Subaltern perspectives in post-human theory

History and Anthropology, 2020

This piece compares two award-winning books on indigenous peoples in very different parts of the world who were confronted with large-scale mining projects and forged new identities to win recognition of their relationships to land. Both books also tackle the more basic questions of how political orders and cultural traditions get constituted, contested and reconfigured, and whoor whatgets to be counted as part of them. In an influential 2010 Cultural Anthropology article, 'Cosmopolitics in the Andes', Marisol de la Cadena introduced discussions by Jacques Rancière, Isabelle Stengers, Bruno Latour and others on the boundaries of the social under Latour's 'modern constitution' (1991) to a wider anthropological audience. She described a Peruvian indigenous struggle to upgrade ancestors and other 'earth-beings' usually treated as mere cultural 'beliefs' to full-fledged political subjects in order to dispute a mining project. De la Cadena's book Earth Beings fleshes out the connection between her theoretical discussion of cosmopolitics and her respectful, affectionate, yet incomplete dialogue with two indigenous informants. In both texts, she deploys her Francophone philosophical interlocutors to challenge the premise that 'the public presence of earth-beings in politics is ontologically unconstitutional in states ordered by biopolitical practices that conceive human life as discontinuous from (what those same practices call) nature' (89). But it's crucial to stress that even for indigenous Peruvians, the earth-beings' ontological status only emerged in a specific historical crisis: when activists produced accounts for broad publicsthemselves formed in response to the neoliberal conjunctureabout how a mine would threaten the mountain/being Ausangate. The ontological emergence also owed much to a new cultural tourism industry that had 'shed the shame associated with addressing earth-beings' and made them 'conspicuously public' (165-168). This pragmatic approach to identity is one reason I compare Earth Beings to Alex Golub's Leviathans at the Gold Mine, another ethnography of a world-scale mining operation that focuses on indigenous political agency. Instead of Peru, where the globalized extraction of precious metals dates to the decades following the sixteenth-century Spanish invasion, in Golub's case a gold mountain presides over the Porgera valley in Enga Province, Papua New Guinea (henceforth PNG). There, direct colonialismand again, miningonly began in the mid-twentieth century. The fact that this book adopts a more classic social anthropological approach and that it addresses people with a much more recent insertion into Western property relations makes connecting the two ethnographies both challenging and productive of new perspectives on extractivism, ontology and history.

Studies in Phikosophy, 2019

103 This paper proposes an indigenous religion paradigm as an alternative to world religion paradigm in examining varieties of religious practices of Indonesian indigenous peoples. Those varieties of religious practices have been dominantly described based on world religion paradigm. As a result, instead of being accounted as "religious", those practices have been labelled as "animistic", the ethnocentric theory of Tylor. Building on scholarship of indigenous religions, this paper will show that the world religion paradigm has misrepresented phenomena of indigenous religious practices, and argue that indigenous religion paradigm is more helpful and just to be employed. Indigenous religion paradigm is based on a cosmological concept that the cosmos is occuppied by different "persons" of human and non-human beings. Personhood is not identical to human beings, but perceived as extending beyond them. It is a capacity that may belong to the so-called "nature" (an essential category in a hierarchical cosmology along with "culture" and "supernatural"). This indigenous religion paradigm is used to specifically examine religious practices through which three groups of Indonesian indigenous peoples are engaged in environmental preservations and protections. The first is the Ammatoans of Sulawesi who have succeeded in preserving and protecting their customary forest from deforestation, the second is the Kend-hengs of Central Java who have been resisting a national cement company for their customary mountain and karst ecosystem, and the third is the Mollos of East Nusa Tenggara, eastern part of Indonesia, who succeeded protecting their costumary land by expelling marble mining companies. For those indigenous peoples, those costumary forest, mountain and land are "persons", whom they interrelate religiously for mutual benefits. They all engage in "inter-personal" relationship with those "natural" beings.

emphasizes the concept of nature when investigating spatial semantics and natural philosophy amongst the Navaho Indians. He underscores the difficulty of grasping Navaho conceptions of space and time and warns his readers of the dangers of imposing a Western logic on non-Western worldviews. The differences between Western and non-Western worldviews suggesting (un)translatability has been addressed by a number of anthropologists and philosophers (notably by Quine, Evans-Pritchard, and Mary Douglas). In the 80s and 90s, scholars have analyzed how subaltern non-Western voices are extracted, recorded, transcribed, and studied primarily by North American and European intellectuals and how these exercised linguistic, political, and institutional violence (Jacques Derrida, Michel de Certeau, Paul Rabinow). The principal issue to be examined became the power imbalances implemented by scientific discourses. More recently, however, philosophers and social scientists have addressed the power imbalances by developing indigenous ontologies, philosophies, and juridical systems in need of recognition (De la Cadena 2010, Escobar 2010).

Journal of Anthropological Research, 2017

2012

The ethnography of indigenous America is peopled with these references to a cosmopolitical theory which describes a universe inhabited by diverse types of actants or of subjective agents, human and non-human-gods, animals, the dead, plants, meteorological phenomena, very often objects and artefacts too-all equipped with the same general ensemble of perceptive, appetitive and cognitive dispositions, in other words, of a similar 'soul'. This resemblance includes a shared performative mode, so to speak, of apperception: animals and other non-humans with souls 'see themselves as persons' and therefore, they 'are persons', that is to say: intentional or double-faced (visible and invisible) objects, constituted by social relations and existing under the double pronominal mode of the reflexive and the reciprocal, that is to say of the collective. (Viveiros de Castro 2009: 21) 3 Thus, certain non-human beings, whether animals, plants or 'things', are regarded by many societies in different regions of the world as having charac-Over the ensuing decades, an efflorescence of Lowland South American ethnography has engaged with this challenge (e.g.

Transmodernity, 2017

Journal of Pacific Studies, 2010

Hunter-Gatherers in a Changing World, 2017

Defaunation is one of the most critical challenges faced by contemporary hunter-gatherers worldwide. In the present chapter we explore how this global anthropogenic phenomenon is being explained by a hunter-gatherer society: the Tsimane' of Bolivian Amazonia. First, we briefl y review the historical context of contemporary Tsimane', with a special focus on defaunation trends in their territory. We then draw on ethnographic accounts to understand how this society explains the drivers of defaunation and integrates them in their understanding of the world, and specifi cally in their mythology. The Tsimane' perceive widespread defaunation in their territory, which they tend to largely interpret as a result of both natural and supernatural forces, with intertwined arguments. The Tsimane' think that supernatural deities control animals and, consequently, they largely associate wildlife scarcity with punishments by the spirits in response to disrespectful conducts. As such, defaunation is interpreted as a consequence of (a) direct harm to wildlife populations by the inappropriate hunting and fi shing behaviour; and (b) the discontentment of the animal deities for not respecting certain established cultural norms. In the Tsimane' view, the latter is also aggravated by their recent relative inability to communicate with the spirits, due to the disappearance of shamans. Considering that the way people interpret environmental change can determine their behaviour Á. Fernández-Llamazares (*)

Graduate Journal of Social Science, 2018

This article is an analysis of key topics in Donna Haraway's Staying with the Trouble: Making Kinship in the Chthulucene. By following the game rules of the two string figures, cat's cradle (non-Indigenous) and na'atl'o' (Din'eh), the article weighs, from Indigenous perspectives, the political and ontological implications of such multispecies storytelling. Through its diffractive close reading, this paper puts in conversation Indigenous and non-Indigenous concepts and authors: Deleuzian rhizomatic deterritorialization and Indigenous self-determinacy, paradigmatic All My/Our Relations of Winona LaDuke, Leroy Little Bear, and Gregory Cajete, and the spider pimoa cthulhu. The aim is to recognize the multiplicity of forms of kinships or dependencies and to consider what kind of implications they have on marginalized assemblages. While Haraway suggests to call our contemporary planetary condition the Chthulucene, an epoch that requires from us to rethink relationality and coexistence , this paper looks at how the animacy of the world and the relationality of nonhuman and human animals in it create circumstances for "tranimals to emerge." By giving ethical consideration to our material animacy, tranimacy will serve as a tool to analyse the entanglement of nonhuman and human animals, trans materiality, and questions relating to agency.