FOUNDATIONAL THESIS
Marisol de la Cadena's groundbreaking work forces modern thinkers to confront a foundational paradox: what happens when the entities we treat as inert scenery—such as mountains and rivers—refuse to remain inanimate objects?
Drawing on a decade of deep collaboration with Mariano and Nazario Turpo in the Peruvian Andes, the book tracks how runakuna (Quechua people) live entangled with tirakuna, powerful earth-beings that shape livelihood, memory, and political struggle.
This is not mere folklore or benign cultural belief; it is an ontological challenge to the foundational premise of Western modernity that separates nature from culture.
The Runakuna and the Tirakuna
To understand the world of the Turpo family, we must abandon the modern separation between humans and nature.
Mariano and Nazario Turpo do not merely live near mountains; they exist in reciprocal, constitutive relationships with them.
Ausangate is not just a geological formation; it is a sovereign entity that demands respect, offers protection, and participates directly in community governance.
The mountain is not a symbol of power; the mountain is power itself, acting within a shared social fabric.
Ontological entanglement defines the everyday reality where humans and earth-beings are mutually codependent.
- Relational Co-Constitution: Recognize that identities are formed through ongoing engagements with both human and non-human entities.
- Active Topography: Treat landscapes as active agents with historical trajectories rather than passive backdrops.
- Reciprocal Obligation: Establish practices of mutual care that acknowledge the agency of the ecological systems sustaining you.
Quechua Historical Memory
History in the Andes is not a linear sequence of dates recorded in archives; it is deeply sedimented in the landscape.
Mariano Turpo's memories of agrarian struggles, land reform, and state violence are inextricably linked to the actions of the tirakuna.
When communities fought for land rights, they were simultaneously negotiating their standing with the local earth-beings.
Historical consciousness in this context requires listening to the terrain and respecting the temporalities of non-human actors.
Memory lives in the rocks, the water, and the shifting moods of the high-altitude peaks.
Landscape as archive allows marginalized populations to anchor their sovereignty in enduring ecological realities.
- Landscape Archiving: Look beyond written documentation to understand how physical environments store historical trauma and resilience.
- Non-Linear Temporality: Integrate ancestral memory cycles into modern strategic planning and institutional memory.
- Ecological Witnessing: Acknowledge that non-human entities bear witness to social conflicts and structural injustices.
The Violence of Modern Translation
Modern state institutions operate on a universalizing ontology that recognizes only one nature and multiple cultures.
When Indigenous claims involving tirakuna enter the bureaucratic or legal system, they undergo a violent process of translation.
State officials reduce living earth-beings to superstitious beliefs, folklore, or environmental resources to be managed.
This translation erases the political reality of earth-beings, turning radical ontological difference into manageable cultural diversity.
Bureaucracy protects the single-world paradigm by legislating out of existence anything that defies its foundational categories.
Ontological flattening strips complex relational networks of their power, subverting Indigenous sovereignty.
- Audit Bureaucracy: Identify where your organizational systems inadvertently erase the lived complexity of stakeholders.
- Translation Vigilance: Monitor how specialized terminology strips qualitative, relational entities of their true agency.
- Plural Recognition: Design frameworks capable of accommodating fundamentally conflicting definitions of reality.
Political Ontology
Standard political science assumes a shared world where actors debate interests over scarce resources.
Political ontology challenges this by examining conflicts where the very nature of existence is contested.
When a mining corporation sees copper ore and local Quechua communities see the body of an earth-being, they are not having a disagreement; they are inhabiting different worlds.
These 'world-annihilating' clashes reveal that politics is not just about power within a world, but about the friction between worlds.
When worlds collide, compromise is impossible if one world demands the literal destruction of the other's reality.
Pluriversal friction is the inevitable result of diverse ontologies bumping against modern universalism.
- Ontological Mapping: Map the underlying assumptions about reality held by different stakeholders in any major conflict.
- World-Conflict Analysis: Distinguish between standard interest-based disputes and fundamental ontological clashes.
- Sovereign Respect: Honor incompatible worldviews without forcing them into a homogenizing universal framework.
Practices of Accompaniment
Marisol de la Cadena did not study Mariano and Nazario Turpo as an objective observer; she accompanied them.
Accompaniment requires researchers to abandon the illusion of detached neutrality and embrace partiality.
By walking alongside the runakuna, the author learned to perceive the world through practices that include the tirakuna.
This methodological shift transforms research into an ethical commitment to the worlds being investigated.
To accompany is to allow your own conceptual framework to be unsettled by the realities of those you study.
Ethical entanglement replaces extractive data gathering with reciprocal intellectual partnership.
- Relational Research: Cultivate long-term commitments with communities rather than executing extractive, short-term studies.
- Epistemic Humility: Allow your foundational concepts to be questioned and reshaped by unfamiliar ontologies.
- Shared Vulnerability: Accept the political and intellectual risks of standing with marginalized worldviews.
The Pluriverse Versus Globalization
Globalization presents itself as an all-encompassing reality that incorporates all local cultures into a single global market.
The concept of the pluriverse—a world where many worlds fit—disrupts this totalizing ambition.
Indigenous movements fighting for earth-beings are defending not just land, but the very existence of pluriversal possibilities.
Defending the pluriverse is an existential necessity in an era of ecological collapse driven by single-world hegemony.
Globalization homogenizes existence, while the pluriverse multiplies the ways of being human on Earth.
Pluriversal resistance provides a conceptual armor against totalizing capitalist expansion.
- Plurality Defense: Actively protect alternative institutional and social designs within your sphere of influence.
- Anti-Hegemony: Resist the impulse to standardize all operational units under a single, centralized model.
- Ecological Pluralism: Adopt diverse ecological stewardship practices informed by local relational knowledge.
The State and the Native
Indigenous peoples are constantly pressured by modern nation-states to assimilate into standard categories of citizenship.
To be recognized by the state, they must perform a sanitized version of indigeneity that strips away disruptive ontological claims.
However, maintaining ties with earth-beings allows runakuna to exceed the limits of state-sanctioned identity.
This strategic positioning lets them engage with national politics while remaining loyal to their earth-beings.
State recognition is a trap if it requires you to deny the very entities that give you life and history.
Strategic alterity enables communities to navigate formal power structures without losing their ontological core.
- Bureaucratic Navigation: Engage with official systems strategically while preserving core autonomous identities.
- Resist Assimilation: Refuse institutional demands to sanitize complex cultural practices for mainstream approval.
- Autonomous Governance: Build internal governance structures that bypass the need for state validation.
Toward an Ecology of Practices
The ultimate lesson of 'Earth Beings' is not that we must all adopt Quechua cosmology, but that we must recognize our own provincialism.
An ecology of practices invites us to acknowledge that Western technoscience is one practice among many, not the mirror of ultimate reality.
By fostering dialogue across ontological divides, we can build coalitions that address ecological crises more effectively.
This requires a radical opening of our political imaginaries to include non-human agency.
We can no longer afford a single-world epistemology when our survival depends on pluriversal collaboration.
Ontological pluralism is the cornerstone of any sustainable planetary future.
- Epistemic Pluralism: Integrate diverse knowledge systems into environmental and strategic decision-making.
- Non-Human Alliances: Form collaborative strategies that treat ecological systems as active political partners.
- Planetary Coalition: Build cross-cultural movements united by the defense of multiple living worlds.
Executive Synthesis & Monday Morning Action
Marisol de la Cadena's 'Earth Beings' shatters the illusion of a single, universal reality shared by all humans.
By documenting how the Turpo family lives alongside tirakuna, she demonstrates that mountains and earth-entities are active historical and political agents.
Recognizing the pluriverse is not an academic exercise; it is an urgent political and ecological necessity for navigating the crises of the modern world.
