The forces of yocle: For an ecosophy of water

Abstract

The following article that takes the form of an ethnographic account, is the product of four years of working with the smallholder community of a small afroandean coastal district of Peru called Subtanjalla. The account is based on various ethnographic events, in which I highlight the way in which the Subtanjallinos’conception of water unsettles the ontological univocality with which this “natural resource” is defined in modernity. In order to emphasize my own learning about these other conceptions of water, I seek to establish affinities between the Subtanjalla smallholders’conceptions of water with the cosmopolitical expression “more than” coined by De la Cadena and Blaser, as well as with some dimensions of the Felix Guattari’s concept of “ecosophy”