Book Review
Elizabeth Kuroyedov
Marisol de la Cadena’s ambitious and beautiful ethnography unfolds the life-worlds of her two Quecha friends to explore complex entanglements of translation, equivocation, and alterity. While set in the Peruvian Andes near Pacchanta and deeply historicised within the formation of the Peruvian state, this book is truly a story of a father and son – Mariano and Nazario Turpo. De la Cadena is painstakingly dedicated to creating this ethnography as a work of ‘co-labour’ with the Turpos. She begins the process of story-telling by examining her positionality and the inescapable process of translating across those differences. To de la Cadena, making equivalent translations across difference would be pointless (2015: 4). These partial connections built through co-labouring and conversations with Mariano and Nazario are what make Earth Beings. Understanding this desire is critical to reading through the ethnography, as translation and representation are strong undercurrents in every chapter, whether discussing archival papers or Andean shamanism in the tourist industry.
As the book moves through seven separate stories, two interludes, and an epilogue, the reader is introduced in interim pauses to major themes in ontological anthropology. De la Cadena from the outset challenges how we conceptualise political categories by including runakuna– indigenous peasants, tirukuna– ‘earth beings’ or natural entities, and ayllu– the summative world in which all these beings interact, at an equal level of relevance. At its core, Earth Beingsis a cosmopolitical proposal, where relations among divergent worlds are a decolonial practice of politics, with no other guarantee than the absence of ontological sameness (2015: 281). Drawing heavily on Isabelle Stengers, de la Cadena argues for “slowing down the principle that partitions the sensible into humans and things to include other than humans in the debate and interactions with modern institutions” (2015: 281). This is the foundational runakuna practice of being ‘in-ayllu’. Living in-ayllu is, “like a weaving, and all the beings in the world – people, animals, mountains, plants, etc. – are like the threads, we are part of the design. The beings in this world are not alone, just as a thread by itself is not a weaving… a runa is always in-ayllu withother beings” (2015:44).
De la Cadena centres the mountain Ausungate as the core example of an earth being as in-ayllu tirukuna, a relation that twists our notion of what can be a political actor. Though confined to the dense epilogue, de la Cadena explains how runa believe mining developments at Ausungate would actively destroy the ayllu, this relational placement through which runakuna exist with earth beings (2015: 274). Yet terms of Ausungate as ayllu were not relatable for politicians – thus the defense of earth beings shifted for a call to defend the ‘environment’. To save the mountains, tirukuna had to be removed from negotiations because their radical difference exceeded modern politics (2015: 275).
Thinking through the implications of tirukuna exclusion echoes across other indigenous struggles in Latin America wrought with uncontrolled equivocations.The filmWhen Two Worlds Collide centres around Alberto Pizango, an indigenous Shawi who served as the president for Peru’s national indigenous Amazonian organisation (2016). It tells the story of a legal battle for forest rights and recognition of ancestral territory versus the Peruvian state’s desire for oil concessions. Again and again, Peru’s ‘development’ is articulated by both President Garcia and Pizango, yet the violent clashes that unfold are a testimony to two entirely different cosmopolitics, and two entirely different conceptualisations of what ‘development’ means.
Colliding worlds ties into another major theme of Earth Beings– that of difference and alterity. De la Cadena shows how radical difference is not just something people have - rather it is a relational, historical formation that exists within other Latin American institutions. The category of ‘indigeneity’ within the Peruvian national consciousness is contingent on very real power structures and multiple levels of interactions. As both Earth Beingsand When Two Worlds Collidedisplays, the inability of politicians like President Garcia to accept the runakuna’s terms reveals the limits of recognition that the state extends to its ‘others’ (2015:277).
Ironically, when the difference between indigenous and non-indigenous lives is attempted to be institutionally recognised, it leads to an underwhelming mess of ‘multiculturalism’ – which de la Cadena frames as the antithesis to cosmopolitics. This is explained through the story of Nazario’s collaboration with the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) in Washington, D.C. De le Cadena explains with an undertone of humour how Nazario came to be in charge of the Quecha exhibition along with a North American indigenous curator. Not surprisingly, these two actors had completely different ideas of what a museum collection was, or should be. A ‘theatre of communication’ was staged in an attempt to make the interests of each group possible (2015: 216).
One visible effect of these equivocations was the exhibit mis-naming Nazario as a paqu,which NMAI translated to ‘a spiritual leader or shaman’. Yet de la Cadena explains how an individual does not easily confer the identity of ‘paqu’ to oneself, rather the villages’ evaluation, often performed through rumour, would identify a paqu, ‘someone who knows’. A ‘shaman’ is a new word relevant to Western tourism, and by making this translation at the NMAI, Nazario later became famous in Peru as an embodiment of ‘Andean shamanism’, going on to pursue his career in tourism. Thus, these translated representations were not without consequence. Even more significantly, to Nazario, the idea that earth beings could be represented in the first place was a foreign concept. Some things in the NMAI were deeply affected by translation and could not be what they were in Pacchanta, nor do what they did there (2015: 233).
Despite the richness of stories, the defining, deep statements in Earth Beings are confined to the epilogue. As a co-construction of knowledge, it would not make sense to lay the book out in a typical linear chronology. Yet I read beyond this assumption - as a reader interested in indigeneity in the North American context, I believe there a particularstatement to be made by putting ‘theory’ last. This acts as a visual signifier against academia which so consistently privileges factual, historical knowledge. De la Cadena discusses the historical versus ahistorical in relation to Mariano’s fight against the hacendado and a box of archival documents. Originally, de la Cadena assumed that her discovery of a box of ‘historical archives’ were sufficient to tell the whole story of the land struggle. Mariano disagreed – there was more to the story of the struggle than what was written on paper (2015: 118). In this sense, I believe Earth Beingsartfully inverses the typical mode of academic knowledge by instead favouring stories that cannot be ‘factually’ checked – but are nonetheless the foundation of the ethnography, and the true proof underpinning her theoretical observations.
Nonetheless, this structure does disfavour the theoretically dense ideas of cosmopolitics and cosmovivir which only receive two dedicated pages of explanation in the epilogue. It might be useful for readers interested in the complexities of theory to read Earth Beings in tandem with her 2010 article “Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual Reflections Beyond ‘Politics’”. I read Earth Beingsas a different text, a book of lived realities where we find cosmopolitics in the ‘real’ world, in the lives of two men. While the lives of Mariano and Nazario give de la Cadena a lens through which to frame her ethnography, I wonder what is lost from such a narrowly defined microcosm.
As a female reader, it is both frequent and disappointing to read beautiful texts like Earth Beings, and then close the cover to realise women are absent. There are only a few moments where women are briefly mentioned – yet this is always in relation to the important men they are associated with, existing only as the wives of Nazario, Mariano, and President Toledo. While focusing on the constructed alterity of indigeneity, de la Cadena does not consider the contingent alterity of other social categories like gender. Analysing gender is a complex task which certainly is not the aim of the book - yet I find it difficult to believe women are absent from in-ayllu relations. How women interact and relate in-ayllu would be fascinating to understand.
Ultimately, Earth Beingsis a testament to the fact that Mariano’s and Nazario’s stories challenge the inevitable historical requirements of politics (2015: 278). It is an ethnography thatproves complex lifeworlds, theory, and action can, and do, exist outside the requirement of modern politics. It is a call for a politics underpinned by divergence, moving across worlds of difference, and the story of the Turpos is a striking insight into just one of many different realms. For those who also believe incosmovivir, or to creating mutual respect among diverse worlds (2015:285), Earth Beingsis an indispensable text.
References
De la Cadena, Marisol. 2010. “Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual Reflections Beyond ‘Politics’”. Cultural Anthropology25(2):334-70.
Stengers, Isabelle. 2005. “A Cosmopolitical Proposal.”In Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, 994-1003. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
When Two Worlds Collide. 2016, motion picture, Taira Akbar. Distributed by Yachaywasi Films and First Run Features.
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