Historian, political scientist and anthropologist, Colombia
Juan Manuel Espinoza Benza, who everybody calls Juma, is a historian, a political scientist and a social anthropologist, and he has been teaching in universities in different countries for more than twenty years.[1] Alongside the teaching he works as a researcher and a consultant on gender and masculinity, on the way identities are formed and how discrimination works, on social movements, postcolonial studies and critical ethnography, and he does that work for corporations as well as for governments and universities.[1] In 2022 he published a study called El Precio de ser Macho, on what masculinity costs, and in 2018 he wrote a guide for the mothers, fathers and families of humans who have come out.[1]
He is half Peruvian and half Bolivian. His parents divorced when he was very young, and at sixteen he moved to Sweden with his mother and stayed there for about ten years.[3] He lives and works in Colombia now, mostly online, and he is affiliated with the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, where he teaches a course for newsrooms and content producers on ethics, quality and self-regulation.[1] He is also a consultant for UNICEF Colombia, on the prevention of sexual exploitation and abuse and on safeguarding.[4]
For years he was also a trusted tour guide through the ancient sites of Bolivia, taking humans out to Lake Titicaca and everything around it, and that is how Henosis came to know him.[3] What he teaches is where our idea of normal comes from and how to get underneath it, and the way he does that is by asking a human what is true for them before deciding anything about them. He calls it story-listening.[3]
Juma has spent more than twenty years teaching in universities in several different countries.[1] His fields are gender and masculinity studies, the way identities are formed, how discrimination works, social movements, postcolonial studies and critical ethnography.[1] He also takes that work outside the university, as a researcher and a consultant for corporations, for governments and for academic institutions.[1][3]
He is a consultant for UNICEF Colombia, where he designs and facilitates Communities of Practice on the Prevention of Sexual Exploitation and Abuse (PSEA) and on safeguarding, building up the capacity of UNICEF staff and partner organisations across the country.[4]
He is affiliated with the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Colombia, and through the university he teaches a course on edX called Contenidos Conscientes. It is aimed at media outlets and content producers, and it covers the quality, the ethics and the self-regulation of what they put out.[1]
El Precio de ser Macho, which translates as The Price of Being Macho, is a study he published in 2022. It looks at what masculinity costs the men who carry it, and what it costs everybody who has to live alongside them.[1]
Four years earlier he wrote a guide for families, called Guía para Madres, Padres y Familiares de Personas que Salieron del Closet. It is not written for the human who came out. It is written for the mother, the father, the brother and the aunt, who now have to work out what they think and what they are going to do about it.[1]
Juma's father was Bolivian, from a very small town in the jungle. He was politically engaged and he did a lot with his life. His parents divorced when Juma was very little, which he says was the good outcome, because if they had stayed together it would have been hell.[3]
He grew up visiting his father and listening to him talk about the way he was, and the resentment he carried bordered on hatred. When he was sixteen he moved to Sweden with his mother, and at one point he seriously considered changing his last name so that nothing connected the two of them any more.[3]
In his twenties he flew to Peru, where his father was living by then, and invited him out for a coffee. He took him to the café his father went to every weekend. What he said to him was that they had a great many differences, and that they could fight about all of them horribly and forever, however the fact of it was that he was going to be his dad until the day one of them died, so why not have the relationship first and talk about everything else later.[3]
They never did talk about it and in the twenty years after that coffee neither of them ever felt the need to raise any of it. "I knew where he was. He knew where I was. We wouldn't step on each other."[3]
Everything we call normal was decided by somebody. Eating with cutlery. Celebrating a birthday, because we told each other that day means something. Weekends. Weddings. Money. A story gets agreed on, then it gets believed, and then it goes quiet, and from there it is simply culture. Juma calls that a naturalised social agreement.[3] A century ago, for example, it was obvious to most that women should not vote.[3]
Most of the time nobody actually sits down and decides any of it. These agreements form on their own, quietly, and that is exactly where the danger is, because nobody is watching the process and so it can be manipulated. The ones who manipulate it, in his experience, are usually the bullies. It becomes common sense at school that the best marks belong to whoever speaks the loudest, and out of that we end up promoting a whole society of influencers, which is why so many of our politicians are influencers and why you so rarely see an introvert become a president.[3]
So the question he leaves open is not who writes the laws. It is who decides what the rest of us accept as natural.[3]
His answer to that is a discipline he calls story-listening. He goes and asks a human about their own life before he draws any conclusion about it, and when they have answered he checks that the words they used mean what he thinks they mean. He started doing it at sixteen, on a piece of fieldwork in Peru.[3]
When he was sixteen Juma was picked out of school to go along with a team of engineering students who were surveying the poorest neighbourhoods in Peru. The houses had straw walls and no floors, there were children everywhere, and almost every one of those houses had a television in it. On the way home each week the team would ask each other why.[3]
They had plenty of theories. Indoctrination. Status. A window on the outside world. Somewhere to park the children. They got good enough at the theories that they started designing projects off the back of them, including one to get the families to sell the televisions and put the money into the foundations of their houses.[3]
On the last day they were told to put the notebooks away, bring food, and eat with the family they had got on with best. Juma ate with one of the mothers, and when her children had left the room he asked her why she had a television. She told him she had grown up in a tiny rural town where one man owned the only television anybody had, and all the children used to go to his house to watch it, and that man raped her. Years later, talking to the others who had grown up there, she found out that he had raped every single one of them, many of them many times. She bought a television of her own so that her children would never have to go to anybody else's house to watch one.[3]
Not one of their theories had gone anywhere near the truth of it, and not one of them had involved asking her, because in the story they were telling themselves she was not worth asking.[3] He has asked first ever since.[3]
In Bolivia it is a running complaint that the indigenous peoples keep their own time. They say yes to something and it takes weeks. Somebody asks how far away the town is and is told it is just here, and just here turns out to be five days' walk.[3]
Juma explains the reason for it. Our common sense puts the future in front of us, so we walk forwards into it and glance back over our shoulder at the past to learn something from it. The Andean understanding of time runs the other way around. A human is walking backwards through it, always, because the only thing any of us can actually see is what has already happened, so the past sits in front of the face and the future is behind the back, where nobody is ever going to get a look at it.[3]
That one turn changes everything downstream of it. With the future ahead of a human there is planning, and an obsession with prediction. With the future behind, there is no point predicting anything, so nobody does.[3]
He makes no value judgment about any of it, in either direction. What he says is that walking backwards or walking forwards changes how a human plans, how they commit and how they raise their children.[3] He uses it on his own life as well. Looked at from far enough back, the human who hurt him is somebody else, another life and another culture, with nothing left in it to avenge.[3]
He read History at the University of Melbourne and graduated with Honours in 2005. His thesis was called "The past becomes history only when we tell it to be: Constructing the Bolivian October Revolution", and it sits in the university's own Honours thesis collection.[2]
From Melbourne he went to Cambridge for a master's in Latin American Studies, and then to the University of St Andrews in Scotland for doctoral study in Social Anthropology.[1]
Yes. Juan Manuel Espinoza holds the mark Henosis Certified Practitioner, awarded after an assessment by a human being against the Henosis Standard. The mark is earned, never bought, and it can be revoked.
Henosis is a global network of practitioners and spaces that remember our eternal nature, each assessed by a human being against the Henosis Standard. The mark is earned, never bought. Read what the mark means.
This entry is maintained by Henosis and written from the sources listed on it. Claims we could not source have not been made. The mark on this profile was earned by assessment and was never purchased.
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