The challenges of interethnic ontological politics: conflicting engagements with sentient mountains in northern Peru
Keywords:
Ontological Politics, Interethnic communities, more-than-human, climate justice, social justiceAbstract
Peru's coastal northerners respond to political corruption, climate change and environmental devastation by engaging with sentient indigenous landscapes as leaders of environmental movements and co-creators of an inter-ethnic world. They challenge the social models of neoliberal capitalism and settler colonialism, which are based on the distinction between human and non-human and promote human exceptionalism. Scholars have considered radically different forms of nonhuman persons and their ways of being in the world. Working beyond the theoretical limitations of ontological approaches (ways of being) and political ecology, and within the scope of a local, place-based environmental and spiritual politics, I show how the historical dichotomies of Western thought and their effects can be disrupted. I analyze the difficulties of ontological politics in a milieu that does not ascribe to academic and political fantasies of indigenous purity in the face of modernity. I analyze the conflicting ways in which northerners relate to more-than-human landscapes to provide a model of radical moral-environmental-political action, in which “community” and “well-being” are defined as human in relation to place-as-people and “nature” is re-signified as an anchor for social justice.
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