“The dominant story of life is not working”. So begins a book that despite being written with the rigour one would expect from three academics at the cutting edge of their respective fields, is a radically experimental text that invites its readers to dare to reimagine that which seems so immutable that it has disappeared almost completely from view. It is a book that seeks to challenge not only the foundations of a particular economic system or political philosophy, but of the very fabric of reality within which and out of which such tapestries of meaning are woven. The authors of this text, Arturo Escobar, Michal Osterweil and Kriti Sharma, are people with extensive experience in thinking deeply about the roots of the polycrisis we currently face as inhabitants of this planet, each originating from distinct socio-cultural and disciplinary backgrounds. Escobar is an anthropologist currently based in Manizales, Colombia, whose critiques of development policy in the Global South, most famously outlined in Encountering Development (1995), have had widespread influence in social movements across Latin America, several of which he has personally collaborated with. Osterweil is an anthropology professor at UNC Chapel Hill and long-time mentee of Escobar’s, whose writing has focused on the emergence of a “new political imaginary” in the form of political projects including the Zapatistas, the World Social Forum and Counter-Summits. Sharma, in turn, is assistant professor of Critical Race Science and Technology Studies at UC Santa Cruz, whose work aims to bridge biology, philosophy and art in search of ways to “re-tell the story of life”. 

As important as these credentials are in establishing the credibility of the writers, their voices in this book are not those of dry no-nonsense researchers but rather of poet-thinkers trying with every new idea presented to break both themselves and their readers out of what they consider obsolete and counter-productive ways of thinking about the existential problems we now face. This approach gives the text an inchoate quality, an open-endedness that beckons toward a hidden horizon lying just out of reach. They make occasional use of poetry in addition to nuanced analysis to precipitate ruptures in thought that could prove fertile ground upon which to sow the seeds of a new reality. Due to the sheer density of concepts expressed, I am not able to fully convey the interweaving of different discursive styles in the text, with my focus remaining on examining the arguments set forth in the text. 

The book, like this review, is structured around a quote by Jamaican novelist and philosopher Sylvia Wynter (2007: 75), to whose writing they often return: “That which we have made, we can unmake, then, consciously now, remake” (italics in original). They split this quote into three parts, corresponding to the parts of the book: 1. Remembering (“That which we have made, we can unmake…”); 2. Choosing (“…then, consciously now…”); 3. Remake (“…remake”) (Escobar, Osterweil and Sharma 2024: 24). The first section concerns itself with further outlining the basis for the argument that we need to find a new a story for life, while also examining the dominant narratives that shape the times we live in and how they came about. I link their discussion with Blaser’s (2013) consideration of how politicians control ontological boundaries in Latin American politics, examining the ways in which narratives are empowered and perpetuated (or disempowered and annihilated) in the real world. The second part consists of one chapter exploring instances of social change through the lens of what they call the politics of relationality. They argue that the failures and misinterpretations (or “slippages” as they call them) of such movements are part of the non-linear path to relational worlds. I look at Tănăsescu’s (2020) study of legal and relational notions of personhood in Ecuador to show how slippages can occur. Finally, the third part suggests some rough principles for the enactment of relational politics, of which I focus primarily on the final one as key.

Remember (“That which we have made, we can unmake…”)

The authors begin by elaborating on the notion of restor(y)ing life, a play on words hinting at the inextricability of enacting the desire to bring life back into balance with itself from the need to craft a different narrative of our place in existence. This interdependence is itself the cornerstone of a new way of understanding ourselves, to which they give the name Homo narrans (also borrowed from Wynter). Homo narrans is a hybrid being made of equal parts myth and biology. In the words of Escobar, Osterweil and Sharma (2024: 25): “The biologies of human beings—our bodies, communities, and ecologies—support consciousness, awareness, language, sociality, storytelling, and myth. The communicative, creative, artistic, storytelling, and meaning-making activities of human beings in turn create lived worlds and lived selves.” This circularity is a kind of chicken-and-egg problem where it is impossible to determine which comes first. Instead of attempting to find an origin, these two components of human nature can instead be seen as emerging simultaneously as an interdependent whole. According to Varela and Maturana (1987), who first developed this circular view of the human being, the main thing to understand here is that the world is not ‘out there’, but that it is instead brought forth from within the organisms which have in turn been brought forth from within the world. 

So what is/are the myth(s) that make our world? Escobar, Osterweil and Sharma identify the dominant self-narrative of our time as that of modern, patriarchal, secular, rational Man. According to this story, humans are fundamentally biological beings selfishly competing for survival in a world of natural scarcity. Wynter (Wynter and McKittrick 2015: 35) calls this the narrative of Homo oeconomicus or Bioeconomic Man. There are two crucial points to be made about this. First, Wynter stresses that this is not the only story being told about human nature, but rather one that is born out of a particular social context of ruling-class bourgeoisie that through its great power overrepresents their narrative as one that encompasses the entire human species as (biologically) defined by it. Second, myth is here being used, as it is throughout this book, in the sense of story-enacted-as-the-real. That is, a story of life endowed with such power that it becomes the fabric of reality itself. This is why our bodies are shaken with true fear at the prospect of abject poverty, unemployment and homelessness even though these are conditions made possible through social structures of our own making, not unavoidable facts of life. The authors follow Wynter in tracing the origins of this story through two successive historical transformations that consolidate the alliance between modernity, patriarchy and science. The first comes with the Copernican Revolution in the 16th century which decentres the Christian God and gives rise to a human defined by their ability to rationally understand the universe through objective analysis. Wynter calls this Homo politicus. Toward the end of the 18th century, Malthus’ notion of natural scarcity combines with Darwin’s theory of Evolution to create an economised human ruled by the laws of nature (Homo oeconomicus) that still prevails to this day. 

Our ability to take this world-understanding and uphold it as the only true way of perceiving reality is rooted in what Escobar, Osterweil and Sharma call modern social theory (MST), which constitutes the principles of modern thought. MST is an intellectual tradition based on three base ontological dualisms, which then give rise to a panoply of surrogate dualisms that make up the world. They are as follows: us/them (or modern/nonmodern, civilised/uncivilised); human/nonhuman; subject/object. These then bring about all other dualisms we are familiar with, including life/matter, reason/emotion, science/non-science, man/woman, etc. In each of these binaries, one half is upheld as superior to the other (e.g. man over woman, science over non-science) causing moderns to dismiss a wide range of human experiences as irrelevant and primitive. This kind of thinking underlies the notion that humans are individuals separate from a single unchangeable natural world ‘out there’, to which each society adapts through their cultures and belief systems. Mononaturalism complemented by multiculturalism. This implies that all societies that do not recognise the physical laws of nature as the basis for reality are living in illusion, and only modern humans know the truth. The authors borrow John Law’s (2015: 126-31) term of one-world world to describe this state of affairs. Law compares this to an Indigenous Australian ontology. For them, a reality ‘out there’ entirely detached from the rituals and work required to (re)enact it makes no sense. Under this paradigm, land cannot belong to people, nor do people quite belong to the land. Instead, they are mutually engaged in a work of creation that remakes life, the spiritual world, land and people all as part of one whole that is tied to a specific territory.

One of the most significant points in this section is that as with the world of moderns, the life story of Indigenous Australians is a matter of knowledge, not belief. The authors point out that the division between belief and reality is itself an ontological dualism originating in the tradition of modern thought expounded above. The ways in which moderns reinforce this dualism is clearly set out by Blaser (2013) in his discussion of Latin American politics. He outlines how the discourse of state politicians is undergirded by a dichotomy between superior modern science-based knowledge and inferior non-modern cultural belief. For instance, in 2009 the right-wing Peruvian government sought to pass some decrees meant to make Indigenous territories open to oil and timber extraction. This was faced with fierce protest by Awaj’un people living on that land, with a young leader stating: “We speak of our brothers who quench our thirst, who bathe us, those who protect our needs – this [brother] is what we call the river.” (IWGIA 2009 cited in Blaser 2013: 13). In response, the president accused protestors of leading Peruvians “into irrationality and a backward, primitive state.” (Alan García 2009 cited in Blaser 2013: 16). This terminology was echoed by centre-left presidents such as Rafael Correa of Ecuador in 2010 when faced with similar protests (Blaser 2013), even though these communities had previously considered him an ally. This shows how regardless of ideological position, politicians ultimately see Indigenous worlds as cultural beliefs that must not be allowed to impede the progress of societies built on true, scientific knowledge. The one-world world is aggressive in imposing itself as the only truth at the expense of any societies that challenge this principle by their mere existence.

Choose (“…then, consciously now…”)

Having outlined the theoretical basis from which the non-relational myth is produced as well as that from which a relational story of life may emerge, Escobar, Osterweil and Sharma use this framework to look at past instances of social change in a different light. They begin by outlining the ontological dimension of political practice following Blaser’s (2010: 3-4) definitions. Blaser sees ontology as a way of understanding the world that sets out principles for the kinds of things that can and cannot exist, as well their conditions of existence and relations to each other. It is that which frames everyday practices and interactions, rather than being framed by them. Finally, ontology comprises the totality of discursive and non-discursive enactments of the world. Used synonymously with myth (and by extension with narrative or story of life), it is neither true nor false but instead creates worlds within which truth is defined. Escobar, Osterweil and Sharma contend that the political is inherently ontological given that it consists in putting forward a particular vision of reality that corresponds to a set of actions to be taken in relation to it. 

Following on from these delineations, the authors determine four main ways in which relational political movements can falter in their struggle against modern thought-reality. These are comprised by (1) reducing notions of political failure and success to the narrow definitions instated by modernity; (2) folding difference back into a dualist worldview; (3) reenacting the individual/collective dualism; and (4) creating a relational/non-relational binary ultimately derived from the way of thinking-being they wish to extricate themselves from (2024: 91). 

I now draw on Tănăsescu’s (2020) study of the tensions between state governments and Indigenous activists around the issue of legal personhood/relational personhood in Ecuador as an environmentalist example of how some of these slippages can manifest. Tănăsescu’s discussion centres around the differences between constitutional and Indigenous understandings of personhood. The Ecuadorian Constitution aims to extend the scope of universal human rights to encompass nature as an equally universal entity. The issue with conceiving of nature as such is that it radically delocalises it, thereby undercutting the Amerindian understanding of nature as a community of beings that exist locally and must be interacted with on that basis. Tănăsescu (2020: 453) explains that legal personhood defines nature according to human criteria, whereas Indigenous personifications of nature bring the human person into genealogical relations with particular places, thereby naturalising humans as opposed to the reverse. This means that justice in the Western sense of sanctioning one side in a dispute and/or rewarding the other is untranslatable to a relational world. Since there can be no true opposition between entities given their fundamental interdependence, what hurts one necessarily hurts the other as well.

This brief summation of a complex example shows how Western legal systems and Indigenous knowledge are ultimately incommensurable. What appears as a victory for the Indigenous activists obscures the fact that it implies a further subsumption of Indigenous worlds to the logic of modernity. This is not to say that there are no benefits to be derived from this legal achievement, but to emphasise that seeing legal battles as the be-all-and-end-all of such movements (accepting the dominant notion of what is political) would be a hindrance to the emergence of genuinely radical social reconfigurations. Similarly, the adoption of Western legal language to describe Indigenous ontologies risks reducing their transformative potential. Escobar, Osterweil and Sharma stress that slides back into the old structures should not be seen as negative, but as integral steps in the non-linear process of building new worlds. 

Remake (“…remake”)

In this part, the authors suggest some principles for the successful practice of relational politics, with particular focus on the spiritual dimension of relationality. The task of defining relational politics is somewhat self-contradictory given its inherent deixis. The Zapatistas, perhaps the foremost experiment in relational politics over the last decades, state this outright: “There are no universal recipes, lines, strategies, tactics, laws, rules or slogans. There is only a desire” (2024: 118). Given this, I turn my focus to perhaps the most universally applicable principle, which is simultaneously the most difficult to fully grasp: “Relationality means being in the heart.” Here the authors articulate a vision of spirituality rooted in practice. It constitutes an attempt at bridging the gap that somewhat puzzlingly remains between the conceptual understanding of relationality and its conversion into praxis. They quote Bell Hooks (2000: 77), who states that spirituality is a way of thinking-being that honours inter-existence/interconnectedness as a principle. She sees our lives as containing a place of mystery where forces beyond human will alter circumstances, guide, and direct us. This is another way of describing Love, not as an individual sentiment but as a disposition toward reality. One in which intellectual understanding of our essential kinship with existence becomes a lived experience wherein we act knowing we are in the presence of an ineffable mystery. 

While at first I failed to understand how one could put this into practice, an idea posited earlier in the book served as a key for grasping it: “What if sentience is an ethical relation before it is a natural property?” (2024: 43). This is in reference to Noë (2009 cited in 2024: 43), who examines why nobody is a solipsist despite this being a serious logical possibility. He argues that our commitment to each other’s sentience is born from our social entanglement in each other’s lives, not in theoretical proof that others are conscious beings rather than figments of our imagination. In a similar way, there will never be any direct evidence from other entities that they are sentient and should be treated as such. Relationality therefore depends not on empirical proof but on the acknowledgement of mutual interdependence and the ethical duties that derive from it.

Conclusion

Turning our gaze toward the myriad conflagrating crises that currently face the world, it seems as though there is a growing sense of collective dread that has seeped its way into the hearts and minds of even those most invested in the status quo, the political and economic elite. Climate summits come and go, leaving behind some version of “movement in the right direction but much more still to be done.” Miracle technologies with a messianic promise of deliverance from the flames, the floods or the rising tides already lapping at our feet join one by one the growing pile of promising-but-not-yet-scalable solutions, and all the while military spending rises in tandem with fascism across the globe as war and genocide ravage the Earth. Not only are we not moving in the right direction, we seem to be moving ever faster away from where we ought to go. It is in this rather gloomy context that a work such as this one has the most to offer. It invites us to give up hope completely, not just gradually and half-heartedly. It tells us that the problem we face goes deeper than we could have possibly imagined, ultimately stemming from how reality is constructed. From this utter hopelessness springs an unexpected source of encouragement, which is that we have the innate capacity to craft a new reality for ourselves and our place in existence. With this in mind, I end with one of the quotes the book starts with: “If you’re going to tell yourself a story, why not tell yourself a story of freedom?” (Weingast 2021: 87 cited in 2024: 23).