[Publication] Paper written by Diego Landivar : "Animism, heritage, commons"


Summary:

The purpose of this article is to probe what links political operations of Native American animism, patrimonial operations, and the philosophy of the commons. Obviously it would be futile to improperly seek to bring these three movements together in a common epistemic filiation. But in the face of the climatic and ecological emergency, it seems to us that all three appear as the new political horizons of our time. More specifically, we will try to demonstrate that the three concepts call for the construction of new cosmopolitical assemblies in facing late liberalism and in facingthe ecological and cosmological collapse this late liberalism engenders. We mean by “cosmopolitical assemblages” the different strategies led by some groups in the South as well as in the North to rethink the public field on the basis of attachments between humans and entities of the world (non-humans, objects, divinities, territories...). We suggest that these three strategies (legal animism, heritage and the movement of the commons) raise forms of contestation or ontological reclaims in reaction to the impoverishment and cosmological collapse engendered by neo-liberalism. We will try to understand how they are part of the same movement of “re-dignification”/revitalization of the entities of the world, before grasping their fragilities and understanding the conditions of their generalization and radicality.

The paper is available in open access.