A World without Objects: Epistemic Bordering for a Transformative Future

This essay will advance the framework of epistemic bordering to interpret recent Latin American paradigmatic shifts and help conceptualize eco-centric assemblages as multidirectional systems of interaction in which the co-existence of difference, rather than its reduction to oneness, is at the foundation of the transformative reproduction of life.¹ In an interdependent system, where individual organisms rely on one another to share limited resources, knowledge-building is embedded in the same material dynamics and therefore contributes to sustaining the relations through which it emerges. Below, two conceptual practices from Latin America are analyzed as examples of epistemic bordering. The first practice is the Aymara notion of taypi-ch’ixi, a space of autopoietic coexistence elaborated in the works of Aymara-Bolivian activist scholar Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (La Paz, 1949). The second border concept is the hybrid ontology of sentipensar, or thinking-feeling, first detected in the Caribbean region of Colombia by sociologist Orlando Fals Borda (Barranquilla, 1925 - Bogotá, 2008) and more recently picked up by anthropologist Arturo Escobar (Manizales, 1952), who explores it as a possibility for the creation of pluri-versal relationality. 

The distinctive characteristic that these frameworks share is that they originate in the collective experiences of eco-social localities. These webs of relations are at once at the crossroads of larger phenomena, such as the creation of colonial economies in the Andes dating back to the sixteenth century, and the social and environmental movements led by indigenous and Afro-descendant communities in twenty-first-century Colombia. The embedded knowledges that have come out of these experiences have in turn been incorporated into anti-colonial and decolonial proposals – in the case of Rivera Cusicanqui and Arturo Escobar respectively. Latin American ecological thought has been, since the early 2000s, part and parcel of what is broadly speaking known as the decolonial movement, which started in the early 1990s. ² Rather than emerging from a specific area of scholarship, alternative socio-environmental proposals have arisen from both activist and scholarly movements deeply rooted in anti-colonial and decolonial agendas, and therefore not tied to a set of disciplines and methodologies. Although in Latin America the Environmental Humanities are not widely established as an academic concept either in teaching on in research, the historically grounded and interdisciplinary vantage point of environmental research and analysis in the region has tremendous potential to contribute to the questions with which Environmental Humanities scholars are concerned. ³

Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s contribution stretches between her scholarly work as a professor of sociology at the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés, Bolivia, for over thirty years and her decades-long political and social activism. In the 1980s she was involved in the Katarista indigenous movement with the Aymara-speaking communities of the Bolivian highlands. The movement sought to reclaim indigenous identity over the class discourse that had been upheld since the 1950s. In the 1990s, she was part of the coca growers’ struggles, from which the movement that led to the presidencies of Evo Morales sprang, while, later, she supported the anti-government march to defend the TIPNIS national park in 2011. Since the 1980s, Rivera Cusicanqui has promoted and has been part of several cultural, artistic and agroecological community organizations. This practice has been instrumental in shaping her analysis of Bolivian and Latin American societies and, more broadly, of the colonial roots of global modernity particularly in her publications since the mid 2010s. Her grounded perspective has led her to be critical of the Latin American decolonial movement that originated largely in North American universities and of which Arturo Escobar, based at Chapel Hill, was one of the early initiators at the end of the 1990s. A critic of the notion of development as modeled on industrial economies, Escobar has increasingly drawn from indigenous and Afro-territorial movements, particularly from the Colombian Pacific coast, as well as from Orlando Fals Borda’s work on the riverine communities in the north of Colombia and his focus on knowledges from historically peripheral and subordinated groups.

As this essay will argue, the epistemic practices that emerge from these intersections reimagine both subjectivities and communal structures by drawing interactive maps of relationships that occur and thrive in impure spaces. In the complex socio-ecological relations that constitute these spaces, the gesture of transiting across replaces the fixed positionality of dichotomic identities. The first section will show how, by appropriating and unsettling the nineteenth-century idea of periphery from an anti-colonial viewpoint, it is possible to move from a center-margin perspective toward an entangled vision of the world as it unfolds in the taypi. The second section explores the possibilities of autopoietic forms of assemblage that can be afforded by the idea of co-existence encapsulated by the notion of ch’ixi. This, it will be argued, has the potential to reframe the experience of both individual and collective life as the acceptance of difference rather than the pursuit of oneness proffered by the nation state. Finally, the last section will consider the ontological significance of the notion of sentipensar as a political act through which humans can both reconstitute their subjectivities and connect with the wider network of relations that make up their epistemic-cum-material world. These processes of epistemic bordering provide a framework built on the principle of acceptance rather than exclusion as a possible vision for future societies that are transformative, and therefore self-preserving, rather than static and self-destructive.

Peripheral Perspectives from an Entangled World

“The wandering gaze,” writes Rivera Cusicanqui, “understood as peripheral and fully awake to its environment, has the potential of being all-encompassing and is capable of relating at once to itself and to everything else. It can go as far as to transcend the anthropocentric nature of the social.” ⁴ In her vision, the peripheral no longer denotes the margins of the world; rather, it is an epistemic and, therefore, political attitude emerging from the experience of contamination and interconnectedness that reaches its highest point in the postcolonial borderlands. Here, disparate and often divergent identities have to coexist. In this liminal space, where the act of crossing boundaries is inherent to both individual and collective identities, one inhabits a very tangible state of being in between. Physical and symbolic realities are enmeshed. This material and intellectual experience becomes a way of knowing by “wandering the streets like an ethnographer.” ⁵ In dismantling the dualistic way of seeing that governs the colonial mindset, Rivera Cusicanqui destabilizes the geopolitical border between the colonizing center and the colonized periphery, which was at the core of the world-systems interpretation of the relationship between the “developed” and the “underdeveloped” world. ⁶

This vantage point reveals networks and phenomena of interconnection between what might be broadly defined as the modern and the pre-modern, or Western and non-Western values. As Verónica Gago puts it by paraphrasing an exchange with Rivera Cusicanqui, this is “a peripheral perspective: that of the vagabond, of the poetic figure of the flâneur that Benjamin evoked, as a capacity to connect heterogeneous elements, thanks to the very mode of passing through, transiting, wandering.” ⁷ Performing physical gestures has the function of keeping intellectual understanding anchored to the changing state of material reality. In this entangled dimension, human creativity is rooted in a kinetic experience that takes place through a physical exploratory relationship with the world and which Rivera Cusicanqui defines as a state of “corporeal perception.” ⁸ The process of acquiring knowledge in the peripheral mode is, in essence, a process of contamination in which subjectivities are formed in relation to everything else rather than existing by themselves. The idea of transiting, of moving across and between the layers of temporal dimensions that have become accumulated in the spatial construction of the periphery, defeats the modernist notion of movement. While the latter is governed by the principle of exclusion, which leaves behind anything that does not conform to its forward direction, the anti-colonial peripheral perspective is multidirectional and multi-layered.

A significant detail in the definition of the peripheral perspective is the image of the wanderer, the stroller whose sensorial experience of the city streets was described by Charles Baudelaire in his essay of 1863 “The Painter of Modern Life.” ⁹ Baudelaire was the first to use the word “modernity” to describe the irruption of the ephemeral, of the transient, of the uncertain into the eternal. The artist was the one who had the most heightened sensibility to capture this new mode of living because he was able to observe and look for the essential through the thick curtain of the ephemeral: “[o]bserver, philosopher, flâneur – call him what you will – . . . he is the painter of the passing moment.” ¹⁰ The artist’s aesthetic experience does not strictly concern the notion of beauty. Much more broadly, it is the act of experiencing the world in a way that involves reason as well as emotions and the physical senses: “[a]nd so he goes searching, searching. But searching for what? . . . He is looking for that quality which you must allow me to call ‘modernity;’ for I know of no better word to express the idea I have in mind. He makes it his business to extract from fashion whatever element it may contain of poetry within history, to distill the eternal from the transitory.” ¹¹ Walter Benjamin is an important intellectual reference for Rivera Cusicanqui, especially for his conceptualization of history. ¹² Benjamin wrote extensively about Charles Baudelaire’s aesthetic theory of modernity, devoting a number of reflections, not always aligned with one another, to the figure of the flâneur. ¹³ Defining the state of being modern essentially as an endless search for meaning not only as an intellectual activity but through an aesthetic modality that requires sensorial and material connection with one’s environment is, for Rivera Cusicanqui, what denotes the peripheral attitude. ¹⁴

Postcolonial countries such as Bolivia, which constitute the world’s historical peripheries, exist in an intrinsic condition of in-betweenness in which modes of being and of knowing are constantly negotiated. When describing Bolivia’s – and more generally Latin America’s – peripheral state not only in political but also in existential terms, Rivera Cusicanqui uses the seeming oxymoron of indigenous modernity. This kind of modernity is articulated in communal ways of life which, while participating in the market, at the same time resist its totalitarian tendencies and escape nationalist attempts to either homogenize or exclude them. ¹⁵ By indigenous modernity Rivera Cusicanqui means “those forms of modernity that are still immersed in the fabric of everyday life as much as in the struggles of those communities that have survived the dual attack from state and capital.” ¹⁶ Due to its subversive power embedded in material relations, the peripheral perspective has the potential to bring change wherever the centripetal forces of economic expansion are failing to ensure the sustainability of life. As Rivera Cusicanqui explains with reference to Aymara linguistic and cultural practices, “Aymara cosmogony touches upon a topic which is without doubt universal: the intimate relationship between human life and the plurality of beings (both living and non-living) that exist in the incommensurability of the cosmos: animals, plants, substances, places and landscapes, rocks and metals, the skies with their myriads of worlds, the deep hollows and subterranean rivers in our planet’s unknown interior.” ¹⁷

While in the Judeo-Christian tradition there is a search for symmetry and resolution, in Aymara philosophy the forces that come together to create the world preserve each their own energy and clash in an intermediate zone called taypi. In this contact zone, the oppositional dynamic between the world of spirit, or ajayu, that comes from above and the world of matter, or qamasa, that comes from below takes place through a violent encounter. On the two sides of the taypi, human action plays a decisive role through the double action of moving (sarnaqawi) and doing (lurawi). ¹⁸ The idea that humans collectively contribute to directing the vital energies of the cosmos and to preserving or endangering its equilibrium places human agency right at the heart of the planetary network of relations. “The alaxpacha (the world above, external and luminous) clashes with the manqhapacha (the world below, internal and dark). However, these two dimensions can only be experienced from the akapacha, the here-and-now of history, the space-time dimension in which humanity ‘walks’ along its path while carrying the future on their shoulders (qhipha) and keeping their eyes (nayra) on the past . . . .” ¹⁹ Human history, as will be further explored in the next section, partakes in the temporal span of planetary life.

The vision of the deep past is a productive exercise of memory that allows human beings to create the future without being intimidated by its mysterious nature. It is in sharp contrast with Benjamin’s angel of history in that it offers an antidote to the paralyzing incongruity between the past and the future in the German philosopher’s famous reading of Paul Klee’s print Angelus Novus. “His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread”, writes Benjamin. “This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. . . . The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead . . . . But a storm is blowing from Paradise . . . . This storm irresistibly propels him into the future. . . . This storm is what we call progress.” ²⁰ The violent thrust of the modernist project, which traces the history of humanity along an unquestionable and unstoppable continuum, severs the strings that connect humans to the whole to which they belong and hurls them around into the future. Instead, Aymara worldviews position human societies within a network of relationships that span the deep history of non-human life. This resets the balance of human prerogatives and responsibility as a grounded ethics of interspecies connectivity. It requires a kind of action that is accountable for the preservation of life, what Donna Haraway calls “response-ability,” that is the act of “cultivating collective knowing and doing.” ²¹ The political and ethical significance of humanity’s transformational ability in its interaction with the world afforded by the taypi imaginary cannot be overstated. Rivera Cusicanqui draws a parallel between the intermediate dimension of the taypi and Walter Benjamin’s notion of allegory as a vital act of capturing experience in a situated mode: thought and action are intermingled in the intellectual and sensorial perception and narration of the world. ²²

The dimension of the taypi represents a third way in the debate about the separation or hybridization between nature and society. On the one hand, the claim that this separation has never really existed has underpinned Bruno Latour’s work since the 1990s and has been espoused by socio-environmental theorists as the way forward for a cross-species justice. On the other hand, scholars who approach this question from the Marxist tradition of historical materialism insist on the urgency of reaffirming the specific role of human societies as external agents acting violently upon the natural environment. In this line of thinking, Andreas Malm has argued that “[th]e more profoundly humans have shaped nature over their history, the more intensely nature comes to affect their lives. The more the sphere of social relations has determined that of natural ones, the more the reverse, towards the point of some breakdown. We may call this the paradox of historicised nature.” ²³ From this perspective, the ecological crisis has set nature apart ever more starkly as humans experience an increasing loss of control over it. Both views, however, seem to accept an underlying dualism as the constitutive structure of material relations, whether this dualism is maintained or whether it is resolved into a hybrid. On the other hand, a taypi world recognizes human co-agency in keeping the balance between spirit and matter. Humanity is not a deus ex machina modeling the world from the outside, but instead is enmeshed in world-making through enacted knowledge. The transformational potential of this grounded imaginary provides alternative perspectives for building future societies around the principle of co-agency, which replaces the principle of control. In this light, the framework of the Anthropocene, the new geological epoch in which humanity is accountable for irreversible ecological and climatic changes, while useful for defining the separation between human societies and nature, does not help us to transcend it. For Escobar, for example, it is part of the environmental discourses that fit in with the uni-dimensional organization of the global north. ²⁴ Without acknowledging the failure of the uni-versal civilizational model and leaving behind its dualistic organization, it will not be possible to create multi-directional and collaborative ways of knowing and being. ²⁵

As a relational self-sustaining structure, the taypi poses an alternative organization not only to the cultural and material model of extractive wealth but also to its anthropocentric sustainable solutions. Unlike the proposals that seek to sustain desires nurtured by a human-centered model of society, the ontological approach suggested by Escobar is about designing new ways of being in the world. “[F]rom an ontological perspective,” he argues, “[the concept of sustainability] allows us, in the best-case scenario, to reduce unsustainability, leaving the universalist ontology intact. Unsustainability is structurally designed into our daily lives; it is the result of concrete practices. Hence the need to reconfigure the design itself.” ²⁶ Redesigning organized life in terms of relational networks in which human beings play a crucial, though by no means uni-versal, role in maintaining a self-supporting equilibrium, means redesigning how communities work and who is included in a politics of the everyday. This means that the non-human world is also a social agent, not only as far as its inclusion in political and legal structures is concerned but, more fundamentally, in the way in which both individual and public happiness are conceptualized and practiced. An ontological approach, therefore, looks at community-based movements to draw situated practices of political and social organization that feed into a new socio-ecological pact based on reciprocity.

The World as Autopoiesis

Rivera Cusicanqui’s scholarly stance reflects her decades-long involvement and leadership in indigenous and labor movements. Since the 1970s, her political activism has played a key role in the recognition of indigenous identities for political and territorial autonomy. By the early 1990s, indigenous communities in Bolivia demanded their own recognition as originary peoples. ²⁷ Rivera Cusicanqui, however, became increasingly wary of the pattern of racialization by which postcolonial countries are organized in order to continue to reproduce existing social and economic hierarchies. The notion of indigenous modernity allows, then, for the contemporaneousness of different historical, social and epistemic modalities that disrupt the exclusionary nature of the modernist project. Grassroots and community organizations are sites for practicing a grounded theory that reminds us that all thought is located or situated in specific experiences while having the potential to be translated into other networks of relations. The peripheral as an epistemic method is, then, also a tool to address the divergence between the universal and the particular in both the production and the hierarchization of knowledge. The Aymara notion of ch’ixi is an expression of epistemic bordering that encapsulates the possibility that multiple identities can coexist and, in order to do so, they must relate to one another. ²⁸

The ch’ixi framework has been developed in the Colectivx Ch’ixi (Ch’ixi Collective), which Rivera Cusicanqui co-founded in La Paz in 2008. ²⁹ Her work with other Latin American collectives, such as the Buenos-Aires based Colectivo Situaciones and the Colectivo Simbiosis organized by Bolivian migrants, resulted in the publication of the Manifiesto Ch’ixi (Ch’ixi Manifesto) in 2011. ³⁰ “A ch’ixi world exists. It means something that is and isn’t at once, a heterogenous grey color, a mottled mixture between black and white, which are opposites while also complementing each other.” ³¹ Rivera Cusicanqui relates that she learned the term ch’ixi from Aymara sculptor Víctor Zapana, who described ch’ixi as a quality of indeterminateness corresponding to a tone of grey which, when observed from a close distance, reveals myriad black and white points like granite stones. In indigenous cosmologies, it refers to fluid entities like the serpent who have the power to cross borders. Ch’ixi beings are neither male nor female, neither from the sky nor from the earth, but flow through different terrains like the rain and underground rivers. ³² Ch’ixi is a mode of being that also defines the violent contradictions of postcolonial societies. An etymologically related term is ch’iqchi, meaning stained grey and referring to the specialized machinery used in the Quechua-speaking mining town of Oruro, near Potosí. ³³ The historical and sociological complexity of impurity and contamination exposes the limitations and dangers of the modern state. This is where the discourse of multiculturalism has failed, in that it avoids deeper possibilities of relational coexistence by creating new market-oriented forms of demarcating and reducing identity. 

In a peripheral worldview, the idea of an abstract level of thought independent from the multifaceted materiality of lived experience is not plausible. “Postulating the (potential) universality of these ideas could lead us into the path of a kind of border consciousness or frontier consciousness,” Rivera Cusicanqui explains, adding that this perspective is a ch’ixi epistemology of the taypi as the contact zone, that is the intra-world where communities are able to shift between capitalist and non-capitalist ways of life and to rely on instrumental reason while at the same time demolishing it. ³⁴ The pacha, the Aymara word that designates the space-time dimension or the cosmos, is composed of a dual concept: pä, meaning “two”, and cha, which means “energy.” ³⁵ The theoretical and interpretative significance of these concepts goes hand in hand with their value as everyday practices. For example, there seems to be no noun to indicate the idea of work as an abstract notion in pre-colonial Aymara, and instead only words indicating specific tasks in which someone engages in particular places, communities and systems of exchange. ³⁶ The cohabitation of multiple energies, lower and higher, is where the creative and productive power of the cosmos comes from. The production of knowledge, far from being separate from the production of material sustenance, can only take place through an engagement with the world by means of physical motions and gestures that keep creating yet new networks and relations. 

The acts that are carried out through and with the world are performative not only in the sense that they involve bodies that move, connect, learn and do, but also in that they are inherent to and partake in all processes of creation (or destruction) of the world. Communities are “autopoietic” spaces when they replicate the relational structure of doing by knowing and knowing through the body with the aim to create a political microcosm of “good government” (buen gobierno) and “good life” (buen vivir). ³⁷ As an image that exemplifies good government in this wider cosmological meaning, Rivera Cusicanqui turns to the ‘knowledgeable poet astrologer’ represented by indigenous chronicler Guamán Poma de Ayala’s 1615 First New Chronicle and Good Government (El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno). ³⁸ A Quechua man, walking while holding a thread of knotted cords known as khipu, is described as a poet “in the Aristotelian sense of the term: creator of the world, producer of food, expert in the cycle of cosmos.” ³⁹ The khipu affords him a deeper perception of time: he stands between the sun and the moon, which represents his knowledge of the cosmic cycles and his ability to grow food. Through the poet-astrologer, human knowledge is deep-rooted in the cyclical time of the seasons.

In the image of the poet astrologer, memory unfolds in movement, through practical engagement with the world, rather than in isolated intellectual abstraction. “From ancient times through the present,” Rivera Cusicanqui explains, “it has been the weavers and astrologer-poets of the communities and villages who have revealed to us this alternative and subversive thread of knowledges and practices capable of restoring the world and setting it on its rightful course.” ⁴⁰ The act of walking allows new threads to be woven across different forms of energy and in collaboration with a multiplicity of agents. Epistemic actions have, therefore, an ethical value in that they have a “poietic” power and are woven into a net of material reverberations. ⁴¹ For example, the inherited knowledge contained in the khipu ensures sustenance not only for the present but also for the generations to come. As will be discussed in the final section, the ontological dimension that Escobar proposes to rethink political action is also connected to the idea of the relational constitution of reality. ⁴² The idea that nothing exists a priori but that everything co-exists by virtue of mutual interactions is, for Escobar, at the basis of a new way of imagining communal life as embedded in networks of relationships situated in communities and territories. For Rivera Cusicanqui, the production of knowledge partakes in the materiality of the world. According to her definition of autopoietic communities, there is no distinction between an epistemic and an ontological dimension.

Escobar also relies on the concept of autopoiesis as a way to conceptualize the material structure of relational worlds. He refers to “Maturana and Varela’s theory of autopoiesis, which stresses the permanent self-production of every living entity out of a system of elements whose interrelation produces nothing but the same entity.” ⁴³ According to the biological theory of autopoiesis, living systems are completely self-contained and are capable of self-constructing and self-regenerating. They are, therefore, also cognitive systems, in that there is no inside and outside: everything occurs and is apprehended through the same system of interactions. For Escobar, the planet functions according to the same “autopoietic dynamics,” since it is an “undoubtable fact that no living being is independent from the Earth.” ⁴⁴ In this framework, human and non-human communities are not only interdependent for their own reproduction but are also partners in producing forms of sociality, including intellectual and epistemic processes. It becomes evident, then, that both the spatial and the temporal fabric of human action are fundamentally changed.

Human history needs to be woven into the much longer timeframe of geological changes. Compartmentalizing knowledge into the sphere of the human and the sphere of the natural corresponds to building human societies as if they were set apart and independent from the world. As Vincent Ialenti puts it, ‘[g]azing into deep time is no longer just for geologists, theologians, paleontologists, astrophysicists, archaeologists, climate scientists, or evolutionary biologists. It is our collective responsibility.” ⁴⁵ From the peripheral perspective, according to which different worlds co-exist and inter-exist, the notion that humans are geological agents (which is the core idea of the Anthropocene) becomes an assumption of response-ability rather than one of inevitability. The danger lies in assuming a distinction between human and non-human histories. Historians have tried to address this paradox over the last couple of decades: “[i]n unwittingly destroying the artificial but time-honored distinction between natural and human histories,” writes Chakrabarty, “climate scientists posit that the human being has become something much larger than the simple biological agent that he or she always has been. Humans now wield a geological force.” ⁴⁶ If we approach this claim from the entangled imaginary of the peripheral perspective, humans are planetary co-agents. In a taypi-ch’ixi world, human beings produce their sustenance, both material and spiritual, within the temporal arc of the cosmos as creative participants in its autopoietic cycles. 

Thinking with the Body, Feeling with the Mind

In the framework of epistemic bordering, human beings are no longer observing the world from afar in the same way as nature is no longer the stage on which human action unfolds. It is not sufficient for human organized life to be imagined as a self-serving project geared around a solely human economy. Human societies need to be reassembled as multitudinous collectives in which the non-human world is included in a new eco-social pact. The correlationist logic by which humans think the world into existence is the same logic that makes it possible to externalize othered humans, non-human animals and objectified ecosystems. This dualistic violence is not a collateral effect but is built into the same exclusionary framework of anthropocentrism. While an autopoietic structure is transformative, in that it is built upon the principle of perpetuating its own sustenance, a dichotomic system based on a subject-object logic relies on creating waste and discarding it outside the reduced confines of human economies. As Timothy Morton puts it, “[p]hilosophers have volunteered a variety of beings to be the decider. For Hegel, it’s Spirit, the necessarily historical unfolding of its self-knowing. For Heidegger, it’s Dasein, which he irrationally restricts to human beings, and even more irrationally (on his own terms, even) to German human beings most of all. For Foucault, it’s power-knowledge that makes things real. . . . The similarity between all the ‘deciders’ is that they are all human . . . .” ⁴⁷ In other words, a subject-object system is intrinsically anthropocentric and deeply rooted in dominant western philosophies.

The human body is excluded from epistemic creation in as much as it needs to be kept untouched and uncontaminated from other bodies. The condition of incompleteness and fragmentation that shapes human-centered societies, a process that Morton calls the “Severing”, is equally experienced within human subjectivity as a fracture from connected ways of being and knowing. “Modern social theory,” Escobar argues, “continues to operate largely on the basis of an objectifying distancing principle, which implies a belief in the ‘real’ and ‘truth’ – an epistemology of allegedly autonomous subjects willfully moving around in a universe of self-contained objects.” ⁴⁸ A world of objects would be a world where not much happens, in that there would be no movement and, therefore, no creative energy, without the world-making prerogative of humans as the only autonomous subjects. Escobar draws on Ingold’s reflections about blobs and lines to conceptualize his definition of relational ontology. ⁴⁹ Ingold argues that the blob-shaped entities that make up the world would not be able to form part of and perpetuate life without the lines that sprout from them and which bind them together. “These blobs,” he writes, “put out lines or swell from them, or are embedded in a linear matrix. It is by their lines that they can live, move and hold on to one another.” ⁵⁰

For Escobar, these patterns of interconnected threads represent an ontology that is able to sustain itself from within through a system of vital intersections. From the perspective of epistemic bordering, while some lines act as borderlines by separating the blobs, others, one might argue, function as the strings that create and keep together a life-supporting network. Escobar uses the imaginary of weaving to signify the principle of interdependence as one in which humans co-create knowledge through entanglements with the non-human world. In his interpretation, weaving is a material act as much as it is also a symbolic act that takes shape through forms of narration and storytelling. ⁵¹ In the relational ontology advanced by Escobar, weaving eco-social relations between humans and non-humans allows for a kind of knowledge that is enacted and practiced through and with the world. These eco-socialities proliferate in self-reproducing structures that are only imaginable in the absence of coercive designs that seek to produce monoverses sustained by monocultures. The relational framework discussed in this section speaks to the crucial challenge posed by post-humanist critics to the correlationist nature of modern epistemology. In Karen Barad’s words, “[l]iberal social theories and scientific theories alike owe much to the idea that the world is composed of individuals with separately attributable properties. An entangled web of scientific, social, ethical, and political practices . . . hinges on the various/differential instantiations of this presupposition. Much hangs in the balance in contesting its seeming inevitability.” ⁵²

Since its beginnings, the Latin American decolonial movement, of which Escobar was one of the founding members, has placed the colonization of knowledge at the center of its analysis. The project of epistemic decolonization has therefore been crucial to Escobar’s scholarly work in the past two decades. Rivera Cusicanqui, on the other hand, establishes her political concerns and intellectual trajectory within an anti-colonial perspective that looks critically at this kind of academic decoloniality. Anti-colonial knowledge should be emerging from the grounded and situated experience of everyday community life. However, there are common threads that connect her reflections with Escobar’s work. They both trace alternative concepts of good living to territorial communities and collective experiences that have been either obscured or heavily chastised by histories of colonial violence. It is what Escobar calls the One-World World (OWW), “the conversion of everything that exists in the mangrove-world into ‘nature’ and ‘nature’ into ‘resources;’ the effacing of the life-enabling materiality of the entire domains of the inorganic and the non-human, and its treatment as ‘objects’ to be had, destroyed, or extracted; and linking the forest worlds so transformed to ‘world markets’ for profit.” ⁵³ Escobar looks with great interest to social movements across Latin America that are committed to creating alternative forms of sociality where the principle of living well is extended to the wholeness of the eco-social space in which they are situated. Some of the movements from which he draws emerged in Bolivia in the 1980s and the 1990s. Rivera Cusicanqui played a central role in establishing one of these movements, the oral history collective THOA (Taller de Historia Oral Andina), an activist research group that applies oral and visual methodologies to Andean history to recover eco-social modes of living that were typical of the political and economic organization of the ayllu system. Other collectives that Escobar brings into play, such as Mujeres Creando (Women Creating), co-founded by Bolivian activist artist Julieta Paredes, seek to reshape communal existence from a feminist perspective by rethinking ideas and practices of masculinity and femininity for alternative politics in which the materiality of the body defines social and political relations. ⁵⁴

The anti-colonial and anti-patriarchal agendas of these and other grassroots initiatives are, therefore, fundamental in shaping Escobar’s reflections on alternative ontologies. It is where neo-colonial agendas push their way in through colonial legacies that the urgency of situated knowledge is most evident. For Escobar, “the knowledges produced from territorial struggles provide us with essential elements for thinking about the profound cultural and ecological transitions needed to face the inter-related crises of climate, food, energy, poverty, and meaning.” ⁵⁵ Anthropocentrism is a cornerstone of even the most radical theories of the western tradition, and without leaving behind a dualist mode of narration that preserves human-only societies from the response-ability of material entanglements, an autopoietic world is impossible to achieve. The riverine communities of the Yurumanguí river in the Colombian southern Pacific rainforest region are presented by Escobar as an example of an interdependent system in which human organized life is connected with a diverse living network. The material intersections between different life forms constitute the ontological system of what Escobar calls the “mangrove-world.” ⁵⁶ The mangroves live at the edge of the river in conditions in which most plants would not survive. They connect land and water ecosystems, enabling both freshwater and saltwater ecosystems to thrive. Complex habitats come to life around their root systems, providing food for many species including humans. The mangrove forests along this coastal region, as well as in many other regions in the Americas and Asia, have been systematically destroyed for the implementation of monocultures and industrial farming. The interconnected system of the mangrove-world clashes noisily against the monospecieism of the plantationocene. ⁵⁷

In the mangrove world, to know is to know the world from here. ⁵⁸ Knowledge is not a solely intellectual practice. It occurs through the whole body by rowing, swimming and fishing. Escobar borrows the notion of sentipensar (to think-feel), or sentipensamiento (thinking-feeling), from Colombian sociologist Orlando Fals Borda, who became familiar with the term in the riverine communities of the Caribbean region of Colombia. ⁵⁹ He first became aware of the idea that to be a thinking-feeling being was a mode of being in the world when talking with fishermen in San Martín de la Loba, in the Caribbean region of northern Colombia. ⁶⁰ During a conversation with a local fisherman, Fals Borda was told about the ancient practices of sentipensamiento, which combines thinking with the heart and feeling with the mind. A thinking-feeling being (ser sentipensante) is member of a dual culture, the “amphibious culture” typical of those communities whose livelihoods and customs have developed at the border between land and water, like the mangrove trees. The Momposina depression area along the river San Jorge is made up of a number of swamps and wetlands that sustain very rich ecosystems. This region has ecosystems that have been subjected to aggressive privatization and exploitation especially for intensive cattle farming. Being adaptable and resilient is a result of this amphibious identity, which is, by its peripheral nature, able to survive across different worlds. ⁶¹ This propensity for resistance, which emerges from embedded knowledge, is increasingly needed as ecological and social equilibria change across hemispheres.

The thinking-feeling attitude as both an existential and an ontological-epistemic method defines a state of individual and social subjectivity. Fishermen living on the San Jorge River relate the concept of the hombre-hicotea, a being who is half turtle and half human. “To be half turtle and half human means not only to be able to think-feel but also to be resilient.” ⁶² The turtle waits for the right moment to come out when there is enough water and is ready to hide again during the hottest months. This same adaptability to hardship, on the one hand, accompanied by a similar ability to find enjoyment, on the other hand, characterizes the hombre-hicotea. ⁶³ The political potential of the ontology of the hombre-hicotea is manifold. To begin with, it is about the possibility of adapting to changing environmental circumstances in a productive way. Therefore, being able to live well means to experience and embrace the world in the full spectrum of its possibilities. It also means to accept its boundaries. This notion of resilience relies on knowledge embedded in the materiality of relationships beyond human-centered communities. What is required is, then, to rethink political assemblages as eco-social commons where there is no inside and outside but, instead, multispecies networks. What all this points to is an alternative to the destructive potential of the subject-object ontology. “[T]he struggles for the defense of relational worlds,” argues Escobar, “might be more farsighted and appropriate to the conjuncture of modern problems without modern solutions than its academic counterparts.” ⁶⁴

This emphasis on the decolonial as grounded practice rather than as scholarly conceptualization arguably unfolds from a growing focus in Escobar’s work on territorially and politically embodied articulations of decolonial alternatives, including Rivera Cusicanqui’s and other feminist collectives’ work. A reworking of the original academic project of decoloniality seems to be at play here by shifting attention towards viable frameworks that, while emerging from specific community experiences, offer potential solutions beyond the global south. ⁶⁵ “Thinking-feeling with one’s environment,” writes Escobar drawing on Fals Borda’s popularization of the notion of sentipensamiento, “means to think with the mind and with the heart at once, or co-razonar … [which] is how territorial communities have learned that art of living well.” ⁶⁶ Drawing on Aymara concepts, Rivera Cusicanqui introduces a grounded theory that has a similar linguistic and material origin. She proposes new multi-agency collective projects and new ways of thinking in common, or corazonar. This term is equivalent to the Aymara notion of chuyma, or the place from which it is possible to think with the heart and through memory. ⁶⁷ The Spanish term corazonar can be both a fusion between corazón, heart, and razonar, to reason, and of the prefix co and the verb razonar, to reason together. Rivera Cusicanqui explains that we need to create “heterogeneous collectives of thought and action in order to corazonar and think together if we are to deal with what’s coming.” ⁶⁸ In the case of the chuyma, there is a stark emphasis on building communities as fundamental spaces for thinking in common through action, “by working with our hands as much as with our minds.” ⁶⁹ The role of memory is essential in the way Rivera Cusicanqui envisages thinking in common as a feminist and anti-capitalist method: “through visual imaginaries and physical work, it is possible to activate the ch’iqua (left) side, which is the dark female side that resides in the space of the chuyma and of the past. This is what allows for the possibility of being in common.” ⁷⁰

Sociologists and philosophers who work in the western methodological and intellectual tradition have never stopped trying to analyze modernity in all of its inflections, including when they have claimed that we have never been modern. In recent years, modernity studies have experienced a resurgence, arguably on the spur of the Environmental Humanities and the Post-Humanities. If we are to tackle the destructive effects of the dominant global economic and political system originating in imperial and colonial expansions, it is unavoidable to investigate modern subjectivity’s obsession with controlling the world. Sociologist Hartmut Rosa suggests the notion of “uncontrollability” to counter the modern principle of objectification, possession and engineering of the world. ⁷¹ This illusory expectation of control comes back to us as a sense of loss and alienation. The more humans multiply their attempts at controlling the world, the more the world slips away from them and becomes increasingly alien. Controllability, one might argue, is the extreme sociological result of the correlationist modern subjectivity. One way of thinking about modernity is, therefore, as “a failed experience of the world, because it allows the subject to approach the world without relating to it, as a dead resource and malleable object . . . .” ⁷² Sentipensar means, on the contrary, to be interconnected with the world and to know with the world by thinking with the body and feeling with the mind. 

Conclusion

As long as the structure of human organized life remains based on principles of demarcation and exclusion, and the focus of reproduction is restricted to the human sphere, the planetary reproductive networks will continue to be broken down. “Anthropogenic climate change […] produces a crisis in the distribution of natural reproductive life on the planet. But our political and justice-related thinking remains very human-focused. We still do not know how to think conceptually — politically or in accordance with theories of justice — about justice towards nonhuman forms of life, not to speak of the inanimate world.” ⁷³ Capitalist and Marxist designs endorse making use of the non-human world for the benefit of fewer or more humans respectively, as they both view it as an instrument which has no part in the social contract. The idea of granting rights to nature, while highly valuable in a human-centered juridical system, would make little sense in an eco-social commons where humans are co-responsible for maintaining a relational structure of co-existence. Philosophically, “simply not appropriating nonhumans would be a quick and dirty (and therefore better) way of achieving what ‘animal rights’ discourses machinate over.” ⁷⁴The idea of protecting the non-human world from human exploitation originates in the same objectifying framework that justifies its exploitation in the first place. The system of enclosure of common lands for animal and food production is the most extensive juridical and economic expression of human-centered sociality. According to Morton, “[d]emarcation and enclosure simply entail the denial of the multiple relations that constitute every existing entity.” ⁷⁵

The most pressing task at hand is to recognize that we need to devise new modes of conceptualizing not how to treat the non-human world but, instead, how to live in and with the world. In this essay, I have argued that forms of epistemic bordering provide us with alternative concepts through which to rethink humanity’s relationship with the world. An autopoietic world is one in which conflict is not subsumed but generates life, as exemplified by the taypi-ch’ixi. In this conceptual dimension, human beings do not need to save the planet or be stewards for other species because they are enmeshed in the same web of relations. The mangrove system where the fishermen formulate the practice of sentipensamiento exemplifies the interdependence of plants and animals, including human animals, across soil and water ecosystems. Recent studies on the destruction of mangroves and the environmental campaigns to protect and restore them show the non-viability of dominant views of conservation based on the notion of the pristine, which is yet another version of the dualistic worldview. ⁷⁶The entanglement of mind and body participates in the complex net of relations that allows ecosystems to live and thrive. The mangrove world becomes a metaphor for the need to restore disorder and contamination and to bring the materiality of the body back into learning and knowing. The interdependence of knowing and doing determines both the process of sentipensamiento and the preservation – or disruption – of life in the contact zone of the taypi. While these frameworks present many affinities to post-humanist formulations such as, for example, Donna Haraway’s Chthulucene, their call for epistemological alternatives grounded in histories and practices of resistance is paramount. In other words, both Rivera Cusicanqui and Escobar not only reposition the human as a lesser player with respect to the non-human, but they also open up the opportunity to reframe the human from the historical and existential perspective of the periphery.

As critical self-reflections from post-humanist scholars have pointed out, “posthumanism has tended to criticize and reconceive ‘humanity’ and ‘nature’ mainly as these appear as cultural constructs of the West, with the (unintended) consequence that alternative, non-Western concepts of human being are frequently eclipsed.” ⁷⁷ While, as Haraway urges us, we must think, we also need to draw up new imaginative ways of languaging the world that show us that anthropocentrism is not an inevitability. What is required is not less impact, but more cooperation. As Max Liboiron puts it, “[t]here can be solidarity without a We. There must be solidarity without a universal We. The absence of We and the acknowledgement of many we’s (including those to which you/I/we do not belong) is imperative for good relations in solidarity against ongoing colonialism and allows cooperation with the incommensurabilities of different worlds, values, and obligations.” ⁷⁸ Sentipensar can be seen as a new “grammar for the future” as it offers new possibilities to “[link] together experience and language.” ⁷⁹ It makes it possible to articulate a different practice of adaptability that is based on interdependence rather than on competition. At the same time, contamination implies that a pristine world does not exist, nor is it desirable, which resonates with recent critiques of decoloniality from Latin America. ⁸⁰ Perhaps falling into the “ecological traps” that started with sedentary agriculture and which have led humans to go from interdependence to high dependence on finite resources is not an ineluctable trait of our species. ⁸¹ The embedded and deep-time scope of the peripheral knowledges discussed in this essay can contribute important new proposals that are lacking in the current global-north-centered Environmental Humanities.

Michela Coletta is an Associate Professor in Hispanic Studies at the University of Warwick. She was a Marie Curie Fellow in Global History at Freie Universität Berlin and an Affiliated Fellow at ICI Berlin (2022–24). Michela has a PhD in History from University College London and has held positions at various institutions in the UK, Germany, Denmark, and Spain. Her research is at the intersection of cultural and intellectual history, environmental history, social and political theory, and the environmental humanities. Her current work on Buen Vivir explores the possibility of tracing anti-extractivist epistemologies across north-south boundaries.