A W O R LD O F M A N Y W ORLDS

marisol de la cadena & mario blaser, editors

A W O R L D O F MAN Y WO R L D S
 A W O R L D O F MAN Y WO R L D S

Edited by Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser

Duke University Press  Durham and London  2018

 © 2018 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca on acid-­free paper ∞
Designed by Courtney Leigh Baker
Typeset in Whitman by Westchester Publishing Services

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data

Names: Cadena, Marisol de la, editor. | Blaser, Mario, [date] editor.
Title: A world of many worlds /
edited by Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser.
Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2018. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: lccn 2018019512 (print)
lccn 2018027041 (ebook)
isbn 9781478004318 (ebook)
isbn 9781478001362 (hardcover : alk. paper)
isbn 9781478002956 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: lcsh: Ethnology. | Indigenous p­ eoples. | Environmentalism.
Classification: lcc gn320 (ebook) | lcc gn320 .w75 2018 (print) | ddc 306—­dc23
lc rec­ord available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​/2­ 018019512

cover art: Gyration, 2016. Acrylic on wood. 22 × 28 inches.

© Paula Overbay, courtesy of the artist.
 contents

Acknowl­edgments
vii

introduction
PLURIVERSE
Proposals for a World of Many Worlds
Mario Blaser and Marisol de la Cadena
1

one
OPENING UP RELATIONS
Marilyn Strathern
23

two
SPIDERWEB ANTHROPOLOGIES
Ecologies, Infrastructures, Entanglements
Alberto Corsín Jiménez
53
 three
THE CHALLENGE OF ONTOLOGICAL POLITICS
Isabelle Stengers
83

four
THE POLITICS OF WORKING COSMOLOGIES
TOGETHER WHILE KEEPING THEM SEPARATE
Helen Verran
112

five
DENATURALIZING NATURE
John Law and Marianne Lien
131

six
HUMANS AND TERRANS IN THE GAIA WAR
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Déborah Danowski
172

Contributors 205  Index 209

vi Contents
 acknowl­e dgments

This volume is the culmination of the Mellon-­Sawyer Seminar “Indigenous

Cosmopolitics: Dialogues about the Reconstitution of Worlds.” It was a long
feast for which Mario, Marisol, Joe, Suzana, and Cristiana and a won­der
group of students met weekly throughout the academic year 2012–13,
which many of us ­will never forget. We read ­great work, dined and wined,
and talked vibrantly. Our conversations w ­ ere dialogues t­ oward the recon-
stitution of worlds—­the title of the seminar that brought us together. The
material we talked about was authored by the guests at the seminar, a cast
that gave us hope and guts to open up thought to new possibilities for the
imagination. In order of arrival, our guests ­were John Law, Elizabeth Povi-
nelli, Marilyn Strathern, Alberto Corsín Jiménez, Isabelle Stengers, Helen
Verran, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. Along with them, we invited
interlocutors: Arturo Escobar, Mary Pratt, Donna Haraway, Judy Farquhar,
Karen Barad, Anna Tsing, Debbora Battaglia, and Marianne Lien contrib-
uted their brilliance and generosity. During the two days their visit lasted,
they ­were with the collective that we then all became—we ­were a cloud, a
crowd, a forest, a school with no principal. Thanks to all of you for joining
us and for your work—it does help ­toward a world of many worlds!
Any list we could produce ­will surely miss some ­people, but we still
want to name you. Personal thanks to Arturo Escobar, our constant co-
thinker, and Margaret Wiener, always inspiration. While uc faculty mem-
bers who accompanied us in this effort have already been mentioned, h ­ ere
they are again with their full names: Joe Dumit, Suzana Sawyer, Cristiana
Giordano, Tim Choy, Caren Kaplan, and Mario Biagioli. Colleagues from
elsewhere who spent their sabbatical or postdoctoral placement with us
or honored us with a visit w ­ ere Salvador Schavelzon, Hortensia Muñoz,
Tanya Richardson, Cristina Rojas, Astrid Stensrud, Filippo Bertoni, Lesley
Green, Astrid Oberbeck Andersen, Andrea Ghelfi, Martina Martignoni,
and Elaine Gan.
Non–­u c Davis (then) students Claire Poirier, Heather Swanson, Pierre
du Plessis, Patricia Alvarez Astacio—­your presence made us happy. And our
­great ucd (then) students Enosh Baker, Juan Camilo Cajigas, Xan Chacko,
Jake Culbertson, Nicholas D’Avella, Meghan Donnelly, Duskin Drum, Nate
Freiburger, Mariel García Llorens, Stefanie Graeter, Ingrid Lagos, Whit-
ney Larrat-­Smith, Kristina Lyons, Sarah McCullough, Laura Meek, Sophie
Moore, Julia Morales, Rossio Motta, Kevin O’Connor, Diana Pardo, Rima
Praspaliauskiene, Magali Rabasa, and Mayee Wong—­your enthusiasm was
crucial our collective success. Thanks!
We also want to thank the incredible administrative support of ucd
staff, particularly Sande Dyer and Yoke Dellenback; also Jennifer Langdon,
then at the ucd Humanities Institute, who helped with all administrative
aspects of the proposal. Without her and the encouragement of Caroline
Thomas, the proposal would not have gotten to the Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation, whose support we gratefully acknowledge.

viii  Acknowl­edgments
 introduction
PLURIVERSE
Proposals for a World of Many Worlds
Mario Blaser and Marisol de la Cadena

­ nless ­there is a global catastrophe—­a meteorite impact, a world war or a

U
pandemic—­mankind ­will remain a major environmental force for many millennia.
A daunting task lies ahead for scientists and engineers to guide society ­towards en­
vironmentally sustainable management during the era of the Anthropocene. This
­will require appropriate h­ uman behaviour at all scales, and may well involve inter­
nationally accepted, large-­scale geo-­engineering proj­ects, for instance to “optimize”
climate. At this stage, however, we are still largely treading on terra incognita.
—­paul j. crutzen, “Geology of Mankind”
Many words are walked in the world. Many worlds are made. Many worlds make
us. ­There are words and worlds that are lies and injustices. ­There are words and
worlds that are truthful and true. In the world of the power­ful ­there is room only
for the big and their helpers. In the world we want, every­body fits. The world we
want is a world in which many worlds fit.
—­e jército zapatista de liberación nacional,
“Fourth Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle” (our translation)

This volume works in the tension articulated by t­ hese two epigraphs. Ac­
companying the explosion of po­liti­cal and scholarly discussions about the
Anthropocene has been the explosion of protests coming from worlds—­
usually labeled indigenous—­currently threatened by the possibility of
immediate destruction by anthropogenic practices. In Latin Amer­i­ca—­
the region with which we, the editors of this volume, are most familiar—­
political and economic forces that first took hold in the sixteenth c­ entury
have acquired unpre­ce­dented destructive might. They have also become
hegemonic among governments, regardless of ideological persuasion to
the left or right. The scale and speed of destruction have become a cen­
tral ­matter of po­liti­cal contention that has pitted environmentalists against
what is currently called extractivism: the accelerated extraction of natu­ral
resources to satisfy a global demand for minerals and energy and to provide
what national governments consider economic growth.1 Technologically
mighty, extractivism is how the Anthropocene makes itself pres­ent in this
part of the world: what can be more eloquent of ­human geological force
than the removal of mountains in a time-­efficient search for minerals, the
damming of large bodies of w ­ ater to reroute rivers for hydroelectric
commercial purposes, the transformation of rain forests into palm oil plan­
tations or ­cattle grasslands and of deserts into land for industrialized agri­
culture? Frequently effected through necropo­liti­cal alliances between the
state and corporations, and said to serve the national common good, ­these
practices create expendable populations in massive proportions. Environ­
mentalists claim that accelerated extraction destroys nature; investors claim
that it develops backward regions. We hold that what is currently being
destroyed is also other-­than-­human persons b­ ecause what extractivist and
environmentalist practices enact as nature may be, also, other than such.
This is one of the ­things we (the editors) have learned from a mountain
in the Andes of Peru that is also a being and from forest animals in Para­
guay that are also spirit masters of their world. We have also learned that
their destruction, perhaps unlike the destruction of nature, is hard for ana­
lysts to grasp. Similarly, making public ­these kinds of other-­than-­humans
is difficult for ­those who live with them; translating their destruction into
a po­liti­cal issue is often impossible and even disempowering. ­After all, he­
gemonic opinion is that nature is—­publicly—­only nature; to think other­
wise, to think that mountains or animals are other-­than-­human persons is
a cultural belief.2
We locate this collection in the critical space opened by the tension be­
tween the scholarly and po­liti­cal recognition of the ecological crisis that
threatens to eradicate life on Earth and the obstinate demands for existence
presented by worlds whose disappearance was assumed at the outset of the
Anthropocene. The tension is, of course, not new. However, awareness of
the pos­si­ble destruction of life on the planet gives this tension a dynamic
specific to the current historical moment: if, before this sense of crisis, “the
world of the power­ful”—­let’s call it so, and take it to mean, following the

2  Mario Blaser and Marisol de la Cadena

Zapatista declaration, a world where only one world fits—­could disavow
the destruction of life that it effected, this is no longer the case. The world
of the power­ful is now sensitive to the plausibility of its own destruction in
a way that may compare, at least in some ways, with the threat imposed on
worlds sentenced to disappearance in the name of the common goods of
pro­gress, civilization, development, and liberal inclusion. Very few, if any,
of the readers of Nature can currently deny that the planet is being driven
down a perilous path. We all share, as Crutzen says, terra incognita. This is
a new condition: now the colonizers are as threatened as the worlds they
displaced and destroyed when they took over what they called terra nullius.
Scientific and economic proposals that would make it pos­si­ble to survive
the moment of planetary crisis are many and diverse. Not infrequently
they come from rivals, and at times they involve strange alliances. Propos­
als range from market-­friendly environmentalisms to an end of capitalism
as the only path to salvation, and even the composition of the common
world through a due pro­cess that needs to be devised—­who would devise
it and how the pro­cess would transpire is up for discussion. Across their
heterogeneity, proposals share an unsurprising—if discouraging—­trait in
common: it seems almost impossible to imagine a response to the ecologi­
cal crisis that does not take the world that is responsible for the plausible
destruction of the planet as the exclusive starting point in a conversation
about the current condition of the planet.
Many practices allegedly intended to save the planet continue to destroy
it. Along with extractivism, such practices manifest the con­temporary co­
lonial ontological occupation of territories by what John Law has called the
one-­world world: a world that has granted itself the right to assimilate all
other worlds and, by presenting itself as exclusive, cancels possibilities for
what lies beyond its limits.3 Extractivism continues the practice of terra
nullius: it actively creates space for the tangible expansion of the one world
by rendering empty the places it occupies and making absent the worlds
that make t­ hose places. And b­ ecause central attempts to save the planet are
frequently indifferent to ­those worlds, grassroots protests against extractivism
have mushroomed; while they are not exclusively a ­matter of indigenous
concern, groups known as indigenous figure prominently in creative, dif­
ficult, and complex partnerships with allies hailing from heterogeneous
worlds: nongovernmental organ­izations, peasants, Afro-­descendant groups
in Latin Amer­i­ca, organic produce growers, small merchants, some workers’
­unions, university students, liberation theology priests and nuns, feminist

Introduction  3
l­awyers, and, of course, environmentalists. Within t­ hese alliances, nature
is practiced both as such and not only as such; their goal is to defend the
specific ways they make their lives and worlds against extractivist destruc­
tion. Their alliance is summoned by what Isabelle Stengers calls “inter­
ests in common which are not the same interests,” or what we see as the
making of an “uncommons”: the negotiated coming together of hetero­
geneous worlds (and their practices) as they strive for what makes each
of them be what they are, which is also not without ­others.4 We return
to the uncommons at the end of this introduction; for now, suffice it to
say that built upon a heterogeneity that negotiates for symmetry (if with
difficulty), t­hese alliances reveal that the commonality touted in claims
about the national common good is an imposition: to be such it requires
the destruction of what the state cannot recognize. Instead, acknowledging
the uncommons that brings them together—an interest in nature or the
environment that acknowledges neither is only such—­these alliances may
also be capable of refracting the course of the one-­world world and propos­
ing, as in the Zapatista declaration, the practice of a world of many worlds,
or what we call a pluriverse: heterogeneous worldings coming together as
a po­liti­cal ecol­ogy of practices, negotiating their difficult being together
in heterogeneity. We are inspired by the Zapatista invitation to reworlding
possibilities. The moment of the realization of the destruction of the Earth,
the current historical moment, can be one when ­people reconsider the
requirement that worlds be destroyed. It can also be one when the condi­
tions for dialogues ­toward the reconstitution of worlds can be formulated.
Thus, we want to pair up the threat posed by the Anthropocene with an
opportunity of similar proportion, by taking the pres­ent as a moment to
reconsider the material-­semiotic grammar of the relation among worlds
that dominates the fabrication of the current historical moment. It is
­toward that reconsideration that we propose the pluriverse as an analytic
tool useful for producing ethnographic compositions capable of conceiving
ecologies of practices across heterogeneous(ly) entangled worlds.
Our proposal for the pluriverse as analytic is not only an abstraction:
being ethnographic, it emerges from our variously mediated (yet em­
bodied) experiences of worldings that fieldwork confronted us with, and
that incited us ­toward a disposition to be attentive to practices that make
worlds even if they do not satisfy our demand (the demand of modern epis­
temology) to prove their real­ity (as they do not leave historical evidence,
let alone scientific). Examples include h ­ uman practices with earth beings

4  Mario Blaser and Marisol de la Cadena

and with animal spirits that populate forests. Emerging from (and requir­
ing) this disposition, the pluriverse is not a ­matter of fact or concern but
rather an opening ­toward a possibility that needs care—­a “­matter of care”
as conceptualized by Maria Puig de la Bella Casa.5
Presenting the pluriverse as an ethnographic proposal requires a caveat:
we think of ethnography as a scholarly genre that conceptually weaves to­
gether ­those sites (and sources) called the theoretical and the empirical
so that thereafter they cannot be pulled apart. Practiced in this way, eth­
nography becomes a concept-­making genre—­yet ethnographic concepts
are idiosyncratically (and perhaps oxymoronically) concrete abstractions.
With a disposition t­ oward the pluriverse, ethnographic concepts may also
indicate excesses to the theoretical and the empirical—­think earth beings
or animal spirits that populate the forests once again. Unlike theoretical or
philosophical concepts, ethnographic concepts signal their connections
to place, for they are not without it. They emerge through the hallmark
practice anthropology calls fieldwork. Yet, rather than a means of col­
lecting information, we think of fieldwork as the practice of (and not
only at) a crossroads involving the practices of the anthropologist and of
­those that she works with.6 At this crossroads, ethnographic concepts are
composed with both the separation and the connection that constitute
fieldwork practices. Composed ethnographically, t­ hese concepts emerge
with the awareness that they constitute practices and are, thus, world­
ing tools. As such, ethnographic concepts lie within the field of po­liti­cal
ontology.
We use the term “po­liti­cal ontology” to designate an imaginary for a
politics of real­ity, and a field that stands where po­liti­cal economy and po­
liti­cal ecol­ogy, formulated with ideas of nature and economic growth, are
insufficient (at times even unable) to think antagonisms that, for example,
involve ­things like mountains and forests that emerge as resources through
some practices but also as persons through other practices. Where po­liti­cal
economy w ­ ill only accept that, at bottom, such conflicts are about the dis­
tribution of resources, po­liti­cal ecol­ogy (especially in its post-­structuralist
version) can only upend the analy­sis a bit: at best the conflicts are between
perspectives on the mountain or the forest, neither of which cease to ulti­
mately be only what they are. In our work, po­liti­cal ontology emerged as
a concept at the specific historical moment when anthropocenic practices
(such as extractivism) seemed to almightily lean against the plausibil­
ity of the pluriverse: in t­hose circumstances, the contention between,

Introduction  5
for example, practices of intense deforestation and local persons’ practices
with what we would call forests could be a ­matter concerning po­liti­cal
ontology. Yet po­liti­cal ontology can also underpin the negotiations within
the above-­mentioned alliances among heterogeneous worlding practices
that come together around dissimilar interests in common. Regardless
of the analytical condition, po­liti­cal ontology wants to enable po­liti­cal
thought and practice beyond the onto-­epistemic limits of modern politics
and what its practice allows. We capitalize the concept—­therefore Po­liti­
cal Ontology—to call attention to the specificity of the imaginary that we
propose ­here, namely, the consideration of the pluriverse as a possibility.
Po­liti­cal Ontology, as we are using it h­ ere, operates on the presumption
of divergent worldings constantly coming about through negotiations, en­
meshments, crossings, and interruptions. It asks how ­those practices tran­
spire and with what consequences. Po­liti­cal Ontology thus si­mul­ta­neously
stands for reworking an imaginary of politics (the pluriverse), for a field of
study and intervention (the power-­charged terrain of entangled worldings
and their dynamics), and for a modality of analy­sis and critique that is per­
manently concerned with its own effects as a worlding practice.
The rest of this introduction pres­ents the chapters as they engage
three thematic axes: concepts as worlding tools, the reworking of politics in
terms of the pluriverse, and the Anthropocene as a scenario of politics
characterized by an undeclared war.

It ­Matters What Concepts We Use to Think Concepts

Inasmuch as knowledges are world-­making practices, they tend to make
the worlds they know. The seeming redundancy of this phrase—­which
echoes our interpretation of the title of the section, a phrase we borrow
from Marilyn Strathern7—­emphasizes that the knowledge practices we
(modern scholars) have at our disposal are, in turn, conditioned to reinstate
themselves. A consequence of this feature is that it may perform epistemic
and ontological invalidations—or absences—of the possibility of the multi­
plicity of worlds that the Zapatista declaration calls for. This concern under­
pins all the chapters in this volume: they show a per­sis­tent care for the
conceptual grammars through which, on rendering itself and its objects in­
telligible, scholarly knowledge performs itself. In other words, knowledge
is recursive: knowledge reveals itself by making its objects (conceptual
or material) through procedures that need to be recognizable (as knowl­

6  Mario Blaser and Marisol de la Cadena

edge) by the community that practices it. What the community of knowers
does not recognize as knowledge is displaced along with its reality-­making
possibilities. As Marilyn Strathern puts it in chapter 1, “knowledge” the
concept is a means to knowledge and, in the case of scholarly, modern
knowledge, deploying the concept and its requirements, to thus move from
means to end (knowledge), may constitute both the subject and object of
its practice. Hence the relevance of concepts as a ­matter of ethnographic
concern: as analytic tools—­tools used to produce knowledge—­they carry a
self-­duplicating potential that may “explain difference away.” The latter is
a phrase Helen Verran has made popu­lar to warn about epistemic explana­
tions that may translate difference back to their image and thus cancel the
difference. Emerging from the world modern knowledge makes, its concepts
and grammars have the capacity to assimilate practices (and also concepts
and grammars) that diverge from it. Take, for example, “culture”—­“one of
the most complicated words in the En­glish language,” according to Ray­
mond Williams.8 He explains that this notion emerged in its modern sense
during the late eigh­teenth and early nineteenth centuries when it was used
to differentiate between Eu­ro­pean and other h ­ uman groups.9 Intriguingly,
therefore, culture has a history that is itself embedded in the history and
imaginary it helped articulate: that of a world populated by heterogeneous
­human groups. Hence the limits of deploying culture to represent such
heterogeneity: explaining through categories that made the difference ap­
pear in the first place may amount to explaining the difference through
“the same,” or difference in terms that are homologous to the self to which
difference appears. For example, deploying culture to explain differences
that emerge in collectives that do not make themselves with such catego­
ries would enact culture and explain away, or block, the possibility of dif­
ference as it might emerge if the situation ­were allowed to display itself
without categories awaiting it.10 ­There would be knowledge of difference
indeed; but that knowledge would be of cultural difference: knowledge
enabled and delimited by the practice of the category deployed (culture).
The proposition that modern knowledge co-­constitutes subject and ob­
ject resonates with Alberto Corsín Jiménez’s contribution, chapter 2. He
proposes “trap” as a concept and ethnographic tool to search the relations
that compose and perform knowledge. As a concept, the trap also works as
a machine: a gathering of heterogeneously composed relations and condi­
tions required to capture prey that therefore is also of the predator’s design.
In this sense, the trap works as an interface, proposing that, just as prey and

Introduction  7
predator are trapped to (and with) each other, the subject and the object
of modern knowledge cannot be conceptually (or practically) separated
from one another. Recursively making a concept full of relations—­trap—to
think about concepts (and the relations that make them), the chapter itself
illustrates the working of a trap, or a method that releases what it makes or
traps and in so d­ oing enables an analytical view of the requirements of mod­
ern knowledge. With the notion of a trap, Corsín also signals the importance
of the material composition of knowledge: subject to creative originality, its
architecture conditions what it catches, but the catch can also surprise the
trap maker (within the conditions of the trap we would think).
The systematic recursivity of the chapter is inspired by Roy Wagner’s
ethnographic analy­sis of “double encompassment,” a condition Wagner il­
lustrates with an analy­sis of “hospitality as self-­guesting”: a situation where
the conditions of guest and host exist within the same entity. For example,
a shaman is guest to the land while, as one of the threads that constitute it,
he or she also is the land. Or a soul is guest to a body, which is not without
it. ­These “double captivities” (or “hostings,” depending on the situation)
are Wagner’s ethnographic concepts.11 As such, they may allow for con­
ceptual transformations of modern epistemic tools while being made by
the latter—­a double enabling. Corsín Jiménez uses Wagner’s doubling as
insight to recursively search the relations with which modern knowledge
produces itself. In this sense, he writes, “It is in fact one of my central intu­
itions that modern knowledge is essentially a trap to itself, such that most
forms of ‘explanation’ are guests unaware they are actually being hosted—­
predators who do not know their own condition as prey.”
Chapter 1 is also concerned with knowledge. Strathern anchors her
discussion in encounters among worlds that compose themselves, the en­
counters, and indeed the knowledges and practices brought to them, with
heterogeneous tools—­including heterogeneous forms of relation. She thus
sets out to open up—or look into—­the diverse relations (the forms and
compositions that make them count as such) that transpire at encounters
and even make them pos­si­ble without becoming the same relation. She
uses the term “domain,” a notion she has productively deployed in previ­
ous works.12 Domain is both empty (enough) of conceptual meaning and
capable of carry­ing empirical reference to thus allow analy­sis. Domain may
signal spheres of life; for example, we say that the modern world makes it­
self with the domains of nature and culture and recognizes itself in such di­

8  Mario Blaser and Marisol de la Cadena

vision. Encounters (everyday, or extraordinary) across partially connected
(and also heterogeneous) worlds may be sustained by conversations that
draw from domains in which not all participants in the encounter participate.
Continuing with our recent example, not all worlds make themselves with
the domains of nature and culture, nor with the epistemic relationship be­
tween, say, subject and object that may ensue from it. When such domains
are deployed, what transpires and the way it does may not be the same
across the worlds that participate in the encounter. Refreshing this con­
versation—to which she has contributed for a long time13—in chapter 1,
Marilyn Strathern discusses cases in which the unshared or divergent ele­
ment is the relation itself. As a means to make knowledge and to or­ga­nize
exchanges, divergence among relations—­not only in terms of when they
are established or what they connect or disconnect, but in what counts as
relation itself—­acquires complex saliency in circumstances of knowledge
exchanges between, for example, scientists and indigenous ritual prac­ti­tion­
ers about an event that concerns both, albeit in ways that are not the same.
Divergence is a concept Strathern uses in chapter 1 and with which,
in this text, she converses with Isabelle Stengers.14 Given the specificity
of this concept, a brief explanation is necessary. Divergence, as proposed
by Stengers, does not refer to difference between ­people, practices, or cul­
tures conceived as discrete entities that share constitutive properties and
therefore can be compared (and thus be similar or dif­fer­ent).15 Rather, di­
vergence constitutes the entities (or practices) as they emerge both in their
specificity and with other entities or practices.16 Strathern foregrounds the
knowledge encounters with which she illustrates her arguments as a situ­
ation of divergence: for example, an encounter around dead bodies that is
both an encounter (a relation) with the kin of one of the groups that par­
ticipate and with repositories of scientific knowledge. Both groups had an
interest in common (knowledge exchange), yet what constituted knowl­
edge (what the dead bodies became as they emerged from relations specific
to the groups) was a site of divergence—­a disagreement that could not be
solved without undoing what each of the groups w ­ ere in relation to their
interest in common: the dead bodies and knowledge exchange.
Significantly, Strathern seems to be saying that the scholarly knowledge
practices that make dialogues may include incommensurabilities. Dia­
logue may be the site of divergence, and thus ­house an interest in common
that is also exceeded by interests that are not the same. Critically, excesses

Introduction  9
across knowledges (ours and o­ thers’) and hence not-­knowing (as we and
they usually know) may be an impor­tant condition of dialogues that allow
for a form of understanding that does not require sameness, and therefore
rather than canceling divergence is constituted by it. It may be impor­tant
at this point to remind the reader that we are not talking about difference
understood as a dif­fer­ent (cultural) perspective on dead bodies, the object
that both scientific knowers and their cultural ­others would share yet
interpret differently (each from their cultural perspective). Instead, we are
talking about the intersecting of understanding and divergence at a partial
connection: an encounter of knowledge practices (and entities) as they
also continue to exceed each other (in divergence). What constitutes the
excess may be obscure to participants in the conversation, yet it would
also be constitutive of it. Ele­ments in the dialogue may rest unknown:
that may be an awkward condition, yet not a deterrent for conversations
across worlds.
Can conditions be created so that heterogeneous knowledge practices
(indigenous and nonindigenous, for example) do not encounter each other
in a relation of subjects to objects? (Or not only in such relation?) Chap­
ter 1 may suggest such a question; Helen Verran, in chapter 4, may offer
grounds to think pos­si­ble responses. An impor­tant assumption of her pro­
posal is that concepts are world-­making tools and therefore par­tic­u­lar to
worlds and their knowers—­yet concepts (dif­fer­ent from ­those participants
bring with them) can also be made in the h ­ ere and now of knowledge
encounters maintaining the difference between knowers. In situations
of knowledge encounters, she explains, ­there is nothing that every­body
knows, for participants are all heterogeneous knowers—­yet they need to
be aware of such a condition. ­Doing so requires them to cultivate a spe­
cific epistemic demeanor, consisting in the ability to articulate the how
and what of their divergent epistemic practices—­their knowledges. Bring­
ing crucial attention to the figure of the knower, her proposal is to enable
an ethical politics of ­doing difference together without any participating
know-­how canceling any other one. This is a politics in which the negoti­
ated agreement through which concepts emerge in the encounter does not
cancel differences among knowers; rather, it makes ­those differences vis­
i­ble as the epistemic then and t­ here from where participants come to the
encounter, and which they have to be ready to leave b­ ehind (while main­
taining awareness of how they go about making them). The encounter thus

10  Mario Blaser and Marisol de la Cadena

becomes the opportunity for the creation of concepts dif­fer­ent from t­ hose
­every participating knower brought with them.
Verran’s proposal is sustained empirically: ideas for the pro­cess ­were
produced by participants in a proj­ect to create the Garma Maths Curriculum—
an entity emerging in conversations between modern math and Yolngu
Aboriginal ways of mea­sur­ing and counting (that ­were not a practice of
mathe­matics). Promoted by the liberal Australian state in the 1980s, it
was taken up by Aboriginal and white Australians interested in d­ oing dif­
ference together. Using Strathern’s terms, the Garma Maths Curriculum
would be one with no subject knowledge creating its object knowledge.
The pro­cess required from participants in the encounter, first, to not
know as they would know as e­ ither a modern thinker or a Yolngu thinker;
and, second, to compose with what emerged to them unmediated by their
knowledges. Verran characterizes the first requirement as “bad ­will,” culti­
vating a feeling of alertness with re­spect to one’s own habits of knowledge
so as to be able to reject the temptation, always pres­ent, to propose one’s
common sense to think difference. Exercising bad ­will, the knower is able
to do both—­recognize the demands of her knowledge and refuse to imple­
ment them; in so d­ oing, she may acquire the capacity to attend to what
emerges in the h ­ ere and now of the space opened by the shifting of the
two conditions, with and without the requirements. This is the stage for
the practice of the second requirement, which Verran calls “good faith”:
a commitment to articulate analy­sis with the conditions that constitute
the ­here and now of the encounter itself with participants emerging self-­
different, not only what they ­were, while remaining aware of their ­there
and then as well. When difference is done together, none of the heteroge­
neous knower participants becomes the other, yet they do not remain only
what they ­were ­either.
This mode of participation requires working at the site of divergence,
where the coincidence among participants does not absorb their being who
they are. This may create the conditions for a decolonial practice where
modern thinkers—­herself, the readers, us—­may be caught (as Verran was)
in analytical and experiential incongruous discomfort (for example, both
criticizing and understanding the requirements of Yolngu practices, or of
mathe­matics) that is not only such, for they also make sense: they work in
dif­fer­ent registers, may talk to each other, and offer space to work t­ oward
making mutual differences emerge. The incongruous discomfort creates a

Introduction  11
welcome disjuncture—­one that does not make the usual sense and where
difference can be made together. This is, Verran says, a cosmopo­liti­cal
practice: the working together of divergent cosmologies where knowers
(and not just her entities or concepts) dissolve themselves (are able to give
up and maintain their t­here and then) in the practice of the h ­ ere and
now of a knowledge encounter that produces a know-­how that becomes
through the encounter and includes what was t­here before, yet it also
changes it.

Cosmopolitics Meets Po­liti­cal Ontology

Cosmopolitics is a concept that we originally borrowed from Isabelle
Stengers.17 She originally proposed it with the intent of opening modern
politics to the possibility of divergence among collectives composed of
­humans and nonhumans that, following her (Greek-­inspired) definition
of politics, agreed to gather around a concern. Members of t­ hese collectives
all recognized the importance of the concern and could also disagree about
it precisely ­because they could recognize its importance. Among the events
inspiring Stengers’s cosmopolitics was the Eu­ro­pean anti-­g mo movement
bringing together young urbanites, farmers, and biologists from the Con­
tinent along with African and Indian peasants—­all with their own specific
reasons to resist gmos. The movement made all t­ hese groups interdepen­
dent: the anti-­g mo collective expressed an interest in common that was
not the same interest. It was underpinned by the divergence among the
groups that composed the collective.
In chapter 3, Stengers explains that the demands posed by Po­liti­cal
Ontology exceed her original conception. We agree: we used Po­liti­cal On­
tology to suggest a politics among heterogeneous worlds and called this a
cosmopolitics, a notion whereby cosmos is always an emergent condition
resulting from disagreements among divergent worlding practices partici­
pating in the discussion. Thus, we borrowed cosmopolitics from Stengers
and gave the term an inflection of our own.18 Grounded in ethnographic
situations, for us cosmopolitics was a tool to think about disputes (we can
also call them gatherings) that concerned and included participants whose
presence was not recognized by all who participated in the gatherings. As
mentioned, our paradigmatic ethnographic examples involved a mountain
that is also an earth being and forest animals that are also spirit masters of
their world. We called them other-­than-­humans (instead of non­humans)

12  Mario Blaser and Marisol de la Cadena

to emphasize that, while actors, they did not share the epistemic or on­
tological status of laboratory t­ hings.19 We also proposed that t­ hese other-­
than-­humans participated in po­liti­cal gatherings (usually convoked in
connection with their potential destruction) both as existents (but not
nature or h ­ umans) and as beliefs (about nature). The dispute about what
­these other-­than-­humans ­were, which depended on the relations that
enacted them, composed a complex negotiation that included cultural
tolerance (or intolerance) of “indigenous beliefs” and ontological politics
(through enactments of the entities in question and the denial of their
being—­other than beliefs).
Engaging our ethnographic setting, Stengers suggests that tolerance
may protect what she calls “­those that know” (for example, “that other-­
than-­humans are beliefs about nature”) from a frightening prospect: that
of having to consider that t­hose practices and entities they deem unreal
(and destined for extinction) could pres­ent themselves with the power to
create a situation where ontological clashes would have to be anticipated
everywhere without offering guarantees for the preservation of that which
makes “­those that know” who they are. She calls this prospect the “chal­
lenge of animism”: it is frightening ­because it unsettles what she calls the
modern command “to not regress” to a supposed earlier stage when “we”
­were unable to discern real­ity from belief. This command, she says, makes
us (­those that know) who we are: ­those that move forward protected
against past illusions. Rejecting what we consider regression, we form a
collective that disdains o­ thers that we also tolerate as we wait for their
disappearance, or actively destroy them when driven by intolerance. The
fright that animism produces is not irrelevant; it may level the terrain, for
“when ontological politics demands that we take seriously the existence
and power of other-­than-­human beings, it is we who cry: do not demand
that we do that when we ourselves are concerned, or you ­will destroy us”
(Stengers, this volume.) Hence the possibility of animism threatens ­those
that ­were not previously threatened with extinction; the prospect that what
makes them be could be taken away from them frightens them. This op­
portunity is not to be lost, and accordingly, animism should be reclaimed.
This, Stengers clarifies, does not mean that the real­ity of other-­than-­human
beings needs to be proven. ­Doing so would imply translating practices with
­those entities into the sphere that distinguishes “­those who know” from
“­those who believe.” Instead, reclaiming animism might translate, among
other ­things, into recovering that which we (­those who know) have been

Introduction  13
expropriated from and regenerating the practices that the expropriation
has destroyed.20
To draw an image of what she means by “expropriation,” Stengers uses
the figure of the testator, the character who tested (the real­ity of) what
alchemists presented to a prince as gold. Like a prince would do with his
testator, we have delegated to a routinized debunking habit (for example,
a proclivity to demand epistemic or historical evidence) the charge of pro­
tecting us from what cannot demonstrate its “real” existence. Snickering is
a manifestation of that debunking habit; even the possibility of question­
ing such a habit is met with a smirk. Escaping the compulsion to debunk
as non­ex­is­tent that which we (­those who know) cannot recognize (which
could have as concomitant sequel its destruction, ­either immediate or tol­
erantly deferred) requires that we face our fear of animism so as to betray
it and thus recompose ourselves as the situation demands. Recomposing
does not mean making ourselves larger or more comprehensive by adding
the practices that make other-­than-­humans to the practices with which
“­those who know” make nature—­mountains or animals—to follow our ex­
ample. That would make us all the same and cancel the divergences among
heterogeneity that make us who we are. Recomposing ourselves means dis­
owning our testator’s habit so as to recover the capacity that Stengers calls
“the pragmatic art of immanent attention.” This she describes as “an em­
pirical practice of ‘realization’ ” (“realization” is Whitehead’s term) and “an
art of diagnosis, which our addiction for ‘the truth that defeats illusion’ has
too often despised as too weak and uncertain.” Translating Stengers to our
goal in this volume: nurtured by what Helen Verran calls “bad ­will”—­the
practice of a deliberate abjuration to the transcendence of the “then and
­there” that makes us who “we” are—­immanent attention could include the
ability to attend to presences that are or can be but do not meet the require­
ments of modern knowledge and therefore cannot be proven in its terms.

The Anthropocene as an Opportunity

for Pluriversal Worldings
The phenomena bagged ­under the term Anthropocene disrupt the nature/
culture divide that had made the world one. Seemingly, then, Anthropo­
cene ­houses a paradox. On the one hand, by revealing the historicity of the
nature/culture divide, it opens a crack through which modern knowers can
consider the possibility of collectives that do not make themselves through

14  Mario Blaser and Marisol de la Cadena

such a divide, and in turn ­these collectives can make a bid to emerge into a
public space that effectively excluded them u ­ ntil now. On the other hand,
modern knowers know about this event through an epistemic regime that
rests on the divide u­ nder question. In this context, it is worth asking how
the commitment to the one world occurs in practice.
Chapter 5 sheds some light on how the one-­world commitment works.
John Law and Marianne Lien’s contribution is a detailed rendering of how
nature (and culture) is done along with salmon in Norway. By attending
to the practices that make a nature-­culture entity (salmon), their chapter
complicates the now well-­known argument that modern knowledge repre­
sents culture as multiple and nature as singular, coherent, and stable. Fol­
lowing the practices that make both wild and farmed salmon (as well as the
distinctions between them), they describe how, rather than singular, t­ hese
practices make a nature that is multiple, noncoherent, and ongoing. And
yet, they say, the assumption of a single nature holds. They surmise that
at least in part this is ­because each practice of nature assumes and enacts
a single world, a unified space-­time container where the multiplicities of
practices occur. In this way, chapter 5 suggests that not even awareness of
the notion of nature as done by ­humans (or culture) undoes the assump­
tion of a one-­world world.
Analogously, we suggest that to open up the possibility of a world where
many worlds fit, it is not enough for the Anthropocene to disrupt the nature
and culture divide that makes the world one. Rather, the practices that ren­
der the Anthropocene vis­i­ble—as well as the proposals for survival—­must
also disrupt such a divide. As a ­matter of planetary concern, the Anthropo­
cene requires analyses and proposals that would reveal the inner workings
of the one-­world world so as to prevent their destructive capacity—­including
when they work as tolerance to what is not itself. This is an overriding con­
cern in chapter 6, by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Déborah Danowski.
They take issue with Chakrabarty’s argument that the Anthropocene could
only be met by the h ­ uman species, which would emerge as subject only
­after the realization by all of humanity of its common doomed destiny as
implied by the Anthropocene.21 In other words, differences would stand in
the way of self-­preservation of the species and, paradoxically, could only
be overcome, if at all, by the threat of common demise. To this proposal
Viveiros de Castro and Danowski respond that the prob­lem is not one of
the ­human species fighting internally along lines of self-­destruction or self-­
preservation and therefore needing unity. Instead, they say that while t­ here

Introduction  15
 are two camps in conflict, culprits and victims, the dividing line that forms
the camps is not simply internal to Homo sapiens. Forming the camps are
entire assemblages of ­humans and nonhumans (think of organisms such
as transgenic soy whose very existence depends on that complex assem­
blage we call industrial capitalism). Thus, they argue, while it is very hard
to trace the lines between one camp and the other (most ­humans and
nonhumans enrolled are victims and culprits at once), it is impor­tant not
to lose sight of the difference between assemblages that are thoroughly
invested in the practices that generate the Anthropocene and ­those that
are more or less forcefully dragged along. The authors identify the former
as H
­ umans; they call the latter Terrans.
Who are the Terrans? Viveiros de Castro and Danowski do not have a
definite answer to this question; however, they do have a sense that Ter­
rans are not a molar body, a Deleuzian ­whole that is self-­similar in spite of
its variations. They also reject the idea that a big-­scale prob­lem must be
given a big-­scale solution. Rather, they ask if it is not precisely a reduction
of scales that the Anthropocene calls for. What they call the p­ eople of
Pachamama, t­ hose myriad worlds who, since the conquest of the Amer­i­cas,
have been encroached on and damaged, could be an example of the Terrans.
Distinguishing between ­Humans and Terrans allows an engagement with
the current fate of the planet that takes stock of the colonial destruction of
worlds as the destruction that the culprits of the Anthropocene imposed on
its victims. The peculiarity of this destruction is that, waged in the name
of pro­gress (or ­under the command not to regress, as Stengers would say),
it has never been recognized as such. Paradoxically, the end of the world as
we know it may mean the end of its being made through destruction: facing
destruction at an unpre­ce­dented rate, the collectives that colonialism—in
its earliest and latest versions—­doomed to extinction emerge to publicly
denounce the princi­ples of their destruction, which may coincide with the
assumptions that made a one-­world world.
Could the moment of the Anthropocene bring to the fore the possibility
of the pluriverse? Could it offer the opportunity for a condition to emerge
that, instead of destruction, thrives on the encounter of heterogeneous
worldings, taking place alongside each other with their divergent h ­ ere(s)
and now(s), and therefore makes of their taking place a negotiation of their
­going on together in divergence? Can the Anthropocene be the scenario of
both the end of the world (as hegemonically conceived and practiced) and
the inauguration of what Helen Verran calls “a cosmopolitics as the politics

16  Mario Blaser and Marisol de la Cadena

of collectively ­doing cosmologies together and separately”? That the latter
phrase was inspired by Verran’s work with her Yolngu colleagues makes for
a hopeful answer.

A Speculative Opening, Not a Conclusion

Almost fifty years ago, Pierre Clastres suggested that the limitations of an­
thropology ­were a consequence of its habit of following the road mapped
by its own world. He deemed that road “the easiest road,” one that could be
“followed blindly.” Away from the limits of anthropology’s own world and
on a dif­fer­ent road, he proposed “taking seriously” the men and ­women
inhabiting what he conceptualized as “primitive socie­ties . . . ​from ­every
viewpoint,” even from t­ hose that negated ­those of “the Western world.” “It
is imperative to accept . . . ​that negation does not signify nothingness; that
when the mirror does not reflect our own likeness it does not prove ­there
is nothing.”22 Currently, the limitations facing anthropology are not felt
by the discipline only. They are experienced beyond anthropology as a
result of the upheaval of the crisis facing the planet expressed in the word
Anthropocene, allegedly the “most influential concept in environmental
studies over the past de­cade.”23 The crisis this word (and cognates) brings
to the conceptual fore may also offer some critical opportunity to slow
down thought and take time to consider the possibility of nature that
is not only such like the mountains and forest animals that have inspired
our works and this discussion. We echo Clastres and translate his ideas
to our proposal: the absence of our image does not reflect nothingness.
Our proposal takes the opportunity of the current planetary crisis to in­
vite anthropology to reckon with the idea that much of what the discipline
deemed cultural beliefs might be not only such. This invitation may be dif­
ficult to accept. Many ­will deem it irresponsible, warn us of its dangers, and
turn around shaking their heads in irritation.
Our proposal affects modern disciplines and their forms of knowledge.
It questions the power granted to their capacity to distribute the real-­real
(or the natural-­real) from the cultural-­real as well as the benevolent au­
thority with which they permit the latter (not infrequently as a lesser pres­
ence.) We consider all ­these—­the division that distributes realities as well
as the combination of power and benevolence that sustains it—as historical
events. We then suggest that such capacity might be limited to the prov­
ince of the division that t­hose disciplines and their knowledges require;

Introduction  17
not meeting ­those requirements (or “absence of their likeness,” Clastres
would say) may indicate an excess to such division, not the emptiness of
nonexistence, and not only the workings of culture. In such cases, rather
than concluding that t­here is nothing to talk about, conversations about
what is might take place in a po­liti­cal field—­political ontology—­where
modern knowledges may or may not pres­ent themselves as an exclusive
decision-­making field or result in one.
The proposal does destabilize a hegemonic state of affairs; the irritation
of ­those so destabilized is to be expected—­even understandable. But the pro­
posal is not irresponsible. Instead, it alters the conditions of the response,
which would now include the obligation to consider (rather than denying)
the possibility (of being) of that which does not reflect the image of the he­
gemonic order of ­things. Considering that the power of modern disciplines
and their knowledges to cancel the possibility of what emerges beyond
their grasp was a historical event (the result of a coloniality that needs not
be such), our proposal offers ­those disciplines the possibility to use their
creative might differently: without the undisputable certainty of superior­
ity, and accepting that rather than resting on colonial world-­making, their
prevalence could be achieved in constant negotiation with worlding prac­
tices that might not—or might not only—­reflect them.
Our proposal also opens space to rethink what a po­liti­cal circumstance
might be and how it might become. To partake in po­liti­cal gatherings, or to
be considered a po­liti­cal ­matter, entities (or, perhaps, events and relations)
would not require, like current practices of politics demand, to (re)pres­ent
themselves deploying historical (or scientific) evidence of existence. They
would instead be required to pres­ent themselves with what makes them be—
in all their heterogeneity. Our proposal is an invitation to think that instead
of the sameness that recognition supposes, politics might not start from, nor
resolve in ontologically homogeneous grounds. Rather, the grounds of ad­
versarial dispute or of allied agreement would be what we call uncommons.
And this is our last point: we propose uncommons as counterpoint to the
common good and to enclosures, and, as impor­tant, to slow down the com­
mons (including its progressive versions.) While usually deployed across
adversarial po­liti­cal positions, all three concepts converge in that they re­
quire a common form of relation, one that (like ­labor or property) connects
­humans and nature conceived as ontologically distinct and detached from
each other. Any of ­these three concepts—­including the commons in its

18  Mario Blaser and Marisol de la Cadena

progressive version—­may cancel the possibility of worldings that diverge
from the ontological divisions and relational forms they require. Repeating
that “it is impor­tant what concepts think concepts,” and to avoid cancel­
ling divergence, we propose the uncommons as the heterogeneous grounds
where negotiations take place t­ oward a commons that would be a continu­
ous achievement, an event whose vocation is not to be final b­ ecause it re­
members that the uncommons is its constant starting point.

notes

1. Eduardo Gudynas, “El Nuevo Extractivismo Progresista,” El Observador del obie 8

(2010): 1–10; Anthony Bebbington, “Po­liti­cal Ecologies of Resource Extraction: Agen­
das Pendientes,” erlacs 100 (2015): 85–98; Fabiana Li, Unearthing Conflict: Corporate
Mining, Activism, and Expertise in Peru (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015);
Maristella Svampa, “Commodities Consensus: Neoextractivism and Enclosure of the
Commons in Latin Amer­ic­ a,” South Atlantic Quarterly 114, no. 1 (2015): 65–82.
2. Mario Blaser, “The Threat of the Yrmo: The Po­liti­cal Ontology of a Sustainable
Hunting Program,” American Anthropologist 111, no. 1 (2009): 10–20; Mario Blaser,
“Notes T ­ owards a Po­liti­cal Ontology of ‘Environmental’ Conflicts,” in Contested
Ecologies: Nature and Knowledge, ed. Lesley Green, 13–27 (Cape Town: hsrc Press,
2013); Marisol de la Cadena, “Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual Re­
flections beyond ‘Politics,’ ” Cultural Anthropology 25, no. 2 (2010): 334–70; Marisol de
la Cadena, Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice across Andean Worlds (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2015).
3. John Law, “What’s Wrong with a One-­World World?,” Distinktion: Scandinavian
Journal of Social Theory 16, no. 1 (2015): 126–39. On the idea of ontological occupation,
see Arturo Escobar, Autonomía y Diseño: La Realización de lo comunal (Popayan, Colom­
bia: Editorial de la Universidad del Cauca, 2016).
4. See Isabelle Stengers, “Introductory Notes on an Ecol­ogy of Practices,” Cultural
Studies Review 1, no. 1 (2005):183–96; and Isabelle Stengers, “Comparison as a M ­ atter
of Concern,” Common Knowledge 17, no. 1 (2011): 60.
5. Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, “­Matters of Care in Technoscience: Assembling
Neglected ­Things,” Social Studies of Science 41, no. 1 (2011): 85–106; Maria Puig de la
Bellacasa, M­ atters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than H
­ uman Worlds (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2017).
6. As a practice of/at the crossroads of practices, fieldwork is a site of many sites,
localized and also nomadic; it includes sites away from the ethnographer’s office but
does not end t­ here.
7. Marilyn Strathern, Reproducing the ­Future: Essays on Anthropology, Kinship and the
New Reproductive Technologies (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1992).
8. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1983), 87.

Introduction  19
 9. Williams, Keywords, 88–93.
10. “Difference” ­here is a placeholder, an empty signifier for what would emerge in
the absence of culture as world-­making category.
11. Roy Wagner, “ ‘Luck in the Double Focus’: Ritualized Hospitality in Melanesia,”
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 18, no. s1 (2012): s161–­s 174.
12. Marilyn Strathern, The Gender of the Gift: Prob­lems with W ­ omen and Prob­lems with
Society in Melanesia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
13. Marilyn Strathern, “No Nature, No Culture: The Hagen Case,” in Nature, Culture
and Gender, ed. Carol P. MacCormack and Marilyn Strathern, 174–222 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1980).
14. Marilyn Strathern uses “divergence” in previous texts as well—­perhaps not in
conversation with Stengers. See Marilyn Strathern, Kinship, Law, and the Unexpected:
Relatives Are Always a Surprise (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 7; see
also Stengers, “Introductory Notes on an Ecol­ogy of Practices.”
15. ­Those differences, the relation that makes them, and their explanation would be
within the same domain.
16. Importantly, divergence is a tool to think what we have called “interests in common
that are not the same interest.” Stengers, “Comparison as a ­Matter of Concern.”
17. Stengers, “Introductory Notes on an Ecol­ogy of Practices.” See also de la Cadena,
“Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes.”
18. See Stengers, “Introductory Notes on an Ecol­ogy of Practices.”
19. See de la Cadena, “Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes”; de la Cadena, Earth
Beings; Blaser, “The Threat of the Yrmo”; Blaser, “Notes T ­ owards a Po­liti­cal Ontology of
‘Environmental’ Conflicts.”
20. ­Here, we are paraphrasing Stengers.
21. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four T ­ heses,” Critical Inquiry 35,
no. 2 (2009): 197–222.
22. Pierre Clastres, Society against the State, rev. ed. (New York: Zone, 2007), 20.
23. Jason Moore, “Introduction: Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History,
and the Crisis of Capitalism,” in Anthropocene or Capitalocene: Nature, History and the
Crisis of Capitalism, ed. Jason Moore, 1–11 (Oakland, CA: pm Press, 2016), 2.

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22  Mario Blaser and Marisol de la Cadena