Paper short abstract:

The paper locates the radical in everyday interactions between the Carib-speaking Yukpa and non-Yukpa. Despite mutual ontological blindness selective communication and interaction is taking place with astonishing ease across cosmologies and reproducing radical differences in a shared single process.

Paper long abstract:

Radical ontological difference is part of everyday interactions between Yukpa and non-Yupka and more generally as I will argue part of Latin American indigenous modernities. Interestingly, the differences between the cosmo-ontological conceptions are hardly perceived in the everyday interactions. The parties involved either assume mutual understanding or attribute irritations to the strangeness of the other rather without exploring the underlying differences and incommensurabilities everyday interactions are based on. Ontological blindness seems at work based on ontocentrisms that also become reproduced in anthropological writings.

Different ontologies that constitute different worlds do not imply that these worlds are irreconcilable worlds apart. On the contrary, communication and interaction may take place with astonishing ease across them and reproduce basic differences. The paper will focus on these processes by analyzing notions of space, time and humanity from interactions between the Yukpa, a Carib-speaking group of NE-Colombia and non-Yukpa. It will demonstrate the highly selective mutual perceptions, (mis-)understandings and ontological blindness that produce radically different conceptions of single processes. This joint 'single becoming that is not common to the two' but between them (Deleuze and Parnet 2002) allows communication across these worlds and mutual awareness of the other without fusing the one into the other. Joint becoming implies creolization as a two way process in which neither of the sides remain the same nor do they necessarily fuse into one. The radicality of everyday divergence leads to becoming an other without becoming the Other.