Paper short abstract:

In Kaata, Bolivia, small scale farmers cultivating mountain terraces consider they inhabit an animate changing landscape. Non-humans are actors with whom humans are in constant conversation with their actions, rather than resources to be exploited, in contrast to western naturalist ontologies.

Paper long abstract:

In contrast to western 'naturalism', Kaata, a village in highland Bolivia, has a largely animist or totemist ontology. Joseph Bastien (1972) explored how the mountain villagers inhabited and cultivate in terraces was perceived as a body, and diviners could cure human bodies by analogy, curing the mountain.

Kaata conceptualises its environment as a constant conversation between humans and sentient non-humans including the wind, mountain and earth. Climate change is thus occurring within everything at the same time. It is in Delueze and Guattari's terms a haecceity, a mood of the world borne in the wind, a simultaneous event. Humans are not merely affecting the other actors in this network- though they are very clear about how everyday 'contamination' of consumer waste in the community causes climate change- but are subject to the humours of the other entities with whom they are conversing. The winds and earth do not like the rubbish contemporary villagers bury or burn instead of the rituals and labour with which they formerly nurtured the land. The earth itself is tired and stony, driving young people to migrate to cities. One cannot stop climate change however by changing our practices, as it is borne in the winds, a more powerful consciousness in which we are al immersed.

As humans cease to feed the other actors of the landscape with their labour and migrate, they weaken and become less animate. In the human centred anthropocene landscape that is emerging, non-humans are becoming mere resources for human exploitation.