The Ethics and Politics of Volcanic Eruptions in Southwest Colombia: From Geomythology to Cosmic Diplomacy

Abstract (English)

Geologist Dorothy Vitaliano defines geomythology as an intellectual enterprise that aims to locate “the real geologic event underlying a myth or legend to which it has given rise, thus helping convert mythology back into history”. This presentation takes issue with this viewpoint that reduces nonwestern climate histories to myth and prerational thought, rendering them as the stuff of “legends” that have no place in history and knowledge about the planet. To do this, I explore the cosmic diplomacy that the Nasa peoples of Southwest Colombia engage in to face the causes and consequences of volcanic eruptions and landslides. Based on extensive fieldwork, I show how the Nasa rituals that seek to refresh the volcano and please their ancestors are not expressions of mythological thinking but of a sophisticated political and ethical orientation to other beings and life in general. Nasa cosmography is divided into three interrelated houses that are connected through an ecopolitical axis made of thunder, ancestors, and lagoons. The death and destruction caused by volcanic eruptions are understood within this schema, which makes of them something drastically different from Western conceptions of “natural disasters”. Rather than a somewhat fortuitous phenomena, volcanic eruptions are lived as expressions of a more than human mind that holds every lifeform, and that can only be appeased through cosmic diplomacy. I propose that Nasa cosmology has the potential to provide ethical and political orientation for these times of planetary human-driven ecological devastation known as the “Anthropocene.”