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between Pachamama and Mother Earth: gender, political ontology and the rights of nature in contemporary Bolivia

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Feminist Review

abstract

Focusing on contemporary Bolivia, this article examines promises and pitfalls of political and legal initiatives that have turned Pachamama into a subject of rights. The conferral of rights on the indigenous earth being had the potential to unsettle the Western ontological distinction between active human subjects who engage in politics and passive natural resources. This essay, however, highlights some paradoxical effects of the rights of nature in Bolivia, where Evo Morales’ model of development relies on the intensification of the export-oriented extractive economy. Through the analysis of a range of texts, including paintings, legal documents, political speeches and activist interventions, I consider the equivocation between the normatively gendered Mother Earth that the state recognises as the subject of rights, and the figure of Pachamama evoked by feminist and indigenous activists. Pachamama, I suggest, has been incorporated into the Bolivian state as a being whose generative capacities have been translated into a rigid gender binary. As a gendered subject of rights, Pachamama/Mother Earth is exposed to governmental strategies that ultimately increase its subordination to state power. The concluding remarks foreground the import of feminist perspectives in yielding insights concerning political ontological conflicts.

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Notes

  1. In her study of the Mesoamerican world, Sylvia Marcos (2006) describes a precolonial cosmology centred on a fluid duality and a shifting balance achieved through continuous movements.

  2. Refusing to adopt gender as a category that organises social life across time and space, Lugones (2007) argues that colonial power employed the binary gender system as part of a broader strategy to dehumanise colonised populations and control territories and sexualities.

  3. After a decade of leftist governance, Latin American nations including Argentina, Brazil and Venezuela have moved to the right, with conservative elites capitalising on growing popular discontent and economic decline.

  4. First published in 1972, the pioneering essay Should Trees Have Standing? by legal scholar Christopher Stone (1996 [1972]), provides an example of the Western liberal argument for the rights of nature. Stone’s proposal to enroll nature into the realm of law has influenced Western NGOs that promote the rights of nature at the transnational level. These include the US-based Pachamama Alliance and the American Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), which played an important role in the Ecuadorian campaign for granting legal standing to Pachamama (Fitz-Henry, 2012).

  5. The statistics about the decrease of indigenous populations provoked much debate in Bolivia. The political analyst Pablo Stefanoni (2016) points out that one of the factors causing this change was the terminology used in the Census. Whereas in 2001, the Census asked whether individuals identified with an ‘indigenous or native’ group (Instituto Nacional de Estadística, 2001), in 2012 it adopted the category ‘indigenous native peasant’ (Instituto Nacional de Estadística, 2013), already present in the new Constitution and the legal framework promoted by the MAS government. The conflation between indigenous people and rural peasants may have dissuaded many urban dwellers from self-identifying as indigenous. According to the Aymara sociologist and activist Silvia Rivera Cusincanqui (2015, p. 88), the Census results show that the MAS policies turned ‘the indigenous majority into a minority’ by creating a division between rural populations and mestizo urban sectors.

  6. Morales is notorious for sexist and homophobic comments. In 2011, during the protests over the project of building a 190-mile road cutting through the indigenous territory known as TIPNIS, he called on his supporters to seduce indigenous women so that they would stop opposing the road. In 2015, Morales interrupted an official speech when he noticed that the Health Minister Ariana Campero was not paying attention. According to media reports, he said, ‘I don’t want to think that you’re a lesbian. Listen to me’ (La Razón, 2015).

  7. World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, ‘Rights of Mother Earth: proposal Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth’, https://pwccc.wordpress.com/programa/ [last accessed 8 February 2018].

  8. The conflict around the TIPNIS has been a political minefield for the MAS government. Indigenous groups fiercely oppose the road project designed to connect the Andean and Amazonian regions and facilitate hydrocarbon exploration. In 2011, a protest march to La Paz was brutally repressed by the national police. In the wake of public outrage over the police response to protests, Morales announced the cancellation of the TIPNIS highway. The law passed in 2017 reversed this decision.

  9. For a critical view of pachamamismo as ideology, see Cuelenaere and Rabasa (2012).

  10. I am taking my cue here from political theorist Regina Cochrane (2014, p. 583) who argues that Huanacuni Mamani’s call to return to ancestral values is grounded on a heteronormative ‘version of gender complementarity’.

  11. Taken together, Lugones and communitarian feminists offer a nuanced understanding of the complexities of chachawarmi. However, there are also significant differences in their views of gender relations in postcolonial Latin America. For Lugones (2007, 2010) gender hierarchies were produced by the colonial system. In contrast, the communitarian feminist Julieta Paredes (2010) maintains that colonial patriarchy combined with precolonial forms of gender oppression. For a discussion on gender, power and coloniality see Walsh (2016).

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  1. Northeastern University, Via Pietro Querini 1 Apt. 13D, 00153, Rome, Italy

    Miriam Tola

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Tola, M. between Pachamama and Mother Earth: gender, political ontology and the rights of nature in contemporary Bolivia. Fem Rev 118, 25–40 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41305-018-0100-4

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