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that leads to the extinction of plant species traditionally cultivated (such as the hun-
dreds of varieties of potato, chili, and many other plant species), of biocultural land-
scapes (such as the forest islands or apete created by the Kayapo people in the
Amazonian region), and of cultural practices (such as exchanges of seeds among
women of Aymara and Quechua communities inhabiting the Andean slopes) that form
an integral part of the ecosystem dynamic in the Neotropics. Many ancestral ecological
practices are currently alive among creole peasant and Amerindian communities that
inhabit Latin America. These communities are traditional stewards of the land (see
Mamani Bernabé ( 2015 ), in this topic [Chap. 6 ] ).
In the decade of the 1960s, the perspective of Kusch contrasted with the fact that
forms of indigenous thought and life were ignored, even negated, by an academic
philosophy dominated by an analytical-positivist school of thought. Counteracting
this tendency, in Geocultura y el Hombre Americano (“Geoculture and the American
Man”), Kusch ( 1976 ) introduced the term geoculture . With this term, South
American geography ceases to be seen through a colonialist perspective, as a virgin
territory to be conquered and used, and begins, instead, to be understood as a terri-
tory where cultural meanings are rooted. Kusch views the American continent as a
place where an extended colonial Western culture coexists with Amerindian cul-
tures, their ancestral memories, lifestyles, and thought patterns that have survived
the colonial and postcolonial (or neocolonial) periods. Confl ictive encounters
between pre-Columbian peoples of the Andes and the Old World Europeans, Kush
argues, established dialectical relationships between two polarized notions:
￿ estar aquí (“to be here” and “to be at”), which expresses the essence of what
remains of the Amerindian cultures, and
￿ ser alguien (“to become someone”), which defi nes the attitudes of the European
colonizers.
Since the arrival of the Spaniard conquistadors, the “New World” environments
have been subjected to the prevailing colonial attitude of “possession of objects,” which
is established by individual self-centeredness focused on “becoming somebody in a
future time” ( ser alguien ). This attitude contrasts with the customary Amerindian atti-
tude of “participation and interaction with organisms,” focused on present time, place
and community ( estar aquí) . As emphasized by Mamani Bernabé (in this topic
[Chap. 6 ]), a person is fully-mature and virtuous through the cultivation of relation-
ships. Kusch's conceptual framework converges with the approach of biocultural ethics
because both aim to better understanding and valuing how heterogeneous cultural hab-
its are interwoven with the heterogeneous native, rural, and urban habitats (Rozzi
et al. 2008 ). Today, these biocultural relationships are disrupted as local communities
are displaced, and native habitats are left open to accelerated processes of land-use
changes, including large-scale mining and expansion of monocultures associated with
a concentration of the ownership of land (Ceccon and Miramontes 1999 ; Neugebauer
2003 ; Tobasura 2006 ; Finer et al. 2008 , 2009 ). The massive rural-urban migration that
has taken place in Latin America since the 1950s has generated a loss of the ancestral
human stewards of the land . The loss of the stewards of the land has led, in turn, to
losses of biocultural life habits and native habitats, including their rich biocultural
diversity, understood as vital communities of co-inhabitants (Rozzi 2013 ) (Box 8.2 ).
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