Climate Change, Modernity, and the Maya Cosmovision: Enacting adaptation across warming worlds

Abstract

Through an ethnographic collaboration with Sotz’il Association, an Indigenous organization in Guatemala, this thesis explores what climate change is (ontologically) at the cross-section of modernity and the Maya Cosmovision. It builds on scholarly conversations regarding how to develop ethical and productive mutualisms between Western scientific and Indigenous knowledges in pursuit of transformative responses to the climate crisis, suggesting that a lens of ontological pluralism can support a deeper and more adequate approach, in which Indigenous epistemologies are treated as ontologically-embedded. Theoretically, it seeks to unite epistemological and ontological pluralism, proposing an analytical framework on the premise that knowledges, worlds, practices, and values are co-enacted as onto-epistemological constellations, and that worlds overlap and diverge in complex and dynamic ways charged with power relations. It explores the ontological politics of the Maya version of the story of a highway construction project in Chimaltenango, revealing conflict between asymmetrical worlds and the trembling foundations of modernity’s nature-culture fault lines. It draws recursively upon Maya philosophy and empirical material to develop Maya enactivism, a theory of causality based in the Maya Cosmovision, through which climate change is revealed as a living world in diminishment due to the erosion of knowledge-praxis based in attitudes of reverence. Finally, highlighting a calendar that systematizes Indigenous knowledge-praxis regarding forest management and other empirical examples, it is suggested that Sotz’il enacts adaptation from the frothy edges of multiple worlds. In national and international climate processes, they promote Indigenous inclusion and onto-epistemic recognition, inhabiting spaces of participation both enabled and constrained by neoliberal multiculturalism. Their transmodern approach is suggested to be coherent with a Maya cosmology of transformation, as they enact an adaptation of overlapping meanings that bridges the gap between epistemic plural fragmentation and universalizing, dominant conceptions and approaches to climate change.