Territorialidad as environmental communication

ABSTRACT

Territorio and territorialidad are concepts particularly elucubrated and embraced by Indigenous and Afrodescendant communities in Latin America as central to their struggles and demands. In this essay, I approach the concept of territorialidad as a pragmatic and constitutive environmental communication to argue that territoriality opens up ways to interrogate space and place, translation, and identity. I based this argument on my research with Awá, binational Indigenous people living at the border between Ecuador and Colombia. As a decolonial option from the Global South, territoriality (1) counters Western narratives that privilege the global over the local; (2) offers novel ways to understand translation as both a communicative practice and a historicist inquiry; and, (3) furthers the notion of ecocultural identity.

KEYWORDS:

• Territoriality or territorialidad
• territory
• space
• place
• translation
• ecocultural identity
• Awá

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Data availability statement

The data set associated with the paper can be requested to the author at any time. The data set is in Spanish and Awapit.

ORCID

José Castro-Sotomayor http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8436-4255

Notes

1 The term ‘allá’ translates as ‘over there.’ However, in the context of this account, this word acquired profound evocative power.

2 Awapit is Awá’s native language; etymologically it means: Awá: people; Pit: mouth (Ministerio de Educación Ecuador, 2009).

3 I understand at-the-margin organizations as those that (1) are not located in urban spaces; (2) have limited access to technology; and, (3) use non-dominant languages as a central element of their collective identity and struggle.

4 A scale is a methodological and epistemological tool that refers to ‘topological rather than topographical approaches to space, and ultimately rejects the notion that regions are territorially bounded’ (Tomaney, 2013, p. 660). According to Neumann (2009), the theorization of scale has been enriched by recent discussions on: (1) the interactions of power, agency, and scale; (2) socioecological processes and scaling; and, (3) scaled networks (p. 403).

5 In Colombia, the original geographic location of Awá people, the growing presence of black populations in nearby proximity to Awá communities resulted from the Vientres Freedom Act of 1821, which culminated in the abolition of slavery in 1852, as well as from cimarronismo.[5] Awá’s binational condition is intimately linked to their relations to Afro communities as well. Between 1920 and 1940, Bisbicús et al. (2010), three Awá elders, write: ‘The growing tensions between Awá and black communities and the difficult living conditions caused by the marginalization of the State [gave rise] to a great migration of Awá families who, crossing the San Juan River (Mayasquer), came to the other side of the river, to the Ecuadorian territory, in search of land and better life options’ (pp. 22–23).

6 Robertson (2015) has been credited with coining the term glocalization to describe a process of deliberatively indigenizing or adapting foreign culture for local purposes (Melkote & Steeves, 2015, p. 35).

7 Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) is understood by Indigenous people as ‘the process of participating (a verb) fully and responsibly in such relationships [between knowledge, people, and all Creation (the ‘natural’ worlds as well as the spiritual)], rather than specifically as the knowledge gained from such experiences. For aboriginal people, TEK is not about understating relationships; it is the relationship with Creation … Equally fundamental from an aboriginal perspective is that TEK is inseparable from the people who hold it … This means that, at its most fundamental level, one cannot ever really ‘acquire’ or ‘learn’ TEK without having undergone experiences originally involved in doing so. This being the case, the only way for TEK to be utilized in environmental management is to involve the people, the TEK holders … Once separated from its original holders, TEK loses much of its original value and meaning’ (McGregor 2008, pp. 145–146. In Figeroa, 2011, p. 238). Anishanbe scholar, Deborah McGregor, developed this definition of TEK, which also can be considered an exercise in translation.

8 Scott and Dingo (2012) use Appadurai’s term ‘megarhetoric’ to describe the way development, as discourse, is ‘propelled by taken-for-granted assumptions about development’s goals, functions, and effects’ (p. 5). These assumptions could be summarized thus: (1) development’s epistemological assumptions fuse rationality and progress within a GDP-ideology; (2) development furthers the idea of an inevitable linear progress and the panacea of technological innovation; and, (3) the notion of development presents itself as apolitical and ahistorical, leaving out considerations of unbalanced power relations in the construction of what is conceived as legitimate knowledge in development discourses.

9 The ideas and definitions put forward in this section draw from a forthcoming publication (Castro-Sotomayor, in press) in which I discuss how the formation of ecological subjectivities and environmental identities must be approached in tandem to understand the constitution of ecocultural identities. Through an ecological lens on interculturality/interculturalidad, I problematize the idea of culture often used to understand intercultural encounters and examine ways to disrupt and move beyond the political implications of dominant Western notions of identity and human exceptionalism.

10 This synthetized way of presenting Awá’s interaction has the sole purpose of highlighting the relevance of territoriality in understanding the formation of ecocultural identities in relation to the discourses deployed by Awá and other actors within katza su. The examples used here are representative of much more complex intercultural relations among diverse, contested, and unfixed ecocultural identities. These relations entail processes of homogenization, fetishization, and blame within inside-outside and respect-disrespect dialectics, which compel attention to the consolidation of Awá’s ethics of care. I address this complexity and its dialectics in Castro-Sotomayor (2019).

11 This is a perverse pattern in the history of nation state-based delimitations of Indigenous territories. Mapping and defining these territories have not stopped the dispossession of Indigenous lands nor has guaranteed the consolidation of Indigenous’ political and cultural projects regarding sovereignty and self-determination (Anthias, 2018; Latta & Wittman, 2012b).

Additional information

Funding

Several institutions granted me financial support at different stages of my studies. The scholarship I received from the Secretaría Nacional de Educación Superior, Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación of Ecuador, supported the first four years of the Doctoral program. The fifth year, the Latin American and Iberian Institute at the University of New Mexico granted me its Ph.D. Fellowship, which allowed me to dedicate most of my time to writing and finishing the dissertation from which this study derives. Lastly, the National Consortium of Environmental Rhetoric & Writer-in-Residence Summer Fellowship Program opened the inspirational space of Enchanted Rock in Hillsboro, NM, at a time when I most needed a retreat from everyday life to land my ideas and emotions.