Past Futures: Long-Time Thinking in South American “Living Well” Epistemologies

Project Information

PAST-FUTURES

Grant agreement ID: 101028251

DOI

10.3030/101028251

Project closed

EC signature date 19 April 2021

Start date 1 January 2022

End date 31 December 2023

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 162 806,40

EU contribution

€ 162 806,40

Coordinated by

FREIE UNIVERSITAET BERLIN
Germany

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - PAST-FUTURES (Past Futures: Long-Time Thinking in South American “Living Well” Epistemologies)

Reporting period: 2022-01-01 to 2023-12-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

What knowledge is needed in an age of climate breakdown and mass extinction? What is considered as knowledge beside western science and who is considered capable of producing it? The research in which I have engaged for the duration of this project starts from this question. Dominant societal models are anthropocentric in one fundamental way: human life, and its preservation, is imagined in isolation from the non-human world. This essential belief system relies on a short-time vision of temporality. How can human societies develop post-anthropocentric political imaginations and reconsider knowledge and action no longer through a human-centric approach to time but through a planetary vision of time? Exploring the socio-ecological knowledge systems of ‘Living Well’ (Buen Vivir), originating from the Quechua and Aymara speaking regions of South America, has the objective to expand the human-centric epistemic basis of politics.

As the techno-green transition paradigm counts on an unprecedented acceleration of resource extraction, the dominant model of knowledge-making remains fundamentally unchallenged. The societal risks of a human-centric temporality as we look to building models of sustainability are very high. As long as the structure of human organised 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. From environmental experts to philosophers, from scientists to economists, there is a general consensus that technocratic solutions are not enough and that new stories need to be told about new forms of common wellbeing using new conceptual and methodological tools. This project brings for the first time indigenous eco-social concepts such as relational subjectivity, interspecies community, and pluriversality, into pressing debates on global environmental citizenship.

The overall aim of a history of ‘Living Well’ is to contribute new proposals that are lacking in current global-north-centered environmental knowledge by drawing up imaginative ways of wordling that show us that anthropocentrism is not an inevitability. There is a philosophical and political urgency to reimagine the place of nonhuman life within societal organisation so that a just and sustainable future can be possible. However, there is still very limited room in current histories of knowledge for principles and values of relationality and interdependence. We can no longer ignore that environments are political and ecological at once. Through its publications and dissemination activities, the project’s most important objective has been to create porous conceptual spaces to spark discussions about the dangers of building the transition project while leaving the extractive foundations unchanged and on what alternative models of a good life can look like.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The project’s results have been multiple and wide-ranging: academic publications, academic papers, academic conferences, outreach events, and interdisciplinary collaborations. Five peer-reviewed outputs have been published or are currently in press. Three more are under review. One book proposal is in preparation. Overall, the project’s publications have revealed forms of epistemic bordering originating in histories of resistance which provide us with alternative concepts through which to rethink humanity’s relationship with the nonhuman world. In this conceptual dimension based on indigenous languages, 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 variety of public events and collaborations has been the most prolific aspect of the project. The project’s results have been shared in twelve events in different countries including Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands, and the UK. One example of continuing collaborative work that has come from the project is the 2024 conference ‘Mapping toxic coloniality: perspectives from Africa, Asia, and Latin America’, co-organized with colleagues from the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Belgium at Groningen. The aim is to generate an understanding of how extractivism’s historical forms of toxicity are carried over into the present as toxic coloniality by centring on questions of environmental in/justice, agency in the Anthropocene, and unequal relationships between the Global North and the Global South. This kind of cross-geographical and cross-disciplinary works is also leading to further plans for collaborative publications and funding bids.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The main area in which the project has advanced the state of the art is the history of cultural environmental knowledge in relation to the Specific Objectives identified at the proposal stage. Through scientific publications, academic presentations, and outreach events, the project has contributed to incorporating indigenous epistemologies into existing understandings of and approaches to the history of knowledge, and particularly the history of environmental knowledge. Post-humanist perspectives, even when trying to account for inter-species identity, still largely ignore indigenous concepts and practices. One key achievement of this project has been to create connections between localized forms of knowledge and dominant understandings of universal knowledge.

The project has also engaged with broader questions about south-north history of knowledge. This area has emerged from engaging with the methodologies of global history and with the role of the categories of ‘global north’ and ‘global south’. Thinking through ‘entangled ecologies’ can be a tool for countering the existing conceptual order, which has led to the north-south division in the first place. Attending to epistemic and ontological entanglements would enable us to ask better and deeper questions about the increasingly complex interconnections across human and nonhuman worlds, especially given the planetary crises we face today.

Finally, the project contributes to methodological debates in the context of the climate crisis. The project benefits from different methodologies while also engaging critically with the human-centric assumptions of humanities methodologies. Global history, for example, is valuable for drawing meaningful interconnections across geographies; at the same time, the globe as a political, economic, financial and digital entity does not account for the role of non-human interactions. The project contributes to questions on the temporality of history by suggesting ways to understand memory not only as inter-generational but also as inter-species. Decolonial studies emerge from an idea of colonialism which is essentially human-centric; the project understands colonialism from a more than human perspective.