Subaltern Geographies by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780820354606
Goodreads: 41861048
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2019-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Pachamama, Subaltern Geographies, and Decolonial Projects in Andean Ecuador

SARAH A. RADCLIFFE

High in the Andes, a simple wedding takes place led by a religious-political authority whose acts reproduce meaningful links between subjects defined by their indigeneity, a politics from below, and the landscape around them. Engaging ethnographically with this event, the chapter examines what we might mean by “subaltern geographies” and what implications it might have for the discipline. Subalternity contains many, often disparate, meanings yet is ineluctably a political category, a way of marking a positionality vis-à-vis a hegemonic state and global power, even as it speaks to the diverse positionings of individuals and collectivities jostling to speak back to power. Drawing on ethnographic colabor in the present, the chapter describes a wedding organized by and for heterogeneous subjects who come together under the banner of Ecuador’s diverse Indigenous nationalities to protest territorial and cultural dispossession and denial of epistemic parity (see also Mamani 2011). In their struggles to imagine and realize nonhegemonic futures, Ecuadorian Indigenous movements have engaged a diversity of imaginative geographies, territorializations, and spatialities. Indigenous civil organizations, often in alliance with diverse social and political actors, have long fought for reductions in uneven development and marginalization, attributed to colonial-modern racism and post-colonial state territorial statehood. Some of these territorializations including countermapping and the legal-cartographic strategy to gain rights to collective territories are documented elsewhere (Bryan 2012; Wainwright and Bryan 2009). Building on these insights, this chapter examines subaltern geographies from two angles: firstly in relation to a politics of Pachamama, and secondly in relation to the production of geographical knowledges outside the academy by Indigenous actors. Pachamama refers to a more-than-human energy-agency that encompasses mountains (such as the site of the wedding described here), rocks, water, and other nonhuman agents. Bringing into focus the more-than-human geographies of Pachamama and the embodied processes of knowledge production, systematization, and practice offers, I suggest, important insights into “subaltern territorialization of space—living it, knowing it, claiming it” (Jazeel and Legg, 6).1 Subaltern geographies of Pachamama moreover challenge geographical understandings of colonial-modern place, power, and difference.

Let us start at the unfixity of subaltern struggles vis-à-vis dominant power, long acknowledged in the South Asian subaltern studies group and Latin American scholarship. Florencia Mallon paraphrases Ranajit Guha to argue that “subordination is a two-way relationship, involving both dominated and dominant” (Mallon 2000, 1526; see also Sharp et al. 2000). Both authors draw on Antonio Gramsci’s insights into how

subaltern groups attempt to influence “dominant political formations” from the start and … this critical engagement was crucial to the transformation of both dominant and subaltern political organizations. In response to pressure from below, dominant groups attempt to enlist the cooperation of subalterns through the formation of new reformist political parties. At the same time, when subalterns struggle politically to create their own increasingly autonomous organizations, they do so in dialogue with, and struggle against, dominant political forms. (Mallon 2000, 1527).

Since the emergence of a national Ecuadorian Indigenous confederation in the mid-1980s, Indigenous politics has sought to

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