"Other common illustrations of absolutising god-views and universalising projections relate to, for instance, mystical relationships with sentient river beings; ways of knowing nature through a direct connection with it; and listening to the voices of the fish, amongst other examples. We do not deny the existence and importance of these (highly diverse) onto-epistemologies. Our point is that grassroots, indigenous, and campesino organisations often mobilise their vernacular, historically-rooted, and more-than-human onto-epistemologies in conjunction with consciously and strategically designed more-than-human socio-natures. The latter is a legitimate and understandable political-strategic tool for empowerment and self-defence. But it should be recognised as a specific politically devised entrance to interpreting, re-presenting, and ordering the real. By generically framing such specific representations and ways of knowing as objectified 'onto-epistemological facts' and 'truthful realities', engaged academics and activists fail to understand this political practice. Such failure is problematic.
One illustration of this failure is how the Universal Declaration of River Rights (just like numerous NGOs and academia) refers to 'factual' grassroots worldviews while stating and proclaiming generically that "(…) rivers in particular are sacred entities possessing their own fundamental rights (…)" (GARN, 2024). In multi-diverse everyday realities, however, river communities may often dynamically shape a 'strategic nature'. We would like to raise the alert against interpreting these complex onto-epistemological realities in a reductionist and de-politicised manner (cf. Li, 2013). As we ourselves have also often witnessed (in over three decades of long-term action-research collaborations with grassroots communities), strategic river representations sprout from inventive contextual struggles. Herein, sentient rivers are often purposefully mobilised as apolitical divine agents by local villagers. They "(…) resignify 'nature' itself as an anchor for social justice and collective ethics. They believe that incorporating [mountain deities] and [sacred sites] into their local environmental movements offers the only viable strategy for counteracting the power of extractive industries" (Bacigalupo, 2022: 181; see also Dukpa et al., 2019)."
Yes they
are all fictional constructions and should be left to local contingencies. However, the thing that makes the truly about justice is the techniques through
which they are able to directly involve the rhythms, limits and needs of those
other codependent beings and forces, into politics. This is the only ‘real’
that can be spoken of, a real that like the movement of planets and stars is
never fixed or stable and changes given a shift in vantage temporal or spatial
vantage point, but nonetheless has a rhythm and balance which can only be radically
ignored by those world building practices, with disastrous consequences for life.
This by no means suggests that there can ever be a truth in social constructs
of relation, and by no means suggests that the rhythms of nonhumans and cosmic
bodies for example, are ever deterministic of the political, but any way of
ordering the social must attune itself to and involve those rhythms, less it be
very short lived – which might also be fine!
llustrative of this danger is the colonialism-born myth that
indigenous peoples would generically disavow (collective or individual) land
and water rights. Combined with the ecocentric RoN slogan 'Nature has no owner
but itself', this may deeply compromise the everyday livelihoods of peasant,
indigenous and fisher communities. It does not help to redress historical land
dispossession and water theft and may deny them legitimate property rights. The
granting of personhood rights to the New Zealand Whanganui River and Te Urewera
territory has received international praise. However, as Coombes (2021: 38)
explains, land restitution and territorial ownership were indigenous key
claims, "so tribal members were surprised that their claims were later
translated into deliberations about rights-of-nature". Many Māori
associated nature’s personhood policies with "diversionary tactics
intended to bypass our ownership claims (…). They divert attention from a long
history of Māori activism to recover ancestral lands" (Coombes, 2021: 44,
51).
It is certain that mystifying, essentialising, and functionalising indigeneity is a common practice in state-centred and neoliberal recognition politics (Hale, 2004; Li, 2010), allowing "compatible identities and claims" while opposing transformative and redistributive reforms. This is a litmus test for RoN and RoR strategies, too. Coombes says, "Attempts to discredit indigenous ownership claims are an important context for the sudden appreciation of personhood approaches (…) any gains from award of personhood are at the expense of aspirations to repatriate homelands" (2021: 36).
Must be about common land – not RoN that can be an elite trojan horse to circumvent ecosocial justice, or worse dispossess campesinos of riverine environments. The issue is when any of these instruments are used as mechanisms of exclusion in any form. The goal is never exclusionary protection, but must instead be based in the establishment of commoning substantiated by enforceable law.
Second, Roth et al. (2015) and Boelens (2015) have pointed out that re-cognition means "knowing again but reinterpreting within a particular ontological framework" – the ontological framework of the recogniser. When related to nature, such recognition therefore implies un-recognising nature as an object and defining it as a subject. The definition of such a specific 'nature subject' is intrinsically accompanied by strategies aimed at governing, steering, and protecting this same subject and its defined characteristics. More than just the acknowledgement that nature is to be addressed as a subject, it deals with the fundamental issue of what kind of subject nature is (or is projected to be), according to whom, why, and with what impacts. This opens the field of subject-making or 'subjectification' (Foucault, 1982, 2008), which is not new but part of a long tradition. Throughout history, state bureaucracy, scientists, policy institutes, and other influential actors have ontologically and socio-technically constructed their objects and subjects to be imagined and governed (e.g. Hommes et al., 2020; Mills-Novoa et al., 2020; De Jong et al., 2024). For this, they have named, normed, and naturalised nature, water, rivers, rights, identities, and organisations, turning them into foci of governance.
