Earth Beings

Marisol de la Cadena is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis, and the author of Indigenous Mestizos: The Politics of Race and Culture in Cuzco, Peru, 1919–1991, also published by Duke University Press.

"While theoretically sophisticated, the book’s concrete language and brief introductory asides make it suitable for advanced undergraduates unfamiliar with its core concepts."  - Carwil Bjork-James (Anthropological Quarterly) "Earth Beings is essential reading for those following current research on relational ontologies and the importance of other-than-human contributions to society (ayllu) by encouraging us to think about how beings, places, knowledges, and power interact, particularly in the Peruvian Andes, but in a way that is relevant to much of South America and beyond.... [T]he exceptional ethnographic narratives and the clarity of writing make this a monograph that could be incorporated into a senior undergraduate or, more likely, a graduate level anthropology, geography, environmental studies, political sciences, or Indigenous studies class." - Katherine MacDonald (Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies) "De la Cadena's Earth Beings reads, from start to finish, as a labor of love. . . . Each page is dense with insights about the intricacies and challenges of collaborative politics." - Emily Yates-Doerr (Medicine Anthropology Theory) "De la Cadena’s book is an important read and a profound application of contemporary theory to Quechua struggles in South America. It is a moving yet challenging read where the discussions, specifically on cultural politics and representation, can be applied in numerous Indigenous contexts to better transform the relational mode of interactions and divisions between nature, humans and other- than- human entities within a political realm." - Agnieszka Pawlowska-Mainville (AlterNative) "Earth Beings is a powerful ethnography, the result of more than a decade of fieldwork in the Peruvian Andes.... [T]he reader can visualize the changes in the political opportunities for indigenous peoples in Peru’s political trajectory from liberalism to socialism to, most recently, the neoliberal multiculturalism of the new millennium." - Anita Carrasco (American Ethnologist) "[T]his book is important and vividly written and deserves to be widely read for how it revalorizes and brings fresh insight to the Andean living earth as a subject of social relations." - Peter Gose (Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology) "A remarkable feat of ethnographic writing with a keen linguistic sensitivity and a stunning accomplishment of cultural translation." - Enrique Mayer (Journal of Anthropological Research) "A remarkable achievement, not only merely in the compelling case it makes for ecologies of nature-humanity practices, but above all, at the level of method and authorship, where it models a concept of anthropology as of colaboring and writing 'from' rather than 'about' a specific place and land." - Valentina Napolitano (Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory)

• Foreword  xiPreface. Ending This Book without Nazario Turpo  xvStory 1. Agreeing to Remember, Translating, and Carefully Co-laboring  1Interlude 1. Mariano Turpo: A Leader In-Ayllu 35Story 2. Mariano Engages "the Land Struggle": An Unthinkable Indian Leader  59Story 3. Mariano's Cosmopolitics: Between Lawyers and Ausangate  91Story 4. Mariano's Archive: The Eventfulness of the Ahistorical  117Interlude 2. Nazario Turpo: "The Altomisayuq Who Went to Heaven"  153Story 5. Chamanismo Andino in the Third Millennium: Multiculturalism Meets Earth-Beings  179Story 6. A Comedy of Equivocations: Nazario Turpo's Collaboration with the National Musuem of the American Indian  209Story 7. Munayniyuq: The Owner of the Will (and How to Control That Will)  243Epilogue. Ethnographic Cosmopolitics  273Acknowledgments  287Notes  291References  303Index  317