Anthropology and the politics of alterity: A Latin American dialectic and its relevance for ontological anthropologies

Abstract

Recent anglophone ontological anthropologies have an important Latin American intellectual and political history that is rarely fully acknowledged. This article outlines some of that history, arguing that debates about the politics of this ‘ontological turn’ should be read in the context of a tension between political economy and cosmological approaches that have been a feature of Latin American anthropology in some form since the early 20th century, and that are deeply implicated in histories of conquest and colonialism, including internal colonialism. This conceptual history helps to explain both the desire of some scholars to avoid a certain kind of politicisation and the argument that methodological and theoretical innovation within anthropology is political in itself. But it also means that ontological anthropology encounters some of the same challenges faced by indigenous movements confronted with similar choices.

The Indians do not speak our language, they do not have money, they do not have culture. They are native peoples. How did they manage to get 13% of the national territory? … [Indigenous reserves] are an obstacle to agri-business. You can't reduce indigenous land by even a square metre in Brazil. (Jair Bolsonaro, April 2015) ¹

In Bolivia, right here next door to Brazil, we’ve got an Indian who is president […]. So why do Indians in Brazil have to be treated like prehistoric men? […] I’ve talked to the Indians. What do the Indians want? The great majority of the ones I’ve spoken to: they want electricity, they want internet, they want doctors, dentists … they want to play football, they want cars, they want to go the cinema, to go to the theatre. They are human beings just like us. (Jair Bolsonaro, President of Brazil, January 2019). ²

The napë doesn't think that, the capitalist napë – I call him a capitalist, I call him the modern man, who wears clothes, a necktie that looks like a dingleberry. This modern man, he thinks he's right, that he's rich, but he's really destroying himself. He isn't doing it alone. He makes the poor work for him. The poor, as you people say, work to make someone else rich. He orders them to work: ‘look, poor fella, go get my things, go cut my wood, cut millions of pieces of lumber for me. I’ll take it and go negotiate with countries that don't have it.’ I call this work dirty. Dirty work. Dirty thinking. (Davi Kopenawa, Yanomami shaman and intellectual (Dias and Marras, 2019); napë is a Yanomami word that means both White and enemy).

Introduction

Jair Bolsonaro's term as President of Brazil, beginning in January 2019, has been marked by his tendency to take strong political positions, bringing uncomfortable echoes of times that many hoped were past. The above quotes from him express attitudes towards indigenous peoples that could have come from almost any time in the last 70 years or so. They are part of a continuum that sees indigenous people as illegitimate qua indigenous: in the first, the ‘Indians’ ³ completely lack culture and therefore do not deserve to control territory; in the second, they are not ‘prehistoric men’ but want culture. In both cases ‘culture’ is national, which means White, modern, and capitalist. In this view indigenous peoples either desire modern forms of consumption or should get out of the way of modern forms of production. Since the Conquest, racialised notions of alterity have been used to justify relations of exploitation, domination and dispossession across the region of Latin America, as elsewhere. In the face of the most recent environmental destruction wrought by such attitudes, some indigenous leaders have responded with alternative cosmovisions, where the Earth is both a being that can weaken and die and a place that hosts ancestral spirits, where the plants, the animals and the land itself are all interrelated. ⁴ Other critical indigenous perspectives, like the quote above from Davi Kopenawa, emphasise the problem of the intersection of class and race within capitalist relations of extraction. All of the above approaches turn on the question of how to articulate or reconcile (racialised) difference between indigenous and non-indigenous in Latin America.

In this article, I explore the political heritage of anthropological theorisations of difference in Latin America and use that to engage with the politics of ontological anthropology, especially as it is understood in the North Atlantic. I suggest that Latin American political history has created a thin line between celebrating alterity and engaging in exoticism, a problem confronted by both ontological anthropologists and indigenous political advocates. This is an urgent challenge in the face of attitudes like those expressed by Bolsonaro. Today, ontological arguments may be apt languages to address key political problems in the region, such as the environmental degradation caused by extractive industries (Ødegaard and Rivera Andía, 2019). But they also stand in an uncomfortable relation to the coloniser/colonised binary that has shaped the region since Conquest.

The ways that colonial heritages have informed the history of anthropology in the region create significant problems for one of the main claims made in a recent debate on the politics of the ontological turn (Holbraad and Pedersen, 2014), namely that its most important political move is actually a methodological one that requires the reconceptualisation of the anthropologist's ideas from the perspective of her interlocutors (see Viveiros de Castro, 2013). Holbraad and Pedersen argue that this methodological move creates new possibilities for ‘ethnographically motivated’ understandings of alternative futures for the world (Holbraad and Pedersen, 2014, 2017: 196). The critique of that move as sidestepping ‘real-world’ politics today is by now well known (see Bessire and Bond, 2014). Alcida Ramos (2012: 489), for example, argued powerfully that ontological anthropology's predecessor, perspectivism, was ‘indifferent to the historical and political predicament of indigenous life in the modern world’. In this essay I want to show that this debate can (and perhaps should) be read in the context of the development of anthropology in and of Latin America. The claim to radical alterity as a methodological or even political stance that does not need anchoring in worldly political action is at the extreme end of one side of a long-standing regional intellectual debate, one that has manifested itself in different ways over time.

The current debate bears a strong family resemblance to the debate between certain strands of indigenismo on the one hand and Marxist political economy on the other that in different guises has been an important thread in social thought and anthropology in Latin America for the last century at least. For economy of expression, I name this contrast as that between cosmology and political economy respectively, tracing in the course of the article the ways that the cosmological approach in particular has shifted over time, from indigenismo through culturalism, structuralism, and lately, ontology. I want to stress that I do not claim that the debate determines the whole of Latin American anthropology, nor that the binary I identify can encompass the different national traditions of anthropological study in the region. Rather, I see the tension as one thread that links together anthropological thought across the region and that resurfaces at different times and in different places, taking shape differently each time. I use the binary as an epistemological device, one that we might consider in a similar way to how the tension between universalism and relativism traverses North Atlantic anthropology (also rooted in the relationship between coloniser and colonised, and also encompassing multiple different national traditions). I deploy the contrast between cosmology and political economy here both to show why the methodological shift proposed by some ontological anthropologists might be seen as political in itself and to assess what the political consequences of that might be.

Ontological anthropology is a large and varied field, with theoretical and ethnographic contributions from scholars across the globe. Both in the region and in the anglophone literature, we might wish to distinguish between a structuralist ontological tradition especially influenced by theories from Amazonia (e.g. see Viveiros de Castro, 2013; Holbraad and Pedersen, 2017; Pedersen, 2011; Àlvarez Àvila, 2017; Kohn, 2015), and a political ontologies tradition which explores questions of ‘cosmopolitics’ ⁵ (e.g. de La Cadena, 2010, 2015; Blaser, 2010; Salas Carreño, 2017). They share the premise that indigenous people occupy ontologies or even worlds that are distinct from – albeit partially connected to – non-indigenous ones.

Ontological anthropology has an anthropological heritage that takes in such luminaries as Strathern, Wagner, Povinelli, Ingold, Viveiros de Castro and Descola (not all of whom would consider themselves to be ontological theorists); and that others have described better than I could here (Holbraad and Pedersen, 2017; Descola, 2014). It is also importantly informed by science and technology studies (Jensen, 2017). Nonetheless, important trends in current ontological anthropology come from Latin America, both as a field of ethnographic enquiry and a source of intellectual production. What I present here is something like a complementary history of ontological anthropologies, one grounded in the politico-intellectual history of the shifting relation between indigenous peoples and the nation state in Latin America. To date, few discussions of the politics of the ‘ontological turn’ have explored in detail their roots in the relation that anthropological theorising in Latin America (ontological or not) bears to regional political histories of the anthropological study of racialised interethnic ‘engagement’ and indigenous rights.

The article unfolds in two parts, first by examining the tensions between indigenista cosmological and Marxist political economy traditions within regional anthropologies, the development of which I illustrate with three debates that took place in Peru and Brazil in the 1960s and 1990s. My contention is that contemporary debates about the politics of ontological anthropology are in some ways a reworking of those older currents, and as such have quite similar implications for both anthropological analysis and indigenous political mobilisation. This is the theme of the following part of the article, as I return to the question of why ontological theorising might have emerged now but answer it through a political narrative of how ontological strategies can be one aspect of contemporary indigenous advocacy in the face of extractive capitalism. I conclude with a discussion of the associated risks of the exoticisation concomitant with such strategies of radical alterity and I assess some of the implications of these risks for contemporary anthropology.

The many worlds of colonialism and implications for anthropology

Latin America begins with the conflict between indigenous and colonial epistemologies or worlds. The story starts with the violent invasion of what we now call Central and South America, and the death and forced conversion of the majority of the continent's original inhabitants. Over the years since, the conflict has been fought on the terrains of land, religion, identity, history, bodies and revolution. Until Independence, the Spaniards even governed their territories in the region explicitly on the basis of two worlds, through the ‘two republics’: different government systems for the indigenous peoples (the República de Indios) on the one hand and the colonisers and city-dwellers on the other (the República de Españoles).

Spanish and Portuguese colonial government and its successor Creole republican government gave rise to a profound internal colonialism that remains acute today, and that in many parts of the region still rests on the binary construction of racialised alterity, which was constitutive of the original colonialism, especially in the Hispanic countries (Rivera Cusicanqui, 2012; Gonzalez Casanova, 2006 [1969]). In its current incarnation, internal colonialism has the following characteristics: deep racism against indigenous peoples and Afro-Latin Americans on the part of the mestizos (mixed Hispanic-indigenous people) and creoles (Whites); and a clear race-poverty nexus, so those communities that are more indigenous or Afro-Latin American tend to be poorer. Both characteristics are maintained by exploitative labour relations between mestizo/White and indigenous or Afro-Latin Americans, and between urban and rural spaces. These exploitive relations were enacted through violence and terror, while internal colonialism today is maintained also through the extraction of economic resources other than labour (timber, minerals, natural gas, oil) from indigenous territories, enabled by preventing indigenous peoples’ control over the land on which they live. Exploitation has been sustained through educational inequity, specifically the dominance of Spanish or Portuguese language and Creole national identity in hegemonic culture and schooling. Finally, and related to all the above points, the condition of internal colonialism has created significant tensions around the ‘assimilation’ of indigenous peoples to dominant models of citizenship (Stavenhagen, 2002).

This history could certainly produce a theory of different worlds; after all, the Iberians saw the original peoples when they invaded as in fact living in a different world. As far as the Spaniards were concerned, for example, ‘the Indians’ were, first, a relatively homogenous group, and second, almost entirely natural. They were evidently human but not quite in the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic sense that the intellectuals of the Conquest defined as humanity at the time (Pagden, 1988). For Europeans this was a necessary aspect of the justification for invasion and dispossession. Fausto (1999: 77) describes how early Jesuit accounts distinguished between different indigenous groups in Brazil according to how rebellious they were, but accounted for their difference on the basis of whether they lived like humans in houses or like animals in the forest, and whether they ate their enemies out of vengeance or because they liked the taste of human flesh. How the originary peoples saw the Spanish and Portuguese at the time is less clear, mediated as it is through European sources. But we know that for at least two centuries after conquest, Europeans saw the peoples of the ‘New World’ as the archetypal savage, noble or otherwise (Trouillot, 2003). Later, in the hegemonic nation-building discourses of the Republican period, indigenous peoples represented the ancestral Other who was both constitutive of national identity and condemned to disappear with modernisation. This was especially acute in those parts of the region which had large pre-Columbian states (largely in Spanish-speaking South America), where native populations were not utterly decimated by conquest but remained (albeit much depleted) as peasant societies serving the occupiers. Brazilian Republicans developed a different but equally troubled relationship to indigenous peoples and Afro-Brazilians as the Others to Creole projects of national identity.

In the early 20th century, one response by Hispanic mestizo intellectuals to the situation of internal colonialism and racialised differentiation was ‘indigenismo’, a celebration of indigenous identity in anthropology and the arts, led by figures such as, in Peru, the photographer Martín Chambi, the sociologist/philosopher José Carlos Mariátegui and the anthropologist Luis Valcárcel, and the anthropologist Manuel Gamio in Mexico. Félix Patzi Paco (2009) argues that there were two strains of indigenismo, one that focussed especially on native culture but aimed at the development of a mestizo version of nationalism, the other that emphasised the economic situation of the indigenous peoples. This latter group saw compatibility between Marxist precepts and indigenous practices, drawing on a creative mix of indigenous philosophies and Marxian ideas of primitive communism (Mariátegui, 1971). Mexican post-revolutionary indigenismo was especially influenced by this mix. Yet, for the historian Waskar Ari (2014: 10), indigenismo from both Right and Left ‘shared a cultural agenda that glorified and defended Indian culture while simultaneously infantilizing indigenous peoples’. Across the region, tension developed between (Marxist) Left and indigenista perspectives on indigeneity, which hardened around the middle of the 20th century, when for many activists and scholars the primary explanation for the exploitation of originary peoples was their class position as peasants. They came to see the indigenistas as either simply romantic or essentially acculturationalist. These tensions have been constitutive of anthropology in the region since its inception. For much of the second half of the 20th century, the distinction situated Marxist thought on one side and Lévi-Straussian structuralism (also culturalism) on the other. In the rest of this section, I briefly set out their interrelated histories, and then discuss the tension in more detail in the cases of Peru and Brazil.

Histories of indigenismo and anthropology

Since independence in the 19th century, Republican nation-building projects especially in the Hispanic parts of the region relied upon a romantic indigenismo that celebrated the indigenous peoples of the archaeological record, such as the Inca or Mexica empires, but that did not extend to contemporary indigenous peoples, at least not at the beginning of this ideology. Thinkers described their countries as the inheritors of pre-Columbian states and saw in that heritage the cultural core of independence from their colonisers (Baez-Jorge, 2002). By the early 20th century, this Creole nationalism had developed into a mestizo nationalism, whose intellectuals drew on these celebrations of the past in order to promote the idea of racial democracy through mixture (mestizaje). José Vasconcelos’ notion of the ‘cosmic race’ in 1920s Mexico is probably the most notable of this trend. The cosmic race is a race of mestizos, composed of mixture in the first instance between indigenous and Hispanic Mexicans, eventually to become a ‘fifth’ global race that would absorb the other four global races (Vasconcelos, 1979 [1929]). Vasconcelos thought that mestizaje expressed an especially Latin American drive to equality. However, as Peter Wade (2017) points out, ideas of racial democracy through mixture depended upon valuations of whiteness as superior and of indigeneity or blackness as inferior. Vasconcelos argued that the ‘lower types’ of people would be absorbed by the superior type, and that through ‘voluntary extinction … the uglier breeds will gradually give way to the more beautiful’ (Vasconcelos, 1979 [1929]); cited in Wade, 2017: 10). This tension between the promise of democracy and the assumptions and realities of racial hierarchy was resolved mostly by placing the subordinate groups outside of modernity, associated with the past and the periphery (Wade, 2017: 22).

In Brazil, 19th century Indianism drew on a much different context than Hispanic indigenismo did, since, as Carlos Fausto recently argued, ‘unlike Peru, Colombia, or Mexico, this past was only made visible through fragile materials – feathers, wood, and pottery – and not by sturdy stone monuments. There was no pre-Columbian indigenous state with which the new empire could identify’ (Fausto, 2020). Dominant Brazilian nation-building historiography of the time tended to focus on the effects of African slavery rather than indigenous populations; while Indianist thinkers of the mid-late 19th and early 20th century looked to the 16th century Tupi-Guarani, who were especially associated with the ritual practice of warfare cannibalism. By the 1920s, cannibalism had become an important metaphor for futuristic Brazilian modernists; with the figure of the anthropophagus perhaps serving a similar metaphorical role to that of the cosmic race in 1920s Mexico. In 1928, Oswald de Andrade proposed that Brazilian culture should devour European culture and digest it, as a cannibal would do, in order to produce something new, a mutual modification through addition. The idea of Brazilian relations with European culture via the predatory incorporation of the other resurfaced in the 1960s Tropicália movement and has influenced national anthropological traditions until now (Fausto, 2020).

In parallel, Brazilian intellectuals also promoted racial fraternity through mixture based on racial hierarchy. Writing in the 1930s, Gilberto Freyre advocated the social democratic virtues of the ‘harmonious fusion of diverse or, even, antagonistic cultural traditions’ (cited in Wade, 2017: 12), and by the 1940s, the notion of racial democracy through mixture was, Wade argues, official policy. In the 1970s, Freyre even proposed a brown (moreno) ‘meta-race’ (Wade, 2017). The point of such ‘miscegenation’ or mestizaje in both Brazil and Mexico was precisely the eventual disappearance of the subordinate category or categories, and these attitudes remain powerful today.

These cultural debates informed the establishment of indigenista government initiatives such as the Serviço de Proteção aos Índios, (SPI; Service for the Protection of Indians) in Brazil in 1910 and the Instituto Nacional Indigenista (INI; National Indigenist Institute) in Mexico in 1948 and led to the development of applied anthropology programmes in universities in Mexico, Brazil and Peru in the 1940s, to study the ‘indigenous problem’ (Baez-Jorge, 2002). In Brazil, Darcy Ribeiro, who was influenced by North American cultural evolutionism and acculturation models, took advantage of state indigenismo to establish the Museu do Índio and a teaching program in anthropology. In this way, in the early 20th century, indigenismo translated into public policy via the combination of ethnological study and an appreciation of the need for policies to improve indigenous people's lives in a material sense across the region. However, both were viewed in the context of Republican nation formation, and the end point of both was the destruction of indigenous identity, what Félix Patzi Paco (2009) names as ethnocide. The Amerindians of this discourse were at the same time constitutive of national identity and in need of policies to be directed at making them modern, which meant less indigenous and more mestizo. This was called acculturation, and its promotion should be understood in the context of the widespread celebration of the mestizo as the quintessential national subject of the early-mid 20th century in Hispanic Latin America, and the promotion of ‘racial democracy’ in Brazil that I discussed above. Both ideologies relied upon a brutal Romanticism, that, by placing indigenous identity in the past, required its annihilation at the same time as celebrating it; or, in the case of Brazil, a kind of mixture through predation and absorption of the other. Alterity thus bore a direct relation to processes of dispossession and exploitation, extended to the metaphor of cannibalism. These processes were fundamentally racialised.

By the 1960s, anthropologists of the Marxist tradition were becoming more critical towards the evolutionism of acculturation theories. Informed by the dependency theory emerging in the region at the time, they argued that indigenous people were poor not because of inherent cultural weaknesses but due to the exploitative relationship with dominant Creole culture. In Brazil, Ribeiro (1970) came to argue that contact between Whites and Indians amounted to ethnocide, through infectious diseases, loss of land and of ethnic identity. The Mexican Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán (1979) argued that Indigenous societies had been pushed into ‘regions of refuge’ where local Whites could exploit them. The answer, for him, was ‘planned acculturation’ (Baez-Jorge, 2002), with anthropologists helping to find a place for indigenous societies within national societies (Jimeno, 2004).

Others went further. In an important collection of essays, Mexican intellectuals inspired by the writings of Georges Balandier on African colonialism pointed out explicitly that indigenous poverty was an effect of capitalism and colonialism (Medina and García Mora, 1983; Jimeno, 2004). Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, for example, critiqued official Mexican indigenismo: ‘not recognising that the indigenous problem lies in the relations of domination that subject colonised peoples, indigenismo has become generally the proposal of lines of action that seek induced – and at times compulsory – transformation (la transformación inducida) of ethnic cultures, instead of the destruction of the structures of domination’. In an even more pointed critique later in the same essay, he said: ‘does it make sense to talk about the integration of the Indian as his only road to redemption? Does the slave-owner (amo, lit. master) assimilate the slave, so that he becomes boss as well, without breaking the relationship of slavery beforehand? Can we all become the slave-owner exactly when the slave-owner exists only because of the existence of the slave?’ (Bonfil Batalla, 1983: 154, my translation). This perhaps marks the break between Marxism and indigenismo and the end of a relationship that had been so important in the early 20th century.

In Brazil, Roberto Cardoso de Oliveira (1972), who had trained in Marxist philosophy in the 1950s at the University of Sao Paulo, and was similarly inspired by Balandier, proposed the influential model of ‘interethnic friction’ to account for the conflictual nature and asymmetry of Indian–White contact (Ramos, 1990). In Peru, the sociologist Aníbal Quijano questioned evolutionist notions of acculturation but saw society moving from one based on a caste-like division between indigenous and non-indigenous to a thoroughly modern class system. When he was writing in the 1960s, he thought that this transition was as yet incomplete and in the Andes had produced the new figure of the cholo. He argued that processes of ‘cholification’ were creating an intermediary group or culture, neither fully Indian nor fully mestizo; but whose position could best be explained through class analysis. The cholo (who was, for Quijano, a masculine figure) could be an indigenous migrant to the city, or a unionised peasant, among other kinds of persons somewhere between indigenous and non-indigenous. The cholo was the result of the fact that relations between ‘indigenous and western Creole cultures’ had only ever been based on domination, but as a figure he also put an end to the lack of communication (‘incomunicación’) represented by that domination (Quijano, 1980: 112, my translation).

Peru

Some of these analytical tensions and debates came to a head in the first of three debates I discuss here, a now notorious Round Table discussion of José María Arguedas’ novel Todas las Sangres (Every Blood) held at the Instituto de Estudios Peruanos in 1965 (Escobar, 1985). Arguedas is arguably the most important Peruvian anthropologist of the 20th century. Brought up by Quechua-speaking servants after his mother died in childbirth, he seems always to have felt that he had a dual world view – part Indian, part mestizo, but not cholo in Quijano's sense. In a speech he gave in 1968, Arguedas said ‘I am not an acculturated (indian); I am a Peruvian who proudly, like a happy demon, speaks in Christian and Indian, in Spanish and Quechua’. Socialism was important to him, but he combined it with an appreciation of the indigenous in him, which he called the ‘magic’: ‘Until what point have I understood socialism? I don't know very well. But it didn't kill the magic in me’. ⁶ He trained as an anthropologist and did write anthropological texts, but his most influential works are his novels (Benavides, 2013). They portray Andean society in very rich detail and complexity and are more akin to contemporary ethnography than the sociological writings of most of his contemporary critics.

Arguedas is far too sophisticated to be easily placed in a tradition of either Marxism or indigenismo, but the controversy over his novel illustrates the tensions between the two traditions. At the Round Table, he was accused of portraying an inaccurate picture of Andean society, in a way that would ultimately have a negative effect. Henri Favre and Aníbal Quijano, among others, thought that the novel depicted the Andes as characterised by a caste system (indigenous, creole, mestizo) as opposed to the class system they thought more correct. They argued that Arguedas had portrayed the Indian as idealised, static, biological and irrational. These accusations hurt Arguedas deeply, and at the time he seems to have felt them as acutely as the breakdown of his marriage. He exclaimed in a letter afterwards, ‘I think that today my life has stopped having meaning. My home is destroyed by the slow and progressive influence of the incompatibilities between me and my wife; (…) two wise sociologists and one wise economist show today that my book Todas las Sangres is negative for the country; I have nothing to do in this world’ (Escobar, 1985: my translation). ⁷ Aside from his personal vulnerabilities, the academic critique is certainly of its time, shaped by the political conditions of multiple uprisings for land reform in the highlands, led by Marxist activists. That rural (and usually indigenous) resistance against the effects of internal colonialism and of US influence tended to be understood in terms of class conflict, essentially as peasant mobilisation (de La Cadena, 2010, 2015). In the Peruvian highlands it eventually culminated in the Maoist fundamentalism of Sendero Luminoso, who vehemently rejected discourses of indigeneity (Degregori, 1991).

In the Andes, non-Marxist anthropologists of the 1960s and 1970s moved to a more Lévi-Straussian structuralist approach (Degregori, 2000), which gradually turned Arguedas’ political claim ‘for an alternative form of knowing, (…) the demand for “magic” to be considered on a par with reason’ (de la Cadena, 2005: 22) into the study of Andean thought as structured cosmology. North Americans and Europeans like Tom Zuidema, Billie Jean Isbell and Gary Urton, together with Peruvian anthropologists like Juan Ossio and Alejandro Ortiz Rescaniere analysed Andean thought as a particular kind of world view, which consisted of ‘the dual division of the cosmos, the complementarity of opposites (tendency towards equilibrium), the equivalence of human, natural and mythical worlds; and the cyclical and not evolutionary vision of time’ (Roel Mendizábal, 2000: 91, my translation). They found evidence of this cosmology in how kinship, work, exchange, fiestas, geographical space and music were organised. For some of them, complementarity was a structuring principle that had survived unchanged in the Andes since pre-Hispanic times.

By now, and as the Marxist traditions became more distinct from indigenista ones, the tension I have identified between the two had become a broader tension between political economy and cosmology, the latter specifically in the form of structuralism/culturalism. It emerged again in the very early 1990s in the second debate I consider, this time within the US anthropology of Peru, as Orin Starn (1991) condemned culturalist approaches as a form of Orientalism, which he called Andeanism. He accused anthropologists of focussing so much on pre-Columbian inheritances within contemporary indigenous cultures in the Andes that they had missed the political–economic conditions that were giving rise to a very modern Maoist revolution under the leadership of Sendero Luminoso. As scholars had done before him, he made a contrast between a style of anthropology that is aware of the contemporary political and economic situation of the region versus one that romanticises indigenous groups as out of time, descendants of the pre-Hispanic era. Enrique Mayer (1991) responded by defending the culturalist approach. He took issue with some of Starn’s portrayals of Andeanist anthropology, accusing him of selective quoting and misrepresentation. More importantly, he argued that to study Andean peoples as a contemporary culture was vitally important in the political context of the time, where both conservatives and radicals alike sought to eliminate cultures and peoples they thought of as archaic (1991:480).

This latter impulse was encapsulated in the 1983 commission of investigation into events at Uchuraccay, an Andean community whose members had killed seven journalists, possibly because they thought the journalists were Senderistas. The commission, led by the conservative novelist Mario Vargas Llosa and including two anthropologists, briefly investigated the killings and concluded that they resulted from the community's primitive and traditional nature, isolated from the culture of ‘official Peru’ (Mayer, 1991). Mayer describes how both the Maoists and metropolitan intellectuals like Vargas Llosa made a distinction between ‘modern’ or ‘official’ and indigenous or ‘deep’ Peru. ⁸ Neither group listened to the indigenous Andeans, and both considered that integration was both inevitable and achievable only through coercion. In response to this, Mayer (1991: 480) says, ‘to search for, to demonstrate with ethnographic facts, and to portray a “living” culture rather than dead “survivals” seemed to those in my generation of fieldworkers to be a worthwhile task. … as a counterweight to the prevailing Peruvian national identity’.

Carlos Iván Degregori (2000) argued that Uchuraccay represented the bankruptcy of both Marxist economism and essentialist structuralist approaches to anthropology: the former because it became clear to metropolitan society that the peasants had no time for Sendero and its class-based analysis of the Peruvian countryside, and the latter because of the racism of the report and subsequent journalistic discussions. The case of the Uchuraccay commission and the debate between Starn and Mayer illustrate the complexity of the political stakes involved in emphasising alterity. This debate with all its political complexities and colonial underpinnings has not gone away; the ‘modernity’ of the Indian remains a contentious political question in the wider region.

Brazil

In Brazil, the distinction between traditions of political economy and cosmology had a different configuration. In the 1950s, Darcy Ribeiro hired Roberto Cardoso de Oliveira to teach anthropology at the Museu do Índio. Cardoso de Oliveira's Marxist training and sympathies for British Social Anthropology did not sit well with Ribeiro's cultural evolutionism, and Cardoso de Oliveira moved to the Museu Nacional in Rio de Janeiro and founded the graduate program in Social Anthropology there in 1968. During the 1960s, the Museu Nacional hosted David Maybury-Lewis, who had been introduced to Lévi-Strauss’ work by his supervisor at Oxford, Rodney Needham. Although by 1970 Maybury-Lewis had become critical of Lévi-Strauss’ structuralism, his leadership of the Harvard-Central Brazil project meant that by the 1970s, two lineages were developing at the Museu Nacional, with consequently different approaches to the study of Amazonian indigenous peoples. One was Cardoso de Oliveira's style, which influenced João Pacheco de Oliveira, and the other was the Lévi-Straussian structuralist style, whose main figures at the time were Anthony Seeger, Roberto da Matta (who had been supervised by Maybury-Lewis), and their student, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, who had been an enthusiastic reader of Lévi-Strauss even as an undergraduate. From the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, the former tradition was seen as more politically engaged and leftist, while the latter became associated with a more ‘classical’ style of anthropology. However, by the 2000s and with the introduction into structuralist ethnography of ideas about animism and perspectivism, the formerly classical approach had become the avant-garde. ⁹

For the purposes of this argument, I would characterise Roberto Cardoso de Oliveira’s style as a political economy approach and place it in contrast to the cosmological approach of the structuralist tradition. In the late 1990s, the distinction crystallised into the third debate I discuss here, between Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and João Pacheco de Oliveira. Pacheco de Oliveira (1998) drew on this well-established characterisation of Brazilian ethnography that distinguished between a national tradition that examined interethnic contact, or ‘friction’ in Cardoso de Oliveira’s (1972) phrase, contrasted with a foreign tradition, that focussed on culture and social organisation of indigenous peoples (Ramos, 1990). Taking the example of agriculturalists in the northeast of Brazil, who were increasingly defining themselves as ethnic groups, Pacheco de Oliveira suggested that this academic division meant that such groups were not seen by ethnologists as indigenous enough to be worthy of study. He suggested that a ‘historical anthropology’ that took state processes fully into account was necessary in contrast to the Lévi-Straussian ‘astronomer's’ approach that found indigeneity only where communities showed cultural continuity with pre-Columbian traditions. This critique is not too distant from Orin Starn's denunciation of the Andeanism of the 1970s North American culturalists.

In response, Viveiros de Castro (1999) argued that Pacheco de Oliveira's ‘ethnology of interethnic contact’ (my translation) was actually a version of 20th century indigenismo because its focus on the relation between indigenous peoples and the state was viewed only from the perspective of the national state. Viveiros de Castro argued that anthropology required the ethnologist to begin from the perspective of the indigenous peoples themselves, rather than from the perspective of the nation state. In fact, Pacheco de Oliveira was always very critical of official state indigenismo, but Viveiros de Castro suggested that it was the indigenismo of the contact school of thought that had led to the misperception of indigenous societies as peasants on the way to proletarianisation. In contrast, he very enthusiastically defended the structuralist tradition, arguing that it was absolutely not foreign, for Lévi-Strauss had developed it as a consequence of his study of Amazonian Amerindian thought. His critique modifies the dichotomy that I have identified (by placing indigenismo and political economy on the same side of the conceptual divide) but nonetheless shows the persistence and political salience at the time of the distinction between political economy and structuralism.

Neoliberal multiculturalism, indigenismo and anthropology

The debate between Pacheco de Oliveira and Viveiros de Castro took place in the context of the Brazilian constitutional multiculturalism of the 1990s, which was in turn related to a continent-wide ‘neoliberal multiculturalism’ within mainstream politics (Hale, 2005). A key figure of neoliberal multiculturalism was and still is the ‘indio permitido’ (permitted Indian). The term was originally coined by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui to describe the indigenous subject allowed onto the scene by dominant groups (Hale and Millaman, 2005). Such a subject could express political agency, but largely in cultural spaces, limited to those which did not challenge the core of the neoliberal project of economic governance. Neoliberal multiculturalism characterised much of the state-led responses to the flourishing of indigenous rights activism across the region in the 1980s and 1990s. Of course, this activism had a longer history that linked to the anti-colonial struggles of the 18th century and before. But, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the traditional Left in Latin America, there was a distinct emergence of a language of rights and culture in the politics of the region. This was linked to the rise of human rights talk globally. So, on the one hand, indigenous rights had become unquestionably important in national and international politics, but on the other, ‘indigenous culture’ was often appropriated by various government agents who in practice just repeated the old forms of domination (Hale and Millaman, 2005: 285). Official multiculturalism represented a shift in state policy from ethnocide to less obvious and longer term processes of ‘etnofagia’ in Patzi’s (1999) term, becoming a ‘concealing mechanism’ for new forms of colonialism (Rivera Cusicanqui, 2012).

Within anthropology, the debate between the two trends of political economy and cosmology continues today, but it is more than just academic, for it turns on deeply political questions about indigenous rights to territory and self-government. For the 1990s contact theorists and their successors in Brazil, the structuralist study of Amazonian peoples takes a perspective so internal to those societies that it ignores the situation of ‘interethnic contact’, which the contact theorists understood to be inherently one of structural domination (i.e. internal colonialism). That leads to the accusation that structuralists avoid and therefore deny historicity and politics, like the Andeanists critiqued by Orin Starn. Many anthropologists would of course deny this accusation, and Viveiros de Castro (1999) has countered that in Brazil at least the activism that results from a critique of internal colonialism almost always ends up as working for the state, rather like the early 20th century Mexican indigenismo of Manuel Gamio. Interethnic contact theorists become participants in the top-down multiculturalism of government institutions and their NGOs. Instead, he argued, anthropologists should focus on the politics of anthropology, keeping that conceptually separate from political activism as such, which is a different domain, one where anthropologists might also act, but separately from their academic action (see also Viveiros de Castro 2013). This stance has been carried into contemporary discussions of the politics of ontological anthropology.

Today, the relationship between activism and anthropology is absolutely central to Latin American anthropology, but the question cannot be disentangled from the discipline's uncomfortable history as arising directly out of the ‘problem’ of how Creole and mestizo nation states should deal with their internal Others, the indigenous peoples. ¹⁰ Myriam Jimeno (2004) suggests that the ‘critical vocation’ of Latin American anthropology arises out of the ‘co-citizenship’, or the ‘vecindad sociopolítica’ ¹¹ between anthropologists and their subjects of study. Across the region, anthropologists have increasingly developed their scholarly work in an activist register, together with indigenous movements: for example, Aida Hernández’ work with indigenous women in Southern Mexico; the LASA-funded Otros Saberes group of researchers; the members of the Taller de Historia Oral Andina (THOA) in Bolivia; or less well-known examples such as Virginia Manzano's work with the Tupac Amaru Federation in Jujuy, Argentina (Hernandez Castillo, 2016; Hale and Stephen, 2014; Manzano, 2015; Rivera Cusicanqui and equipo THOA, 1992). For many, this is simply inherent to the anthropological endeavour in Latin America (Hale, 2006). Nearly 30 years ago, Alcida Ramos suggested that scholars had no alternative but to be politically engaged: ‘The Black Panther adage of the ‘60s in the United States can now be applied to many a case in indigenous Brazil: you’re either part of the solution, or you’re part of the problem’ (Ramos, 1990: 454). Today, much as they might wish to do so, anthropologists cannot avoid asking themselves whether they are solution or problem.

And now? Ontological politics

Recent Latin American ontological anthropology has emerged not only from the intellectual tension between political economy and cosmology that I have mapped out here but also as an outcome of political economy in the region (Ruiz Serna and Del Cairo, 2016). Political economic conditions have proved propitious for the emergence of ontological languages of politics; when positing alternative worlds can be a radical critique of politics as usual, and exoticism potentially an effective political strategy. A key part of this process is the role of ontological languages in contemporary politics of the Anthropocene, which address the political consequences of particular human–nonhuman relations (Kohn, 2015), especially by contrasting ‘Western’ and indigenous perspectives. For example, the activist and lawyer Nélida Ajay Chilón describes the Pachamama as a living being, our mother, who suffers when mining companies come to destroy the lakes (in the Peruvian Andes). In the film ‘Hija de la Laguna’ she explains that the water of the lakes is both the blood of the earth and mother (mama yaku), and tells the story of how when she was young she became ill from fright (susto) where she had not taken the water a small offering, and so the water had temporarily taken her soul (animo) in turn. ¹² Davi Kopenawa describes a similarly animate and alive forest, which ‘feels pain just like humans do. Its tall trees moan as they fall and it cries in pain when it is burned down’ (Kopenawa and Albert, 2013: 382).

Arguably, the critique of ‘Western’ assumptions about and understandings of Nature as an objectivised environment ‘out there’, open to manipulation by Man is the least contentious assertion of ontological anthropology, in both its Latin American and North Atlantic forms. As Descola summarises, ‘certain [indigenous] peoples (…) regard themselves, not as social collectives managing their relations with the ecosystem, but rather as simple components of a vaster whole within which no real discrimination is really established between humans and nonhumans’ (Descola, 2014: 16–17). An example of a contemporary political expression of such a philosophy is in the Kawsak Sacha initiative of the Sarayaku Kichwa people in Pastaza, Ecuador. The community initiative seeks the legal recognition of a new category of protected territory, the Living Forest. Their June 2018 declaration states that ‘KAWSAK SACHA [Living Forest] is a living being, with consciousness, constituted by all the beings of the Jungle, from the most infinitesimal to the greatest and supreme. It includes the beings of the animal, vegetable, mineral, spiritual and cosmic worlds, in intercommunication with human beings’. ¹³

Explicitly recognising ‘nature’ as a complex relation between human and non-human enables scholars and activists to emphasise the politics of the especially rapacious form of extractive capitalism that the region is living through at the moment and the particular Western version of Nature that is associated with it. ¹⁴ While under the rapaciousness of colonialism and republicanism peoples were wiped out and terrorised either for their land or because of the demand for their labour, today many of the most desired resources are under the ground, and the urge to exterminate those who live nearby is not admitted quite so openly. Meanwhile, timber remains a valuable commodity, forested land is cleared for soy farming and by fire, and epidemic disease sweeps the region again. We are still witnessing the effects of the new campaign of desertification that was impelled by the commodities boom of the 2000s and which leaves these communities, their air, their waterways, their territory as collateral damage in the war to accumulate profit; and against which indigenous peoples across the region assert their territorial rights.

Ontological approaches can help to understand the consequences of extractivist processes, especially when (ontological) alterity is mobilised as a strategy of resistance to dispossession. Anthropological work shows us how in the face of the onslaught, local groups speak multiple languages of opposition, some of those ontological (Rivera Andía, 2019). Marisol de la Cadena (2015) describes how Mariano and Nazario Turpo lived in Pacchanta, Andean Peru, with Ausangate, an earth being or mountain (in ‘our’ world), and mobilised politically on behalf of their ayllu, the community which incorporates both the people there (runakuna) and the related earth-beings (tirakuna). At one point, Nazario explains that he and his people object to a proposed open cast mining project because it will destroy Ausangate and he will become angry. Ultimately, Nazario and his community are advised to articulate their opposition to the mining through a more ‘conventional’ discourse of environmental responsibility and risk; but nonetheless, at various points in the process, they bring the earth-being into politics in a way that for de la Cadena (2010) shows the difference of worlds and constitutes an alternative cosmopolitics.

Yet, it should be noted that an ontological argument against mining is not the only political language possible; one can make an anti-capitalist argument against the exploitation of the mountain without invoking the earth-being, and people do (de La Cadena, 2010; Li and Paredes Penafiel, 2019). Nonetheless, the politics described by de la Cadena are one example of how one might incorporate cosmopolitics into contemporary political debates through the acknowledgement of multiple worlds.

The multiple worlds thesis is still a contentious aspect of ontological theorising, product of the relationship between perspectivism and the ‘ontological turn’. As Bessire and Bond (2014) have pointed out, the problem comes when this discussion is diverted into one primarily about anthropological method, even at times reduced to the injunction to ‘take the native seriously’ (see also Cepek, 2016), and to accept that if we do so then ethnographic work challenges ‘our’ concepts and requires new forms of conceptualisation. For Holbraad and Pedersen (2017), these hold out the radical potential of anthropology, the possibility of imagining alternative futures. They argue that anthropology cannot act within this world, it ‘cannot, for example, roll back the forces of colonialism and postcolonialism – surely that takes political activism (indeed action) of an altogether different order of force and scale. What it can do, however, is operate in that direction in its own immediate ambit, namely the economy of anthropological inquiry itself’ (Holbraad and Pedersen, 2017: 196). The problem comes when this moves away from a consideration of political economy in a materialist sense into ‘the economy of anthropological enquiry itself’ in (mostly) European anthropological theorising. It should be evident by now why it is that the traditions of Latin American anthropology outlined above – combined with the contemporary situation of extractive capitalism – make this an inherently depoliticising move. The issue is not the presence or lack of political activism as such, but whether or not to bracket it out from ethnographic writing. As Alcida Ramos's work from over 30 years ago shows, that point has been made for some time now (Ramos, 1990).

Conclusions: the politics of alterity

The challenge for ‘many worlds’ theorising when it is conducted in the world we share is that ontological languages might restrict the scope of political engagement beyond just whether we analyse material politics or ethnographic methods. In some circumstances, the invocations of multiple worlds, or of earth-beings, do hold out the promise of conceptualising alternative relationships with the earth and its inhabitants – human and non-human – and therefore enable quite a radical politics of environmental critique (Ødegaard and Rivera Andía, 2019; de La Cadena, 2015; Salas Carreño, 2017). It is less clear how they might work better than political economy languages to inform resistance against other forces, such as the mass deforestation and environmental degradation caused by soya cultivation for the Chinese market, or the differential violence of the COVID-19 pandemic. And so far, even in its most politicised form, cosmopolitical and ontological anthropology has had less to say about other equally important political issues for indigenous people. By this I refer to questions of the effects of racial capitalism beyond human-nature relations, such as exploitative labour relations, gender and other power inequalities, including within communities. Prominent indigenous intellectuals such as Davi Kopenawa do not shy away from these issues, as the quote from him at the beginning of this article shows.

Furthermore, the trouble is that the intellectual politics of ‘other worlds’ theorising does not help to address the longstanding political and analytical problem of exoticising the Other, a question deeply infused by racism and internal colonialism in Latin America. As I have shown in the political-intellectual history presented in this article, this has been central to how the Spaniards and Portuguese characterised originary peoples during conquest and colonisation, and how Creole nation builders after independence celebrated the ‘indio histórico’ of archaeological record. Ideas of racial alterity have been buttressed by historical and social theory, and used to justify relations of exploitation, domination and dispossession. They have also been a problem for anthropology in and of the region since the discipline's beginnings. The tension between the approaches I have called, on the one hand, cosmological – variously, indigenista, culturalist or structuralist – and on the other, political economy – mostly Marxist – is then a debate that arises out of the question of how White or Creole cultures can acknowledge indigenous alterity without either assimilating or exoticising (which need not be essentialising, but often is in practice), in a historical context where the alternative to either of these for indigenous peoples has been extermination.

Indigenous advocacy has to negotiate a careful line between the celebration of alterity on the one hand and exoticism on the other, and that dynamic has sometimes had very significant consequences. To take an Andean example, during the turn of this century, the public rhetoric of one of the most important late 20th century Aymara movements in Bolivia, Katarismo, relied upon a definition of indigeneity that was overwhelmingly rural. Despite the fact that many of its leaders were educated urban Aymara speakers, rhetorically the movement appealed to indigenous peoples largely as noble peasants with an alternative social, political and economic logic based upon either the ayllu or the peasant union (e.g. see Untoja, 2000; Quispe, 2001). Rural–urban migrants (those whom Aníbal Quijano analysed as cholo many decades before) were seen as already assimilated into Hispanic society; at best a sort of bastardised category of Aymara, lying outside of the essentialised scheme of identification that was the framework for indigenous politics at the time. In Bolivia, this essentialised framework for political discourse, Rivera Cusicanqui (2012) argues, was a result of 1990s multiculturalism. She argues that multiculturalism ‘conceal[ed] a secret agenda to deny the ethnicity of the multicolored [abigarradas] and acculturated populations – the settlement areas, mining centers, indigenous commercial networks in the internal and black markets, the cities’ and, as such, constituted a ‘strategy of depriving indigenous peoples of their potentially hegemonic status and their capacity to affect the state’ (Rivera Cusicanqui, 2012: 99). The ‘multicoloured’ populations she refers to are not hybrid in Garcia Canclini's sense, for that connotes infertility, but ‘ch’ixi’. Ch’ixi is a combination of Aymara and European elements like the grey that is formed by black and white coloured threads in a textile, that meld without mixing; ch’ixi refers to the ‘parallel coexistence of multiple cultural differences that do not extinguish but instead antagonize and complement each other’ (Rivera Cusicanqui, 2012: 105).

In the early 2000s, political Katarismo found it difficult to address those ‘multicoloured’ people who are both rural and urban, acculturated and not, and who move between the two with ease. Evo Morales, on the other hand, did not, and instead targeted precisely that group, in a creative combination of indigenous politics, populism and anti-Yankee imperialism. Then, because urban indigenous people became his main constituency, once he became President in 2006 he was able to disregard the concerns of mostly lowland, rural, indigenous communities affected by his government's promotion of economic extractivism and state developmentalism. Indeed, he even mobilised exoticist notions of indigenous alterity to override those lowland communities’ objections to extractive activities (Postero, 2017). What kinds of political and analytical strategies might be called for in such a situation? One of the problems with ontological languages in this context is that they pitch different indigeneities against each other, because those urban people who supported Evo are just as indigenous as the lowlanders who oppose his developmentalism. Ontological analyses also do not help to explain the alliances between indigenous communities and mestizo elites that challenged Evo's commitment to democracy, and which ultimately led to his downfall in November 2019. But neither does the class-based model proposed by the political economy tradition. And neither approach explains the resurgence of his political movement just one year later.

In Brazil, in words reminiscent of 1980s distinctions between official and ‘deep’ Peru, Jair Bolsonaro said in 2015 ¹⁵ that the Indians should not be treated ‘like animals in the zoo’, by which he meant treating them as exotic characters who are not ‘human beings like us’ (from the 2019 quote that opened this article). These statements reveal his desire to assert the ‘Indians’’ modernity by denying their indigeneity. That readily fits into a particular economic agenda: in the 2015 interview, he also said ‘There is no indigenous territory where there aren't minerals. Gold, tin and magnesium are in these lands, especially in the Amazon, the richest area in the world. I’m not getting into this nonsense of defending land for Indians … [Indigenous reserves] are an obstacle to agri-business’. When national presidents like Jair Bolsonaro still view Amerindians as primitive and obstacles to development, it becomes imperative for indigenous peoples to assert their humanity, their cultural sophistication and their right to control over their territory. It should be evident by now how asserting radical alterity might be a logical political response in this context despite the risks of strategic essentialism (Ramos, 1998); but also that it would be dangerous to rely only on this without engaging at least to some extent with the political economy of indigenous autonomy and extractive capitalism in the region. This combination has usually come easily to indigenous activists, even if others have not listened to them and persist in locating them in essentialised categories.

The indigenous leader and intellectual Ailton Krenak says: ‘The indigenous movement was born with this conscience of the children of mother earth, and with a capacity for active political critique’ (de Souza e Silva, 2018: my emphasis). Here we can find an indication of how activists and scholars might develop an anti-capitalist agenda for economic and social justice that avoids the pitfalls of both (potentially) essentialising multiple worlds theories and simplistic modernisation theories. Yet, for anthropologists, my sense is that an attempt to overcome the binary might be too ambitious, precisely because of this binary's centrality to our discipline in the region.

In this article, I have shown that the tension between the two analytical traditions of political economy and cosmology has run through Latin American anthropology since its inception as a discipline and even before. This is unlikely to change dramatically in the near future, but there are several possible strategies in response. First, we can recognise the dialectic but not try to reach a synthesis between the two poles. Rather, the challenge would be to maintain both in tension. Second, we should place ontological anthropology in a more explicit dialogue with the more directly politically-engaged traditions of Latin American anthropology and social thought, especially the work on multiculturalism, indigenous politics and decolonisation (e.g. Hernandez Castillo, 2016; Jimeno, 2004; Ramos, 1990; Rivera Cusicanqui, 2015). Third, we can follow the lead of those developing less totalising theoretical languages, ones that seek neither full assimilation (i.e. sameness) nor complete alterity but are instead more ch’ixi in Rivera Cusicanqui’s (2012, 2015) terms. Such an endeavour would privilege anthropologies of contingency, mixing, change and the simultaneous occupation of different positionalities and perspectives, while remaining attentive to differences of hierarchy and inequality. Krenak (2020: 31–32) argues that Davi Kopenawa's work ‘has the power to show us, the denizens of this world in demise, how it is still possible for a group of cultures and peoples to inhabit a cosmovision, dwell somewhere in this world we share, and to do so in such a special way that everything acquires meaning’. This is perhaps a modest but still important goal for anthropologists to aspire to: better understanding of this world we share and our dwelling somewhere within.