Marisol de la Cadena

Are Mestizos Hybrids? The Conceptual Politics of Andean Identities

Through a genealogical analysis of the terms mestizo and mestizaje , this article reveals that these voices are doubly hybrid. On the one hand they house an empirical hybridity, built upon eighteenth and nineteenth century racial taxonomies and according to which ‘mestizos’ are non-indigenous individuals, the result of biological or cultural mixtures. Yet, mestizos’ genealogy starts earlier, when ‘mixture’ denoted transgression of the rule of faith, and its statutes of purity. Within this taxonomic regime mestizos could be, at the same time, indigenous. Apparently dominant, racial theories sustained by scientific knowledge mixed with, (rather than cancel) previous faith based racial taxonomies. ‘Mestizo’ thus houses a conceptual hybridity – the mixture of two classificatory regimes – which reveals subordinate alternatives for mestizo subject positions, including forms of indigeneity.

Runa: Human but not only

Comment on Kohn, Eduardo. 2013. How forests think: Toward an anthropology beyond the human. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Anthropology and STS: Generative interfaces, multiple locations

In this multi-authored essay, nine anthropologists working in different parts of the world take part in a conversation about the interfaces between anthropology and STS (science and technology studies). Through this conversation, multiple interfaces emerge that are heterogeneously composed according to the languages, places, and arguments from where they emerge. The authors explore these multiple interfaces as sites where encounters are also sites of difference—where complex groupings, practices, topics, and analytical grammars overlap, and also exceed each other, composing irregular links in a conversation that produces connections without producing closure.

New ontologies? Reflections on some recent ‘turns’ in STS, anthropology and philosophy

This paper discusses the recent emergence of ontological approaches in science and technology studies (STS), anthropology and philosophy. Although it is common to hear of a turn, or the turn, to ontology, more than one line of intellectual development is at stake. In reality, we are witness to a plural set of partly overlapping, partly divergent, turns.

Matters of method; Or, why method matters toward a not only colonial anthropology

The following is a response to the comments on de la Cadena, Marisol. 2015. Earth beings: Ecologies of practice across Andean worlds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, which was published in Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7(1): 537–565.

Cosmopolitical zoo: a response to Tironi and Hermansen

‘We have never been human’ is the title of the first section of Donna Haraway’s When species meet. She paraphrases the title of Bruno Latour’s famous book to signal that it is relations that compose the substance traversing and (thus also composing) humans, and that it is through this substance that humans and non-humans appear in, and thus with, each other. Continuing the processual unfolding of this phrase, I want to propose that ‘Cosmopolitical encounters: Prototyping at the National Zoo in Santiago, Chile’ changes the point of view to propose the mirror image: animals are the relations that make them, and this may include humans. Considered as a form of flexible entanglement, as the authors suggest, the prototyping process they initially practiced and subsequently analyzed acts as a complexly shared ground (because the sharing does not add the ground to the same), on which humans and non-humans emerge with each other (i.e. with what they are not) and in recalcitrance: challenging each other and thus shaping the conditions of the configuration that which the shared devises. Key in making the challenge work is that throughout the process, the shared grounds remain complex: never simply shared, these grounds constitute, as the authors say, an ecology of divergent practices, becoming together without becoming the other. Like the orchid and the wasp: composed in a relation – a shared condition – that does not require either one to become the other. Yet the example I have just used illustrates only partially the attempt of the article, for neither orchid nor wasp is charged with translating the other to human worlds. And this is the challenge that the article wants to face: it is an attempt to translate between the practices of Judy and Gombe – two chimpanzees bred and raised in a big urban zoo – and the practices of design, without ignoring the former (even if, of course, like in any translation, it leaves behind much of what makes Judy and Gombe and exceeds the relation with the human designers). Following the above, I would say that what concerns this article is a matter of knowledge, which the authors have chosen to interrogate through design and, more concretely, by initially experimenting with and then analyzing a specific (flexible and open-ended) practice of prototyping. Here I suggest that in so doing, the authors articulate a proposal for a mode of knowing of which this article is, itself, a prototype.Or such is my reading of the article: a prototype for a mode of knowing, which – rather than conceived of and practiced as a relation between a subject in pursuit of an object’s capture – desires instead a practice of knowledge as its process, one that puts its own premises at risk, because it welcomes co-laboring with those that it is about and, in its process, also with. This mode of knowing is as flexible and open-ended as the prototype the authors are commenting on and experimenting with, and it includes in its process the possibility of not-knowing – for actually, that is how it knows. Like the prototype too, its ethos is ecological; it does not command but in fact subverts commands, as it relentlessly rejects capturing its object and instead regards it also as subject, one that can challenge that which seems to have been captured by knowledge as its object. I want to surmise that ‘not knowing’ as practice of knowing is also a component of Stengers’s cosmopolitical proposal – at least in my reading of it. In my reading, it is a proposal that wants ‘us knowers’ to feel that ‘we’ do not possess the meanings that modern knowledges authorize, for it (including the ‘we’ of the knowers) is populated with unknown presences that are generally ignored,