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Posthuman Rights Struggles and Environmentalisms from Below: Pluriversal Life Projects
keywords:
political ecology
indigenous peoples
ontology
In decolonial determinations to resist the modern ontological separation of nature from culture, people living in Andean Community countries increasingly recognize natural and cultural forces to be inextricably interrelated under the principle of the pluriverse (Blaser and de la Cadena 2018, Escobar 2019). After years of struggles led by Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and campesino communities, mobilizations by new social movements, and citizen activism, constitutional reforms affirmed the plurinational and intercultural natures of the region’s polities. Across the Andean Community region, communities articulate human rights and responsibilities ‘from below’, giving voice to political ontologies in which the agency of non-human actors features in the assertion of collective life projects. To what extent and how do such posthuman articulations reconfigure territory and the rights of humans, nature, and other beings? In this roundtable, our discussion is grounded in ethnographic fieldwork conducted with Indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples living in different coastal, Andean, and Amazonian regions of Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. Presenting research informed by ontological, multispecies, and posthuman approaches, discussants will recount how local communities are enacting life projects that rely on intimate relationships between human and non-human agents including plants, ecologies, and territorial animacies. We will show how across the Andean Community, ecocentric initiatives are maturing to advance agendas to reclaim territory, ensure the continued vitality of agrobiodiversity, and enact new models for biocultural rights governance.