Indigenous cosmopolitics in the Andes: conceptual reflections beyond “politics”

Abstract

In Latin America, the policy practiced by indigenous peoples has been classified as “ethnic politics”. Their activism is interpreted as a matter of making cultural rights prevail. But what if “culture” is an insufficient, and even inadequate, notion to think about the challenge that indigenous politics represents? Inspired by recent political events in Peru - and, to a lesser extent, Ecuador and Bolivia - in which the indigenous-popular movement has evoked sentient entities (mountains, water and land - what we call “nature”) into the interior of the sphere of public policy, the argument of this essay has three dimensions. First, indigeneity, as a historical formation, exceeds the usual notion of politics, that is, an arena populated by rational human beings vying for the power to represent other humans before the State. Second, the current political emergence of indigeneity - in opposition anti-mining movements in Peru and Ecuador, but also in commemorative events in Bolivia - challenges the separation between nature and culture that supports the prevailing notion of politics and its corresponding social contract. Third, in addition to “ethnic politics”, current indigenous movements propose a different political practice, plural not because it is promoted by bodies marked by gender, race, ethnicity or sexuality (as multiculturalism would understand), but because they evoke non-humans as actors in political arena.