Landing Philosophy: Guamán Poma and the Metaphysics of Land

ABSTRACT Despite how often he is quoted and discussed in the literature on Colonial Latin American Studies, there have been few attempts to interpret Guamán Poma as proposing an original philosophical position. This essay intends to be an initial move in this direction and argues that his distinct conception of land and the philosophical praxis related to it may serve as inspiration for a new metaphysics of land, in which both our ontology and our epistemology are dependent on the territory we inhabit, and in which philosophers are conceived as travelers, as pilgrims who both reconnoiter the territory in the manner of astrologists and transform it under the guise of artists. The essay, though, does not limit itself to hermeneutical considerations, and instead attempts to argue for a new philosophical conception inspired by Guamán Poma; to do so, it reconsiders several ideas stemming from the work of Gloria Anzaldúa (on borderlands) and Nishida Kitarō (on the logic of basho). Along the way, it also offers general remarks on the methodology used and on its possible applications to intercultural philosophy in general.