Abstract

TOLA, Florencia. Introduction: ontological diversity and conflicting ontologies in South America. Etnográfica [online]. 2020, vol.24, n.2, pp.455-464. ISSN 0873-6561.  https://doi.org/10/4000/etnografica/9013.

In Latin America, as in other regions of the world, Indigenous Peoples suffer territorial dispossession and systematic violence by states and private companies. In this context, the study of ontologies does not mean a lack of interest in the political dimension that these peoples experience. On the contrary, it implies, among other things, seeking new ways of approaching politics. In order to understand the relationships between Indigenous Peoples and National states, the approach on conflicts and ontological heterogeneity allows to highlight the misunderstandings that these relationships involves. Territory, politics and natural resources do not refer to the same “thing” for National states, multinationals enterprise and Indigenous Peoples. In this sense, ontology has less to do with a plurality of cultural perspectives, but with a multiplicity of worlds. To take other forms of composing the world seriously is to recognize that we are not in the domain of native epistemologies, but of ontologies, and the ideas expressed by our interlocutors can no longer be read in terms of cultural imagination, metaphors or symbols of the reality out there.

Keywords : ontologies; ontological conflicts; cosmopolitics.

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