Sara Castro-Klarén and Christian Fernández (eds.), Inca Garcilaso and Contemporary World-Making (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016), pp. ix + 382, $28.95, pb.
mess up the ontology of the political. Central to all the stories is the relationship that runakuna, and Mariano and Nazario in particular, have with tirakuna, the earth-beings that populate the landscape, most importantly of all Ausangate (a being that a Western gaze would describe as a ‘mountain’). De la Cadena builds on these stories and relationships to outline a scenery of ‘cosmopolitical moments’ (p. ) where the modern liberal history of state politics has accomplished little except the ontological annihilation of runakuna livelihoods, yet where, occasionally, liberal and runakuna interests and aspirations have partially coincided in generative or complementary developments. While the heuristic of partial connections offers a very productive placeholder for grasping the fortunes of translational equivocations, there are some passages where one wonders if the complicities through which Mariano and Nazario reckoned with the challenges they faced are adequately re-described by this idiom. Thus, we hear a number of times of Mariano’s abilities to make ‘friends’ across class and racial lines, even when he did not speak Spanish (p. ). In this sense, whilst ‘friendship’ may indeed be a partial connection, one could think of it also as the re-description of a specific type of complicity for a particular kind of complexity. All in all, the stories of partial connections that Marisol de la Cadena, Mariano Turpo and Nazario Turpo have co-laboured for us in this book are a treasure trove of ethnographic sensibility, analytical solicitousness and anthropological imagination. They are also a fecund reservoir for and of political hope. Over the years the Andean world of the Turpos has been simplified for modern consumption in the languages of religious syncretism, of environmentalism, of peasant social movements, of commonsbased ownership of the land. Yet these are all descriptions that leave unblemished the ontological matrix upon which they are founded. They are stories that shy away from the not-only. They reproduce the archive rather than unpack the box. In their place, Marisol de la Cadena has composed a series of ‘cosmopolitical moments [whose] capacity to irritate the universal and provincialize nature and culture’ (p. ) opens up the ontology of politics to novel alliances and configurations.