“A indianidade é um projeto de futuro, ñao uma memoria do passado” Footnote 1
“On December 14, 2014, [we] the indigenous communities of Corinto resumed the liberation of Mother Earth.”Footnote 2 So begins what could be called the Nasa manifesto for the Liberation of Mother Earth (LME).Footnote 3 This movement to reclaim ancestral lands from ingenios (sugar plantations) and haciendas gained momentum in 2014 when the Nasa launched yet another offensive against what they consider to be untenable land shortages and environmental destruction.
The Nasa are not new at this. They are one of the largest, most organized and militant indigenous groups in Colombia. Although the CRIC (Cauca Indigenous Regional Council), the Nasa's largest political association, is far from being a monolithic organization with some factions favoring alliances with guerilla groups and others queuing up for government resources, the greater part of the movement has historically vied for autonomy and succeeded, especially in times of crises, in putting up a united front against Colombian authorities that has brought them important territorial and political gains.Footnote 4 It has also earned them heavy-handed repression and the persistent assassination of many of their leaders and rank and file mingueros.Footnote 5 But, with a centuries-old tradition in resistance, the Nasa view their struggle in historical and spiritual terms. For them, the LME is only the latest phase in a five-hundred-year-old conflict over land and two differing cosmologies: one that conceives Nature as an all-encompassing, living, and intelligent organism, and one that sees it as a storehouse of dead, atomized items which are there for the taking, to be extracted and hoarded for profit “until stocks run-out”.
This latest phase, however, stands out because it is being steered along a brazenly defiant philosophical rudder which the Nasa have labelled as “la desalambrada de la Madre Tierra”. (Seguimos en minga…, 14) Literally speaking, desalambrar means to remove barbed wire; so that “la desalambrada de la Madre Tierra” or “la desalambrada de Uma Kiwe” as it is also known, speaks to the removal of barbed wire demarcating private property throughout the Cauca province that the Nasa have been carrying out with relative, albeit spasmodic success for thirteen years, ever since they first occupied a 346-acre hacienda with an anachronistically colonial name to it (La Emperatriz or The Empress) in 2005.Footnote 6 But the desalambrada or de-barbwiring of Mother Earth is not just a strategy devised to recover much needed land for the growing Nasa population; it is also a philosophical standpoint that allows the Nasa to challenge Colombian land property laws as well as the Western mind frame these laws are embedded into. In the following pages, it is this standpoint, this idea of de-barbwiring Mother Earth that I would like to explore inasmuch as its conceptual scaffolding — ontological continuity — unsettles and challenges that most Eurocentric of all Eurocentric concepts: the unsurmountable divide between nature and culture. More specifically — bearing in mind the age-old, quasi-universal association between women and Nature (Mother Earth) — I would like to explore what it can possibly mean for women, gender, feminism, and the environment.
One-Hundred-and-Fifty years of Barbwired History
From a historical point of view, the Nasa idea of de-barbwiring Mother Earth is a remarkably disruptive proposition, especially in light of the political history of barbed wire as reconstructed by French philosopher Olivier Razac. (Razac Reference Razac2009) The de-barbwiring of Mother Earth not only defies the capitalist creed of private property, it challenges a device that in the words of Razac “epitomizes an entire age”. (Razac Reference Razac2009, 8) As a key part of the tool kit of the last 150 years of biopolitics, barbed wire is intrinsically connected to three major events still haunting the modern era: the nineteenth-century extermination campaign against Native Americans, the carnage of World War I, and World War II Nazi concentration camps.
According to Razac, these events constitute a sequence in which barbed wire as a device of biopower and biopolitics signaled the advent of a new kind of violence marked by the “ambiguity of its brutality and the efficiency of its economy.” (Razac Reference Razac2009, 24) Patented in 1874 by J.F. Glidden, a farmer from Illinois, barbed wire was first used to protect the fields of white pioneers as they encroached on Native American land west of the Mississippi. Forty years later, European nation-states would rise above the bloodied barbed-wired trenches of WWI, and only two decades later, six million people would perish encircled by barbed wire. Today the trend continues: in Gaza and the West Bank an entire nation withers away in an open-air prison made of eight-meter walls topped by barbed-wire.Footnote 7 This latest experiment in corralling entire populations has served as the blueprint for the more recent burgeoning of camps throughout the planet with all kinds of “surplus” people: “war refugees”, “economic refugees”, “climate refugees”, etc., who might otherwise disturb the peaceful and productive lives of those whose wars, economic adventures, and disregard for nature put them there in the first place.
In speaking of the “ambiguous brutality” of barbed wire, Razac points to the perverse duplicity of its singular purpose — to keep in and to keep out, but also to its very real, violent material nature (whosoever happens to brush against it, gets injured) and yet simultaneous virtuality, whereby a couple of strings of barbed wire can, and indeed have replaced the thickest and tallest of stone walls, hence its “efficiency”. This efficiency has proven to be such that even today with the array of electronic control devices available (video surveillance, thermoelectric detectors, biometric detectors, surveillance drones), barbed wire continues to be used as a complementary deterrent to keep in or keep out entire populations. Through this efficiency, barbed wire has played a critical role in the modern experience: because of its simplicity, its ease of use and adaptability, its low cost, and lethality, it has allowed for the organization of space into territorial grids wherein people and bodies, human or otherwise, can be controlled in an effective and long-term fashion. In this way, barbed wire has become a crucial device in modern territorial conflicts and the concurrent displacement, re-settlement, incarceration and extermination of millions of people throughout the world. This is why the Nasa idea of de-barbwiring Mother Earth is such a disruptive proposition subverting not only an economic system, but the spirit of an entire age as defined by a very specific technology of domination over lives and bodies.
A Bridge over Modernity and Coloniality
The Nasa believe it is not just the barbed-wired haciendas and ingenios that threaten their survival. Like other indigenous groups around the globe, the Nasa understand that the idea itself of the division of land into privately owned plots fenced-in by barbed wire that seeks to underwrite a private and individual status for people within their own resguardos (reservations) threatens the very fabric of their communities. Such policies can only break up and atomize the communal structure of their society, putting at risk not only their physical, but their cultural survival. This is why the Nasa idea of de-barbwiring Mother Earth goes well beyond the physical removal of proprietorial barbed wire fences. According to the Nasa, it is not just the earth which has been crisscrossed with barbed wire; our hearts and minds have also been fenced-in with barbed wire:
“[…] the de-barbwiring of Uma Kiwe rests on the de-barbwiring of the heart. De-barbwiring the heart rests on the de-barbwiring of Mother Earth. Who would've thought? Heart and land are one and the same.”Footnote 8
Such a statement introduces a core concept at the heart of Nasa thinking and one that represents a major difference vis-à-vis Eurocentric modern colonial modes of reasoning. In English, the closest word to apprehend such an idea is perhaps the word continuum. When the Nasa state that “heart and land are one and the same” they are not being merely poetic, they are articulating a central tenet of their worldview: the idea that human beings and nature constitute an organic sequence with no unbridgeable ontological barriers. In fact, the LME cannot be fully grasped without understanding the very different relations posited by the Nasa between humans and non-humans. As Mario Blaser, Marisol de la Cadena, and Arturo Escobar and other decolonialists have pointed out, most indigenous struggles throughout the Americas are advanced on the premises of radically different ontologies or relational ontologies as Mario Blaser has dubbed them. (Escobar Reference Escobar1999, Reference Escobar2014; Blaser Reference Blaser2009; Blaser M. and De la Cadena, M. Reference Blaser, de la Cadena, de la Cadena and Blaser2018) As a general rule, from the standpoint of relational ontologies, there is both consubstantiality and commensurability between humans and nature; consequently, what is emphasized in these ontologies is relational affinity, not substantial identity. For example, in Nasayuwe one can say “I am a tree” without being branded a lunatic, a poet, or both. (Portela Reference Portela and González1988) This statement is not a metaphor; on the contrary, this is a factual statement because to the Nasa the human body is indeed a tree, and both consubstantiality and commensurability are established between trees and the human body. Consider the Nasayuwe word for tree — f'tü, the word for arm being ku'ta, the way to say tree branch is f'tü ku'ta or “tree arm”. This organic continuum can also be extended, for example, to the concept of wing — the word f'u meaning to fly, wing is f'u ku'ta or “arm for flying”. (Portela Reference Portela and González1988, 9) It is important, however, to understand that here neither trees nor plants as a whole provide a generic locum for humans. Instead, what is generic in this worldview is humanity itself: humanity is the universal substratum or the “conceptual analogon” as Eduardo Viveiros de Castro calls it, shoring up the ontological bridge that warrants continuity between human beings and all other beings. (Viveiros de Castro Reference Viveiros de Castro, Danowski, de la Cadena and Blaser2018, 174)
Indeed, according to Amerindian creation narratives, in the beginning there was no difference between humans and all other forms of life: “Tobacco was people”; “Jaguar was human”.Footnote 9Since then — as the basic narrative goes — all these peoples have taken on different accoutrements, though their humanity persists underneath their distinctive attire. Humanness here is a starting, not a culmination point. Accordingly, from this standpoint, the world is one big social complex wherein all kinds of peoples (humans, trees, plants, birds, jaguars, etc.) live and interact under similar rules of conduct regulated by their mutual co-dependency. What is specific about the different communities that people the world is what Philippe Descola has termed “the robe” that each collectivity dons and the habitus springing from the specificity of their corporal attire. (Descola Reference Descola2012, 200–208) But these are mere formalities through which Amerindian and Nasa thought navigate rather smoothly: since bodies are just a form of packaging that come with removable and exchangeable attributes (tusks, fangs, hair, wings, arms, branches, leaves, etc.) — that once removed reveal an anthropomorphic subjectivity — in Nasayuwe a word like v'l’il’ points to nails or fingers in humans, but in reference to birds or animals, it points to claws, hooves and paws. (Portela Reference Portela and González1988, 9–13) Now, just as trees and humans are technically interchangeable, so land and the human body — conceived as a territory unto itself “[…] composed of water, stones, peaks, hills, hollows, roots, stems, buds, leaves, etc” — become commutable. (Portela Reference Portela, Viveros and Garay2005, 206) The continuity established between people and trees is reproduced at a wider scale between the human body and Earth itself with humanness operating as a kind of universal threading motif stringing together everything and everyone. Such continuum is then conceptualized through patterned sequences of relational affinities based for the most part on morphology or functionality. In Europe this kind of reasoning was best approximated and illustrated by Gian Battista della Porta (1535–1615) in his work Phytognomonica (Reference Della Porta1588) in which he established a series of similarities between human as well as non-human organisms and plants through morphological criteria. (Fig. 1–4)
Gian Battista della Porta (Reference Della Porta1588)
Gian Battista della Porta (Reference Della Porta1588)
Gian Battista della Porta (Reference Della Porta1588)
Gian Battista della Porta (Reference Della Porta1588)
Ribbons of Power and Intelligence
Another domain besides language where the concept of ontological continuity at the heart of Nasa thought is highly visible is textiles. Textiles are a favored art form among the Nasa. Just as clay-modeling is regarded as the preeminent act of creation in Judeo-Christian tradition, Nasa people consider weaving to be the original act of creation. Uma, the first woman, is remembered as the supreme weaver who wove the world into existence. (Quiguanás Reference Quiguanás Cuetia2011, 17) The metonymy between weaving, creation, and sowing is such that the word for loom — tul — is the same word used for the vegetable gardens where Nasa women grow their families’ food. (Quiguanás Reference Quiguanás Cuetia2011, 44) Among the Nasa, it is women who weave. They excel at making ruanas and capisayos (ponchos), jigras and cuetanderas (woven shoulder bags), and cinchas and chumbes (sashes) in which they weave or knit motifs depicting Nasa history as well as Nasa core concepts. In fact, weaving and knitting are regarded as acts of collective actualization whereby Nasa thought and history are summoned, re-inscribed, and thus re-potentialized; so that whenever Nasa women weave or knit, it is believed they are weaving or knitting together Nasa history and thought all over again. In doing so, women have been designated as the keepers of Nasa symbology and history. (Quiguanás Reference Quiguanás Cuetia2011, 4)
As with the Maya in Guatemala, the Inca in Peru, the Aymara in Bolivia, and the Mapuche in Chile, textiles are considered a form of writing. Manuel Quintín Lame, a famous Nasa guerilla leader, once said that “the rage of centuries [of colonization] had not been able to destroy these writings.” (Cited in Quiguanás Reference Quiguanás Cuetia2011, 33) For most Nasa specialists, the chumbe is in fact “the Nasas’ book”.Footnote 10 The Nasa describe chumbes as taw or “ribbons of power and intelligence”. (Quiguanás Reference Quiguanás Cuetia2011, 18) Chumbes are normally used as belts for anacos (skirts), straps for swaddling babies to their mothers’ backs, and band ribbons for hats; at the same time, they are considered repositories of knowledge where history and law are recorded. (Fig. 5–6) One of the most popular designs in chumbes is the spiral. In fact, similar to most other indigenous textile traditions throughout the Americas, the spiral is ever-present in Nasa designs which draw their inspiration from the spiral fractals that abound in nature. (Fig. 7–10)
Author's photograph.
Author's photograph.
Wikimedia Commons.
Wikimedia Commons.
Wikimedia Commons.
Wikipedia Commons.
Because the spiral suggests continuous expansion, growth, and development, for the Nasa the spiral geometrical progression or spiral fractal represents connectedness, movement, evolution, life, time, thought, and eternity. (Fig. 11–12)
Wikimedia Commons.
Wikipedia Commons.
According to the Nasa,
“The spiral is a symbol of evolution. It reminds us that everything has an origin; it is a snake or a rolled-up chumbe. It is the weft of life, with both an umbilical cord (the beginning of life) and a crown (intelligence), animals, people, jigras, hats. It is a coil that allows us to advance and find our origins at the same time.”Footnote 11
The spiral thus represented in Nasa textiles conveys the concept of ontological continuity between all life at the center of Nasa thought. This concept condenses two basic ideas: the common origin and the kinship of all life forms. In chumbes, this idea is represented geometrically through an endless rhomboidal spiral which in turn is assimilated to a snake. (Fig. 13–14)
Author's photograph.
Author's photograph.
The diamond formed by the two intertwining strands is known as the snake's eye.Footnote 12 As in Christianity, among the Nasa, snakes, women, and creation are closely associated, albeit with a very different twist. This intimate connection is carried over to chumbes and further illustrated by the fact that chumbes are woven in a forked loom exclusively made for this purpose, known as the taw umnxi which is assimilated by the Nasa because of its amphora shape to the female uterus “where life is spun”. (Quiguanás Reference Quiguanás Cuetia2011, 44) According to tradition, the first chumbe was worn by Yuu Luuçx, the first cacica or female chieftain: when Yuu Luuçx emerged out of the waters of creation, she was wearing a most beautiful chumbe that looked like a snake bearing splendid designs. (Quiguanás Reference Quiguanás Cuetia2011, 20) The rhomboidal spiral fractal or geometric snake design in chumbes represents therefore “the weft of Life” through which it is possible to both retrace and visualize the common origins and kinship of all life as it is eternally recreated, re-enacted, and projected into the future.
Long before fractals were accepted by modern science as useful tools for apprehending the non-linear complexity of our world, in what could be called a fractal perspective, the Nasa (along with other Amerindian peoples) embraced fractals as an ideal way to conceptualize multiform continuities or fluidity across different scales, dimensions, and systems. Although fractal definitions vary and even Mandelbrot once expressed regret for having defined the word at all (Mandelbrot Reference Mandelbrot1982), most Eurocentric definitions would agree with his early definition of fractals as complex and irregular shapes that are iterated across different scales. (Mandelbrot Reference Mandelbrot1977) While the Nasa would certainly coincide with the idea of repetition across different scales, the recursion of movement or patterns of movement is perhaps a better definition for fractals, at least one closer to the spirit of indigenous thought systems. Where Eurocentric thought can be said to be trapped in form, Amerindian thought is bent on apprehending movement. And fractals have provided Amerindians an ideal avenue for doing so for a long time, very much in the same way ecology today, for example, uses computer-generated fractals to describe the flow of organisms and populations within the complex imbrications of different ecosystems. (Scheuring Reference Scheuring and Riedi1994) If the spiral fractal design is favored by Nasa thought and textiles, it is because it conceptualizes both the radical interdependence of everything that exists as well as the tendrillar motility of sentient life not only across different scales, but also across time.
The rhomboidal geometric representation of these ontological continua are, after all, not unlike that primeval weft of life that is the double helix structure of DNA. (Fig. 15)
Public Domain Pictures
As a sequence of information or “instructions” that lays out the foundations for the structure, function, and heredity of all living organisms, DNA ensures a certain level of continuity from one generation to the next, while allowing for slight changes that contribute to the diversity of life. Contemporary genetics have shown that this continuity is sustained not only for a particular organism or species, but also across different organisms and species. Humans, for example, share genetic sequences with bacteria, yeast, fungi, flies, worms, bananas, and primates, to name a few. (The Genes We Share with … 2001) People share 50% of their DNA with bananas; cats have 90% of homologous genes with humans; cows are 80% genetically similar to humans, and 60% of chicken genes correspond to similar human genes. 99% of all rat genes are also found in humans. (Mouse Genome Sequencing … 2002) Life is essentially hybrid. Every living organism, whether plant, animal, or otherwise is the hybrid outcome of the hybridization or weaving together of infinite genetic strands. Before examining how the idea of hybrid continuity at the center of Nasa thought challenges the Eurocentric divide between humans and nature, I would like to dwell on one more Nasa art form where the continuity of life is affirmed: ritual dance.
The Dance of life
Dance is an essential part of Nasa life. Many dances take place during the great ritual of Saakhelu Kiwe Kame (Offering to Mother Earth), celebrated every year between the 19th and 22nd of December. Except for the Spanish two-hundred-year colonial hiatus, Saakhelu has been observed among the Nasa for more than a thousand years. (Gutiérrez Reference Gutiérrez2017, 18) As a celebration of Uma Kiwe (Mother Earth) and her agricultural bounty, the four-day celebrations are closely scripted around four basic agricultural activities (weeding, plowing, planting, harvesting). In order to carry out all of the activities involved, a great minga or collective effort is organized. Celebrations begin with an evening feast where newly elected officials are presented while the community's problems are expounded and discussed. Early next day, to the sound of chirimías (local wind and drum ensembles) the Tree of Life is chosen and cut down, only to be replanted in the afternoon. This second day of celebrations ends with another feast and a collective refrescamiento or communal cleansing. On the third day, adult community members exchange seeds with other adults as well as children. Dancing begins shortly after: first the dance of fertility takes place, then the snake dance, followed by the wind dance. After lunch, people resume dancing. They dance the welcome dance, the honey dance, the hummingbird dance, and then the highlight of the day which is the snail dance. The day ends with yet another feast. On the fourth and final day, more dancing takes place: people dance the buzzard dance, the condor dance, the snake dance, and the sun and moon dance. This dance cycle ends with a thanksgiving dance. After lunch, the effigies of the sun and moon that were placed on the Tree of Life are retrieved and entrusted to the people in charge of organizing the next Saakhelu the following year. The four-day celebrations end with people returning home to the sound of chirimías and more dancing.
Each of the twelve dances performed during Saakhelu has a precise ritual meaning. However, the snail dance marks the high-point of the four-day festivities as it reaffirms the Nasa idea of timeless continuity. Because dancing is an opportunity to step in synchronicity with others, Nasa people consider dancing a powerful technology for reestablishing harmony and balance with nature as well as other community members. This idea is powerfully at work in the snail dance. Participants line-up forming a great big snail or spiral with women and men alternating one behind the other. The woman at the forefront of the snail opens the dance by stepping along an imaginary rhomboid figure. The man behind her then performs a semi-circle around her which she then replicates by dancing in another semi-circle around him. This pattern is repeated by those behind, so that men and women dance around each other continually in semi-circles. In this way, the snail formed by all the participants dances in one big spiral arrangement. According to the Nasa, this dance recreates the umbilical cord linking all people to their origins; at the same time, it is believed to reproduce the crown on people's heads, so that ultimately this dance is thought to replicate human life's evolution from its very beginning to its highest point of achievement. (Gutiérrez Reference Gutiérrez2017, 22) Participants in the snail dance thump their feet briskly on the ground as they chew coca leaves to keep up their energy, dancing until they reach a trance-like state through which they overcome fatigue. Nasa people believe this dance drives away sloth, boredom, weariness, and sickness. (Gutiérrez Reference Gutiérrez2017, 23–24) By stamping their feet vigorously on the ground, they claim to obtain energy from earth itself; this energy is then re-directed and passed along to the entire group. Through this human umbilical cord linking the people to the land, the entire community is thought to be reconnected, re-energized and re-vitalized. A final meaning attached by the Nasa to the snail dance is that of temporal continuity or timeless elliptical time. (Gutiérrez Reference Gutiérrez2017, 25) Indeed, unlike the European linear perception of time, Nasa people conceive time as a spiraling ellipsis where the past and the future are cyclically connected. In dancing the snail dance, the Nasa believe they are engaging in the timeless dance of life and time where the future recreates — albeit with slight variations — the past.
Desalambrando
Thus the idea of continuity at the center of Nasa thought is displayed in ritual dance in the same forceful way in which it is deployed in textiles and language. The Nasa concept of continuity between all life forms is an idea that the Nasa share with many other indigenous cultures throughout the Americas. According to Philippe Descola, “in spite of the differences that they exhibit internally, all of these cosmologies share the common characteristic of making no trenchant distinctions between humans and animal and plant species. All of the entities inhabiting the world are connected in a vast continuum animated by unitary principles and a common social system.” (Descola Reference Descola2012, 33) In postulating such an ontological continuum, the Nasa along with most other Amerindian cultures, challenge that most Eurocentric of all Eurocentric ideas: the idea of an unsurmountable divide between human life and all other forms of life. Although the degrees of continuity posited in such a continuum may vary according to the different Amerindian cultures as so many anthropologists have remarked (Weiss Reference Weiss1975; Reichel-Dolmatoff Reference Reichel-Dolmatoff1977, Reference Reichel-Dolmatoff1996; Grenand Reference Grenand1980; Brown Reference Brown1986; Renard-Casevitz Reference Renard-Casevitz1991; Van der Hammen Reference Van der Hammen1992; Viveiros de Castro Reference Viveiros de Castro1992; Isacsson Reference Isacsson1993; Chaumeil Reference Chaumeil1998; Kohn Reference Kohn2013), the fact remains that the idea of a basic and fundamental continuity between all life forms constitutes a major difference between Nasa (and Amerindian) thought and modern European colonial (and neocolonial) thought.
Such continuity is advanced because it is predicated on relational affinity, rather than substantial identity. In other words, such a concept of bio-continuity or bio-continuum is possible because Nasa thinking (as well as most other Amerindian thought systems) privileges relations over substance and affinity over identity. By contrast, Eurocentric thinking favors essence over relations and identity over similarity. In doing so, modern European thought introduces discontinuity. Hence, this essence-oriented, identitarian mindset has little room for alterity. At its best, this kind of worldview regards difference as an unsurpassable gap that can only be bridged if alterity is first reduced to a minimum. But the relational, non-essentialist perspective of indigeneity makes room for difference.
Although there is significant overlap with feminism and queer theory's anti-essentialism, indigenous America's non-essentialism is rooted in a very different sense of self, itself grounded on the “physical and conceptual continuity with others, with the body, and beyond the body, with the world.” (Klor de Alva Reference Klor de Alva1988, 66) According to Viveiros de Castro, this sense of self-continuity ultimately and somewhat paradoxically gives way to an ethos of “essential ontological incompleteness” where the self is constantly looking for continuity and completion in and through all other forms of life. (Viveiros Reference Viveiros de Castro2011, 47) In other words, from such a perspective, it is precisely because humanity exists —at all times and under all guises — as a universal yet incomplete condition (though not a nature), that the Amerindian self craves alterity or the Other, and therefore, in contrast to imperial reason, privileges relational affinity over substantial identity. (Viveiros Reference Viveiros de Castro2011, 47) As a result, the Amerindian self is not only more fluid, it is also more of an expansive, comprehensive, plural self. This is why the Nasa embrace diversity as a precondition of life. By looking for, privileging and weaving together all the possible associations, connections, and similarities that difference can harbor, this kind of perspective posits a hybrid continuum or alterity continuum as the basis of all life, not unlike the kind of continuum the ongoing scientific genomic mapping project has been revealing in the last three decades. Considered one of Western civilization's finest achievements as well as a definite proof of its so-called technological superiority, scientific genetic engineering is itself based on the principle of hybridization. Despite this, the Eurocentric mindset continues to display a surprising difficulty in coming to terms with the concept of hybridity and hybrid continuity undersigning all life. Trapped in form, Eurocentrism cannot stomach mixture which it too often associates with the absence of order. And since it does not stomach mixture well, it has a very difficult time conceiving life as a continuum because this continuity rests precisely on mixture, diversity and hybridization. From a Nasa standpoint, however, hybridization is the Law: there is no life without it. No Order. Ironically, no other modern Western technology knows this better than scientific genetic engineering.
Eurocentric thought's difficulty with hybrid continuity is in part due to the fact that it still cannot think of Life — all life— as intelligent. If only Man is intelligent, it follows quite logically that there can be no continuity between Man and Nature/Woman/Blacks/ Indians/animals/insects/plants/wildlife/savages/others/the Other. From a Nasa standpoint, however, Life — all life — is intelligent: Life is not the product of an intelligent agent — Life itself is intelligent. And since life is alterity, alterity is intelligence, Order, Law:
“The diversity of life is the key to the comprehension of the order of nature, an order which can only be justified through the observance of the specific tasks necessary for the care of life, of nature. Diversity is the origin of order just as order is the origin of the diversity of life.”Footnote 13
The intelligence of life is a self-evident fact in much the same way as the reality of things is a self-evident fact for the Eurocentric mind:
“Reality is one. There are no partitions. Only continuities. It is not necessary to explain the nature of such continuities. They are evident. The events that take place in the world unleash different types of energies in different intensities. These different energies sustain a direct relation with the events that take place in the world. Therefore, coexisting with energies is as connatural as living with things. A tree has the same reality as that of any energy. Its vicinity, its proximity, its coexistence, and therefore the sphere of its mutual influence closes-in on man like an infinite circle in infinite movement. The rivers of energy flow like the rivers of water. We bathe in the rivers of energy like we bathe in the rivers of water. The world that is not seen is as visible as the visible world because the things we see point with forcefulness and precision to the presence of energy. In this way, things possess an energetic reality; therefore, to see the nature of things is like looking at energy. Therefore, there are no cuts. Nature and energy are one and the same. We live in a world consubstantially made of things and energy. One reveals the other. One and the other mutually co-create each other.”Footnote 14
It follows then that there can only be continuity. Life is therefore not only a continuum of alterity, but a continuum of intelligence as well as a continuum of energy, and as such, it is also a continuum of movement. Finally, if there is continuity between all life forms, then all life forms are related, all life forms are relatives and we are all one great big family:
“Nature is one big family. It is a family with many descendants. The sun and the moon (father and mother) are the forefathers of everything. All there is comes from them. This is not to say that nature is like a family. On the contrary, this affirms the fact that nature is a family. It is not an analogy. It does not operate as a simile whose function is to clarify meaning. Claiming that nature is a family is a descriptive claim. In other words, this claim contains in itself the understanding of the nature of nature. The turning point is clear. Nature is not to be understood based on man. Man is to be understood based on nature. In a big family, every one has ties of kinship. Man with trees, trees with the river, the river with other men, and so on. In this way, all men have a profound connatural relationship. […] Man's familiarity with his parents, children, and siblings is more a consequence of his familiarity with all that exists. From this point of view, it is not possible to affirm that man attempts to understand nature based on his family relationships, but that he understands his family relationships based on the understanding of the mechanism that is at work in the life acting in nature.”Footnote 15
Now, from a Nasa standpoint, wherever you have Relations, you have culture; so that life is not just a bio-continuum, an alterity continuum, an intelligence continuum, an energy continuum, and a motion continuum, but also a cultural and social continuum.
In the West, for a long time, this kind of thinking in which all life forms are conceived as being socially organized and having a culture of their own was systematically relegated to the mythical or anthropomorphic department. In the last forty years, however, biology has been warming up to the idea of animal and plant intelligence/culture. (Attenborough Reference Attenborough1995; Griffin Reference Griffin1976; McGrew and Caroline Tutin Reference McGrew and Tutin1978; McGrew Reference McGrew1992; Asquith Reference Asquith, Else and Lee1986, Reference Asquith and Mitchell1997; Savage Reference Savage1995; Skutch Reference Skutch1996; Dugatkin Reference Dugatkin1999; Whiten et al. Reference Whiten1999; Llínas Reference Llínas2001; Vertosick Reference Vertosick2002; Grey Reference Grey2003; Trewavas Reference Trewavas2014; Mancuso Reference Mancuso and Viola2015; Godfrey-Smith Reference Godfrey-Smith2016) In 1999, the world's leading multidisciplinary science journal Nature even provided a major watershed when it published an article on the ability of distinct groups of chimpanzees to come up with and transmit group-differentiated tool-making techniques. (Whiten et al. Reference Whiten1999) Despite this sanction by scientific orthodoxy, Eurocentric thought is still grappling with the idea and its implications, particularly in terms of the kind of political aggiornamento that such a shift in paradigm would seem to require.
Considering the quasi-universal gendered association, as well as the long history of shared oppression and exploitation between Nature and women, we might ask how the liberation of Mother Earth and the liberation of women connect? Ecofeminism has for a long time argued that one cannot take place without the other. (D'Eaubonne Reference D'Eaubonne1974; Eisler Reference Eisler1987; Shiva Reference Shiva1988; Merchant Reference Merchant1990, Reference Merchant2005; Diamond I. and G. Ernstein, eds. Reference Diamond and Ernstein1990; Mies M. and Shiva V. Reference Mies and Shiva1993; Adams C. Reference Adams1993; Warren Reference Warren1997, Reference Warren2000) Within the LME, Nasa feminist activist Vilma Almendra believes the emancipation of Mother Earth must necessarily lead to the demise of patriarchy:
“But this [LME] is only a brave beginning that we must all care for, feed and protect as we would a live seed that will in time overrun this patriarchal system through communal matriarchal transformations spun around a full life, limiting until we are able to defeat the separations that have been imposed on us as natural.”Footnote 16
Insofar as the LME is a decolonization project, it is easy to see how Almendra's argument is a plausible proposition, provided depatriarchalization is singled out from the start as a chief objective of the Nasa decolonization agenda. The heart being the seat of correct thinking, the LME's central premise — the de-barbwiring of Mother Earth rests on the de-barbwiring of our hearts and vice-versa (11) — calls for an intellectual liberation or intellectual de-barbwiring that entails the removal of the separations or discontinuities that the colonial mindset has deceptively introduced in the way we conceive our relations among ourselves and with the world at large. One such discontinuity, as María Lugones has pointed out, is gender in its colonial configuration, that is, as a device that paved the way for the vertical hierarchization of societies in the Americas along stiff patriarchal, sexist and heterosexist gender lines — a use of gender unimaginable before the European conquest when gender in the continent was a much more fluid affair. (Lugones Reference Lugones2011, 111) Through the Eurocentric vise between identity and form, a number of different planes of experience — genitalia, sexual orientation, sexuality, gender identity, and work — that in the Amerindian precolonial mind were loosely connected when connected at all,Footnote 17 were fused together in a conceptual and experiential straitjacket that afforded the colonial enterprise both the kind of massive cheap labor and wholesale control over it that it required. The strict patriarchal sexual dimorphism imposed by colonial rationality with its attending degradation of women's bodies turned indigenous women into a residual labor force, even cheaper and more expendable than their male counterparts (whose bodies had already been depreciated through the insertion of that other key monstrous colonial discontinuity — race), fracturing indigenous communities along gender lines in culturally unprecedented ways that confused them and from which they have ever since found it very hard to recover. The brutal instrumentalization of indigenous women's bodies that these incarnate discontinuities allowed for was so outlandish and shocking in the eyes of indigenous people that in the face of it the famous sixteenth-century Quechua chronicler Guamán Poma repeatedly exclaimed “the world has turned upside-down.” (Guamán Poma de Ayala Reference de Ayala1956, II:62, 154, III:84) On the other hand, the invaders themselves were to be shocked by the very open and significant manifestations of third-gendered individuals throughout the continent. These individuals were an important and fully integrated part of pre-contact Amerindian societies, often held in high esteem as they represented an ideal of human wholeness that frequently went hand in hand with positions of power and important social responsibilities and appointments. Whether it was because of this or because their very existence called into question the instrumentality of patriarchal sexual dimorphism, the colonial rationale set about the systematic persecution and killing of third-gendered individuals from Alaska all the way to Tierra del Fuego, and almost succeeded in erasing a cultural ideal prevalent throughout the continent prior to European conquest of human accomplishment and autonomy based on the fluid complementary and balanced interaction of masculine and feminine properties. (D'Anglure Reference D'Anglure1986, 66)
Liberation
The kind of gender fluidity that is now widely accepted by specialists for precolonial America (D'Anglure Reference D'Anglure1986; Looper Reference Looper and Ardren2002; Sigal Reference Sigal2003) was possible precisely because bodies and beings were predicated on the basis of their physical and conceptual continuity. Hence, the kind of intellectual de-barbwiring that both depatriarchalization and decolonization would require is ultimately tantamount to the de-barbwiring of ontology and epistemology in order to redefine self and being along a physical and conceptual continuum among all life forms. This continuum is possible only if there is room for hybridity and difference. Feminism and queer theory have long understood the importance of difference for liberation, but the self of feminism and queer theory remains hopelessly atomized, discontinuous, and identity-fixated, trapped in the very pitfalls it seeks to avoid — identitarian conceptual fault lines demarcating beings and bodies that they may operate as instruments of patriarchal and colonial bio-social hierarchization, exploitation and domination. The acronym LGBTTIQQ2SAs (lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgender, transsexuals, intersex, queer, questioning, two-spirited and allies) is an illuminating case in point: an unpronounceable conundrum attempting to articulate the fluidity of gender while remaining fiercely identitarian. This is not to say that these vindications have not been relevant in the path towards liberation, only that they express a distinctly Eurocentric malaise and dilemma: for all its claims to gender fluidity, feminism remains tributary to form. But the liberation of women and LGBTTIQQ2SAs may well be impossible without the liberation of all other forms of life. If difference is to survive, affinity must prevail over identity. Difference must be conceived anew within continuity. The self of feminism and queer theory must not only be fluid, it must also become more expansive and encompassing. Moreover, when difference becomes difficult to articulate, when ad infinitum fractioning threatens the very possibility of difference, a shift in paradigm may be in order.
In terms of the liberation of Mother Earth, the need for a paradigm shift is somewhat more apparent. The kind of world-scale environmental collapse confronting humanity today may well be the product of a mind unable to wrap its head around the hybrid web-like continuity that is the bedrock of life in this universe. The world this rationality has ruthlessly ruled for the last 500 years through the inception of artificial discontinuities among bodies and beings has come back to haunt it with a baffling and vengeful organicity it has yet to fully understand. But if we are to survive as a species, if we are to avoid extinction encircled by barbed wire in a giant greenhouse gas chamber, we must be able to fully take in the Web of Life, which is to say that we must be able to move through form while envisaging the universal motility of sentient life. Humanness can no longer remain trapped in form. It is vital that we understand that it is fundamentally motile and ubiquitous. The cell need not have evolved into the human; humanness may well have evolved into prokaryotes, and more recently, into hominids. Like the Nasa and other indigenous peoples in the Americas, we might yet graciously (and truly democratically) extend a generic subjectivity or humanness to all Life as an a-priori condition with the understanding that no one life form — not even Man — can exhaust it.Footnote 18
The implications of such aggiornamento are of course vast. Relations — all Relations — would have to be renegotiated. The instrumentalization and depredation of “Nature” would certainly become more problematic. So too would violence and discrimination against women, LGBTTIQQ2SAs, and people of color. Amidst the holocaust of the sixth extinction, we might rediscover more sophisticated, subtler “primitive” technologies that once sought to think along a continuity — working-with-Nature instead of working-against-Nature — framework. The invasiveness, destructiveness, high costs, and sheer awkwardness of much of Western technology might become visible for what it is. Such extravaganza might even become obsolete. Many of us could end up choosing to live in the midst of anthropogenic forests like the Amazon (Balée Reference Balée2013) where every living form would be conceived as the achieved expression of the successful transmission of memory and know-how over the course of millions of years. (Kohn Reference Kohn2013) In the age of the Holocene Extinction, this might indeed be worth a thought.
History, also, would have to be renegotiated. If it turns out after all that the injuns did not live in the wild (terra nullius) but in gardens painstakingly co-engineered, co-designed, and co-cultivated with “Nature” over the course of centuries, how is the discovery and conquest of the Americas by Christian Europe to be understood henceforth? If the land that was colonized was not some vast lonesome uninhabited wilderness, but carefully administered and sophisticatedly engineered social landscaping and architecture, how is the colonization of the Americas to go down in the annals of history? Moreover, how are the descendants of such a tradition, indeed the custodians of such a perspective, to be dealt with?
Eurocentrism´s unfortunate response to its difficulties with alterity and continuity — its colonial urge to superimpose uniformity (“a world where only one world fits” Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional 1996) over the flamboyant fabric of life — is a death impulse: it threatens life itself. Like terminator technology, it is a death warrant. Life as atomized discontinuity devoid of any intelligence is a construct, an artificial construct of the Western modern mind that has allowed it to loot and plunder the world for the last five hundred years. There is simply no such thing as a cultural or social vacuum in the world. Today, this intellectual fallacy is not only outrageously unjust, but deadly. It threatens our very survival as a species. The writing is on the wall. It is high time we begin removing — like the Nasa — the barbed wire from our minds and start acknowledging Life — all life for the magnificent cultural web it is. “Who would've thought? Heart and land are one and the same.”
Susana E. Matallana-Peláez is a full Professor at the Universidad del Valle, in Cali, Colombia. She holds a PhD in gender studies from Rutgers University. Her areas of interest and research are in ecofeminism, gender systems, indigenous women's colonial history, Amerindian thought systems, and decolonialism. She currently teaches English literature at the undergraduate level in the Foreign Language Department and gender and decolonialism in the Gender Studies and Research Center's doctoral program. She has presented papers at conferences both home and abroad, and published articles in various journals, as well as two books. She is also a recipient of two Fulbright scholarships. (susana.matallana@correounivalle.edu.co)
