Terricide, a label coined by Mapuche women, names the current epoch of the Earth: one in which some humans now have the capacity to destroy the world through their makings. While related to scientific and feminist namings of the same epoch, the terricide explicitly foregrounds the actions of worlds that do not abide by the nature and human ontological divide in their defense against their destruction. The actors in the stories from what we call the “anthropo-not-seen” are neither human or nature but both together; they pluralize both “human” and “nature” making them not only such. We propose pluriversal contact zones as analytics against terricide, one that enables political alliances across the same onto-epistemic divides that made the Anthropocene. ‘The rights of nature’ may be one such contact zone, an onto-epistemic site for alliances that may transform the current Anthropocenic-capitalocenic destruction of the planet—the terricide—into an opportunity to transition to what the Zapatistas call “a world of many worlds.”
For more info, visit Serralves website.
Arturo ESCOBAR is an activist-researcher from Cali, Colombia, working on territorial struggles against extractivism, postdevelopmentalist and post-capitalist transitions, and ontological design. He was professor of anthropology and political ecology at UNC, Chapel Hill, until 2018, and is currently affiliated with PhD Programs in Design and Creation (Universidad de Caldas, Manizales, Colombia) and in Environmental Sciences (Universidad del Valle, Cali). Over the past twenty-five years, he has worked closely with Afro-descendant, environmental and feminist organizations in Colombia. His most well-known book is Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (1995, 2nd Ed. 2011). His most recent books are: Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds (2018); Pluriversal Politics: The Real and the Possible (2020); and Designing Relationally: Making and Restor(y)ing Life, with Michal Osterweil and Kriti Sharma (forthcoming).
Gonçalo D. SANTOS is an anthropologist and a leading international scholar in the field of China studies. His research explores new approaches to questions of modernity, subjectivity, and social, technological, and ecological transformation in contemporary China. He is an assistant professor of socio-cultural anthropology in the Department of Life Sciences and a Researcher and Group Coordinator in the Research Center for Anthropology and Health (CIAS) at the University of Coimbra. Prior to joining the University of Coimbra in 2020, he held positions at the London School of Economics, the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, and the University of Hong Kong. He is the author of Chinese Village Life Today (University of Washington Press, 2021) and the co-editor of Transforming Patriarchy (University of Washington Press, 2017). His research has been published in leading scientific journals in the fields of anthropology, science and technology studies, and Asian studies. He is a member of the Research Group on Culture and Society, Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues, at Georgetown University, and is the founder and the director of Sci-Tech Asia, a transnational research network that focuses on the relations between technoscience, politics, and society in Asia and around the world. He is interested in comparative approaches that draw on Chinese and Asian perspectives and histories to challenge the hegemonic power of Euro-American epistemologies and narratives of modernity.
Marisol DE LA CADENA was trained as an anthropologist in Peru, England, France and the US. Her work occupies several interfaces: those between STS and non-STS, between major and minor politics (and what exceeds both), between history and the a-historical. She is interested in ethnographic concepts – those that blur the distinction between what we call theory and the empirical and can indicate the limits of both. Her most recent book Earth Beings. Ecologies of Practice Across Andean Worlds (2015) is based on conversations with Mariano and Nazario Turpo that included Ausangate, an earth being (and a mountain) that presides over vital landscapes in Cuzco, Peru. The book reflects on the intriguing crossroads where modern politics (and history) and earth-beings (and the ahistorical) meet and diverge. It is an ethnography concerned with the concreteness of incommensurability and the eventfulness of the ahistorical. Marisol’s current ethnographic research focuses on cattle ranches, peasant farms, slaughter houses, cattle fairs, breed-making genetic laboratories, and veterinary schools in Colombia. There she engages practices and relations between people, cows, plants, and things. Thinking at divergent bio/geo interfaces, she is interested in “the stuff” that makes life and death across labscapes and landscapes in a country that itself struggles between war and peace.
