Indigenous Andean

Symbolism and Climate

Change
By Arnold Arnez – COMP 37057
 Scientific Absurdity and
Geoengineering
 For Jean Baudrillard, modern rationality has allowed the
possibility of “murdering reality” by replacing signs of
reality with human copies, removing the need for the original
from which the copy comes from.
 This has been the logic of geoengineering in response to
climate change.
 Solutions such as giant mirrors reflecting sunlight away from
Earth or Carbon capture machines either deny parts of nature
(the sun) or replace it (trees) (Gorvett 2016, BBC)
 Extinction Rebellion
 The movement Extinction Rebellion released a manifesto
titles “The Emergency”, providing scientific evidence of
Climate Change.
 However, beyond the statistical data, there is the call for
openness to the magnitude of Earth and our human
relationship to it: “[t]he unbelievable complexity of Earth is
something before which we should be humble” (Extinction
Rebellion n.d.).
 However, there is no prescription for how this is to be done.
 Environmentalism
 Arturo Escobar, Alberto Acosta, and Ernesto Gudynas
propose the Andean idea of “Buen Vivir” (Living Well). This
view holds that there needs to be a harmonious relationship
between the humans, humans and earth, and humans and the
cosmos.
 However, they do not go beyond Western calculatory thought,
since most of their works focus on how ecological degradation
hurts Indigenous communities, not why this damage contrasts
with Native principles.
 Ernesto Gudynas rightfully states that Buen Vivir “will not
stop building bridges, and will not reject the use of Western
physics and engineering” but does not guide one to a new
ontological relationship to rationality.
 The Answer in the Indigenous
Andes
 The Indigenous philosophical traditions of the Andes (Inca
and post-Inca) offer answers to the “how” of humbling
oneself to nature.
 The Bolivian philosopher Guillermo Francovich describes
how the environments of the Andean nations (the Andean
mountain range and the Amazon rainforest) offer the
inspiration for an ecological philosophy in the Indigenous
peoples and Indigenous inspired works in the Andes.
 He labels this particular school of though “Mística de la
tierra” or “Mysticism of the earth”
 The Andean Sublime
 Franz Tamayo, a Bolivian poet, reveals the power of the
tutelary mountain of Bolivia: Mt. Illimani.
 The mountain is considered both a provider and symbol for
eternity. The mountain’s glacier provides the water for the
capital city of La Paz as well is a symbol for the power of the
cosmos to bring forth any type of being.
 Schopenhauer explains the sublime as the power of nature
becoming so apparent that one’s individual subjectivity and the
desire to act upon the world is diffused into a collectivity of the
universe.
 The poem reveals the aesthetic power of Illimani to reappear at
every sunrise with its immense size, overshadowing the city, its
infrastructure, and rational modernity in the process.
El alma de estos montes
Se hace hombre y piensa.
Tramonta un ansia inmensa
Los horizontes.
Y en la luz huraña
Más de una sien transflora
Una montaña
(Franz Tamayo in Francovich 1956, 56)
The soul of these mountains
Are made man and it thinks.
Beyond, an intense yearning,
The horizons set.
And in the untouchable light
More than a head’s temple shimmers
Forth a mountain
(My Translation)
 Rumichikoq and the Sublime
 The myth of Rumichikoq (In Quechua: “The rocks allow
themselves to be placed by him”) says that there was an Inca
so great, the rocks built monuments by themselves.
Metaphorically, it means that the social organization of the
Inca allowed the monuments to be built as if there was no
one forcing them to be built.
 Rather than an individualistic and competitive Capitalist
system, sublime reveals the essence of the myth where the
withering of the individual creates a new subject-object
ontology that seeks harmony rather than increasing
exploitation for human desires or greed.
Antonio Huillca’s Inca Countryside
 The Inca’s universal order
 The Inca’s presence in the Peruvian village is symbolic of his
power as the one who brings order. The anthropologist Jorge
Flores Ochoa connects the title to the Quechua word “enqa”
meaning amulet or stone which brings good fortune.
 Heidegger describes how modern technology used to bring
order to the world is based on “enframing” or reducing an
entity’s essence to energetic output to be exploited.
 In contrast, the Inca brings in harmony whereby the essence
of beings is expressed in their seamless interaction in the
world. The plane is one key example.
 The Plane in the Inca’s world
 The Indigenous worldview is capable of assimilating the
plane into its mythical schema.
 The plane contrasted with the Condor, as the Sun and Moon
are, to show their companionship. But, in contrast to that, the
plane is given symbolic coherence to the mythical world by
its mimicry of the Condor, making the experience sacred and
tied to a dependence on the natural world.
 To the Quechua, the plane is not a Heideggarian enframing
of industrial power; it is a return of that technology to its
essence as symbolic animal rather than an overcoming of
animal-kind.
Freddy Mamani’s Pachamama
 Interpreting the Pachamama
 In Quechua and Aymara, Mother Earth’s essence is diffused
throughout the mountain landscape as Pachamama (World
Mother)
 Where Mt. Illimani overwhelms the rational and shows how
experience is phenomenologically prior, this is symbolically
expressed in the breast at the top of the mountain.
 Much of the water in La Paz flows from glaciers at the peaks
of the mountains, so Mother Earth feeds the people through
the mountain and is what brings life and rationality into
existence.
 Conclusion
 The symbols that are present within Andean art bring about
the sublime which gives a window to a collective, rather than
an individual, subjectivity with the cosmos.
 Andean cosmology’s ability to assimilate modernity (eg. The
plane) into its mythical framework offers ways Western
metaphysics can reorient technology to be a part of nature.
 Pachamama/Mother Earth being diffused across reality
shows how the sublime is capable across all Her
environments. As such, Tamayo’s poetics can inspire
humility in any local environment, allowing for a new
ontology to combat climate change.
 Bibliography
 Baudrillard, Jean, and Chris Turner. The Perfect Crime. London: Verso, 2008.
Print.
 Extinction Rebellion. “The Emergency”. N.D. Online. https://rebellion.earth
/the-truth/the-emergency/
 Gorvett. “how-a-giant-space-umbrella-could-stop-global-warming” BBC. 2016.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160425-how-a-giant-space-umbrella-could-
stop-global-
warming
 Gudynas, E. Buen Vivir: Today's tomorrow. Development 54, 441–447 (2011).
https://doi-org.proxy.wexler.hunter.cuny.edu/10.1057/dev.2011.86
 Heidegger, Martin, and David F. Krell. Basic Writings: From Being and Time
(1927) to the Task of Thinking (1964). New York: Harper Perennial Modern
Thought, 2008. Print.
 Tamayo, Franz in Guillermo Francovich. El Pensamiento Boliviano en el Siglo
XX [Bolivian Thought in the 20th Century]. 1956.