12.03.2024

The church-land-child. An indigenous dispositive to constitute the land in a context of extractivist ruination.

This talk explores the terms by which an Amerindian group establishes its relationship with the land in a local context marked by extractivism and the forms in which this relationship emerges in the Peruvian Andes today.
What kind of ideology is used by these indigenous peoples when they evaluate the transformations in their rituals or narratives? What can we learn from these indigenous points of views when we try to understand rural peasant societies in Latin America?

Juan Rivera’s ongoing research examines cosmologies among indigenous groups of South America, particularly Quechua-speaking peoples of the highlands. His projects have received the support of the UNESCO, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, and they have taken place in research centres such as the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies, the Smithsonian Institution, and the universities of Barcelona and Nanterre. Among his publications is his first monograph La fiesta del ganado en el valle del Chancay (2003). In the last years, he has edited the volumes “Non-humans in Amerindian South America” (2018) and “Indigenous life projects and extractivism” (coedited with Cecilie Ødegaard, 2019). He also coproduced a video installation and film series with P. Snowdon entitled The owners of the land: Culture and the spectre of mining in the Andes (2013).