Missing the political: A southern critique of political ontology

Abstract

Against the backdrop of a world in crisis that plays as the stage of the ontological turn and political ontology, and based on long-term research on Colombia’s Andean southwest indigenous politics, this article critically assesses political ontologýs claims to the powers of difference. Following Wolin, Mouffe, and Laval and Dardot, it presents a notion of the political that takes into account the passionate, educational and transformative aspects of indigenous political praxis and engagements with commonality. The analysis of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s ontological multinaturalism, Mario Blaser’s critique of modernity and Reason, and Arturo Escobar’s ontological political practice points at three interconnected problems: the persistent appeal to binary thinking; the making of relativism anew; and the problem regarding the dialogue and knowledge exchange between the ethnographer and the ethnographic subject. Recapturing the political is a way to engage complex and entangled political histories and experiences of democratization in which indigenous peoples emerge as bearers of the political. The feminist concept of situated knowledges is presented as an alternative to deal with knowledge partiality, self-reflexivity, political solidarity, and collaboration.