Earth Stewardship and the Biocultural Ethic: Latin American Perspectives - Earth Stewardship: Linking Ecology and Ethics in Theory and Practice - page 92

and everyday life of Aymara communities. The diversity of forms of ecological
knowledge and practices rooted in Amerindian colonial and post-colonial cultural
habits - which, in turn, are embedded in ancestral native habitats and contemporary
anthropogenic habitats - offers today insights for stewardship and biocultural co-
inhabitation both at local and planetary scales.
The complementarity of the forms of knowledge offered by Amerindian world-
views, pre-Socratic philosophical foundations of Western civilization, and contempo-
rary sciences is emphasized by the biocultural ethic. Ancient and modern forms of
knowledge indicate that human beings participate in an ecological structure and order.
Today, the ESA's Earth Stewardship Initiative can be built upon by incorporating the
original meaning of economy: an administration of the oikos (or habitat in the termi-
nology of the biocultural ethic), that understands and respects the ecological order of
the oikos and the political order of human societies. Toward this aim, it is indispens-
able to reorient the current supremacy of prevailing neoliberal free-market policies.
The essence of these policies has been to free themselves from restrictions for entre-
preneurship and economic growth. As a consequence neoliberal policies override or
often ignore both the ecological order and the political order, as we will discuss below.

8.3 Biocultural Roots of South American Environmental

Philosophy

In mid twentieth century, some Latin American anthropologists and philosophers,
such as Rodolfo Kusch in Argentina, forged pioneer studies that interrelated the bio-
physical reality of Meso- and South-American landscapes with the symbolic-linguistic
reality of Amerindian cultures. These studies examine the intricate links between both
realms of reality embedded in their fractured, dynamic, historical courses of colonial-
ism. In his topic America Profunda (“Deep America”), Kusch developed an approach
that incorporates ways of understanding and inhabiting the landscapes rooted in pre-
and post-colonial contexts that question the prevalence of theoretical models devel-
oped in academia (e.g., the Tragedy of the Commons as discussed by Kingsland
2015 in this volume [Chap. 2 ] ): “as if” such theoretical models would have universal
validity unaltered by local biocultural and historical contexts.
To counterbalance concentration on theoretical models and assumptions that become
universal in academia, Kusch focused on dynamic forms of knowledge while research-
ing the Incan legacies in peasant communities of Bolivia and northeast Argentina.
Working at the University of Salta, he initiated a comparative ethno-philosophy that
contextualizes supposedly “unalterable” universal notions, thereby enabling a better
understanding of the diversity of local forms of knowledge and environmental thought.
Kusch elaborated a geocultural perspective that considered both the cultures and the
territories (Romero-Bedregal 2006 ). The integration of culture and territory is essential
for an Earth stewardship, because concentration of land property and displacement of
local poor communities is facilitated by prevailing development models (see May Jr
(2015a, b); da Rocha and Possamai 2015 ; Viola and Basso 2015 in this volume [Chaps.