Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice across Andean Worlds

Anthropological Quarterly, 2016

Journal of Anthropological Research, 2017

KULT_online. Review Journal for the Study of Culture, 2017

The ethnographic monograph "Earth Beings" from Marisol de la Cadena takes a closer look at indigenous practices that have challenged modern state politics in Peru in the last fifty years and that are described as "cosmopolitics.“ Through a complex ethnographic narration, composed of seven stories and two interludes, the author shows the political relevance that natural entities, also called "Earth beings," play in the lives and political struggles of two indigenous leaders from a community located in the region of Cuzco. This approach to indigenous politics in a postcolonial context not only invites us to acknowledge other forms of existence and other forms of "doing politics,“ but it also critically revises ethnographic readings about indigenous practices.

American Religion, 2024

Pan-Indigenous Peruvian norteños respond to political corruption, climate change, and environmental devastation by engaging Indigenous sentient landscapes as leaders of environmental movements and cocreators of a pan-Indigenous world. They challenge social models of neoliberal capitalism and settler colonialism, which are based on the distinction between the human and more-than-human and promote human exceptionalism. Scholars of political ontology have considered radically different forms of more-than-human persons and their plural ways of being in the world embedded in relations with the state. I argue that more-than-humans are not just alternative ways of being in the world, but frames through which norteños engage in subversive politics to challenge the justice of neoliberal capitalism and the state. By working beyond the theoretical limitations of ontological approaches (ways of being) and the state’s definition of politics, and within the realm of a local, place-based environmental and spiritual politics, I show how the historical dichotomies of Western thought, Western politics and their effects can be disrupted. I also analyze the difficulties of ontological politics in a milieu that does not ascribe to scholarly and political fantasies of Indigenous purity from modernity. Specifically, I analyze the conflicting ways in which norteños engage with more-than-human landscapes to provide a model for radical ethical-environmental-political action, in which community and well-being are defined as humans in relationship to place-as-persons and d the earth is resignified as an anchor for social and climate justice.

This paper offers a brief look at the recent wave of Indigenous and leftist political struggles that have articulated political demands which include rights of Mother Earth, cultural autonomy and respect for communal and alternative forms of cultural, political, spiritual and economic relations. I first discuss the concept of Earthbound people proposed in 2013 by French science studies theorist Bruno Latour, and after sketching out this basic concept, examine recent political struggles in the Andes, suggesting we can see some of these Earthbound practices and ideas in action. The importance of both radical political demands (plurinationalism, critiques of development) and alternative cosmopolitics (Rights of Mother Earth, sumak kawsay & buen vivir, Pachamama) are explored, and their relation to larger global social movements are considered.

Latin American Perspectives, 2017

In 2009, farmers in the highlands of Ecuador challenged a proposed water law by staging public rituals to venerate their watershed, called Kimsacocha, as the embodiment of the Pachamama (Mother Earth). They rejected the proposed law because it allowed for mineral extraction in communal watersheds. They argued that human and nonhuman entities are interconnected and that the state should designate communal watersheds as no-mining zones to defend the right to life. While some scholars have argued that indigenous ontologies decolonize the political realm, in fact they have uneven outcomes when mobilized in contentious mining politics. Indigenous ontologies enabled farmers to build a multiethnic movement in defense of life, but this did not lead to the implementation of their demands. Instead, the state appropriated the language of the Pachamama to produce a revised water law that promoted piecemeal environmental conservation.

Geoforum, 2019

Getting public opinion to see 'mining' and 'Nature's Rights' as non-contradictory and even equivalent and harmonious, calls for far-reaching power strategies. Nature was entitled to rights by Ecuador's Constitution at about the same time that the Government began promoting mining as central to Ecuador's future. Building this equivalence to make 'mining mean nature', and materialize large-scale mining in the Quimsacocha páramo wetlands, the State and its institutions tested new tactics to manage territory, coined new imaginaries and subjectivities, and limited indigenous/rural political participation. In response, communities started to dispute these governmentality strategies through political practices that framed new meanings of territory and identity. They use formal political and legal arenas but, above all, their day-today practices. This article analyzes forms of power and counter-power in the Quimsacocha páramo mining conflict, through the four different, interrelated 'arts of government' (Foucault, 2008) and mutual strategies by promoters and detractors of extractive industry who, in apparent paradox, both appeal to Nature's Rights. We conclude that using Nature's Rights to promote mega-mining manifests the limitations of social and environmental rights recognition under neoliberal gov-ernance, and the tensions inherent in Nature's Rights themselves. However, anti-extraction struggles like Quimsacocha's critically make visible as well as challenge the development model and economic system that is implicit in the debate over Nature's Rights, inviting us to rethink the socio-natural order and foster more just, equitable alternatives.

2015

In June 2011, over 25,000 protesters congregated in Puno, Peru to demonstrate against a recent mining concession to a multinational mining corporation. Protesters employed an ‘eco-ethno’ rhetoric that centered around the potential for the mine to contaminate local water sources and made explicit their indigenous identity. The mobilizations eventually provoked the central government to revoke of the mining license and temporary halted all new extractive industry projects in the Puno region. The Puno protests present a case study to explore the impacts of neoliberal economic policies on indigenous peoples, the factors contributing to the emergence of a national indigenous movement in a country where previously ethnic activism was absent, and the utility of eco-ethno narratives for indigenous movements. The paper is composed of three main sections and arguments: (1) that while overall the acceleration of extractive industry investment caused by neoliberal policies threatens indigenous livelihoods, international governance structures and communication technology provide important new methods for indigenous peoples to secure international allies and legal support (2) that an indigenous movement centered around opposing resource extraction is emerging in the Peruvian Andes (3) that the eco-ethno narratives that won Amazonian indigenous peoples first-world environmentalist allies may not be successful in the Andes, but that a different variant of ecological rhetoric has proved useful in challenging state policies. DOI: 10.1016/j.exis.2014.10.002

Anthropologica, 2013

This article examines a conflict over the expansion, into Cerro Quilish (Mount Quilish), of the Yanacocha gold mine, in Northern Peru. In campaigns against the mine, Cerro Quilish was an aquifer (a store of life-sustaining water) and an Apu (usually translated from Quechua as ‘‘sacred mountain’’). Neither the product of ancestral tradition nor the invention of antimining activists, Cerro Quilish came into being through knowledge encounters that brought together actors with diverse interests, although at times a single entity—water—became the central focus of debate, obscuring other realities. Drawing on science and technology studies literature, I examine the practices that bring entities into being and argue that contemporary conflicts involve an ongoing process of contestation over socionatural worlds.