De La Cadena (2015)

Main argument

• Even post-colonial history that extends itself to marginalised peoples retained the nature/humanity divide

• Indigenous practices that operate through earth-beings and relational time rather than chronological time are either excluded or reduced to 'cultural belief'.

Mariano’s archive

• A box of 400+ documents (1920s–70s) collected by largely illiterate Peruvian indigenous leaders. De la Cadena initially hoped to use it to reconstruct a history of peasant resistance — but Mariano insisted the documents were insufficient to tell the full story

What is the Ayllu and how does it change the archive?

• An indigenous community encompassing living, dead, human, and non-human beings

• The ayllu operates through relational obligation to ancestors, not chronological time. The archive meant legal evidence to the state but relational obligation to the ayllu

• The same documents functioned in two ontologically different registers at once.

Ontological translation problem

• When indigenous leaders pursued land rights through legal documents, earth became geographic features and relational place-based belonging became collective land ownership.

• The legal framework severed the inherently relational character of indigenous beings.

Advances beyond previous scholars

• Does not just argue for more voices or better evidence.

• Argues for ontological multiplicity — genuinely different worlds, not multiple perspectives on one shared reality.

• Pushes beyond epistemological pluralism (many ways of knowing one world)

Link to the ontological turn

• Arguing that indigenous realities must be taken literally rather than translated into 'cultural belief'