Pluriverse and Relationality from an Andean Ethnographic Perspective
The Global South is today the scene of an unprecedented extraction of resources feeding a global system that seems careless of its unequally distributed human and environmental costs. In this setting, indigenous groups are considered either as victims of structures associated with extractivism or as conservationists willing to protect a »Mother earth.« This project problematizes these conceptions in relation to first-hand knowledge of Andean communities. It will focus on land ownership. How is it designed in these scenarios where different cosmologies and artistic traditions clash, co-exist, permeate and entangle each other beyond the inert object deprived of agency that neoliberal extractive practices and ideologies compose? The project will provide ethnographically grounded information that is key for any further elaboration of the role that land ownership can have in the destruction and safeguarding of the human and environmental components of areas strongly saturated by extractivism.
Juan Rivera’s ongoing research examines cosmologies among indigenous groups of South America, particularly Quechua-speaking peoples of the highlands. His research projects have received the support of the UNESCO, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, and they have taken place in research centres such as the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Study, the Smithsonian Institution, among others. His publications include ethnographic monographs; articles, chapters and review essays such as: »Killing what you love. An Andean Cattle Branding Ritual and the Dilemmas of Modernity« (Journal of Anthropological Research, 2005), »Indigenous Divergences from the Sacrifice Zones and Rehabilitations of Extractivism« (The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, 2022), and »Re-enchantment and correspondence in the Anthropocene« (Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2022). He has also edited »Non-humans in Amerindian South America« (Berghahn 2018). Finally, he has coproduced 4 films: The owners of the land: Culture and the spectre of mining in the Andes (2013).
»Indigenous Divergences from the Sacrifice Zones and Rehabilitations of Extractivism«, in: The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, 27, 2022, p. 165–170.
»Beyond the ›dismal imagery‹: Amerindian abdication, repulsion, and ritual opacity in extractivist South América, in: HAU. Journal of Ethnographic Theory 9 (3), 2019: p. 655–660.
»Andean Musical Expressions. Ethnographic notes on materialities, ontologies and alterities«, in: Linda J. Seligmann and Kathleen S. Fine-Dare (eds.), The Andean World, London: Taylor & Francis/Routledge 2019, p. 452–467.
Non-Humans in Amerindian South America. Ethnographies of Indigenous Cosmologies, Rituals and Songs, London: Berghahn Books 2018.
Killing What You Love: An Andean Cattle Branding Ritual and the Dilemmas of Modernity, in: Journal of Anthropological Research, Vol. 61, No. 2, 2005, p. 129–156. URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3630852
How does the adoption of concepts such as good living and Pachamama—earth being present as a cosmological figure—allow for an understanding of those worlds that live partly outside the separation between nature and humanity? Do they make it possible to think beyond the episteme of modernity?