2017 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (2): 1–10

DEBATE

Matters of method; Or, why

method matters toward a not
only colonial anthropology
Marisol de la Cadena, University of California–Davis

The following is a response to the comments on de la Cadena, Marisol.

2015. Earth beings: Ecologies of practice across Andean worlds.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, which was published in Hau:
Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7(1): 537–565.

Once a book is published, it acquires a life of its own. When readers embrace it
either with gusto or disgust, without apathy, the satisfaction is big: like mine. My
goal was to provoke thought—mine had been provoked by the years spent with
Mariano and Nazario; provocations can be controversial, and so is Earth beings
(2015). Academic colleagues, whether I know them or not, either engage the argu-
ment or reject it, many times without engaging it from within. The engagement, of
course, is not blind acceptance; it is the practice that offers creative critical com-
ment, a demand for more rigor, complexity, and subtlety—like Catherine Allen’s
(2017) and Valentina Napolitano’s (2017) comments for this symposium, and with
which I will start.
Catherine Allen’s first book was published the same year I arrived in the United
States as a graduate student: 1988. Back then I was critical of it. I still remember
thinking “people died throughout the period of Allen’s fieldwork—how could she
not have included that more prominently in her narrative?” Little did I know how
much her narrative would assist my efforts to accept the Turpo’s challenge to en-
gage with what, as I say in the book, “I did not get.” She responded to a related
challenge using tools that were different and also similar to mine, with dialogic an-
thropology being a good example of it. My conversation with Mariano and Nazario

 his work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Marisol de la Cadena.

T
ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau7.2.002
 Marisol de la Cadena 2

as a shared practice of thought participates in such lineage. Yet, unlike the 1980s
dialogic anthropology, I do not use our conversation toward linguistic analysis, to
get close to “meaning,” or to alter the politics of representation. Maybe we also do
all that. But the goal of our conversation was to create a shared condition where
equivocations and their control (when possible) were enacted. This allowed us an
awareness—as much as possible, at least—of practices and entities as they emerged
among us as more than one (because they also were with and through our mutual
excess) yet less than many (because we shared them). Our conversation became
the shared site where our worlds also diverged as they emerged in/with their con-
stitutive difference. A partial connection par excellence, “our conversation” was the
complex site from where I felt and thought with my friends, even when I was do-
ing it alone. This may be “dialogic anthropology,” but also exceeds it. As Catherine
Allen acknowledges, it is not the same wheel (just like “dialogic anthropology” was
not the same dialogical wheel that anthropology had been before!).
The richly equivocal conversation that was our partially shared condition, of-
fered possibilities to displace and redescribe practices, entities, and conditions that
appeared different from, but still connected to, what (or who or how) had initially
been to me.1 I borrow displacement and redescription as ethnographic practices
from Marilyn Strathern (1992).2 Displacement results from controlling—without
canceling—(the practice of) categories, concepts, or analytics that may overpower,
perhaps even kidnap the situation that is up for description. Marilyn Strathern calls
what results from this practice “a better description”—one that, for my purposes, also
indicates the limits and therefore excesses to the displaced categories/practices that,
while present yet controlled, cannot further explain away the situation in question,
which remains opened to a “better description”; this can go on endlessly, without clo-
sure. As a method and an analytical site for displacement and redescription, our con-
versation was also the place from where to perform what I call ontological openings,
the possibility to unsettle “the onto-epistemic stance that drives to ‘secure’ intelligibil-
ity between worldings,” to use Valentina Napolitano’s precise words in her comment.3
Sonqo ayllu and Pacchanta ayllu are other similar and different sources of in-
spiration Allen and I share. Located in the former, she challenges my rendition of
ayllumanta parlaqta as “speaking from (not for) the ayllu”; she says it is insuffi-
cient. Intriguingly she writes: “Ayllumanta exceeds its possible English or Spanish
translations because the materiality of the relations it references differ radically from
relationality and materiality as we usually understand them” (Allen 2017: 541; her

1. Thus, perhaps different from dialogic anthropology, my relationship with the other was
to affect the way I/we think.
2. See also Ashley Lebner (2016) and Alberto Corsín Jimenez (2015)
3. Andrew Canessa (2017) refers to our conversations as “interviews.” Such reading sim-
plifies my conversations with the Turpos; it is also an analytical error, if only because
interviews aim to produce “information” in a relation where a person asks and the
other responds. A conversation is dialogic: utterances (of diverse sorts, including prac-
tices) are shared. This productively obfuscates the difference between originating and
ending points even when the conversation is composed by questions and answers and
their overlap. Also, instead of “information,” in my opinion, the usual goal of the inter-
view, a conversation seeks to share ideas through togetherness.

2017 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (2): 1–10

3 Matters of method

emphasis). Manta, she explains, is a complex preposition with more than the mean-
ing that I give it; it indicates an Andean kind of emergence in which detachment from
an origin is impossible. The purpose of my translation was to indicate the inherent
relationality between the ayllu and Mariano, and thus the impossibility of his role
as a modern “representative” with the ability to detach himself from the collective.
Allen’s comment does not thwart this interpretation. On the contrary, it continues
the onto-epistemic opening of Mariano’s complex “political representation”—that is,
Allen’s “there is more to it” beautifully resonates with “not only,” the analytics that
Mariano taught me in order to constantly open up what seemed to have come to a
closure. I think he would have joined Catherine Allen in her challenge to me.
Allen continues to demand more—in her words, “an ethnographic and theoreti-
cally more nuanced treatment” (2017: 541)—and she proposes that in-ayllu intra-
relationality can be represented. It requires a semiotics and a practice specific to it
such as the khipu, which, following Gary Urton (2003), Allen defines as “a complex
communication device composed of knots and strings.” I want to open room for
conversation here, and not only to acquit myself from ethnographic oversight by
saying that I was specifically talking about modern forms of representation—which
I was. But beyond that, and embracing refrains like Allen’s “there is more to it”
and Mariano’s “not only,” I would like to briefly reflect about the potential ana-
lytical actions that “representation” may perform: an important one is severing the
khipu (the representation device) from its being in-ayllu, which maybe it was (as
was what I called Mariano’s archive, and as are some textiles depending, of course,
on the practice that makes them and keeps them). Severing the in-ayllu khipu rela-
tion may have been a frequent practice performed in interactions between colonial
functionaries and Andean khipukamayuq—these latter are individuals who may
have also been intrarelated to the “device.” Considering/translating khipus as rep-
resentation devices might have yielded much desirable information, for example,
“records” about “ayllu,” rendering the latter through a relation between place and
people. This would not be too different from representations of ayllu in modern
documents, both legal and ethnographic. Avoiding the interpretation of khipu as a
device to represent ayllu does not preclude its possibility as such. I do not want to
cancel possibilities for alternative representational forms; however, to be cautious
(also because it adds layers that enrich the analysis) I would like to suggest that
khipu may have been a specific representational form, and not only.
Dwelling in equivocation—Allen’s title to her comment—is risky; it requires
constant attention to its complexity. This takes me to an important point raised
by Valentina Napolitano: what would an exploration of sexual difference that uses
ontology as analytics look like? This is an immense question meriting a book of its
own. In fact, she is right to say that women appear only peripherally in Earth beings,
and sexuality simply does not appear at all. This not a neglect; instead, it’s a pur-
poseful choice. My decision was also (but only in part) conditioned by Mariano’s
agenda for the book and his personality towering everybody else’s in his family. Of
course, this I could have interpreted through “patriarchy,” but I did not want to if
only because I would have walked shopworn analytical paths. And then there was
my close friendship with Nazario, which did not extend to Liberata, his wife, even
if she was charming, strong, bright, and with tirakuna day and night. It was not easy
for me to engage those relations and not just because I did not want to interfere—I

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 Marisol de la Cadena 4

think to this day I was also not let into those relations. Thus, I left it there. Sexuality
was also a constant event in Pacchanta—Nazario and Liberata’s kids partnered up,
and they had children. Alcohol let loose sexual jokes all the time, and talk about
body parts was loud among men, among women, and among men and women. I
participated in the conversation, teased along with everyone else, and also avoided
serious engagement—it would have been another book, or so I thought (and still
think!). What would sexuality—a modern discursive field—partially connect in
Pacchanta? I avoided the question with no regrets. Valentina Napolitano’s ques-
tion, though, is specific to the sexuality of earth-beings. I never heard talk about
it, but probably because I was not paying enough attention. Earth-beings are male
and female, they have children—and they are both individuals and may emerge
within each other, making them also indistinguishable individually—they are lit-
erally everywhere, below our shoes of course. Both female and male tirakuna are
munayniyuq—they can destroy anything if disrespected. Sometimes the destruc-
tion is spoken about as eating—consuming someone’s body, crops, animals.4 Eating
is also a word used in sexual jokes throughout the country, and in the environs of
Ausangate I have heard such use of the word in Spanish. Eating, sexually speak-
ing, may overlap with tirakuna’s consumption of bodies; in both cases, it may be a
munayniyuq practice, a powerful exercise of the will, and Napolitano’s invitation to
such exploration is well taken.
During a recent visit to Lima, I participated in a workshop attended by a diverse
group of intellectuals. Some of them were Latin American academic colleagues
working in North America and Europe, while others work in South America, and
still others were “ethnic politics” activists (ethnicity is the category through which
indigenous claims are routed to the state). My feeling of achievement was unprec-
edented when they explained that it was impossible to oppose the current destruc-
tion of tirakuna (at the hands of the mighty mining machinery amalgamated by an
alliance between the Peruvian state and global corporations, currently termed ex-
tractivism) in their terms—namely, from an in-ayllu condition. And my feeling came
from the realization that the book could live up to the life-purpose that Mariano
and Nazario wanted it to carry and that these activists shared: their profound wea-
riness at the impossible fact of their being accepted as who they are by the state,
their acknowledgement that “the common parameters through which power can be
gauged and challenged” (Hornborg 2017: 554; my emphasis) are precisely not com-
mon. Rather, they are decided by those who make them usual—or “common,” as in
Alf Hornborg’s comment. Hornborg’s comment denotes annoyance at the disquali-
fication of these (one-sided) usual terms by what he sees as the “extreme exoticism”
of my rendition of runakuna-tirakuna inherent relationality. While he is willing
to accept the relations (between humans and mountains, I guess) he would only

4. This is a point that Allen makes and she wishes I would have developed it—there are
many more things I did not develop. My intention was not to render a narrative with
the pretense of being complete. That would have been impossible, as instructed by
Mariano’s “not only”: this phrase is conceptually powerful as in opening up the pos-
sibility of events, things, relational forms to be more than what they already are, it
potentially cancels the “order-word” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 79) that structures
the desire implicit in modern knowledge to master it all.

2017 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (2): 1–10

5 Matters of method

accept “animated mountains” (not tirakuna, although Hornborg would not care
about this difference) as beliefs to which he would respectfully relate. (Hornborg’s
separation between relations and tirakuna is consequential as it sways the analysis
away from the relational grammar I use. I discuss this below.)
Hornborg relates to me with respect, too—but he would accept to engage in dis-
agreement with me (like he does in his response). Instead, I suspect that he would
not engage in a serious practice of disagreement with Mariano, Nazario, and the
several activists that I recently met in Lima. He would very respectfully think they
are wrong, and consequentially reveal the “uncommonality” of the usual terms with
which power is gauged. From those terms, mountains as earth-beings are beliefs
and to say otherwise is “exotic.” I agree: earth-beings and their world are indeed
exotic to the world in which they are mountains; however, this “exoticism” is an in-
tricate historical condition that is both able to impose the reality of mountains (and
their world) in the world of earth-beings, and unable to cancel the latter—at least so
far. The historical condition that makes earth-beings exotic to Hornborg is the rea-
son that mountains are not exotic to the Turpos or the activists who I recently met.
Hornborg’s reading rejects “partial connections,” the analytics that underpin the
book throughout and that I like to think is also the condition that pins my world
and the Turpos’ world; both, therefore, emerge together as both similar and radi-
cally different from each other. And because the radically different cannot be, when
official political negotiations are needed, they are conducted in the terms made
common to both worlds via a historical imposition that Hornborg’s comment also
illustrates. “Accommodations to modernity” (Hornborg 2017: 554) are not new in
the Andes; in fact, such (benevolent) phrasing is historically problematic. Rather
than simply “accommodating to modernity,” Mariano’s collaboration with leftist
politicians in the 1960s and current indigenous participation in environmental
movements were and are necessary political alliances to recover hacienda land, in
the first case, and against the destruction of nature, in the second case. Yet, haci-
enda land and nature are not only such. As I explain in Earth beings, they occupy
a complex space also occupied by runakuna and tirakuna in-ayllu: the inherent
relations through which they take-place together. Hornborg asks what the politi-
cal implications for anthropology would be if these in-ayllu relations were to be
taken seriously. My answer: the practice of a not only colonial anthropology would
be closer to possible.
I am as surprised by Hornborg’s question as he is by what he sees as my proposal
to take tirakuna seriously, although his words translate my proposal inaccurately.
I will extensively quote one section in his comments to explain how he makes sev-
eral steps that move my analysis to the place of his criticism. At that site, he makes
statements that I do not make, but that he can make because of the place where he
moves my analysis. This is Hornborg:
Remarkably, however, de la Cadena asks her readers to take seriously not
only the relationships that runakuna maintain with earth-beings but also
the existence of those earth-beings themselves. The former [relations] is
a crucial and obvious foundation for the ethnographic project since its
inception, while the latter [earth-beings] has become a shibboleth for the
so-called ontological turn in anthropology. If we are seriously prepared to
endorse animistic mountain worship, to the point of deploring the exclusion

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 Marisol de la Cadena 6

of earth-beings from the public policy discourse that saved Ausangate

from a mining project, what are the political implications for anthropology?
What is the significance of animism for our endorsement of a land reform or
environmental protection? (Hornborg 2017: 554; my emphasis)
And this is my comment: as I say over and over in the book (and he acknowl-
edges, if with obvious disgust, that I do so) runakuna and tirakuna (what he calls
people and mountains) are in/through their relation; I cannot separate the rela-
tions from either without undoing them. Therefore, I do not want the reader to
take seriously earth-beings alone: I am asking them to think—to take seriously—a
relational form from which tirakuna emerge with runakuna (not generic, or even
Andean, people or mountains). “Animistic mountain worship” articulates a differ-
ent form of relation: one that religion (and also modern politics) uses to connect a
subject and object (in this case, people’s worship of nature) that exist independently
of their connection. Modern political representation is premised on the same kind
of relation: a representative stands for (represents) his or her constituency; distinct
from each other, this relation connects them. Mariano’s situation was similar and
it overlapped with his in-ayllu relational being as personero: as such, he was unable
to detach himself from what granted him speech.5 I thank Allen for allowing me
to make my initial point stronger. Perhaps it slows down Hornborg’s hasty analyti-
cal move to the form of relation that connects subjects and objects as entities (also
facts, events, and so forth) that exist independently of their connection and subsist
their disconnection.6
Performing what I call ontological openings requires that we slow down our ana-
lytical habits; it demands that we pause at our grammars. I am not arguing, like the
comments suggest, that subject and object relations are obsolete—I am strongly
arguing that in-ayllu is a different relational form. If there is any subject in my ac-
count, I would say that is the ayllu: the intrarelational condition that makes runak-
una with tirakuna. Perhaps the latter (together, that is, as more than one, less than

5. Maybe using Michael de Certeau I can explain the inseparability of Mariano from in-
ayllu speech (and runakuna from tirakuna) in terms that some readers will listen to
with less discomfort. He explains that writing separates speech from the place of its
enunciation, signifier from signified—without writing, speech remains with the place
where it happens (de Certeau 1988: 216). The form of relation from which Mariano was
in-ayllu personero was similar. It was also different because, grounded in-ayllu, it did
not depend on the presence (or absence) of writing.
6. Canessa makes a similar hasty analytical move when, describing what he sees as the
redundancy of my book, he writes: “The Andean ethnographic record is clear that
many Andean people inhabit an animated landscape where the mountains and the
earth are beings intimately connected to the lives of people” (2017: 547; my emphasis).
He is right, that is what the Andean ethnographic record says—and I do not say it is
wrong. But there is a difference that Canessa does not apprehend and that makes him
think his sentence above and the sentence “runakuna are in-ayllu with tirakuna” say
the same thing. The difference—which Allen notices—is one between an interrelation
(between mountains and the lives of people) and ayllu as intrarelation (from where
runakuna emerge with tirakuna). Consequently, Canessa misses my reading ayllu as
relational form.

2017 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (2): 1–10

7 Matters of method

many) are the complex objects of such complex subject:relations. It matters what
relations we use to think other relations with—this is a refrain Donna Haraway
(2016) repeats, which she learned from Marilyn Strathern. Form and content are
important; they mutually correspond to the event whose expression they are. I am
sorry if the grammar of those events is cumbersome to Canessa—and maybe other
readers too—but I felt they were necessary.
Finally, a word about history, neoliberalism, and ontologically informed anal-
ysis. As I explained in previous work (de la Cadena 2010), I became aware of
earth-beings when Nazario and I attended a demonstration to protest a prospec-
tive mining venture that threatened to destroy Ausangate. During the weeks that
followed this event, I learned that what to me was a mountain was also an earth-
being and that this was not a discussion about different views of the same thing—it
was not a relativist situation. Ausangate was both a mountain and an earth-being;
however, one of them could not be when the interlocutors were state officials. They
would respect Ausangate as a cultural belief but could not accept its reality—like
Hornborg in his comment. I was privy to a politics of what could be, where who
decided what was could not be in question: an ontological politics at the limits of
state recognition. The defense of Ausangate was a consequence of what in Latin
America we call extractivism: the neoliberal opening of the region to the brutal
corporate extraction of resources to satisfy the global demand of minerals, energy,
and cattle feed.
Thus, I agree with Hornborg: confronting neoliberalism is important. Yet, even
in its multicultural version, neoliberalism is not without colonialist and mod-
ernist aspirations for uniformity as he apparently claims. Prioritizing the former
brings about the latter—it is impossible to purify neoliberalism from coloniality.
Extractivism is a neoliberal practice with the economic, technological, and politi-
cal capacity to—in modern colonial practice—make uniform nature out of other-
than-human entities. Hornborg positions himself within that uniformity; given his
comment, even if he would fight extractivism from an environmental positioning,
he would be among those with the unquestionable power to decide what is. To
clarify Hornborg’s misunderstanding: siding with the indigenous defense of earth-
beings does not demand the suspension of disbelief; that might be equivalent to
conversion. What we need to suspend is the power we grant our disbelief to define
what is!
Paradoxically, Ausangate as earth-being, an ahistorical entity, became part of
my analytical attention because of neoliberal extractivism, a historical practice.7
Mariano’s insistence that there was more to his story than what I could read in
the documents in his archive offered the opportunity of similar paradox: histor-
ical events made with the participation of ahistorical entities. Rather than a foil
(Canessa’s word) the story of Nazario using historical documents as kindling
opened up possibilities beyond history. Yet, I do not reject history (like Canessa
thinks); instead complex history—the possibility that it might be with the ahistori-
cal—is one of the projects of the book. I work with a historical object—Mariano’s

7. Similar events—the local defense of other-than-human entities that are also nature—
continued to happen in Latin America; most of them were only locally known, others
appear in websites, rarely they make it to central newspapers.

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 Marisol de la Cadena 8

archive—conceptualized as boundary object with the capacity to open up the his-

torical to the ahistorical (in this specific case, in-ayllu practices).8 I am not worried,
as Canessa understands, that “extending historicity to subalterns . . . may serve to
include them within a coloniality of history and displace other ways of seeing the
past and the present” (my emphasis). Displacement in this simple, unidirectional
way—one way of “seeing the past and the present” is replaced by another one—
is not an analytic form in my book.9 In fact, it is hard (to say the least) to make
such a proposition using partial connections as analytics. What I propose is that
both ways—modern history and ahistorical events—are complexly together, that
the historical is not the only regime for “events.” Canessa’s phrasing above is it-
self problematic: it implies a hierarchical place from where historicity is “extended”
to the so-called subalterns—as if the latter were without it, which is not what I
wrote. A note specifically about subalterns: in an earlier work (de la Cadena 2000) I
used Gramscian categories to conceptualize runakuna as peasants. In Earth beings,
my concern is runakuna’s ahistorical eventful intrarelationality with tirakuna—it
would be hard to think the latter through the category subaltern. Finally, and on
a related note, although I quote Bruno Latour, I do not go “further” than him as
Canessa (mis)understands. Latour includes things in history. I do not conceptual-
ize tirakuna as things—emerging in-ayllu they are not supernatural entities, and
they are not like the saints Spaniards brought with them either! Likening relations
between people and saints—religious relations—to the in-ayllu relationality of ti-
rakuna with runakuna ignores the specificity of this relation. It also translates it
to “people intimately related with the animated landscape”—a different relational
form. If I have dwelled on that too much already, it is because many of Hornborg’s
and Canessa’s critical comments result from their rejecting—or misunderstand-
ing—this relational form. It is true, like Canessa says, that the Andean ethnograph-
ic record is replete with references to the “animated landscape” of “ayllus.” I do not
write about “animated landscapes”; that phrase transpires within the grammar of
nature. Earth beings are not nature. This short sentence obliges a method that dis-
places that grammar (that of a subject and an object, I repeat!) without canceling
it.10 Practicing such displacement, Earth beings (the book) is also about method:
the grammar it uses redescribes “most ethnographic descriptions of the Andean
community” (Canessa’s words) including the habit of assuming that individuals
are not the ayllu—because the habit indicates that the ayllu is the sum (the added
plurality) of individuals, and that practices (like those of Mariano and Nazario)
are individual only. Redescribing the Andean ethnographic record through the
grammar of Roy Wagner’s “fractal person” (1991), the ayllu emerges through, for

8. I wrote that my intention was to open “the historical archive to the otherwise; that
is, to the ahistorical in-ayllu practices that contributed to the making of this archive”
(2015: 150).
9. See above for my use of displacement as analytics toward redescription.
10. In the sense of displacement explained above; that is, not implying replacement (the
sense with which Canessa uses the term.)

2017 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (2): 1–10

9 Matters of method

example, Mariano or Nazario,11 and their practices are not only theirs: they also
emerge in-ayllu. This displaces the analytic habit that describes those practices as
being shared/ not shared by individuals (summing up to more or less numbers of
individuals involved in “traditional practices”—or those of Mariano and Nazario).
And one last caveat: Earth beings does not seek to demonstrate anything. It seeks to
affect our usual concepts to enable “descriptions that would be better” toward the
possibility of a de-colonial anthropology.

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11. A small yet important correction: neither is “a being in-ayllu,” like Canessa paraphras-
es me. They are in-ayllu, one again, the relational form—the grammar—in those two
phrases is different!

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 Marisol de la Cadena 10

Urton, Gary. 2003. Signs of the Inka Khipu: Binary coding in the Andean knotted-string re-
cords. Austin: University of Texas Press.
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Cambridge University Press.
 Marisol de la Cadena
 Department of Anthropology
 University of California-Davis
 135 Young Hall Davis, CA 95616 USA
mdelac@ucdavis.edu

2017 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (2): 1–10