Articulating worlds otherwise: decolonial geolinguistic praxis,multi-epistemic co-existence,and intercultural education and development programing in the Peruvian Andes

Introduction

Just as we nurture the alpacas, they nurture us. ¹

We want good technicians [técnicos] who know alpacas. . . who have lived since childhood with alpacas, who really know the alpacas (kamayoq Guillermo, 2013, translation of Spanish transcript, from Quechua audio). ²

The Quechua term for nurturance – uyway – refers to a reciprocal process of ‘affective attunement’, which is practiced by all members (human and nonhuman) of the Andean living community. ³ The translation from Quechua ‘uyway’ to English ‘nurture’ therefore needs explaining, as reciprocal Andean concepts and relational ontologies of nurturance do not align neatly with the common (often linear) usage of ‘nurture’ in English. In contrast, the comments from Guillermo – a research participant from a remote community in Apurímac, Peru – were spoken in Quechua, but the word ‘technicians’ was uttered in Spanish: técnicos. By using the Spanish word, Guillermo emphasized a degree of incommensurability, conceiving ténicos as outside of – and yet still connected to – Quechua co-nurturing relations with alpacas. ⁴

As a ‘kamayoq’, Guillermo was also articulating (linking and communicating) between these worlds – between techno-scientific interventions and co-nurturing human-alpaca relations. We unpack the term kamayoq (and related equivocations) in detail below, but in development contexts it is used by NGOs to refer to a community-based specialist responsible for sharing ecological and productive knowledge-in-practice (praxis) among fellow campesinos (peasants). In focusing on kamayoq, we explore a politics of translation that underpins our research into the connections between Indigenous knowledge-sharing practices and the intercultural and bilingual development programs of NGOs and Peruvian State agencies. Kamayoq have long been central to Quechua knowledge-sharing practices, and since the 1980s a number of NGO programs have been established to train kamayoq formally as intercultural and bilingual development agents. In 2009, the Peruvian government launched a new approach to intercultural adult education, which built – in part – on the kamayoq training model established by a prominent NGO. Our research focuses on the role of kamayoq within these programs, and on the effects the programs have on kamayoq praxis. ⁵

In this paper, we explore how equivocations of kamayoq serve multiple, sometimes conflicting political purposes. We locate these equivocations within (and as constitutive of) a historical and colonial politics of translation, particularly one conditioned by translations of Quechua (and other Andean) oral cultures into Spanish and other languages. ⁶ Rather than describe such a politics of translation, we outline some of its mechanics in contemporary contexts of intercultural development. Moving beyond re-stating the colonial politics of mis/translations, we argue that greater focus is required on re-translations being enacted from the borders of coloniality – translations that are worked through Andean concepts to destabilize hierarchies of power, knowledge, and language. ⁷ We explore how iskay yachay, as intercultural and reciprocal dialogue among knowledges, may change the terms of translation by reaffirming multiple knowledges, re-working post-colonial social relations, and acting as a geolinguistic praxis of multi-epistemic co-existence. The paper contributes to ongoing debates about decolonizing Indigenous and intercultural education (formal or otherwise) and about the role of decolonial geographical knowledges, particularly where translational processes simultaneously shroud and challenge hierarchies of knowledge and colonial differences. ⁸ In building both a critical (deconstructive) and productive (constructive) discussion of translation and its alternatives – as Kiran Asher suggests ⁹ – we explore how variously positioned interlocutors navigate between the ‘perils of translating back’ and the ‘dangers of remaining mute’. ¹⁰

We begin by positioning our contribution and by clarifying the key concepts that we deploy: equivocation; intercultural translanguaging; and iskay yachay as a reciprocal dialogue among knowledges. We then clarify our own positions and locus of enunciation within a politics of translation. Thereafter, we focus on four equivocations: kamayoq/agent of animation; kamayoq/a two-way-door; kamayoq/rural promoter; and a double equivocation, as the animating role of kamayoq is re-worked through iskay yachay. We conclude by critically exploring the decolonial and ontographic (world-articulating) possibilities of kamayoq praxis in repurposing equivocations.

Articulating multi-epistemic being: from translation and equivocation to dialogue among knowledges

[In the Andes] Language is not a verbal representation. . . in a world that is alive, language is also alive. ¹¹

In this paper we explore a living politics of translation associated with intercultural development programs in the Peruvian Andes, focusing on geolinguistic practices of equivocation, translanguaging, and iskay yachay. ¹² ‘Politics of translation’ refers to the historicized contexts in which language and meaning are organized into and expressed through hierarchies of power. ¹³ Recent cultural geographical attention has focused on a politics of translation at cultural interfaces between knowledge systems, where multiple ontologies are politically rendered ‘available’ or not. ¹⁴ In these contexts, Indigenous knowledges, practices, and ontologies are sometimes mistranslated as mere cultural constructs, unequal to the Western sciences of conservationists and policy-makers. ¹⁵ A collection of recent articles about Sámi herding and salmon fishing practices implicates (mis)translation as a driver of the continued dismissal of Indigenous knowledges and practices within dominant conservation approaches, thereby acting as the expression of colonial state power. ¹⁶

In the Latin American context, similar processes have been conceived through Fernando Ortiz’s notion of ‘transculturation’ – colonial cultural transformations. Sundberg used the concept to explain how the uneven translation of discourses and identities can lead to cultural shifts in the name of conservation. This process provides decision-making powers to groups able to translate their own interests into conservation language, while excluding those that can/do not. ¹⁷ More recently, cultural geographers have linked these discussions to critical analyses of decolonization, with Anthias highlighting how Guaraní territorial claims in Bolivia have been translated into ‘the dominant discourses of colonial society’, thereby delegitimizing Indigenous knowledges and erasing Indigenous sovereignties. ¹⁸

In an attempt to understand the mechanics of transculturation through translation, we build on the notion of equivocation. In contrast to mistranslation, equivocation reveals the impossibility of perfect translation, highlighting instead ongoing and recursive processes in which multiple actors may be equivocating around similar discourses simultaneously, producing new meaning in the process. ¹⁹ This points us to diversity in translation – to two incommensurable things, rather than two versions of the same thing.

Returning to an example from environmental governance may help to clarify. Mario Blaser has used ‘equivocation’ to explore the question of ‘what is caribou?’ in the Canadian North. ²⁰ In environmental management, various ‘dissonances’ exist ‘between different versions of caribou’, as wildlife managers, NGOs, and Indigenous groups bring different ‘caribou’ into the discussion. At times these are kept apart for simplicity; at others, they are combined for attempted conformity, often to suit the interests of a powerful group. These processes rely on translations of caribou as a techno-scientific artefact: as a material thing, out there to be observed. However, these translations do not portray atîku – the Indigenous word assumed to mean the same thing as ‘caribou’, but which refers to a relational ontology of caring among humans and non-humans. Thus, there exists a multiplicity of atîku/caribou, but this multiplicity his held together by an equivocation – an assumption that atîku and caribou are just distinct cultural references for the same material animal.

Østmo & Law also identify equivocations in their study (e.g. bivdit/fishing; javrediksun/friluftsliv; meahcci/utmark/wilderness), but they interpret them as ‘ugly translations’ and mistranslations – terms that imply there may be just one thing at stake, which has been interpreted differently/mistakenly. ²¹ In contrast, Blaser’s approach points to incommensurability: atîku/caribou is inherently multiple and incommensurable.

Taking this approach to the Andean context places focus on the incommensurability and multiplicity of Quechua and non-Quechua systems of meaning. Janice Nuckolls has shown how ideophony – the use of sounds to invoke sensory perceptions – is used in Quechua to present nonhumans as having articulate thoughts. ²² The inability to translate ideophony means there is an ‘impoverished form that Indigenous public discourse may have to take when it is adapted for literate circulation’ beyond Quechua. ²³ For example, Sarah Radcliffe highlights how the equivocation of sumak kawsay/buen vivir can bring political recognition to Kichwa communities, but it also flattens difference among and within Kichwa and other Andean cultural groups, resulting in problematic state policies. Since sumak kawsay is not a homogenous concept, these outcomes are geographically differentiated and historically specific: Kichwa women experience differentially-constituted development programs due to culturally-inflected equivocations of sumak kawsay. ²⁴

These equivocations are partly why Marisol de la Cadena argues that key mediators can only establish ‘partial connections’ between Quechua and non-Quechua worlds. ²⁵ When mediators engage in translational processes, a series of physical, linguistic, and epistemic displacements are produced, thereby complicating any passage between worlds that may be supported by translation. ²⁶ These displacements result in multiple meanings, but only some of those meanings (e.g. ‘mountains’) are validated at the expense of others (‘earth beings’). ²⁷ Earth beings/mountains emerges as an equivocation of worlds, because the two cannot be the same (there is no correction to the mistranslation), and the equivocation takes on new meaning as Earth Beings enter political discourses.

The mediators identified by de la Cadena might be considered ‘border crossers’ between worlds, or what Gloria Anzaldúa calls nepantleras – ‘intermediaries between cultures and their various versions of reality’. ²⁸ These nepantleras ‘must choose to occupy spaces in between worlds’, epistemologies, and belief systems. ²⁹ For Mignolo and Walsh, nepantleras begin from the borders of coloniality, producing an ‘otherwise’ to colonial knowledge systems. ³⁰ They uphold a form of intercultural ‘translanguaging’ – ‘a way of speaking, talking, and thinking in between languages’ that opens up ‘new epistemic avenues’ by beginning from experiences and knowledges that coloniality has disavowed. ³¹ Enacted by mediators, such as nepantleras, from ‘the particularity of local histories, and political, ethical, and epistemic places of enunciation’, translanguaging feeds into interculturality as a ‘project of an otherwise’. ³² Translanguaging is therefore a kind of border translation – a process of translating from the borders to stimulate ‘a transformation conceived and impelled from the margins, from the ground up, and for society at large’. ³³

Attending to specific context and histories of translanguaging means paying attention to bilingual praxis (rather than abstract bilingualism). In this context, Catherine Walsh highlights the concept of chakana, an inherently place-based ‘educational perspective that accounts for unity in diversity, complementarity, reciprocity, correspondence and proportionality of knowledge’. ³⁴ Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui similarly pointed to the Aymara concept of ch’ixi, which emerges from the effects of colonial histories but reflects ‘a creative dialogue in a process of exchanging knowledges, aesthetics, and ethics’ – a process in which multiple cultural differences are not extinguished but instead antagonize and complement each other. ³⁵ Anthias demonstrated the utility of the concept for cultural geographical analysis in revealing the co-existence of Indigenous world-making projects and contradictory processes of capitalist and postcolonial development in the Bolivian Chaco. ³⁶

Both ch’ixi and chakana maintain difference and diversity, as multiple knowledges, discourses, and practices of being-in-the-world are held in tension without commensuration. A similarly culturally-embedded geolinguistic concept for understanding translanguaging in Peru’s Southern Andes might be that of iskay yachay – which Grimaldo Rengifo outlines as a productive and reciprocal process of diverse knowledge-exchange. ³⁷ Referring to a ‘couple of pairs’ (rather than simply ‘double’) iskay yachay results in multiple, connected possibilities for nurturing life. ³⁸ Iskay yachay may reflect a kind of generative ‘translanguaging’, as it feeds into broader, creative projects of revitalizing Quechua through new forms of knowing, learning, meaning-making. ³⁹

As ch’ixi selectively includes Modern/Colonial knowledges, so the reciprocal underpinnings of iskay yachay uphold dialogue among knowledges to inform context-specific applications and disseminations of multiple knowledges-in-connection. This recursive dialogue among knowledges may help to manage equivocations continuously and reflexively, facilitating a process of re-knowing multiple knowledges. In what follows, we explore these possibilities for iskay yacahay to act as a geolinguistic praxis of multi-epistemic co-existence; first, however, we briefly clarify our own positions and locus of enunciation.

Locus of enunciation in a politics of translation

The research we discuss is part of an ongoing project initiated in 2010 to explore the role of NGO-trained kamayoq in Peru’s Southern Andes. The research has included interviews and focus groups with 90 different kamayoq in the departments of Cusco and Apurímac, and with 49 key informants in government, NGOs, and the private sector. ⁴⁰ Observations were conducted in scenarios such as kamayoq field-based knowledge-sharing, kamayoq training, NGO meetings and workshops, government meetings and public fora, and public certification ceremonies. These activities occurred as we tracked the spatio-temporal evolution of development programs working with kamayoq, initially to explore their impact on kamayoq knowledge systems. The impetus for this paper emerged from our observation that the bilingual and intercultural design of these programs does not flatten knowledge hierarchies nor overcome a historical, colonial politics of translation.

As the research evolved, it became immersed in its own linguistic and epistemic challenges. Cultural geographers have pointed to the ethical-translational risks of research conducted across Western and Indigenous contexts. ⁴¹ Gidwani has highlighted how ‘connective geographies’ produce an uneven ‘politics of translation that is at once a politics of [knowledge] transportation’. ⁴² Scholars of cultural translation are also sensitive to the geopolitics of ‘travelling theory’, and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui has critiqued the cooptation of Indigenous concepts. ⁴³ We are therefore conscious that writing this paper in English risks implying that theory is developed in Anglophone academia, even as we think through Andean concepts and draw on kamayoq experiences of the colonial difference. Nonetheless, the paper is a part of an ongoing collaboration across Anglophone, Hispanic, and Quechua worlds, and the process of writing English and Spanish versions of the paper has been supported by continuous dialogue (in Spanish and Quechua) with key kamayoq interlocutors.

Given this context, here we reflect briefly on our own positions, roles, and ‘locus of enunciation’. ⁴⁴ Our collaboration began in 2012, as Julian (a researcher epistemically located largely in the global North and among Westernized knowledge-producing institutions) invited Justina to participate in the research as a paid research and field assistant, partly to help navigate some of the challenges of researching across Quechua and Spanish. Born in a Quechua community in rural Cusco, Justina is bilingual (Quechua/Spanish) and has previously worked on NGO projects relating to kamayoq training. Travelling together frequently, we developed a close working relationship. Justina would conduct and manage interviews in Quechua, and then transcribe them directly into Spanish. This process risked forcing Justina ‘to think epistemically like the ones in dominant positions’ – that is, like Julian as a researcher epistemically located in the global North. ⁴⁵ It also risked silencing Quechua language and knowledge practices, even as we seek to highlight some aspects of Quechua meaning-making. We made the joint decision while travelling to Quechua communities and discussing the challenges of inferring meaning across linguistic and epistemic systems and cultures. ⁴⁶

While attentive to the geopolitical implications of translating across Quechua, Hispanic, and Anglophone worlds, our methodology therefore produced its own equivocations. For example, our discussions would not necessarily carry the ideophony highlighted by Nuckolls, which may have been important in initial conversations with kamayoq. ⁴⁷ Justina’s experiential Quechua generated a relational understanding during the interviews (of human-alpaca relations, for example), which could not be carried through to subsequent explanations in Spanish. While possible equivocations might be identified in transcripts, it is no longer possible to return to the context of the interview to explore – and possibly manage – their effects. For example, the transcription of paqocha as alpaca misses the context-specific and relational meaning of paqocha (which we elaborate below). These equivocations are also gendered, as the final Spanish and English transcripts do not convey relational gendered meanings of concepts such as paqocha. These gendered dynamics of translation also reflect the structural histories of education and language, as Quechua women have systamtically been excluded from education and Spanish. The politics of translation is therefore intersectional, as it cannot be divorced from the broader colonial structures and processes that reproduce hierarchical categories of social differentiation. Given these challenges, we hope the four main equivocations we explore will be read as contextual windows into the politics of translation (including our own), rather than as unequivocal statements about Quechua worlds.

Equivocation I: kamayoq/agent of animation

The paqocha kamayoq [alpaca kamayoq] is the person who has the quality to transform the nature of the animal (Carlos de la Torre, interview in Spanish, July 2011). ⁴⁸

Carlos de la Torre worked with kamayoq for over three decades of his career with the NGO Soluciones Prácticas, which has been training kamayoq since the 1980s. De la Torre spoke with experiential authority and he was aware of kamayoq ties to Andean celestial spirituality. These ties descend from the Quechua root verb, kamay – to (give) charge (to), to animate, or to transform. ⁴⁹ Adding the –oq suffix, he explained, lends an individual the ability to mobilize the verb, meaning that kamayoq can be considered agents of animation. Yet de la Torre’s comments embody two related equivocations: kamayoq/agent of animation; and paqocha/alpaca, which together risk shrouding Andean animist ontologies and human-animal relations within ‘resource’-focused development programs.

When de la Torre used the phrase ‘change the nature of the animal’ he was mostly referring to processes of selective reproduction (to which we return later); yet there was also an implied connection to the historic role of various kamayoq. Prior to Hispanic colonization, for example, yanca kamayoq were responsible for overseeing a series of animistic rituals intended ‘to charge with being, to infuse with species power’. ⁵⁰ ‘Yanca’ can be translated as ‘to gift’, which in the Andes entails a reciprocal relation.

Through reciprocal gifting, yanca kamayoq mediated relations between camelids (alpacas and llamas), sacred mountains (Apus), pastoralists, and an animating constellation known as the Yacana. As ‘a being abounding in energy as physical as electricity or body warmth’, the Yacana is an animator (camaquin or camac) of alpacas and llamas. ⁵¹ It ‘moves through the middle of the sky’ before descending to earth to ‘infuse a powerful generative essence of llama vitality, which causes earthly llamas to flourish’. ⁵² Yanca kamayoq would oversee annual rituals to channel Yacana animating powers into earthly alpacas – for example, by racing alpacas up a nearby Apu, with the winning animals blessed by the Yacana and selected as prime breeding specimens.

For the Yacana to gift the infusion of vitalizing energy, however, the yanca kamayoq had to gift an earthy alpaca: each year in the month of camay, alpacas were sacrificed in order to consecrate the set of camelids to be used in the following year’s ceremony. ⁵³ Through these processes, kamayoq would ‘mobilize’ camay as ‘the energizing of extant matter. . . [as] a continuous act that works upon a being as long as it exists’. ⁵⁴ Describing a kamayoq as an agent of animation therefore necessarily refers to these relational engagements as articulated through animist rituals and held as continuous energy in earthly alpacas.

Such engagements point to a second equivocation of paqocha/alpaca. ‘Paqocha’ signals a relational engagement tied the affective nature of the animal, as derived from the animating powers of the Yacana. The term combines the root ‘paqo’ – which can mean animal – with ‘cha’, meaning affect or affective. Paqocha transliterates as ‘affective animal’, but the English phrase does not fully encapsulate the above ontology of species vitality. The Yacana itself can also be referred to as Paqo, suggesting an inability to separate earthly paqochas from the animating Yacana. Paqo can also refer to a sprit that calls to the Apus, ‘an initiate’ (shaman), or a gift that is transferred through ceremony (in this context, vitalizing energy). These equivocations reveal a complex process of interchange within which distinctions between the gift-giver and the gift-receiver begin to blur. Similar to Blaser’s detailing of the simultaneous and multiple nature of atîku and caribou, for kamayoq today paqocha is both alpaca and paqo – it is the articulation (linking in meaning and existence) between the two without commensuration.

Kamayoq have therefore long acted as mediators between worlds, translating the vital, animating energies of camacs such as the Yacana into earthly alpacas. Referring to kamayoq who participate in contemporary intercultural development programs as agents of animation acts as an equivocation of these historic but ongoing relations, as well as an equivocation of paqocha. Blaser has argued that Indigenous communities have long been sensitive to these dangers of equivocation – dangers often ignored by colonizers as they collapse diverse realities into one common world. ⁵⁵ In the following sections, we demonstrate this sensitivity by exploring how the historic translational relations upheld by kamayoq are re-asserted within development programs.

Equivocation II: kamayoq/a two-way door

The kamayoq act as a two-way door. . .the training allows the communication of content without facing cultural barriers, and it can be received with an attitude of dialogue and constructive debate. ⁵⁶

We farmers are also scientific researchers in the field: every day we are looking at this space. . .it is our world, of us the campesinos, and most of all the kamayoq (kamayoq Efracio, 2013, translation of a Spanish audio/transcript).

Carlos de la Torre’s notion of a two-way door reflects his positioning of kamayoq as ‘transcultural bridges’ within the ‘culturally appropriate’ model of campesino-a-campesino (farmer-to-farmer) technical extension that was implemented by Soluciones Prácticas. ⁵⁷ Beginning in the late 1980s, Soluciones Prácticas built on Andean agronomist Toribio Quispe Jallo’s system for training kamayoq as farmer extension agents, who would train other farmers in agricultural techniques and pastoral care. In 1996, de la Torre helped to introduce Escuela de Kamayoq (Kamayoq School) to the department of Cusco, with the aim of enabling the ‘faster flow of knowledge transfer and technical skills among peasant farmers’. ⁵⁸ The program grew into a broader approach to ‘community-based extension systems’, before being used as a model for state programs of intercultural adult education (see equivocation III).

De la Torre stressed that these programs were culturally appropriate due to the historic significance of kamayoq, their respected positions within Andean communities, their bilingualism, and their ability to articulate concepts of agricultural innovation in ways that Quechua communities would understand and adopt. ⁵⁹ Yet placing kamayoq at the center of these programs creates an equivocation of kamayoq/two-way door, through which NGO program staff conceive kamayoq as experts in transmitting and diffusing technical agricultural expertise.

Efracio’s comments above speak to the limits of this conceptualization. In stating that kamayoq are scientific researchers in and of the Andean world, Efracio questioned the purpose of a two-way door: while kamayoq might facilitate flows of knowledge, when the doors are constructed by NGO staff, kamayoq may be mobilized to serve the needs of pre-conceived programs. Yet Efracio was not entirely rejecting different knowledge systems; he was simultaneously drawing attention to hierarchies of knowledge, stressing the value of Andean knowledge systems to try and break down hierarchies, and articulating the value of being scientists across multiple epistemic realms (and disciplines). He was stressing that, in his Quechua community, Western science is not held above Andean knowledge systems, and that their intersection does not simply lead to convergence (or a hybrid): choices are made about when and under what circumstances to draw on different knowledges-in-connection.

Efracio’s other comments called for attention to processes of co-learning: for prioritizing Andean solutions to Andean agricultural problems and for feeding those solutions into supplementary forms of knowledge, which are developed in Quechua communities through dialogue (rather than by importing technical knowledge, for example). ⁶⁰ Efracio was pointing to a process similar to iskay yachay, with kamayoq acting as interlocutors in a reciprocal dialogue among multiple knowledges. Efracio stressed the reciprocal component, arguing that many development organizations and agencies have much to learn from Quechua knowledge systems, particularly given their attachment to the Andean living world (see equivocation I) – an attachment not possible for the kinds of technical knowledge brought by external organizations.

Taken together, Carlos and Efracio’s comments embody an equivocation of kamayoq in terms of their knowledge-animating roles. While attentive to the culturally-embedded nature of kamayoq, de la Torre translated kamayoq knowledge-sharing into the terms of technical extension. For kamayoq Efracio, this places diverse knowledges into a hierarchy and imbalances iskay yachay. Frustrated with multiple experiences of his knowledge-in-practice being rejected or coopted by NGO programs, Efracio has begun to resist participation. Instead, he has been advocating among his fellow campesinos for more autonomous approaches to conceiving and implementing local plans, based on Quechua understandings of nurturing the living world. While this importantly begins from the experience of being rejected at the borders of coloniality (in Mignolo & Walsh’s terms), like Cusicanqui’s ch’ixi it does not prohibit the inclusion of Western knowledges. The following sections illustrate some of the challenges that Efracio and his colleagues face in living this tension.

Equivocation III: kamayoq/rural promoter

In 2009, a newly-created government entity – the Peruvian Institute for the Evaluation, Accreditation, and Certification of the Quality of Basic Education (IPEBA) – introduced a national system for certifying the ‘competencies’ of ‘rural extensionists’ (extensionistas rurales) and ‘livestock promoters’ (promotores pecuarios). ⁶¹ Using Soluciones Prácticas’ Escuela de Kamayoq as a model, and enlisting the NGO as an official partner institution, IPEBA established certification programs for a variety of technical kamayoq specialities (e.g. animal health, reproductive management). In 2015, IPEBA was folded into its parent institution, SINEACE, which now runs the certification programs. ⁶² The kamayoq/rural promoter equivocation embodied in the IPEBA/SINEACE framework inscribes and values certain kinds of knowledge, thereby redefining what it means ‘to be’ kamayoq.

Despite developing the framework through a series of mesas técnicas (participatory roundtables) with existing kamayoq, key individuals in IPEBA and SINEACE took the advice of Soluciones Prácticas staff to focus on technical knowledges that are amenable to standardized testing. Although some experienced kamayoq stressed their responsibility to preserve traditional knowledges (such as traditional medicines using Andean plants), kamayoq did not overwhelmingly object to the technical orientation, partly due to their general desire for knowledge and training. But the technical focus still did not come from the ground up, like Mignolo & Walsh’s vision of decolonial knowledges. Rather, it reiterates the hierarchical organization of kamayoq training programs by determining what kinds of knowledges are deemed appropriate for certification.

The IPEBA decision prompted the exclusion (until 2018) of culturally-situated knowledge-practices from the ‘norms’ and ‘indicators’ that IPEBA/SINEACE-qualified assessors use to evaluate kamayoq ‘competencies’. ⁶³ According to IPEBA/SINEACE representatives, they made this decision on logistical grounds, with the cultural components of kamayoq knowledge-sharing expected to occur organically through peer-to-peer and field-based processes of inter-cultural training. Knowledge hierarchies were therefore reproduced, as kamayoq ‘competencies’ were conceived as technical expertise, which was explicitly valued above culturally-situated ways of knowing the Andean living community.

IPEBA/SINEACE certification manuals and training practices also conceive the equivocation of kamayoq/rural promoter in economic terms, creating a shift in conceptions of knowledge validity and value. We observed a training component implemented by Soluciones Prácticas staff and consultants as part of the roll-out of the IPEBA approach. The ‘Workshop on Participatory Diagnostics of Market Systems’ aimed to help kamayoq understand their position and role within economic markets, encouraging them to participate as rational economic actors. This emphasis is upheld by the translational processes embodied in the design of the kamayoq competency certification process, which revolves around the ‘professional profile’ of the candidate, as determined according to a ‘functional map’ and a related set of knowledge indicators. Each ‘specialty’ (e.g. reproductive management) corresponds to a particular profile and functional map, containing a series of Units and ‘transversal modules’ relating to broader training objectives. ⁶⁴ To complete the training and evaluation process for a Unit, each kamayoq must complete a series of ‘functional fulfilments’, demonstrating practical application of knowledge according to ‘performance criteria’, ‘evidence of knowledge’, ‘range of application’, and ‘desirable attitudes’. ⁶⁵ Once kamayoq have completed at least a year of training and then demonstrated their ‘functional fulfilments’ in front of an IPEBA/SINEACE-accredited evaluator, they receive a formal, government-stamped certificate attesting to their specific skill set.

Through this process, kamayoq praxis shifts from an oral, practical, and reciprocal sharing of place-based knowledge, to an inscribed and relatively fixed list of indicators and performance criteria. Kamayoq knowledge/praxis is literally inscribed on a page in Spanish; until 2018, there were no Quechua versions of the training modules, despite the fact that training and evaluation is mostly conducted in Quechua (as encouraged). This fits Andean norms that Quechua is often reserved for oral interactions among other ‘pure’ Quechua speakers. ⁶⁶ Yet in this case, the orality of Quechua knowledge production and circulation is inscribed in Spanish for the purpose of achieving the Peruvian state’s objectives of increasing employability (the certificates act in lieu of formal education certificates). This process of assessing kamayoq knowledge, of rendering some forms of knowledge visible while obscuring others, highlights uneven processes of exclusion and inclusion entailed in a politics of translation. To borrow the language of Blaser and de la Cadena, inscription institutionalizes equivocations of ‘kamayoq’ by rendering some equivocations valid (‘rural promoter’) while excluding others as incommensurate multiplicities (‘agent of animation’).

These processes produce the kinds of disjunctures and power differentials identified by Gal, as kamayoq praxis is translated into evidence for the state’s political project. ⁶⁷ Indeed, SINEACE proactively distributes ‘success stories’ of formally-employed kamayoq in their publications and in public fora. ⁶⁸ Yet these success stories are socio-spatially variable; some kamayoq take on the role of flag-bearer, others distance themselves from the constraints of the programs. The training programs are therefore internalized in multiple ways by different kamayoq, as the politics of translation works through the colonial structures of Andean societies and the hierarchical ordering of Spanish and Quechua.

Translation/equivocation is therefore a key component of how development programs are differentially constituted in the Andes (as Radcliffe has highlighted). The outcome is also a spatial ordering of kamayoq praxis according to localized Quechua knowledge systems, linguistic norms, inter-Quechua communication strategies, and Spanish-Quechua inter-relations. ⁶⁹ Given this spatial patterning, how might different communities of kamayoq engage in practices that begin to manage the above equivocations kamayoq praxis? To address this question, we return to the equivocation of kamayoq/agent of animation.

Double translation: kamayoq/agent of animation

By participating in the training programs discussed above, kamayoq begin to repurpose equivocations of kamayoq/agent of animation and paqocha/alpaca. This occurs as kamayoq link alpaca co-nurturance to private and state-related actors/institutions implementing genetic improvement programs to re-vitalize alpaca populations. ⁷⁰ As part of their training in the IPEBA/SINEACE certification process, kamayoq visit alpaca genetic experimentation centers to learn new techniques in alpaca reproduction and management. The Director of a leading, privately funded research station describes genetic experimentation as a process of ‘refreshing the blood’ (refrescamiento de sangré). ⁷¹ To combat genetic defects, research stations develop prized breeding males, and ‘the animals that. . .are not good enough to be sold for any kind of money to the market, then we just give them away to the very small breeders as refreshers of blood, so they can combat and avoid any major genetic defects’. ⁷²

The connection of kamayoq to these practices prompts translational shifts in the notion of infusing species power into alpacas, of the paqocha/alpaca equivocation, and of the forms of animation articulated by kamayoq. For kamayoq such as Guillermo, ‘good técnicos’ come from these genetic research stations, but only if they have intimately ‘lived with alpacas since childhood’. Rosaline – a young kamayoq from the neighbouring region – similarly expressed that only she can truly know her alpacas, because she has ‘grown with’ her alpacas, she is always with her alpacas as they are with her, and technical knowledge cannot displace this co-nurturance over lifetimes and generations. ⁷³

A kamayoq couple, Juan and Julia, also discussed everyday aspects of living with their ‘alpaquitas’. ⁷⁴ New techniques applied by the couple complement, but do not displace, affective human-paqocha relations, particularly as reproductive management in the field is necessarily intimate. Due to what genetic scientists at leading alpaca research stations deem to be a quirk of alpaca reproductive dynamics, frozen alpaca semen cannot be used for assisted reproduction; rather, the male has to be live, present, and willing to facilitate acts of assisted insemination. ⁷⁵ For Juan and Julia, this is more than a genetic quirk; it produces new dimensions of knowing alpacas and of engaging in co-nurturing processes of ‘affective attunement’ according to the practice of charkoy (breeding) entailed in alpaquero calendar. This calendar is as much a relational map of alpaca re-production as it is a time-stamped list of best practices in alpaca management: knowing when and how to facilitate reproduction means living with alpacas, and practicing the celestial rhythms of the alpaquero calendar, and understanding biological rhythms of ovulation and fertility.

In this way, multiple knowledges are applied in conjunction: Juan and Julia ceremonially burn dry alpaca foetuses (paqocha q’osñichiy), symbolically offer the first alpaca offspring of the season to condors (uña t’inkay), and they practice breeding (charkoy) as assisted reproduction in line with technical training; while all are aimed at successful insemination and gestation, their pathways are different. The result would not be the same if an external técnico were to arrive, apply technical knowledge, and burn an alpaca fetus. An external técnico cannot be ‘with sibling alpaquitas’; while they can offer knowledge opportunities, implanting such knowledge as praxis requires sibling alpaquitas – it requires the relational engagement embodied in paqocha. External técnicos can refresh the blood of alpaca populations, but they cannot re-animate earthly paqochas without living the relational engagement. Hence Gillermo’s point that alpaca técnicos must relationally live with alpacas, and Efracio’s sentiment that being Andean scientists in the field prioritises everyday and experiential knowledge of and engagement with the Andean living community, and then initiates dialogue with the concept of diverse scientific research. As practices held in connection by kamayoq-paqocha/campesino-alpaca relations (like the ‘couple of pairs’ embodied in iskay yachay), affective attunement is achieved through these interlocking dialogues.

This condition of relational engagement points to a kind of double translation and translanguaging similar to that outlined by Mignolo & Schiwy, as it creates a ‘condition for political intervention by subaltern languages’. ⁷⁶ In our example, living with paqochas is a condition for the application of knowledge-praxis, thereby repurposing the equivocation of paqocha/alpaca carried by many NGO staff and research center technicians. Kamayoq are enacting a kind of border translation, as newly introduced knowledges must work through the Andean animist and relational notion of paqocha.

While not an act of resisting translations or colonial knowledges per se, these scenarios are more than simply multi-lingual; there is more at work here than a re-translation back from (technical) alpaca to (relational) paqocha, as intercultural development programs begin to be restructured (in part) according to the relational engagements that underpin paqocha. Through the partial connections brought about by this dialogue among knowledges, each knowledge system is transformed ‘while simultaneously seeming to keep something about it the same’. ⁷⁷ In working back through Andean praxis of co-nurturance – through concepts of kamay, paqocha, Yacana – kamayoq hold multiple knowledge systems in tension, transforming those knowledge systems while maintaining their distinctive qualities. As such, kamayoq repurpose equivocations from their lived experience of the colonial difference. These insights raise questions as to whether kamayoq knowledge praxis, when articulated through iskay yachay, might reflect a geolinguistic praxis of decolonial ontography – the charting of ontological assumptions and presuppositions from the borders of coloniality. ⁷⁸

Conclusion: repurposing equivocations as geolinguistic ontographies of co-existence

Cultural geographical scholarship is increasingly debating the contested spaces, landscapes, relationalities, and geolinguistic practices that are produced by and through post- and decolonial entanglements. We have sought to contribute to these discussions by highlighting how diverse ontographical praxis is shaped by and may challenge colonial hierarchies of knowledge and language. While ontographies are hierarchically ordered – as articulations of one world are held over those of others – we also raised the question of how we might better account for the border translations that challenge such hierarchies. We explored articulations of iskay yachay as a potentially decolonial geolinguistic praxis that is oriented towards epistemic co-existence.

We use the phrase multi-epistemic being and co-existence to convey the role of language in upholding links between multiple knowledges and realities in the Andean living community; to convey both the ontological bases of language and the linguistic bases of ontologies. ⁷⁹ A series of tensions emerge through the geolinguistic practices and ontographies that characterize these multi-epistemic spaces. Exploring these tensions complements cultural geographical work on the politics of articulating Indigenous identities, ethnicities, and forms of belonging in the more-than-human world. ⁸⁰

First, there is the question of whether/how we might read kamayoq praxis as decolonial – as the articulation of worlds ‘otherwise’. Sarah Radcliffe has argued that a commitment to decolonial geographies means ‘placing diverse knowledges on a horizontal relation, bringing knowledges from different settings into juxtaposition with each other’. ⁸¹ At the center of a politics of translation in intercultural development programs, kamayoq may be key mediators in such a juxtaposition; they may be similar to Anzaldúa’s nepantleras. ⁸² For Mignolo and Walsh, nepantleras live in and emerge from the cracks produced by the colonial difference. ⁸³ Yet nepantleras must choose to occupy these spaces, which is perhaps only partially true for many of the kamayoq who engaged in our study (few expressed similar sentiments).

Nonetheless, kamayoq may help to build Sundberg’s notion of ‘multi-epistemic literacy’ – the ability to understand the world in dialogue with multiple different worldviews. ⁸⁴ Blaser similarly proposed that ‘border dialogue’ can create open-ended ‘practices of knowledge’, which articulate the multiple realities that coloniality has disavowed. ⁸⁵ This is what we mean in the title by ‘articulating worlds otherwise’; in our analysis we demonstrated how equivocations of Andean world-making processes may be managed through the praxis of iskay yachay, countering processes of commensuration that collapse Andean worlds into one world of development programing. In this light, iskay yachay offers a culturally embedded and geographically expressed form of retranslation-in-connection, helping us think through how equivocations might be repurposed through translanguaging and other geolinguistic praxis in place-contingent ways.

Second, the potential for kamayoq to forge decolonial alternatives from colonial borders comes into question when we examine their links to bilingual adult education and intercultural development programs. Some cultural geographers have argued that such programs create opportunities of professionalization and affiliation across places ⁸⁶ ; while critics in Peru have highlighted that these programs can ignore diversity within Quechua groups and can reproduce socio-cultural inequalities. ⁸⁷ Both of these assessments may be the case for some kamayoq (as we discuss elsewhere). ⁸⁸ Can the praxis that emerges from participation in these programs still be considered ‘decolonial doings’ – relational, embodied practices that begin from the borders of coloniality? ⁸⁹ Among kamayoq these might be relational engagements with paqochas, or kamayoq praxis of reciprocal knowledge exchange underpinned by iskay yachay. Yet kamayoq praxis does not necessarily reflect outright rejection of colonial knowledges; iskay yachay is not founded on rejection, but on reciprocal (if still contested) dialogue among knowledges.

Thus, if Mignolo is right to assert that ‘decoloniality to be defended cannot be funded’, what does it mean when kamayoq praxis is connected to a politics of translation upheld by funded intercultural development programming? ⁹⁰ Are kamayoq dismantling colonial value systems, as Pablo Mamani requests, or are they reproducing what Walsh calls ‘functional interculturality’, which shrouds ongoing colonial relations and differences? ⁹¹ Our analysis points to a complex in-between space; to the cracks of modernity/coloniality in which seeds of decoloniality may germinate, but not without constraints. ⁹²

We cannot speak for kamayoq and we can only analyze the perspectives of kamayoq who participated in our study; nor do we mean to forcibly reveal kamayoq relational ontologies and decolonial praxis that may otherwise be intentionally concealed from colonial view. ⁹³ Nonetheless, we have argued that repurposing equivocations – by re-translating through Andean relational concepts and praxis – may help to assert alternative ways of being, even when connected to formal development programs. Catherine Walsh has argued that praxis may be understood as decolonial when it is a ‘propositional and prospective praxis that points towards an otherwise’, even if it is ‘not always labelled by [its] participants as decolonial (nor necessarily framed by the concept of decoloniality)’. ⁹⁴ As with Anzaldúa’s nepantleras, however, this must remain a choice; we cannot unequivocally conclude that kamayoq praxis is decolonial, even if we make use of some decolonial analytical tools.

Nonetheless, we consider it important that research focuses on the gray areas where key mediators such as kamayoq exist: in the cracks between intercultural development programs, formal adult and bilingual education reforms, and the application of geolinguistic and ontographic practices for multi-epistemic co-existence (place-based approaches to knowledge-sharing, education, and re-embedding praxis through Andean concepts and ontologies). It is at these intersections where a kamayoq geolinguistic praxis of repurposing equivocations may represent decolonial experiments, doings, or everyday articulations/ontographies of worlds otherwise.

Further attention to these everyday geolinguistic practices would be fruitful, we argue, to move cultural geographical debates on decolonial education beyond the confines of formal education institutions. ⁹⁵ Nicholas Padilla, for example, has stressed that while Indigenous education institutions may reproduce Western pedagogical models, they also ‘promote intercultural indigenous unity by working across and maintaining cultural difference’. ⁹⁶ Virginia Zavala has meanwhile demonstrated that while formal intercultural and bilingual education programs in Peru struggle to guarantee Quechua rights, Quechua youth take creative and politized routes of their own through the use of language in everyday urban life and within socioeconomic struggles. ⁹⁷ Our analysis adds to these findings by highlighting everyday and extra-institutional dynamics of intercultural knowledge exchange and the geolinguistic praxis entailed.

Bringing similar insights to bear on cultural geographical debates would beneficial, we argue, given the limits of decolonizing education within formal, often Westernized education institutions. For those working with kamayoq (e.g. NGO program staff), emphasis might be placed on reflexive support for everyday Quechua processes of building knowledge and praxis, rather than on processes of standardization according to technical criteria. For cultural geographers, we encourage attention beyond just the ongoing colonial politics of mis-translation, to focus on the spaces produced by the repurposing equivocations and geolinguistic praxis as ontography.

Finally, therefore, these insights contribute to broader discussions about the production of decolonial geographical knowledges, even though we do not claim to be dismantling colonial histories (as suggested by Halvorsen). ⁹⁸ Our contribution remains bound by a politics of translation across Quechua, Hispanic, and Anglophone worlds. In this bind – discussed by Jazeel in relation to the structural challenges and geopolitics of supporting decolonial scholarship, and which we have elsewhere referred to as a decolonial analytical problem – there is a risk that attempts to support decolonial praxis may paradoxically reproduce a colonial geopolitics of knowledge production. ⁹⁹

Critically engaging and self-challenging our own locus of enunciation is important, but perhaps more valuable would be an opening of knowledge production processes to highlight the work of decolonial Quechua and other Indigenous scholars, activists, and practitioners, who are interested in the kinds of inter-Quechua and inter-Indigenous communication strategies that might be employed across diverse linguistic groups, dialects, and contexts. ¹⁰⁰ If there is a need for processes of ‘entering and exiting academia’, as Radcliffe argues, this might prompt more than just critical reflections on modern epistemology, suggesting support for everyday Quechua and other Indigenous geolinguistic practices and ontographical projects. ¹⁰¹ As our own locus of enunciation suggests, we might be in a position to support such projects, but without defining them or determining the conceptual terms of intercultural and multi-epistemic dialogues. This approach, we hope, can ground analyses of decolonial praxis (rather than abstractly theorize about decolonization). In this way, we might create space for diverse (border) knowledges to thrive on their own terms, supporting those who re-purpose equivocations to change the terms of the conversation.