Indigenous Worldings (Syllabus) - Princeton University - Fall 2023

Global Environmental Politics, 2018

Many socioenvironmental struggles around the globe involve trying to protect the disappearance of other "worlds." Along with biological diversity, human languages, traditions, understandings, and the intimate relationships between peoples and their lands are under attack through various forms of colonization, capital expansion, or simply the globalization of lifeways. Scholars of international relations have recently come to appreciate that the world is made up of many worlds, and that great pressures threaten to reduce its diversity. This work has been essential for understanding the struggle of maintaining many worlds on a single Earth. Such scholarship has yet to penetrate fully studies of global environmental politics (GEP). This article extends such sensitivity and scholarly effort to GEP by dialoguing with Indigenous ways of knowing. It argues that Indigenous struggles are struggles for the survival of many worlds on one planet and that we could learn from this. The intention is not to generalize Indigenous knowledge but rather to make a call for engagement. Through Creative Listening and Speaking, a worldist methodology, the article focuses on the Yanomami's forest-world and presents a few perspectives to illustrate how relational ontologies, stories of nonhierarchical and dialogical divinities, make ways of knowing and being from which we could learn how to relate to the Earth as equals. Ursula K. Le Guin's novel The Word for World Is Forest tells the story of natives living on Athshe, a planet made up of thick forests and far from Earth, witnessing the destruction of their land and way of life. The novel describes how the Terrans, future humans, have traveled to Athshe to cut down the planet's trees (sending them back to Earth) and to prepare the land for future Terran colonizers. Two Athsheans talk about the sanity of the Terrans: "A people can't be insane."

Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change, 2025

The profound transformation of the Earth and its ecosystems within the Anthropocene, have opened up a discussion about how to imagine, plan and implement climate action. Nature-based Solutions (NbS) are frequently approached as the human actions aimed at protecting, managing, and restoring ecosystems with the dual objective of enhancing environmental conservation and addressing societal challenges such as sustainable development. In this work, we offer a critical analysis of the narratives from which NbS result from. We contextualize the NbS narrative as emergent from the Anthropocene frameworks and use the lenses of alternative worldviews from Latin America and the Caribbean, which hold other ways of knowing historically neglected by Modern ontologies and epistemologies. As most of the research on NbS has been produced in the Global North, we, a group of Latin American early-career scholars and an Indigenous activist, argue that hegemonic narratives on nature-driven current decision making in global environmental change policies-perversely reinforces exclusionary environmental practices at national and local scales. Such narratives are based on human-centered, Eurocentric and hegemonic scientific worldviews. Drawing on qualitative research that included a critical discourse analysis of existing literature, Indigenous Peoples declarations, and interviews, we examine how NbS is defined within the framework of the Anthropocene and in some cases in contradiction with local Indigenous-based narratives and realities. In this paper, we unpack the need to seek and develop local and pluralistic narratives of climate solutions beyond NbS frameworks in Latin America.

Revista Ambiente & Sociedade, 2015

The aims of this article is to reflect on the contradictions between a conception of development that is anchored in the idea of progress, industrialization and economic growth and worldviews of indigenous peoples, for whom the existing symbiotic bond between man and nature necessarily involves intangibility and irreducibility of natural resources as a source of economic and social development. For this reason, it is argued that a proper view of development must include an epistemic shift in which the ideas and knowledge of indigenous communities are built to radically alter society/nature and highly predatory logic environment relationship and life human that comes currently prevail. This new perspective implies a change in the discourse and everyday practices of “knowing” and “doing” in what some authors have referred to as post-development.

Antipode, 2024

Indigenous Peoples are gaining renewed attention within both policy and academia, as examples of "resilience" and of non-humanist, non-modern ways of relating to nature, which might, it is hoped, provide tools to withstand the socio-ecological crises associated with "the Anthropocene". This paper argues that such representations obscure both their own colonial foundations and the ongoing forms of racialised dispossession and ecocide faced by Indigenous Peoples today. Instead, we conceptualise indigeneity and nature as deeply entangled categories that are co-produced with capitalist modernity. Engaging anti-colonial and Marxist scholarship, and drawing on our long-term research with Indigenous movements in Bolivia and Colombia, we highlight how discursive and material assemblages of indigeneity and nature are dialectically linked to capitalist processes of dispossession and subaltern efforts to contest these. We further highlight how romanticised accounts of non-modern nature-cultures are unsettled by the violent world-making of colonial capitalism and the unequal burdens placed on Indigenous territories and bodies. We use an ethnographic vignette from the Bolivian Chaco to illustrate the messy everyday ways in which real Indigenous people navigate, contest, endure, and make do amidst the contradictory processes of racialisation, dispossession, and conditional recognition that characterise their positioning within colonial capitalism. In doing so, we show how thinking from the sacrifice zones of extractive capitalism unsettles contemporary debates on decolonising nature in the Anthropocene.

Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 2021

Revista de Estudios Sociales, 2024

In this special issue, our focus will be on analyzing the contributions that Latin American thought has made or could make to the socio-ecological problems that currently afflict us. Latin American thought stands out for its epistemic-ecological disruptiveness, which reflects its ability to transform the very way we speak, know, and feel the relationship between humans and more-than-human entities (Alimonda, Toro Pérez, and Martín 2017). Latin American critical perspectives advocate for relational and ecological approaches to knowledge construction, while also revealing the presence of cosmocentric political, economic, historical, and artistic practices that challenge anthropocentric forms, modern dualism, and instrumental reason. These ideologies are responsible for the problematic division between humans and non-humans. The contextual nature of Latin American thought, coupled with its emphasis on relationality as an epistemological principle, fosters productive dialogues with intellectual traditions from various regions (such as Europe, India, or Africa). It enables Latin American perspectives to respond to global eco-social issues in a situated yet impactful manner. At the same time, the theoretical rigor and transformative potential of the Latin American perspective have led authors from the global north to draw on these perspectives to develop sophisticated critical theories and to complexify, for example, understandings of the Capitalocene (Moore 2015 and 2016) or theories of environmental justice (Álvarez and Coolsaet 2020; Rodríguez and Inturias 2018). We look forward to receiving contributions that explore how Latin American critical perspectives contribute to the ecological shift. To fully grasp the complexity of the socio-ecological crisis and the resulting responses, we eagerly invite theoretical texts that offer conceptual analysis or critical discussions of theoretical proposals. We also welcome empirical analyses, including field research or qualitative/quantitative methodologies, among others. Contributions can be organized around the following thematic axes, without being limited exclusively to them: 1. The utility of diverse non-canonical knowledge traditions in Latin America for addressing the global socio-ecological crisis. 2. Proposals emerging from Latin America within anti/post/decolonial studies, feminist perspectives, and artistic/aesthetic practices as pathways to addressing the socio-ecological crisis. 3. Critical Latin American studies on socio-environmental conflicts, conservation, and environmental preservation in specific territories, conducted through empirical methodologies involving fieldwork and/or engagement with communities. 4. Comparative analysis of contemporary critical approaches from Latin America in the fields of political theory and social theory in response to the challenges posed by the ecological crisis within the realm of social sciences.

Journal of Anthropological Research, 2017

e-cadernos ces, 2015

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In this course, we explore how Latin American cultural production, both past and present, exposes and confronts the profound challenges and consequences of the Anthropocene-a geological epoch defined by human impact on the planet. Through an ecocritical lens, we will examine the environmental and social consequences of this era, focusing on the intersections of cultural studies, literary studies, and environmental humanities. By engaging with works that conceptualize the Anthropocene and related terms like the Capitalocene and the Plantationocene, we will uncover the connections between our ongoing environmental crisis and the legacies of colonialism, racialization, and extractivism. Our interdisciplinary approach includes diverse texts and artistic pieces that illuminate these complex interactions while also proposing possible responses to the problems they pose. By the end of the course, students will be familiar with current scholarship in environmental humanities and have a deeper understanding of Latin American culture, literature, and environmental art. The course will be taught in English, with further readings suggested for those proficient in Spanish or Portuguese.

Pace Environmental Law Review

international lawyer, expert judgment in international environmental law, CEO of Biosphere Group-Think Tank on Sustainable Futures Research (Biosphere Group), member of the Academy of Environmental Law and of the World Commission on Environmental Law (IUCN). † Eduardo Calvo B., member of the Board of Directors of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). ‡ Jorge Iván Palacio P., lawyer, former President of the Constitutional Court of Colombia. § Juan José Munar M., lawyer, general manager-and Principal Partner-of Valle Riestra & Munar Law Firm (Perú), Principal Partner of Biosphere Group. ** Carlos Loret de Mola, geological engineer, former President of the National Council for the Environment (CONAM, Peru). † † Darío Espinoza M., anthropologist, President of the Sami Center (Cusco, Peru). ‡ ‡ Yuri Godoy P., lawyer, member of Biosphere Group.