The Subversive Politics of Sentient Places: Climate Change, Collective Ethics, and Environmental Justice in Peru

• In Event: Governance, the Environment and Natural Resources

Abstract

Humanism and the idea of sentient landscapes interacting with humans have been theorized in multiple ways, although rarely with an eye toward environmental justice and collective ethics. Poor mestizos in northern Peru offer a new model that transcends the limitations of both ontological cosmopolitics—which focuses on the radical alterity of sentient landscapes removed from modern politics—and a political ecology that does not consider sentient landscapes. None of these approaches addresses the ways that poor Peruvian respond to climate change and environmental contamination by turning to indigenous sentient landscapes as participants in an interethnic world. I argue that these mestizos challenge the forms of governance implemented by late liberalism: by engaging sentient landscapes as involved in local movements for environmental justice, collective ethics, and health. Despite an interest in values and moral selves, the anthropology of ethics has been less concerned with collective ethics, which serve as models for political change. I argue that poor Peruvian mestizos offer a model of collective ethics that attaches moral agency to the natural world for the purpose of social and environmental transformation, thereby opening a new kind of political debate. By defining “community” and “well-being” as humans-in-relationship-to-places-as-persons, poor mestizos resignify “nature” itself as an anchor for social justice

Author

• Ana Mariella Bacigalupo, State University of New York at Buffalo (SUNY)