Kinship with the land and indigenous cosmopolitics of care

Abstract

This article addresses issues related to the Anthropocene from the perspective of indigenous epistemologies and ontologies, which disrupt non-indigenous understandings of humanity, nature, supernature and, consequently, life, death and extinction. From an ethnographic perspective, we focuses on indigenous ways of thinking, inhabiting and transforming their “forest-lands”, through relationships with “other-than-human” beings, both living and non-living, regulated by a series of precautions. Our hypothesis is that the multi-species kinship allows us to understand both the creation and sustainability of the vitality/fertility of the “Earth/Land/ Forest” and its coexistential networks, as well as its depredation/extinction in terms of the rupture of relations between beings through estrangement and abandonment, configuring “cosmopolitics of care”.