues of gender difference and sexuality at the core of Mesoamerican thinking gives additional indications of elements that complement the critique of 1492 from an indigenous perspective that Dussel provides in The Invention of the Americas. Marcoss text makes clear that if we want to know about Mesoamerican thought we need not limit our view to the tlamatinime (wise men or Aztec philosopher priest) as Dussel and others tend to do, but that we should also seek to understand the rich conceptual world of the curanderas.Notes[1] In the presentation on Marcoss book at the 2006 meeting of the Caribbean Philosophical Association in Jamaica, I contrasted Marcoss decolonial approach with the colonizing efforts of scholars such as Max Muller in his understanding of Indian religions and sacred texts. One can also contrast her approach with Mircea Eliade, for instance, who has been criticized at large by Russell McCutcheon in Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). See also