HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

Constructing cosmoscapes : cosmological currents in conversation and contestation in

contemporary Bolivia
--Manuscript Draft--

Manuscript Number: 2018086R3

Full Title: Constructing cosmoscapes : cosmological currents in conversation and contestation in

contemporary Bolivia

Short Title: Constructing cosmoscapes

Article Type: Article

Keywords: Cosmopolitics
Climate Change
Alterity
Indigeneity
Andes
Bolivia

Corresponding Author: Rosalyn Bold, PhD

University College London Centre for the Anthropology of Sustainability, Department of
Anthropology
London, UNITED KINGDOM

Corresponding Author's Institution: University College London Centre for the Anthropology of Sustainability, Department of
Anthropology

First Author: Rosalyn Bold, PhD

Order of Authors: Rosalyn Bold, PhD

Order of Authors Secondary Information:

Manuscript Region of Origin: UNITED KINGDOM

Abstract: This article explores how cosmological currents contest and converse with one another
to compose a shifting 'cosmoscape' in Kaata, a highland Bolivian community, and at
the national level. The community is experiencing transformation from a world founded
in reciprocal relations between humans and animate mountain 'earth beings' towards
an anthropocene where non-humans comprise 'natural resources' for human
exploitation. Challenging an easy contrast between modernity and animism as reified
'ontologies', I explore the community as a cosmoscape composed of conversations
between contrasting cosmological trends; mountain beings are themselves the result of
cosmopolitical negotiations with the colonial modern state rather than timeless
constructs. In the wider state-level cosmoscape in which the community sits, social
movements contest the tokenistic utilisation of 'earth beings' in contemporary
indigenist legislation with an alternative cosmology in which they are capable of
retribution, a vision contesting extractivism, and revealing similar tensions and
conversations between relational and extractive currents.

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Opposed Reviewers:

Response to Reviewers:

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Cover Letter

Dear Deborah and reviewers,

Many thanks for your careful comments on this draft of Cosmoscapes. I agree that the
article is maturing with every revision and am happy to have such clear and
considerate guidance; it will now I hope be ready for publication.

Firstly, I have modified the section on state politics to make it clear how communities
like Kaata participate directly in decision making under the indigenous state, a
fascinating and somewhat unusual situation that merited further exploration. I have
described the Kaatan delegates to the Conamaq assembly in La Paz and their views on
the conflict surrounding the Law of Mother Earth, as well as referencing a NACLA
article on this for further detail on it than I have had space for. I have also squeezed in
a little relevant ethnography on coca, key in motivating the migration of young
people, and in shaping attitudes to the government (President Morales was the head of
the coca growers’ union). This was a feature of earlier drafts that was lost in
successive revisions; I am happy to have restored it!

I have kept the ‘equivocation’ in, explaining the term further as requested. I consider
it is crucial to the article to indicate how indigenous worlding language can be
employed tokenistically without exploring its real ramifications for extractivism; this
is a major issue under an ‘indigenous government’, and another of the particularities
thrown up by the unusual regime in Bolivia, which will be of interest to a wider
research community working on indigeneity, and also forms an informative
counterpoint to Cepek’s work. I have re-introduced his article at the end of the
preceding section, yet have left this ultimate contrast implicit which I believe is more
powerful in stating the contrast explicitly.

I am grateful to the editor for inviting a regional specialist to comment on this draft. I
agree with the implications of the language the reviewer highlights in their opening
paragraph, and have modified those passages accordingly. I also explore the
generational differences more through the explication of coca growing, though my
space to do this here is very restricted!

It is really marvellous to have come across someone familiar with the area through
Jonathan Alderman’s thesis; as the discussion of the mummies occurs only in an
appendix I had not read it myself, though as a contemporary working in the same area
I am of course familiar with his research, and was delighted he knew of the mummies
too. I have spoken to Jonathan about this as well as reading the interview, and he
agrees with my interpretation that his informant is obfuscating Jonathan’s clear and
repeated request for information on Kaata’s mummies. Jonathan agrees that the theft
of the mummies by community leaders was widely known and discussed by the
various villages of the mountain, and in another of the interviews included in this
thesis, a second informant, Aureliano, agrees that terraces below Kaata’s square
belonged to the chullpas who were in caves among them, and taken out certain days
of the week and celebrated. The interview the reviewer refers to is with a leader from
the neighbouring community of Niñokorin, Feliciano. Instead of replying with
reference to Kaata’s mummies, he replies in terms of another dig in Niñokorin at
which mummies were not found, but only shards of pottery!
This is quite typical; as Niñokorin forms part of the major ayllu of Kaata their leaders
collaborate on various matters, so Feliciano is unlikely to detail a theft that would
implicate them, even if he is not actually complicit in it himself. Cases of fraud and
theft among community leaders are sadly quite common and it is in my experience
almost impossible to ask them about it without shutting down communications and
relationships. As for the museum, Feliciano states that it is empty, so it seems to be a
failed attempt.

It is of course true that Bastien specifies Kaata’s mummies were burnt and thrown
into the river by the Spanish. It seems that some remained and were kept a secret by
the community for a very long time, even from Bastien himself (or else he was
entreated to keep quiet about them), which is understandable given that they are
considered to be under threat from outsiders (like Bastien or the Spanish, who as
q’aras occupy a similar category to Kaatan minds despite their spatio-temporal
distance to ours!). I have added a footnote on this, citing the evidence that there were
mummies in Alderman’s work and my own, as well as Llanos Layme’s description -
his article in Spedding’s book is available in the British Library, though is of course
hard to access it was published in Bolivia, as so many publications by ethically
motivated Andean anthropologists!

As regards the minor points, I have removed the reference to the Viracocha pachakuti,
and agree that it was unnecessary. I have left Gose’s description of pachakuti in as it
is part of a quote which deals with other matters more important to the argument; in
any case I believe that his short summary of pachakuti as ‘returning to earth’ is
coherent with the wider explanation of the concept that I detail in this section, and
functions well as a summary. Gose is widely renowned as a very careful scholar; his
work revisits the conclusions that Bastien he claims came across semi-intuitively and
supports them through a formal and factual methodology. I have specified that the
coca traded with the lower villages was not grown there but traded with the valleys.
Where the word q’ara might be misleading, such as in describing the change villagers
are undergoing, I changed this to misti, where necessary- q’ara is the idealised end of
the pole that incorporates mistis too! I believe ‘oblige’ is the best translation in ‘we
must oblige the earth to produce’ - what the person means is that they have to give it
a lot to oblige it to give something back, which it is less willing to do now than
before. Oblige I believe is much better than ‘force’, ‘bind’ or ‘compel’, secondary
suggested translations for the term in the dictionary - humans can’t force earth beings,
only make them aware of their obligations! I have dropped the reference to returns to
mountain spirits for the mine as suggested as I have no space to explore it in sufficient
detail.

I hope this satisfactorily answers your concerns and that you will be happy with the
revised draft of the article.

Best wishes

Etc.
Manuscript

Constructing cosmoscapes : cosmological currents in conversation and contestation

in contemporary Bolivia

A wave of anthropological accounts highlighting other worlds’ non-modern

ontological premises has followed Stengers’ 2005 call for a cosmopolitics “where

cosmos refers to the unknown constituted by [these] multiple, divergent worlds, and

to the articulation of which they would eventually be capable” (Stengers 2005:995).

Cosmopolitical conversations are crucial in a context of environmental, economic

and climatic crises, and increased extractive activity (Danowski and Viveiros de

Castro 2017, Latour 2017). Studies focussing on ontology have however been

justifiably accused of reifying and isolating indigenous worlds from modernity (Bond

and Bessire 2015, Holbraad and Pedersen 2017). ‘Ontologies’ become troublesome

when reified as bounded entities, as anthropologists discovered of ‘culture’, little

accommodating flows of ideas, values and things across space and time. Rather than

categorising others as idealised bearers of non-modern ontologies, we should be

“honouring intellectual agency by accepting their multiple epistemological positions,

their uncertain political representations, and their explicit acknowledgement of the

provisional nature of such quasi-objects as ‘earth beings’” (Cepek 2016:633).

Simplifying generational differences leads to portraying others as inhabiting “largely

homogeneous “worlds” or unchanging cultures” (Erazo and Jarrett 2018:159).

Such critiques of the Ontological Turn make it clear that we need to build more

complex understandings of how ontological currents converse with and accompany

one another in specific settings. The material I will analyse here, from the highland

Bolivian village of Kaata, shows that actors have conflicting ideas about mountains,

which are sometimes ‘natural resources’ to be exploited and at others powerful ‘earth

1
beings’ (de la Cadena 2010). Moving away from a reified vision of earth beings as a

timeless Andean configuration which we can safely juxtapose to a de-animating

(Latour 2017) ‘modernity’, I will show how contemporary transformations in the

nature of mountains/earth beings emanates from a historical trajectory of

cosmopolitical conversations that we can trace to the colonial era, when ancestral and

political agency became concentrated in mountain beings in a pachakuti, a moment

of cosmic transformation. Rather than a reified and static understanding of mountains

as earth beings, we will see how contemporary conceptualisations of them are

contested, contextual, and emanate from syncretised colonial visions. I will consider

these understandings of earth beings in the context of contemporary claims by the

‘indigenous’ Bolivian state and social movements to be realising a pachakuti,

understood in this context - by some - as a long-awaited moment in which colonial

repression is reversed, and the internal logic of directly democratic, autochthonous

communities becomes widespread in the nation-state (Gutierrez Aguilar 2014). A

contrasting contemporary pachakuti connotes the ethnic succession of indigenous

peoples to ‘colonial’ wealth and privilege in an anthropocentric world with little

room for earth beings; I will examine this as a telling case of ‘equivocation’ (Viveiros

de Castro 2004).

These conflicting cosmological currents are visible across the contemporary

community of Kaata; they appeared in concentrated form early in my fieldwork when

I asked the community leaders elected for that year whether they still carried out

weather rituals. Largely they did, even if there are ‘only a few of us up here now to

maintain them’; yet the complex of ceremonial entreaties to stop a deluge in the early

rainy season, inundating new seedlings, could no longer take place. Key to them were

the chullpas, the mummified ancestors which used to be buried below the main

2
square which was once the ‘heart’ of the animate anthropomorphic ‘mountain body’

(Bastien 1979). The chullpas, they told me, ‘ruled over everything here before’.

There were widespread accusations among the villagers that they had been sold by

former community leaders to ‘archaeologists from Cusco’ - a matter which was hotly

argued over.1

What I attempt to conceptualise in this article is the shifting of ontological

frame which allows these mummies to be simultaneously, on one hand, key to the

contemporary cosmology of the village, and on the other, sold by those of its

members entrusted with leadership. This is an on going cosmopolitical conversation

visible across the community’s activities, and indeed those of the wider ‘indigenous

state’.

To conceptualise the nature of interacting cosmopolitical understandings in

actors’ experiences of the world, we can turn to the literary theorist Pavel’s concept

of ‘ontological landscapes’ (1981). Pavel indicates “one cannot avoid the impression

that ontologies are in a continual state of fermentation, change and degradation, in a

permanent movement” (Pavel 1981:7). He commences his analysis with a reference

to Haydn’s The Creation, an “enthusiastic, open celebration” (149) of what was by

then an old cosmology, whereas a new cosmology was established in European

scientific milieux and was constantly conquering new social territories. Pavel thus

explores a context of cosmological change, when conflicting ideas composed the

‘ontological landscape’ of Europe. I will show how such conflicting or contrasting

1 Bastien (1978) records villagers’ testaments that Kaata’s mummies were burnt and thrown in
the river by the Spanish, though we imagine the community might have succeeded in keeping some of
their treasured mummy bundles hidden over intervening years, a secret even from the anthropologist;
Alderman (2015) concurs that the story of the sale of Kaata’s mummies by local leaders resulting in
changes to the weather was widespread among the villagers of the mountain. We can further add to
local evidence the testament of Llanos Layme (2005) who records a ceremony to stop the rains with
Kaata’s mummies at the centre.

3
strands combine in Kaata in what I call a ‘cosmoscape’ of surfacing and subsumed

understandings, succeeding each other contextually.

Which cosmological framework we are influenced by in interpreting the world

at a certain moment is determined by circumstance, as by strategic decisions. Cepek

(2016) urges against a too literal acceptance of instrumental or contested assertions

about earth beings, showing how the internationally resonant idea that oil is, for the

Cofán of Ecuador, the blood of buried earth beings was constructed by Cofán actors

challenging hydrocarbon extraction on their land. The ethnography demonstrates that

ideas about ‘earth beings’ can be in a continual state of change and dialogue with

‘other’ ontological understandings. That the idea of oil as ‘blood’, hypothesised or

‘made up’ by Cofán activists, is taken literally by international actors, and widely

taken up in activist networks, as Cepek highlights, demonstrates Cofán success in

communicating with the international realm to further their wider objectives in

challenging oil extraction. The idea is also likely to be accepted by a younger

generation of Cofán, becoming culturally inscribed. This selective essentialism on the

part of the Cofán should not surprise us. ‘Indigenous’ thought in Latin America is

frequently the fruit of such cosmopolitical conversations, and identities are

strategically claimed (Urban and Scherzer 1991; Postero and Zamosc 2004).

As de la Cadena (2010) indicates, the decision, by a coalition of leftists,

environmentalists, and indigenists, to bring non-modern understandings to the fore by

writing the pachamama or ‘mother earth’ into the Ecuadorian constitution is also

cosmo-political, “rendering illegitimate the exclusion of indigenous practices from

nation state institutions”, as well as accompanied for some by underlying non-modern

convictions. Such approaches fulfil Stenger’s (2005) call by offering us an

opportunity to ‘slow down’ reasoning and contemplate the possibility of new

4
interpretations. I will consider how the Kaatan cosmoscape merges into that of the

contemporary state through the Bolivian “Law of Mother Earth”, championed

internationally as a radical measure making the earth a legal subject with rights, and

subject to considerable contestation by coalitions of actors, who it would be

misleading to separate into camps of modern and non-modern. Revealing how

convictions are expressed circumstantially does not mean that belief in these earth

beings is solely instrumental, though it can be espoused in such a way by specific

actors for their own ends: it means that different worlds come to the fore in certain

moments and contexts; that they are in short, cosmopolitical. Reality is fragmented,

and many worlds can be at play in the same moment, contesting each other for

relevance, or complimenting one another’s perspectives.

In considering Kaata, a village experiencing cosmological change, I find that

contrasting ontological currents surface in certain contexts and times. The mountains

are sometimes earth beings, yet in other contexts open cast mining is permissible, as

is selling the mummies who ‘ruled over everything’ until a short time ago. I propose

we conceive such terrains as cultural ‘cosmoscapes’, where cosmologies may come

to the fore contextually. In affixing the suffix ‘scape’, I draw on Ingold’s elaboration

of a landscape as a complex of social and natural activities, a “congelation… of

ancestral beings”, furnishing humans with origins and destiny points, an “ordered

network of places”, which “can possess meanings at different levels” (Ingold 2000:

53-4). I also draw on Appadurai’s (1990) ‘scapes’, which convey a fluid irregular

character; they are deeply perspectival constructs that don’t look the same from every

standpoint, or ‘imagined worlds’. Interweaving ontological understandings can take

similar shapes or ‘scapes’, especially at moments of cultural encounter, challenge,

and change.

5
A Kaatan Cosmoscape: changing selves and cosmos in Kaata

Kaata, an ayllu2 of around a hundred families, sits around 3600m above sea

level among the snow-capped mountains of Apolobamba, in the north of the state of

La Paz. Joseph Bastien (1978), in a now classic ethnography, explored how the

mountain on which the village sits was a ‘metaphorical’ body with organs. Kaata was

the ‘stomach’ of this mountain deity, producing potatoes key to the sustenance of the

villages at other ecological levels, exchanged for coca traded from the low-lying

valleys by the villages at the ‘legs’ of the mountain, and meat from the herders at its

‘head’, in a classic Andean ‘vertical economy’ (Murra 1975). The Qollahuaya healers

of the region were famed for their skill in divination, locating illness and misfortune

in the human body by throwing coca leaves, or cutting open a guinea pig and reading

the spots on its liver. The pertaining part of the mountain body could then be cured,

ensuring an analogic cure in the plaintiff. In this way we might say that the landscape

Bastien describes is fractal, another expression of the ‘symmetry across scale’ Allen

(1997, 2016) identifies in the Andean use of miniature models.

Villagers tell me of the mountain body metaphor they ‘did use to say this, but

do not think it any more’, often remembering the idea with affection. In many ways

however the mountain remains agentive, and the spatial orientations and attributes of

its metaphorical body still have some standing in terms of their characteristics.

Powerful ritual specialists still come from the ‘head’ of the mountain to preside over

Kaata’s ceremonies, the realm of the condors and snow capped heights. Kaata still

produces the potatoes that were the stomach of the mountain, though the trade with

2
An ayllu is commonly taken to mean the collective encompassing a community and their lands.

6
the lower and upper levels has declined, as the upper ayllus have become wealthy

enough to migrate away and visit markets to buy staple carbohydrates.

Researching in Kaata between 2010 and 2014, I was told that ‘everything is

changing’; what the villagers called ‘climate change’ was an inseparable component

of a mood of the world, transforming the entire landscape and indeed cosmos of the

village. This encompasses changes to weather and crops, as well as human activities

like tending the soils with chemicals, and shifting economic practices, in a seamless

transformation encompassing cultural and natural changes. The village cultivates

potatoes, wheat, barley, beans, peas and maize on terraced fields on the steep slopes

of Mount Kaata. As the climate warms, the upper level at which potatoes are grown

increases every year, and the maize cultivated at the lowest and warmest levels is

every year ‘climbing’ the slopes. Most young people now live and work outside the

community, which consists predominantly of middle-aged and elderly couples and

their youngest children. Many young people migrate to the lowlands to cultivate the

cash crop coca, the principle ingredient in cocaine. Middle-aged men often move

between Kaata and La Paz, and return to carry out community offices for a year,

serving in one of six rotating authority roles which all must take in their turn in to

attain full membership of the ayllu. Whilst in Bastien’s day there were 200 families

living in Kaata, today my research assistant and I estimated there were 100, not all of

whom were resident all year round. My young migrant friends were concerned that in

another generation’s time there would be no one in the village at all, and some were

keen to teach their children traditional arts like playing the long tarka flute, or

carrying the woven scarlet bags emblematic of Callawaya healers, in which the

itinerant healers once kept their medicinal herbs as they walked from village to

village.

7
 Key to the changes taking place in the community since Bastien’s time, to the

minds of its inhabitants, are clothes. Young people wear different clothes now;

shinier, newer and more self-conscious than the torn and well-used items that their

fathers use for everyday work in the fields, the woven ponchos men wear for special

occasions, or the woven skirts, blouses and headbands that many women wear every

day. International fashions are in evidence; I noted in 2011 the very latest trends in

the winkle pickers and drainpipe jeans on a young man who had spent two months

down a one-man mine shaft teasing out fragments of gold, and was taking them for

sale in La Paz.

Clothes express a complex of changes for the villagers, and are key to

constituting Andean ethnicity (de la Cadena, 2000; Weismantel 2001; Seligman

1989; 1993). De la Cadena explores how clothes help to articulate a circumstantial

and fundamentally relational ethnicity; as she explores in Cusco’s markets, what

matters most in a social interaction in this constantly racially aware climate is who is

‘more Indian’, and who is ‘more white’ (de la Cadena 2000). Whilst there are many

grades of identity between the two extremes, such as mestizo (mixed), or chola

(citified Indian), Indian and white are essentially two hierarchically skewed poles that

frame self-identity and interaction. Clothes are crucial in signalling these identities:

Weismantel (2001) and Seligman (1989, 1993) explore the importance of the clothes

in constituting the chola, Weismantel’s informants widely agreeing the wide pollera

skirt to be the fundamental marker of chola identity. Chola women are independent

actors who mediate the space between the city and countryside. Girls in Kaata now

wear polleras, which connotes a change in character: they go to cities and coca fields

and are less subject to their fathers’ control.

8
 As young people shift their clothes, Kaatans are moving away from an Andean

runa (‘person’ in Quechua) countryside-dwelling identity to a citified way of being.

They are becoming to their own minds, more like the q’ara (whites) or misti (mixed).

Artefacts are perceived to be complexes here of the relationships that compose them;

inherent in the clothes young people wore were the circuits of desire that attracted

them to the cities and coca fields, where they work for cash. These circuits replace

the reciprocal economies of subsistence farming in Kaata, and the networks of

exchange that connected it to the other villages of the mountain.

In Bastien’s time, I was told, the community was held together through ayni:

villagers would exchange days of their labour, allowing households to mobilise large

work parties. Ayni is a form of reciprocity, expressing the return of like for like,

governing work relations between humans of equal status. For Gose (1994) this

ensures the communitarian egalitarian relations of Andean runa or ‘commoners’.

Ayni is being replaced in Kaata with wage labour between villagers employing each

other on a daily rate, referred to as mink’a. Gose (ibid.) specifies that mink’a

characterised ‘notables’ or monied townsfolk in contrast to the egalitarian dynamics

characterising runa. Whilst before when they were doing ayni, people would turn up

early and work hard for one another, I was told, now that they were being paid they

would come late and take frequent breaks.

This decline in the ability and motivation to work hard is another changing

feature of Kaata: villagers widely perceive the ‘people of before’, including certain

elders still alive, as more hardy that themselves. Hard work is crucial to Andean self-

identity (Lazar 2007), thus this is a fundamental shift of character, indeed of ethnic

personhood, as runa define themselves in relation to exploitative, lazy mistis. The

replacement of egalitarian ayni with stratified mink’a maps a similar shift of ethnic

9
character towards a more misti way of interrelating, with repercussions for

community relationships of trust and solidarity, and is indicative of the increasing

social differentiation in the ayllu as its members shift to cash economies.

Shifts in ethnic self-identity as runa entail changes in relations with non-

humans and to the cosmoscape of the village. Mannheim indicates that ayni is part of

a complex of reciprocities composing runa life and identity, also involving mañay

prestations to powerful non-human telluric spirits, often with the request for a return

prestation. Such reciprocity is, Mannheim (1986) indicates, fundamental to

constituting Andean runa cosmos and is as such a ‘total social phenomenon’ (Mauss,

1966 [1925]). Runa or Quechua-speaking country-dwelling people define themselves

in contrast to whites (q’ara) according to their immersion in and respect for these

reciprocal relations:

“Quechua speakers make the primary social distinction in their universe

between runa human beings and q’ara, naked or uncultured, uncivilised.

The defining characteristic which sets off human beings, runa, from q’ara

is reciprocity” (Mannheim, 1986:268)

To be runa then is to conduct reciprocity between humans and certain non-humans,

conceived to be sentient and agentive, in a relational landscape composed of

reciprocal energetic exchanges. As we encounter with the sale of the mummies or the

decline of ayni, the egalitarian exchange relations binding humans to other humans,

as well as the respectful terms of mañay to deities, are currently breaking down; the

network of relationships which crucially constituted the ontological bases of the

landscapes Mannheim (1986), Gose (1994) or Bastien (1978) describe are

weakening. As this change occurs, community members become more like,

10
according to their self-perceptions, to the mestizos or q’ara of towns and cities, for

whom self-enrichment at the expense of others, human and non-human, is the norm.

This shift in identity and attendant cosmology is evident across generations; elders

report that young people now think of them as “Indians, with empty pockets”. Indian

is an insulting label. Runa by definition are imprecated in their exchange

relationships with each other and with landscapes; many now are escaping these

relations and with them the idea of temperance in individual consumption, and

realising an ethnic change.

That the Andean landscape inhabited by runa is a myriad of relationships

which constitute being or compose its ontological warp and weft is well established

by contemporary ethnographers (Allen 2016, de la Cadena 2010). This relational

landscape in contemporary Kaata is interlayered with anthropocentric currents in

which non-humans are reduced to mere resources for human exploitation and

enrichment, as they are in what Scott (2016) terms the ‘realist rational’ world of

western modernity. As runa are adopting q’ara modes of exchange, work and dress,

so these practices become conceivable. Worlding practices collide, slide across and

contest one another for meaning-making capacity in contemporary Kaata. We can

consider them as existing in dialectical alterity, composing a cosmopolitical

landscape or ‘cosmoscape’.

Climate change, contamination and critique in the cosmoscape

The shifting nature of human-environmental relations is subject to internal

commentary and critique in Kaata, sometimes couched in terms of ‘contamination’ or

‘climate change’; a phenomenon touching everything within the landscape and

comprising a weakening of the relationships holding it all together. As the

11
community were shifting away from subsistence agriculture to consumption and cash

economies, industrially produced foods, like white rice, sweets and noodles, were

increasingly consumed. These were considered to ‘contaminate’ bodies and

landscape, and contribute to ‘climate change’. Discarded waste wrappers make the

mountain weaker, as human bodies consuming the foods they contained were

simultaneously thought to become weaker. Nutrition is composed of reciprocal

relationships and hard work here, an enduring conception in times of change:

community members asserted that white rice had no nutritional value, unless it were

grown and threshed by hand by Kaatans who had moved to the lowlands. It is the

hard work and ayni or exchange relationships in a thing that comprise its value, and

nutrition is seen as an element of this cycle (Author 2019). Villagers combine

cosmological currents in contradictory attitudes to these commodities, whereby they

are consumed yet, it is considered, not without consequences.

The contemporary use of agricultural chemicals was similarly described as

‘contamination’. Chemicals, pesticides or fertilisers, which augment the harvest are

an attempt to ‘take too much’, forcing the villagers’ exchange relationships with the

mountain and soils in ways that have repercussions for their fertility, weakening them

just as human bodies were weakened by the consumption of the food produced.

However, whilst all spoke against them, I saw people spraying crops with pesticide

several times, and their use is tacitly acknowledged. As temperatures become

warmer, potato crops on lower fields are increasingly prone to blight. As a

consequence of this exploitative treatment, the pachamama was tired, as evinced by

the increased stoniness and infertility of the soil- it was claimed that “only obliging it

now can we produce”. ‘Obliging’ the earth, humans push their part of the relational

bargain with a worn-out and somewhat reluctant partner. Human ‘ambition’ was

12
identified as a key cause of this over-exploitation. A modernising agricultural trend is

conversant with the relational landscape, in which such ‘ambitious’ attempts to

intensify production are simultaneously suspected to have repercussions, composing

a contested cosmoscape of interweaving currents of modernist and relational thought.

‘Disposable’ batteries were also considered key to ‘contamination’. Initially

considered fertiliser, exhausted batteries were ploughed into the fields, before

workshops on climate change were carried out in Kaata by Idelfonso, a leader from a

neighbouring village, regional representative to the Conamaq3 indigenous movement,

and employed by the Ministry of the Environment. For Idelfonso, source of local

interpretation of the terms climate change and contamination, these issues are linked

to capitalism and extractive industries, while the traditional lifestyles of the mountain

“don’t contaminate at all”; “we respect the earth”, he claims, in a tone of perfect

humility and reason. Learning they were ‘contaminating’ the land, the concerned

villagers organised an operation to recover as many batteries as possible. It was

explained that they are largely used by young people to power their radios; a blow to

reciprocal relations, as they replace the ritual music once played to draw the elements

and land into relations of exchange. Elders often expressed their concern that young

people declined these days to partake in ceremonies thanking the earth and elements,

and making offerings for their renewed fertility; their music and actions were seen as

crucial contributions to the network of exchange relationships composing the

cosmoscape. Cosmological understandings converge, combining into a single focus

within this ambivalent cosmoscape: the modern and relational analyses of batteries’

impact on the fertility of the land come to similar conclusions about them as

3
Consejo Nacional de Ayllus and Marqas de Collasuyo – National Council of
Ayllus and Marqas of Collasuyo.

13
contaminants. The modern discourse of contamination is used to strengthen relational

concerns (Author 2019).

Despite the lack of young people to play music, the ‘earth practices’ of the

agricultural cycle, in which humans feed the mountain and other non-humans mañay

offerings to ensure their continued fertility, are still carried out in Kaata by a number

of participants much reduced since Bastien’s day, a matter frequently commented on.

As detailed above, I learned in 2011 that the elaborate ceremonies to stop an excess

of rain could no longer take place due to the sale of the mummies that were central to

them. A widespread Andean myth recounts that such mummies are chullpas of

another damper and darker age of the world predating this Christian era, who ‘dried

up’ into their current form when Jesus Christ/ the sun rose for the first time and shone

in through the east-facing doors of their round houses, in a cosmos-shifting pachakuti

(Abercrombie 1994; Gose 2008, 2016). Two layers of meaning in this cosmoscape

here collide: the mummies were still powerful, and some of the villagers would have

used them in ceremonies, yet at the same time, the increasing importance of money

meant that even they could be sold. Excessively heavy rain, arriving late and

suddenly at the start of the growing season and inundating the seedlings, has indeed

become a contemporary issue, a phenomenon widely attributed to the lack of the

chullpa mummies and the villagers are now unable carry out ceremonies to stop it. In

this way the sale of the mummies is coherent within a relational perspective with

excessive rainfall. Modern changes, as anthropologists long ago learnt of culture, are

not one way; their repercussions in the landscape can reinforce animist

preconceptions, thus cycling into a cosmoscape, or continuous conversation of

ontological convictions.

Such continuation of what might seem like contradictory cultural currents is

14
ethnographically familiar in the Andes through the relational interweaving of colonial

and Andean thought. It is exemplified by Turino’s (1993) account of the dance of the

Achachk’umus in the nearby village of Conima, on the eastern shores of Titicaca.

When asking who the dancers are, Turino is told that they are the achachilas,

powerful mountain spirits, and also ridiculous Spanish conquistadores. He takes these

two apparently conflicting explanations to a senior man, who tells him the dancers

are both- every dance must have two meanings! This enduring reality of colonial and

Andean worlds coming into conversation with and contradicting one another are a

feature of Andean cosmoscapes, also evident in the enduring and contentious

relationships between runa and q’ara. Whilst conflictive, the identities are not closed.

The crux of controversy: a contested mining venture

These contradictory currents, evident in everyday life, came to the fore in a

controversy revolving around a mine, opened by Victor. Through selling alpaca wool

his mother had amassed enough capital to hire a retro-excavadora, a JCB, in order

for her son to mine a site on Kaata’s slopes well-known for its mineral deposits. It

was hoped he would find gold; though he found none, the earth he extracted was rich

in minerals used in computer components. He subsequently made a good living from

the mine, as evinced by the array of consumer goods, such as a large flat screen

television, that began to appear in their house on the steep slopes of the city of La

Paz.

Gold mining has a long history in the Andes; nuggets of gold are frequently

asserted to grow ‘like potatoes’ in the mountain, and can be taken out if exchange

relationships with it are nurtured and maintained (Absi, 2015[2005]; Nash, 1979). As

de la Cadena (2010) indicates, relations with mountains can be maintained with shaft

15
mining, yet in the case of a large-scale open cast mine which would effectively

decapitate a mountain, her informants were deeply concerned about the mountain’s

capacity for retaliation. These days however, when community members claim to ‘no

longer say’ that the mountain is a body, Victor’s mine was permitted, provided that

he feed some of the wealth into the community, conspicuously through buying all the

alcohol consumed at fiestas. The couple and their children would return to the village

frequently to host these fiestas. Victor also undertook to ‘improve’ the main square,

now devoid of its subterranean mummies, with a raised central seating area like the

one in the regional capital town of Charazani, an element of colonial architecture

associated with the more mestizo world of the townsfolk.

Driving to Charazani to restock the thirsty village, Victor drove off the narrow

road, plummeting into the side of the mountain. The impact killed outright the five

young men from Kaata travelling with him. Road accidents are very common in

Kaata, as in much of Bolivia, the narrow one-track roads and steep sides of the

mountains – to my mind - contributing to this, as well as a lack of signage or stop

barriers. Many community members had lost relatives to accidents, and suffered

injuries themselves. A few shots of neat alcohol, one poured for the mountain and

others imbibed by the driver and lead passengers, were considered a vital safety

routine for a journey: it is this communication with mountain spirits engaging their

blessing that ensures road safety. Certain sites were particularly dangerous, places of

ill-feeling where the mountain was likely to push you off the road; the mountain is

widely considered for responsible road accidents. The mountain is thus

simultaneously agentive, as it is in other contexts a mute resource which seemingly

can be mined without recompense or fear of retaliation, comprising a cosmoscape of

conflicting cosmological currents.

16
 The time for collectively coming to terms with the deaths of the young men

was All Souls or the ‘Day of the Dead’ (Dia de los Muertos) at the start of

November, when the first rains and clouds arrive. In the cemetery five tables or

mesas had been erected, screened with sugar cane, and covered with foodstuffs for

the spirits of the dead to consume. Sitting among them, a group of men told me; “this

is not our culture; that Victor, he’s an addict”. “Our culture” was invoked here as a

redistributive mechanism that would not allow such selfish amassing of resources

constituting the commons, a reinforcement of the runa perspective. An addict, I

learned, was one who took too much from the social whole for themselves, focusing

on their own individual consumption. The mountain, hungry as ever (Gose 1994),

had defied the ‘de-animising’ (Latour 2018) modern or q’ara perspective, and come

out of its slumber as a ‘natural resource’ to exact its revenge on the man who dared to

think it less than a deity, seizing the counterpart to the bargain in which Victor had

with his mine engaged. The more taken, the more was required in return.

Seemingly contradictory ontological precepts converse with one another to

compose Kaata’s contested cosmoscape. Whilst it was permissible in the current

climate for Victor to open the mine, and to extract the flesh of the mountain for sale,

much like the chullpas were sold to the ‘archaeologists’ according to modern

capitalist precepts, the understanding also surfaced, in the cosmic chaos engendered

by the accident, that this would entail a counter-reaction from the mountain,

considered a conscious and agentive presence. The relational and modern

cosmologies converse with one another to comprise the conflicting cosmoscape of

the community, straddling worlding practices.

Wonder and worldly succession: cataclysm in the cosmoscape

17
 Pavel (1981) proposes in a European context that ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’

landscapes co-exist and come into contact at sacred sites like churches or persons like

the ‘son of God’, composing landscapes of layered ontologies. In incidents like those

above we see contrasting ontological currents in Kaata come into contact. How might

we conceptualise how ontological currents merge and contest one another in this

cosmoscape? Is Pavel’s layering metaphor appropriate in this context? In the Andes,

there are many stories of the interiors of mountains harbouring other worlds, which

might emerge, for example, through waterways (Gose 1994, Harris 2000). I will

explore here the potential for disruption by hidden underworlds; the below is not

stratified or static in Kaata but liable to suddenly re-emerge, reshaping space-time.

Whilst there is increasing ‘ambition’ visible in agriculture and mining practices,

which essentially comprise capitalist exploitation, this brave or indeed ‘wondrous’

(Scott 2016) new world is simultaneously treated with suspicion, the concern that one

is ‘taking too much’, and fear of reprisal. Scott (2016) hypothesises that one

ontological order seen from the perspective of another will always provoke wonder;

and it is thus that the capitalistic conviction that the landscape can be exploited for its

wealth without check is treated by young men like Victor in Kaata. Victor described

the ‘empty’ jungle lowlands, where he had shares in a second mine, with eyes shining

at the exciting riches that it promised, and likewise told me a waterfall across the

valley might rain down treasures upon one. His more sober brother-in-law however

cautioned that there were dangerous spirits there. The wondrous world of individual

enrichment embraced by some is conflicted by the sobering reality of an exacting

relational landscape, which arises to take reprisal time and time again through the

celebrated ‘long memory’ of the Andes.

18
 Given the risky changes that are occurring in the community, reprisals seem

inevitable. Villagers say that when the snows of the last steadily diminishing glaciers

disappear from the apu or chief mountain lord of the region, Akhamani, visible

across the valley from the village, it will explode into a volcano and subsume

everything in streams of lava. Melting snows are understood among a complex of

changes, including rising temperatures, or a shifting mood of the world described by

the term ‘climate change’. The eventual cataclysm of volcanic eruption is calmly

assumed to entail the deaths of everyone, though some may survive in caves. This

cataclysm is not restricted to Kaata: rather mountains will erupt, amidst other natural

disasters, first in more ‘developed’ places - indeed a young man told me that the

contemporary Japanese tsunami and Chilean earthquakes were evidence this was

already underway. Sometime soon Illimani, the iconic mountain overlooking the

capital La Paz, would also explode into streams of lava, and then Akhamani itself.

The villagers thus acknowledge that the process of riling the landscape to the point of

extreme reaction is one considerably further along in other places, yet visible in their

own lives and practices. Ontological currents in the Andean cosmoscape thus it

seems subsume and emerge from one another in a fluid metamorphosis, which we

can contrast to the seemingly static, reminiscently stratigraphic layers which for

Pavel (1981) characterise the European ontological landscape.

The volcanic cataclysm recalls stories of pachakuti, a moment of cosmic chaos

and upheaval when the world is ‘turned on its head’ as it is described in historical

Andean texts. Classen (1987:210) indicates, drawing on the seventeenth century

writings of chronicler Garcilaso de la Vega, that “[t]he pachakuti is a period of sacred

and highly dangerous fluidity between the land and body during which humans

emerge from the natural world and can also return to it”. Subsumed by lava, the

19
villagers are taken into the mountain body: Kaatans are literally returned to the land

that, once below, comes to be above, a cosmological shift composed of reversal

between humans and the mountain, fitting with the historical notion of an

apocalyptic, epoch-shifting pachakuti.

The term pachakuti, Bouysse-Cassagne and Harris (1987) note, was seldom

used by Aymara-speaking Altiplanic communities of the 1970s; the authors found

that the Christian ‘Judgement’ however described a ‘turning over of the world’, a

cosmic revolution where the manqa pacha of repressed Andean earth spirits would

resurge to replace kay pacha, ‘this world’. Judgement introduced a moral sense that

the concept had not carried before, yet this Judgement was not considered final

(Bouysse-Cassagne and Harris 1987). It seems the concept and spatiality of pachakuti

remains in contemporary Kaata in the volcanic eruption of mountains, and that this

similarly expresses a contemporary moment of cosmological shift.

Pacha is a spatio-temporal construct constituting not just an age but an entire

world, a cosmos. Allen (2016) argues that ‘cosmos’ is “a partially accurate translation

which nevertheless captures neither the fluidity of scale nor the presence of human

and non-human consciousness inherent in the concept”; pacha is she emphasises also

a lived-in moment composed of human and non-human activity. Kuti describes a

‘turning over’, and according to Mannheim, implies a cyclical return, as well as the

alternation of two elements exchanging via ayni (Mannheim, 1986). Mannheim

defines pachakuti as “a turn in the basic ontological assumptions constituting an

evidential model or world” (1986:269). Through the changes occurring in Kaata, the

villagers are as we have seen experiencing such a ‘turn’ in ontological assumptions.

The shift of structural equilibrium between runa and misti or q’ara engenders cosmic

chaos, as exploitative misti actions embed themselves in relational runa worlds

20
through the controversial sale of mummies, the exploitation of the mountain through

open-cast mining, or the contamination of the pachamama. The realisation of this

wondrous new world of freedom for individual enrichment is simultaneously seen as

entailing a concomitant re-incorporation into a living earth that subsumes everything.

Colonial cosmopolitics: the conception of mountains as earth beings

During the colonial period communities continued to hope for the return of the

Inca and overthrow of the colonial order in a pachakuti that would reverse the

transformation experienced with colonisation (Szeminski 1987, Flores Galindo 1987,

Campbell 1987), surfacing with the rebellions of Tupac Katari, on the Aymara

altiplano, and Tupac Amaru II in Cusco in the 1780s. Despite the royalist victories

over these rebellions in the short term, Gose (2016) describes a widespread pachakuti

in Indian communities whereby mountains came to subsume political power from

kurakas, hereditary community leaders, and ancestral authority from mummified

ancestors. During this period the kurakas came under increasing attack from the state

and from below, having become increasingly alienated from their communities and

kin (Gose 2008, 2016). Communities instead came to centre political power and

ancestral authority in mountains: “mountains represent an indigenous sovereignty

that, according to the Andean epochal formula of pachakuti, ‘returned to the earth’

within which it may be subordinate but is still ongoing and capable of returning to

dominance” (Gose 2016:10). Inheriting the lordly titles of mummified ancestors,

important mountains were thenceforth called ‘apu’ or lord. Mountains thus came to

represent an indigenous sovereignty that whilst within the earth might rise again-

perhaps in the outpourings of lava that will subsume the increasingly q’ara world of

the village which abuses and overstrains its relationships with them.

21
 Gose argues that this pachakuti ended colonial indirect rule; communities that

had formerly been hierarchical and class-ridden became “co-residential direct

democracies” (2016:28), and many remain so today, like Kaata, resolving differences

in collective assemblies presided over by rotating authority figures. Mountains came

to embody relationships with state power holders, as well as agricultural fertility,

forming a “quasi-ancestral shadow state modelled on actual holders of state power,

but unlike them one that remained deeply grounded in subaltern Andean interests in

agrarian fertility and the circulation of life” (Gose 2016:21). This ‘returning to earth’

of Indian power was “a strategic retreat” from the state, taking the form of a

pachakuti “in which a previously dominant order was driven underground where it

persists in a latent and subaltern form capable of resuscitation” (2016:28).

This pachakuti is thus embodied in the chullpa mummies. While chullpas were

driven underground, and became associated with hidden springs and the interiors of

mountains, the mountains themselves came to embody ancestral sovereignty, having

the advantages of being associated with the contemporary political order and

Christian faith. Their height was associated with Christian heaven, the alax pacha or

upper world of the gods and saints, and the sun that punished the chullpas. Indeed as

Gose (2008; 2016) indicates, mountain lords are often depicted as white, owing to

these associations, as well as their association with state functionaries. As Gose

explains, “the great genius of Andean politics has been to carry forward these

traditional ancestral expectations into the present, to fuse them with actually existing

state power and not allow them to be marginalised or driven underground” (2016:29).

Cosmological currents then have fused in the figures of mountain deities at

least since colonial times; they are according to Gose a composite of the Christian

schema of heaven with colonial state power and existing earth practices for the

22
fertility and regeneration of the land. They are a mode of engaging with the state as

well as syncretising cosmological currents, adding a layer of historical complexity to

the composition of the cosmoscape. Such complexity challenges the allegations of

timeless separation of modern and other which have dogged the ontological debate.

In the cosmology of these ‘earth lords’, subject to and inseparable from contemporary

political and social changes, we see how ontological currents combine to make

cosmoscapes that shift over time, and as Cepek indicates, shift circumstantially in

communication with the wider cosmoscapes within which they are inscribed (Cepek

2016). And it seems they shift more in certain significant moments, which the

Andeans think of in terms of pachakuti, the incorporation (burying) or ex-corporation

(explosion) of the past.

The Equivocation of Earth Beings in Contemporary Cosmopolitics

As contemporary cosmoscapes are the product of centuries of colonial

relations, we can consider how Kaata is interconnected with the contemporary state

in a wider cosmoscape. Bolivia’s indigenist MAS government under Evo Morales,

elected in 2005, embraces pachakuti and ‘earth beings’, yet understands these in

ways contested by the social movements in which Kaatans participate. The

Callawaya ayllus are affiliated to country’s main highland indigenous social

movement, the Conamaq, and elected representatives from the region regularly travel

to La Paz to participate in the range of social forums integrating social movements

into state decision making mechanisms which have flourished under the indigenous

government in its attempts to transform the enduring ‘colonial’ status quo,

compensating for centuries of indigenous exclusion from the centres of power in an

ethnic revolution often referred to as a pachakuti.

23
 The call for a pachakuti was espoused in recent decades by the city-based

Katarista movement - the notable Aymara leader, Felipe Quispe, widely known as

“El Mallku”, called his political party the Indigenous Pachakuti Movement

(Movimento Indígena Pachakuti). Katarismo emerged in Bolivian cities among

Aymara migrants under in the 1960s and 70s as a way of reclaiming ethnic identity,

expressing not only class but also ethnic oppression. The city-based Katarista

pachakuti took the form of a demand for a return to past times, with increasingly

specific connotations of ethnic reordering. Sociologist Gutierrez Aguilar claims that

the pachakuti embraced by the social movements at this crucial time “refer[s] to a

mythic time of redemption when the principles that govern today only social

coexistence within the communities, surrounded by the complexities of relationships

of liberal domination and exploitation suffered by all, will once again reign on a

greater scale” (2014:50).

Gutierrez explores how the contemporary pachakuti expresses the concept of

emergence from inside to outside, and turning around: “What was inside, in the

communities, such as their most intimate logic - and of course below – [would now

be] placed where it is visible, valid, legitimate, outside, and ‘on top’” (2014:51). This

logic consists of the democratic processes of community organisation that Gose

informs us came about in the 1780s and which characterise contemporary

communities like Kaata, with its monthly community meetings attended by all, and in

its leaders elected to hold authority positions lasting only a year. These have persisted

in many ayllus and among city dwellers (Lazar 2007, Tassi 2012), and the social

movements hoped they would become widespread and overtake the ‘colonial’ and

corrupt state. Gutierrez explains that these hopes of pachakuti also refer to the wider

logics of sharing and reciprocal aid present in ayni- exactly the characteristics that,

24
instead of emerging on to the national level from the community in the contemporary

moment in a triumphal pachakuti, are declining in Kaata.

At the national political level the contemporary pachakuti has become an

expression of a sense that it is “time for the poor to receive their fair share… passing

the benefits of national patrimony to the poor who were traditionally barred from

those benefits. They are not as concerned about environmental damage to rural lands

as they are about overcoming poverty” (Postero 2017:111). This allows the state to

expand its extractivist base, removing vast quantities of ‘natural resources’ from the

earth, whilst still espousing the indigenist rhetoric of pachakuti. The reversal entailed

by the pachakuti to which President Morales, who claims to be the country’s first

indigenous president, makes frequent reference is that those at the bottom of society

are able to rise, taking on the benefits formerly restricted to those at the ‘top’. This is

has become an anthropocentric, and even ethnic pachakuti. It limits its focus to the

groups of humans changing places within society, and neglects the earth beings,

whereas the villagers of Kaata, even as they modernise and westernise their livings to

embrace more exploitative practices, have not.

For the people of Kaata and the other villages of the mountain, promises of the

pachakuti which the government holds out are taken with a realistic pinch of salt; my

informants consider that Morales, who rose to prominence as a syndicalist leader for

coca growers4, favours this sector, for the price of coca and cost of living soars whilst

that which can be raised for their crops barely makes the journey to market

worthwhile. For them this economic reality tempts young people into leaving the

ayllu to cultivate and process coca in the lowland valleys, resulting in widespread

migration and, they foresee, the eventual disappearance of the community and its

4
Coca is a raw ingredient of cocaine.

25
associated worlding practices (see Author forthcoming). For them, it ois fasir to say

that the state is describing in its depiction of the rise of indigenous peoples, the

‘wrong pachakuti’, or the reverse of that they are experiencing: runa lifestyles and

worlds are at this moment being transformed to the misti worlds.

Neglect of the significance of earth beings as agentive actors is central to

conflicts between the ‘indigenous government’ and social movements. The recent

Bolivian Law of Mother Earth is much lauded internationally for affording the Earth

juridical personhood5. When it was eventually passed after heavy revision from the

relevant ministries in 2012, there was outrage from the social movements who had

worked on it. The indigenous delegates to the Plurinational Legislative Assembly

issued a statement condemning the new version as it:

“re-introduced the capitalist and mercantilist concept of natural resources,

when the great agreement of the Pact of Unity in the Planning of the Law

of Mother Earth, was to not mention the concept of natural resources, as it

expresses a violent appropriation and exploitation of the Mother Earth. It

established an agreement, as an alternative, to talk of beings, of the

components and benefits of Mother Earth, comprehending furthermore as

beings of mother earth the cycles of nature…

It introduces seriously and even in a threatening way, the colonial

extractivist model of dependent western capitalism, under the name of

integral development, pointing toward the destruction of the Mother

Earth, contaminating and predatory, owing to the expansion of mining,

5
See eg. https://nacla.org/blog/2012/11/16/earth-first-
bolivia%25E2%2580%2599s-mother-earth-law-meets-neo-extractivist-economy

26
 exploitation of hydrocarbons, and the extension of the agricultural frontier

(author’s translation).6

The Conamaq sent a letter of support in which it confirmed its support for the

assembly delegates, holding amongst other concerns that the redrafted version of the

Law reduced the Mother Earth to a matter of ‘natural resources’, paying only lip

service to the original draft, and that it was predicated on the concept of ‘nature’ as

that which might be exploited to fulfil society’s needs. 7 The legislative version is

accused of side lining earth beings for natural resources and thus missing the entire

point that the Law was meant to communicate.

The national political scene presents a similarly contested cosmoscape as

Kaata, one in which Kaatan delegates indeed play their part. The mallku nacional,

Atanacio, who succeeded Idelfonso as the regional Conamaq delegate, was frequently

in La Paz representing the community in forums shaped along the direct democratic

practice of the communities, like the Conamaq assembly or the Bolivian Platform on

Climate Change, in which all social movements and a collection of international

NGOs participated in regular assemblies debating themes ranging from GMOs to the

Law of Mother Earth, all intrinsic to the local conception of ‘climate change’.

Atancio is from and continues to live in Kaata; like Idelfonso, he is runa and became

the national representative through his interest in politics and after having carried out

the community ‘cargos’ or rotational positions of leadership in various village-based

roles. In contemporary Bolivia such voices have some chance to make themselves

heard on the national level; however their rise is tempered by the selective inability to

understand what they are saying, as in the equivocal modifications to the Law of

6
Available at https://www.bolpress.com/?Cod=2012082404
7
available at https://www.bolpress.com/?Cod=2012082404

27
Mother Earth by the ministries, which challenges its real power to create change.

Idelfonso expressed his frustration with the skewed priorities of such modern

worlding practices: “they say the mother earth depends on us [to look after it], but it

is the other way round! We depend on it”.

Here modernity and what might be called ‘indigenous cosmovision’ appear to

come into conflict; it is necessary however that rather than reifying these tendencies

along ethnic lines we admit the heterogeneous realities they compose. The Conamaq

came into existence in the late 1990s with the support of British NGO Oxfam, as well

as Danish NGO IBIS, the Inter-American Foundation, and Plan International (Lucero

2006). Whilst composed of representatives like Atanacio or Idelfonso who are elected

by their villages, its organisation bears striking resemblance to the British

parliamentary system, with each ayllu represented by regional delegates to the

confederation. These social movements have benefitted from trans-national advocacy

networks (Keck and Sikkink 1998), as indeed has President Morales, who through

participating in these networks came to represent repressed indigenous peoples across

the Americas at international forums, and to employ strategic essentialisms to create

unity across the Andean region (Andolina 2001). Both ‘sides’ in this cosmoscape

then are composed of heterogeneous realities; yet it is here that conflicting

cosmological currents can come into conversation.

Contrasting the visions of the state and social movements in composing the

Law of Mother Earth, we see that their espousals of ‘earth beings’ have very different

implications, which we can examine in terms of what Viveiros de Castro calls

‘equivocation’, a “referential alterity between homonymic concepts” and a “mode of

communication par excellence between different perspectival positions” (2004:5).

That is, the same term can have different meanings according to the world or

28
ontological understandings within which it comes nested, and when contrasting

practices meet there is significant space for telling misunderstandings. In one usage

here earth beings are employed instrumentally, as a complementary nod to the ‘other’

whilst espousing a modern extractivist politics, whilst for the indigenous social

movements, they are actors who can take retribution, challenging extractivism and

the modern convictions upon which it is founded. This second perspective emanates

from the vision espoused in Kaata, channelled with streams of other indigenous

actors into the social movements. In the discourse around the Law of Mother Earth

worlds communicate and contest one another in the cosmoscape of international

politics.

Conclusion

Kaata is experiencing a transformation in which Indians are able to access

clothes, lifestyles and work formerly conceptualised as reserved for mestizos or

whites. However, this entails for many the intrinsically related transformation of an

entire animate landscape, which will subsume the humans who attempt to escape

their interrelations with it in a wonderland of self-enrichment. The resultant volcanic

cataclysm is an all-encompassing apocalypse, extending into the elements and land,

and engulfing ethnic change. Indeed, we might say that it comprises the engulfing of

one world, a shiny capitalist surface, with another relational reality, which explodes

out of the midst or depths of it to cover its surface; sub-surface worlds can be

agentive actors in the landscape, and its strata may suddenly shift. Comprising these

conversant layers which surface circumstantially, the community can be conceived as

a ‘cosmoscape’.

29
 The community sits within the wider cosmoscape of the indigenous extractivist

state, where similar cosmological currents converse with and contest one another. It

is the anthropocentric understanding that the world might be subject to endless

exploitation without reprisal that the indigenous movements highlight as the

difference between the legislative version of the Law of Mother Earth and their own.

The legislative version, they claim, embraces the idea of earth beings in a tokenistic

sense, not as actors who must be accommodated, or who are capable of rebalancing

their exchange relations with humans, coming to a central contrast in this cosmoscape

between earth beings as instrumentalised rhetoric amidst ‘extraction as usual’, or as

world ending disruptants. Showing a similarly anthropocentric metamorphosis, the

agency of earth beings disappears in the transformation of the term ‘pachakuti’ to

describe an ethnic take-over the state, a rebalancing of ethnic relations in an

anthropocentric social world. The assumed univocality of the equivocal (Viveiros de

Castro 2004) understandings of Morales’ pachakuti, the historical concept, and that

of the contemporary social movements has the effect of excluding vital elements of

the discourse of the latter, excluding runa experience of a relational animate

landscape, as, de la Cadena (2015) reminds us, have modern states through Andean

history. Morales and Kaata share a national history, which give the idea of pachakuti

its resonance, but they are coming at it from the only ‘partially connected’ worlds of

the modern state and indigenous community (Strathern 2004; de la Cadena 2015).

Ontological understandings may be complex and circumstantial, but without them we

cannot distinguish between a tokenistic adoption of a discourse and one that follows

the ramifications of living in a contested animate world of human and non-human

beings.

30
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