Transcending the Coloniality of Development

The Foundations of Differences

According to Arturo Escobar, “The logic of difference is a means to widen the political space and increase its complexity,” and if conceived from the perspective of the colonial difference, “the articulation of struggles across differences may lead to the deepening of democracy—indeed, to questioning the very principles of liberal democracy” (2008, p. 15). In other words, by recognizing and confronting cultural domination and asymmetrical cultural distribution or the effective power associated with cultural meanings and practices, we might broaden political spaces. Cultural difference emerges not simply from difference per se but from the meaning we give to this difference in the definition of social life and all this entails in terms of how it is expressed through economy, ecology, knowledge, body, cosmos, and so on (Escobar, 2008, pp. 14-15). Thus, articulations of difference, such as by indigenous peoples and other subaltern groups, are not simply about different perspectives of the world but often have to do with ontological differences—distinctions over the nature of existence.

The dominant political field we currently recognize is a world shaped by the antithetical and hierarchical separation of “Humanity” and “Nature” (cf. de la Cadena, 2010; Latour, 2004a). It is a world where modern science gained epistemological privilege from the 17th century onward allowing eventually both for the technological supremacy of Western societies and the suppression of other knowledges (Sousa Santos, 2007). In her essay “Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes,” de la Cadena (2010) describes how the social construction of “nature” became the realm of science; it was reduced and objectified to study, dissect, and determine its laws. The social and relational aspect of “humans,” on the other hand, not the biological, became the realm of politics. Thus, politics existed as a category only insofar as nature had been determined to be void of politics and void of subjectivity—nature as object.

Within this European reductionist imaginary, however, indigenous peoples defied the antagonism between “nature” and “humans.” They were, according to Europeans’ first introduction to Native Americans, living in a “state of nature,” and thus part of the natural world, and presented as such. ⁹ In Columbus’s letter to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, he described the people he encountered on the island of Hispaniola:

[A]ll go naked, men and women, as their mothers bore them, although some women cover a single place with the leaf of a plant or with a net of cotton which they make for the purpose. They have no iron or steel or weapons, nor are they fitted to use them, not because they are not well built men and of handsome stature, but because they are marvelously timorous. ¹⁰

While the Vallodolid controversy confirmed for some Spaniards that Indians did, indeed, have souls and could be “saved” (they were, therefore, humans), the idea was that they then had to be saved. ¹¹ They had to be brought out of this state of nature and “civilized,” whether through the introduction of Christianity or later through modernization and development.

New identities and positions were, therefore, created from this framework of European colonization. In his discussion on the emergence of the “coloniality of power,” Anibal Quijano claims that discussions such as the Vallodolid controversy replicated the discursive context of the period and produced two main axes of power based first on the codification of the differences between conquerors and conquered in the idea of “race,” a supposedly different biological structure that placed some people in a natural situation of inferiority to others. Race became a constitutive and founding element of the relations of domination that the conquest imposed. The other process was the constitution of a new structure of control of labor and its resources through slavery, serfdom, small independent commodity production, and reciprocity, which together would form the basis of capital and the world market (Maldonado-Torres, 2007, pp. 243-244). Here it is important to emphasize not just dominion over labor but over resources. Thus, while Quijano highlighted skin tones as ultimately determining for Europeans the degree of humanity of a group of people, he overlooked the link between the natural world and racialized identities. Indigenous peoples or Black slaves were viewed as inferior and, therefore, hierarchically closer to the natural world. They were neither fully “civilized” humans, nor fully possessed of true political agency. As de la Cadena (2010) notes,

[T]he birth of the modern political field, we learn from science scholars, was tied to the denial of the state of “Nature.” Sustaining the notion of the political that eventually became hegemonic was the ontological distinction between “Humanity” and “Nature,” the creation of the “natural Man,” his sentence to inevitable extinction along with his other-than-human beings, and the occlusion of this antagonism through the notion of an adamantly inclusive and hierarchically organized “Humanity.” Only the fully humans engaged in antagonisms, and only they could transform their enmities into adversarial relations—that is, engage in politics. (p. 344)

The political field as conceived through this distinction, through this hierarchical antagonism between humans and nature, came to define what would become America, and came to form an integral part of the European imaginary. It would become a model of power, the very basis of modern identity.

So dominant was the scientific episteme by the 19th century “second Enlightenment” (Latour, 2004b), when Europeans gained such confidence in their so-called universal knowledge and cultural expressions and in their ability to determine “natural laws,” that even the political and social realms became objects of scientific inquiry. Europeans attempted to reduce societies, states, markets and even groups of peoples through racialization, to “natural laws,” abstracting them from historical time, geographical space, and real human experience. According to Latour,

The critical power of the moderns lies in this double language: they can mobilize Nature at the heart of social relationships, even as they leave Nature infinitely remote from human beings; they are free to make and unmake their society, even as they render its laws ineluctable, necessary and absolute. (Latour, 1993, pp. 35, 37; also see McMichael, 2011, p. 3)

It then becomes clear that colonization mobilized “Nature” and formed the foundation of modernity as discourse and as a practice. Modernity would not, therefore, be possible without coloniality, and coloniality continues to be an inevitable outcome of modern discourses and practices. This affects how knowledge produced by some bodies is systemically naturalized, while “other” knowledges and bodies are marginalized and systemically “otherized.”

First, as a product of this historical process, a modern/developmental divide lies at the heart of social science theory and its categories, thereby reproducing an ontology that reifies a sociopolitical linear evolution of human societies moving from “natural” or tribal society (i.e., native, indigenous) to a “modern” state (in the image of Europeans—if not in hue, at least in dress and sensibility). ¹² Indigenous peoples, therefore, have historically and categorically been rendered unfinished or “underdeveloped” and in the process of evolving toward this modern state.

The discipline of modern anthropology, for example, arose out of natural history to research and document the “inevitable extinction” if not physically, at least culturally, of indigenous peoples as a result of European colonial expansion, and later because of the internal colonizing processes produced by modernization policies. It was based on an underlying universalizing assumption that humans would become ever distanced from and control nature through science and technological advancements as modernity was realized. The ecological practices and diverse knowledge systems of many indigenous peoples were studied, therefore, not by modern scientists but by scholars of the humanities as myths, legends, superstitions, and rituals. ¹³

Second, this expected shift toward modernity consumed much of Latin American social history as “the Indian problem” ¹⁴ —how to assimilate (or culturally annihilate) the indigenous population. An incipient “indigenist” movement that began in the 1920s flourished in the postwar period concerned with the plight of indigenous peoples. ¹⁵ Whether politically conservative or from the left, these nonindigenous intellectuals viewed native populations as passive subjects—peoples without political agency. Indigenists and other sectors of Latin American societies tended to blame their generally weak economies and limited industrialization on the persistence of premodern agricultural practices and forms of social organization of native populations. They advocated policies of modernization, particularly the expansion of rural education, to address this “problem” (Heurich, 1999, p. 69). ¹⁶

Anthropologists and linguists, on the other hand, often regarded indigenous communities as isolated and in danger of being integrated and exploited. For the most part, however, they perceived integration as inevitable and dedicated much of their scholarship toward documenting the distinct cultural and linguistic practices of native peoples. In 1950, for example, anthropologist and indigenist Gonzalo Rubio Orbe conducted a study in Punyaro, Imbabura province, of the “Indian problem.” ¹⁷ He then prescribed solutions to achieve the incorporation of “the Indian” into national life requiring more than just a change in dress and hair, but also in speech and familial patterns. He writes,

I am interested, more than anything, in knowing up close the level and characteristics of the mestizo and Indian habitat; the reciprocal relations and influences and the differences that separate them and do not allow for the absorption [of indigenous peoples] to the more advanced group with the superior culture [mestizos]. . . . On simple observation I was able to recognize the existence of persons in the process of transition from Indian to mestizo; various external elements hinted at mestizo characteristics: dress, haircut up to the shoulders; the use of shoes, for example. Other [characteristics] at the same time unmistakably hinted at indigenous roots, for example, speech, physical aspects and familial connections. (Rubio Orbe, 1950, prologue)

This order of things, at least from a Eurocentric perspective, rendered natural peoples as incapable of contemporary knowledge production—a cognitive injustice that had and continues to have fatal consequences for peoples, landscapes, memories, and other cultural phenomena. Amalia Pallares (2002, p. ix), for example, relates a joke told to her when she commented on her learning Kichwa while conducting her field work in Ecuador. A wealthy student from the coast asked her, “How do you say computer in Quichua?” Her response of silence completed the joke based on a long-held, shared assumption that indigenousness and contemporary knowledge production are incompatible.

Whether viewed as innocent victims of colonial exploitation or closed societies that negated progress, indigenous peoples, peasants, and Afro-descendants became objects of study to analyze and make policy decisions. Such characterizations, particularly of indigenous communities, would only increase as modernization came to dominate national policies during the heyday of developmentalism in the aftermath of the world wars. ¹⁸ During this period that saw the expansion and consolidation of global economic links based on unequal relations of interdependence and improved communication networks, measures of progress became systematized and rationalized through universal quantifiable measures of development, though clearly at the expense of the qualitatively very different human experiences with these measures. In Latin America, where the discourse of modernity rejected European domination while at the same time internalized the European civilizing mission, indigenous peoples, Afro-descendants, and peasant communities all became targets of self-colonization processes that assumed distinct forms in different political contexts and historical periods (Coronil, 1997).

Developmentalism

Developmentalism as an ideological project reproduced the scientific, economic, and political categories of modernity and thus the embedded ontological assumptions regarding the progress of human societies. This was achieved through the creation of the United Nations in 1945 and other suprastate-level institutions dedicated to supporting state-level development initiatives and the later institutionalization of the UN System of National Accounts, which represented levels of development per nation-state in terms of overall gross domestic product and rates of GDP per capita. These institutions provided an overall political-legal framework of the nation-state (e.g., the legal recognition of the self-determination of nations) that, in many ways, reified and politically naturalized the nation-state form (rather than emphasizing its mythical qualities) and provided economic institutional frameworks for newly independent states (e.g., national banks). It was presumed that any state, given the correct state-promoted policies and access to foreign capital, could march toward modernization and attain the levels of economic growth achieved by the West, and that growth or level of development could be measured through universal quantifiable measures (cf. Escobar, 1995; McMichael, 1996; Rist, 1997).

On one hand, as Da Costa and McMichael (2007) note, the developmental divide that results from these measures represents a political ontology that determines how we think about world ordering, but also what is valued in this order. It underlies much of social scientific inquiry and, therefore, determines the categories and methodologies through which knowledge is produced, whether referring to bounded categories of comparison such as the developed or developing state—that reifies the state as the instrument of development—of groups of people or of development indicators. ¹⁹ There is, however, a longer history of critiquing such categories, as Wallerstein’s (1974) world-system analysis and McMichael’s (1990) “incorporated comparison” demonstrate (McMichael, 2011), and even an attempt by the United Nations to rethink development away from GDP and incorporate a more holistic view that can be found in the UN’s Human Development Index (HDI). The HDI, while still bounded by the state, includes such factors as wealth inequality and other social and health indicators such as literacy rates, gender inequalities, and infant mortality rates.

On the other hand and related, this linear, Eurocentric modern rationality imposes a quantifiable, namely economic, logic on social life. McMichael refers to this logic as an “economic calculus,” ²⁰ in contrast to the “ecological calculus” that characterizes the material and social forms of reproduction of the many societies often considered “traditional,” such as indigenous peoples, that do not, necessarily, separate their material conditions of existence from their surrounding landscape, nor do they necessarily instrumentalize this for the purpose of economic rationality. Whereas the former represents a “capitalocentric” focus, namely of market objectification, that reinforces an ontology that externalizes ecological relations (McMichael, 2011, pp. 7-8), the latter, by definition, emphasizes the interactions and relationships between dynamic systems, but becomes articulated only as modernity “encounters” its ecological underpinnings, “simultaneously subordinating and clarifying ecology” (McMichael, 2011, pp. 2-3). As McMichael states,

Whereas “ecological” practices organize around replenishment, “economic” practices organize for “robbery”—at the expense of the former practices. While the former respects biological time, the latter concerns itself solely with value’s velocity of circulation. One consequence is to deem ecological (rather than economic) practices anachronistic and change-resistant. (McMichael, 2011, p. 12)

There are two important issues to add regarding this ontological encounter. First, to further enhance McMichael’s perspective, we must consider how such “robbery” has been justified through scientific principles as the epistemic foundation of the “economic calculus”—a call to rationality, so to speak, “for the advancement of the nation.”

Second, the “encounter” between modernity and its ecological underpinnings is, ultimately, a colonial encounter metaphorically through the categories it produces that legitimate the biophysical process of continued conquest of people and other earthly entities, but it is also a node of connection where these distinct logics become articulated, creating new identities and positions. Indigenous ecological practices, therefore, become “anachronistic and change-resistant.” Yet it is this very ecological logic that respects biological time and limits that forces a response, particularly because of the commodification of indigenous means of material existence, while it also shapes the manner in which this distinct ecological ontology becomes articulated. In turn this can reinforce the conditions for continued biophysical, cultural, and psychological aggression. Indigenous communities have historically been dismissed as valueless—except maybe to illustrate human cultural variation—not as examples of ways of knowing and producing knowledge.

While we may view the encounter between an economic-scientific modern ontology and ecological ontologies or expressions (human and nonhuman) as seemingly antithetical and maybe even in opposition, they are connected. It has been through this colonial encounter that the latter found political expression through the other—whether through the articulation of resistance (through countermovements), negotiation or building a type of consensus that I will highlight below. I will address the issue of nonhuman actions further along in the article.

The Coloniality of Development Encounters in Ecuador

The ontological assumptions embedded within the development paradigm shaped economic and political frameworks that affected how newly independent states, after the Second World War, and economically weaker states in regions such as Latin America, began to fashion their economies. Multiethnic states in Latin America, for example, would impose a singular sense of nationhood to construct the desired vehicle of economic development—the nation-state. This transpired through a process of internal colonization that affected peoples considered by the “moderns” to be traditional, obsolete, and, ultimately, slated to disappear (given the governing ontology), and it would affect the landscape.

In the 1980s, Whitten tellingly wrote that mestizo or “mixed” Ecuadorians viewed themselves as true nationals. They believed that progress consisted in transforming the peripheries (indigenous peoples and Afro-Ecuadorians) of the nation through education and development to change the landscape and its peoples in ways that conform to the ideology and the projects of North American industrial growth (Whitten, 1993, p. 14). What is telling about this depiction of the promise of development for the “true” Ecuadorian” was that it necessitated a transformation both of the landscape and the people embedded within it. It is clear then how indigenous peoples and Afro-Ecuadorians have been considered, at least from the perspective of national narratives, as “outside” the nation or, at the very least, on its fringes socially, cognitively, and geographically.

They were viewed not as collective subjects, but as “dead weight” that stalled the progress of the nation, a characterization made poignantly in 1977 in a supplemental article in the national El Comercio newspaper concerning the National Education and Literacy Plan promoted by the military government. The article outlined the cognitive, cultural, and socioeconomic characteristics that distinguish the “New Type of Ecuadorian Man” from the “Individual or Marginalized Group” (Casas, 2006). Some of the highlighted characteristics were that the latter “is of magical-ingenuous consciousness” who “waits for others to ‘think for him’ and that others ‘do things for him.’” In contrast, the “New Type of Ecuadorian Man . . . thinks as an Ecuadorian, as the ruler of his own destiny. He acts and exercises his rights. He is ready to produce and consume more [italics added]” (Casas, 2006).

This excerpt represents yet another example of a node of connection produced out of ontological encounters that shape discursive outcomes. In this case, the “New Type of Ecuadorian Man,” and his characteristics, is clearly defined in opposition to the “Marginalized Man” (the indigenous man) who is ready to “produce and consume!”

This vision of indigenous peoples had particularly grave consequences in the Amazon region where, to relieve land pressures in the highlands, the 1964 Agrarian Reform Law was passed together with the Law of Non-Cultivated Lands (Tierras Baldías). The principle of this law was simple. It basically considered lands in the region to be abandoned because they were not cultivated (at least not in a recognizable manner to the untrained eye) and “waiting for” colonization. In this manner, government promised land titles and easy credit to settlers who migrated to the region, cleared forest, and planted crops or pasture. In addition, government officials pledged to “civilize” native peoples and integrate them into the dominant national culture, especially when oil was discovered in Huaorani territories in 1967. This translated not only into the continued extension of education and adult literacy programs to the region, viewed as the cornerstone of any set of development policies to achieve national integration and progress, but also into the expansion of infrastructure (roads, towns, etc.) that would attract both settlers and oil companies.

As a result, indigenous peoples found their lives and the world around them irrevocably transformed—the loss of their ancestral lands, in some cases forced settlement, the rapid expansion of roads and other forms of infrastructure to the region, the expansion of education programs, including programs funded by the very companies engaged in oil exploration and exploitation, the introduction of new diseases, the erosion of food sovereignty, the introduction of a cash economy, and, overall, a complete disregard and disrespect for indigenous forms of social, cultural, political, and economic organization.

Development and Nodes of Connection: Pitfalls and Gains by Indigenous Peoples

The former director of education of CONAIE, Blas Chimbo, an Amazonian Kichwa, described in 2002 the physical and psychological violence even young children confronted as a consequence of national education projects directed toward the creation (imagination) of national unity and the construction of a “mestizo” national identity:

My parents, they’re indigenous. What I remember is that when I was in school, I was educated in the Josefina Mission boarding school. My parents would come from far away and leave us in the boarding school and here we learned to study in Spanish. . . . In school it was prohibited to speak in Kichwa. We were punished if we spoke in Kichwa. They didn’t give us food and we had to kneel for two or three hours on sand or simply they hit us and said that we had to learn Spanish. Nevertheless, even with this difficulty, we progressed and we progressed. . . . Up until this point I didn’t realize that there were these difficulties between indigenous peoples and white-mestizos—this whole situation . . . it was then that I realized that I was of a nationality and that I should defend what was mine. Because in the end, as you know, with the conquest and with their laws and with their rules, the rest disappears. This is what has happened with us indigenous peoples. (Casas, 2006) ²¹

Not all indigenous peoples who had been educated in the Hispanic education system viewed their experiences negatively. A Shuar activist for bilingual education described his experience as constructive. Bosco Atamaint was taken away to a missionary boarding school when he was 5 years old until his graduation from high school. There, the missionaries did not allow the children to speak Shuar openly until the fourth grade. He said that the teachers were very strict, but he felt it was better in a way because “otherwise many would have just escaped back home to go about their fishing and hunting without having had the opportunity to make something else of themselves.” Atamaint believed the missionaries prepared him to confront a world completely different from his own and, as he claims, “we didn’t forget Shuar or who we were.” ²²

Education and literacy became a type of weapon that indigenous leaders used to advance their goals and projects. As Atamaint claims, his educational experiences prepared him to confront a world unlike his own in which he worked toward advancing the organization of his people. Many current leaders of the indigenous movement that emerged in the 1990s began their activism through struggles for bilingual education in resistance to assimilationist and racist educational practices (Pallares, 2002; Selverston-Scher, 2001). ²³ A statement in a 1989 CONAIE document describes the link between education and leadership in the indigenous movement:

Education affected our organization process in two ways: on the one hand, it provided us with the knowledge and space to question the socioeconomic and political situation of the country, on the other, it created expectations of work and social ascendancy that were not satisfied by society given the few offers of employment, as well as discrimination against us: this led us to reflect upon and question the system. In our organizations and in the analysis of our distinct histories, we have found that in the majority of cases, indigenous peoples that have promoted their development and that are part of our leadership are those who have had access to education. (Useche, 2003, p. 99)

As indigenous peoples were incorporated on a broader scale into the matrix of dominant mestizo society through education, into the national economy and, in some cases, to international markets, their lives were transformed, though not always along a predictable path. Whereas the logic of accumulation converted many subsistence economies into dependent economies, creating much more vulnerability to economic failures, many indigenous communities diversified their activities. Among those indigenous peoples who became “urbanized” in towns and cities, most maintained strong links with their communities of origin and still often own land (Korovkin, 1998; Pallares, 2002, p. 43).

Korovkin, for example, describes how the modernization of large landed estates in the 1960s and 1970s in northern Ecuador overhauled indigenous production strategies causing many to become rural and urban small commodity producers, even at the point of an increasingly commodified rural Andean society. Nevertheless, among these “new” artisans, “Indianness,” rather than disappearing or indigenous peoples blending into the state-sponsored mestizoness, redefined indigenous culture and allowed for the emphasis of nonmonetized values (Korovkin, 1998, p. 126).

In another case, Rudel, Bates, and Machinguiashi (2002) studied cattle ranching and cash cropping among the Shuar in the Amazonia. In response to the Law of Non-Cultivated Lands, which supported the colonization by highlanders of “non-producing” lands in the region, the Shuar not only organized to create the Shuar Federation in 1964 but also initiated the process of taking up cattle ranching and cash cropping to protect their territories from the highland settlers. Though cattle raising and cash-cropping Shuar in the tropical rain forest has shattered the essentialist image of the ecological Native American, Rudel and his colleagues demonstrate through surveys and remote-sensing data from 1987 to 1997 that Shuar and mestizo smallholder pattern of land use varied considerably, particularly as the Shuar acquired titles over their land base. They found that while Shuar initially deforested tracts of land quite rapidly, over time they relied less and less on cattle and reforested their land with traditional garden crops and some cash crops, including coffee and cacao. This was not the same with mestizo smallholders who continued to raise cattle. “The low chemical inputs and green-manure focus of Shuar smallholders, together with their appreciation for the value of forests in restoring soil fertility, makes it plausible to include them among smallholders who practice ecologically sustainable agriculture” (Rudel et al., 2002, p. 157).

Overall, development policies broadened the educational opportunities of indigenous peoples and improved infrastructure, which increased access to national and international institutional frameworks that led to the greater possibility of democratic inclusion. At the same time, however, the logic of the developmentalist state assumed a singular vision of progress and reproduced (and in many ways reaffirmed for dominant society) long-held myths regarding the superiority of European descendants, while categorically ignoring or disregarding the varied knowledges and lifeways of indigenous peoples, as well as Afro-descendants. Thus, development policies often produced varying responses: assimilation, adaptation, resistance through the creation of various indigenous organizations to protect territories and lifeways, and, increasingly, efforts to shape change. This process would lead toward the transformation of indigenous peoples into citizen–subjects, particularly after the country returned to democracy in 1979 and literacy was no longer a requirement of suffrage, thereby extending the vote to many indigenous peoples. It also lent greater credence to the rise of a resistance politics of culture that centered on antiracism and alternative approaches to education. As a result, cracks began to appear in the dominant developmentalist paradigm.

Advances made during the early 1980s were short-lived as the country made a turn toward neoliberal policies under the presidency of León Febrés Cordero. This, combined with continued struggles for land reform, territorial recognition, and an increasingly well-articulated cultural critique by indigenous intellectuals, would alter the political landscape. Claiming difference through indigenousness, as opposed to other identities—ethnic, minority, peasant—would become a type of resistance identity. ²⁴

In 1990, 4 years after CONAIE was organized, indigenous leaders would launch a national uprising to voice their demands to the state. This action, along with others organized by CONAIE over the following decade, would mark the movement as the most powerful social movement in the country throughout the 1990s. CONAIE and its affiliate organizations provided a vital platform for the articulation of a sustained critique against state and international actors with a presence in indigenous communities.

Overall, Ecuador’s indigenous peoples joined an international network of indigenous and other social movements throughout the world that have been a potent force in uncovering the exploitive and oppressive practices of social and political institutions nationally and globally, including those of academe, and have inspired various constituencies—activists, environmentalists, scholars. At the same time, they have created, constructed, and articulated novel educational, social, political, and economic projects often aimed at decentering structures of power (Casas, 2006).

What I have demonstrated then is that sites of encounter of ontological distinctions are nodes of articulation out of which new identities and positions emerge. This can often lead to conflict as a result of asymmetry, but also of social and material change. Sites of encounter mutually, if unequally, shape and condition one another. In Ecuador, although a unified indigenous social movement no longer captivates the attention of the country as it did in the decade of the 1990s, many sectors of Ecuadorian civil society engage in the projects and concepts proposed by indigenous sectors including the concept of sumak kawsay and rights of nature or Pachamama. The ecological advocacy by indigenous sectors of Ecuadorian society provided the momentum for the constitutional changes that, at least in theory, broadened the political field. It is evident, therefore, that indigenous responses crystallized the effects and actuality of “coloniality” in such a way as to infiltrate public discourse and recognition of the ecological principle. Yet we cannot lose sight of the fact that while nature having rights might be understood in “environmental grammar,” according to de la Cadena (2010, p. 335), ontological encounters, even when they lead to consensus and change, do not necessarily obliterate difference, nor are they about finding “common ground.” This presents a challenge, even to environmentalists who, though they advocate for “nature,” might do so from a distinct narrative—from a distinct understanding of being.