Andean Cosmovision: Pachamama and Relational Ontology

Andean cosmovision, articulated across Quechua- and Aymara-speaking communities of what are today Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador, centers on Pachamama, a term combining pacha — a concept denoting an indivisible unity of space, time, and world rather than a purely spatial "earth" — with mama, "mother." Pachamama is not simply a personified nature-goddess in the sense of a discrete deity presiding over an inert material world, but the very generative, encompassing world-order within which humans, plants, animals, mountains (apus), and ancestors alike participate as constituent members. The Swiss-Bolivian philosopher and theologian Josef Estermann, in his influential study Filosofía Andina: Estudio intercultural de la sabiduría autóctona andina (1998), argues that Andean thought is best characterized as fundamentally relational (relacionalidad) rather than substance-based in the Aristotelian sense: for Estermann, no being in Andean cosmovision possesses its identity independently of its network of relations, so that "to be" is always already "to be in relation to."