Decolonial Conversations in Andean Patagonia

A deep ethnography of life in the Mapuche territories of Patagonia that shows how decolonial and Indigenous approaches speak to one another in practice

In this open access book, Agustina Solera draws on four years of sustained engagement in the Mapuche territories of Andean Patagonia in an attempt to open Western knowledge to Andean ways of relating to, knowing and feeling the world, as well as to show the challenges that such opening entails.

Although decoloniality is a concept that has gained widespread usage in academic circles in the Global North, it is often employed without full engagement with the originating debates that questioned the stubborn persistence of Eurocentric colonial dynamics even in the postcolonial era.

Solera summarizes these debates; shows how they speak to the ways in which coloniality and development are lived and felt in Patagonia and reveals how Indigenous ways of inhabiting the territory in Andean Patagonia make important political gestures in ways that are under-recognized in Western thought.

Ultimately, Solera offers a uniquely situated exploration of the fundamental question that lies at the heart of any conversation between Western knowledge and the plurality of ways of knowing that it has historically excluded and dismissed: how can Western knowledge open itself to the rich and profound gnoseological plurality in the world?

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on Bloomsbury Collections. Open access was funded by the Bloomsbury Open Collections Library Collective.