The question of dignity in Indigenous worlds

Abstract

In the worldwide humanly caused environmental crisis, dignity and the perceived dissociation of humans with their common house (Earth) have become a porous and diverse philosophical ground for a contestation and the displacement of the knowing Anthropos that made from the conquest of nature its privilege position; it is this relevant ground that has enabled too the ‘knowing – feeling – thinking’ of dignity without the Anthropos as ´an end in itself´, or better, ‘not only against it’ (De la Cadena, 2019, p. 478; Kant, 1996). Given that dignitas hominis is predominantly an anthropocentric Western concept, rethinking it without humanity, or without the hegemonic rationalities that have constituted its anthropocentric universal substance, requires a dialogue with multiple Earth ethics, particularly with those world’s ethics that never have accepted the colonial division between the human and the non- human life, namely Indigenous worlds. At a time of urgency when human rights are rampantly fragile at a global scale, the making an issue of dignity in this paper starts with repositioning it as an ontological invitation. Referencing dignity as such has some methodological consequences. One of these consequences is the possibility to disengage this value from its anthropocentrism to foster an intercultural dialogue with multiple dignities. Second, by reinforcing the locus enuntiationis and the practices from which dignity and the environment is defended, a canon opens up for pluriversality that is a ´world where many worlds fit´(Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional [EZLN], 1997). Standing in the front door of a comprehension of the world that far exceeds the western understanding of it and, the acknowledgment that the cognitive experience of the world is extremely diverse, this paper will problematize the idea of dignity in the universality paradigm (Guilherme y Dietz, 2017; Merali, 2014; Mignolo, 2011; Quijano, 2000).