My colleague Angeles Eraña an me have recently seen our chapter on the Zapatista emancipatory project and tzotzil ontology finally in print, now that The Oxford Handbook of Applied Philosophy of Language is finally out. Last week, we were invited to discuss the chapter with Autumn Scarlett Harrison, Ana Carolina Zamora Buen Abad and Janice Dowel at Syracuse University. Unfortunately, my friend Ángeles was in Rome for the World Congress of Philosophy so I was the only one who could attend the teleconference meeting.

They had read the chapter and had many insightful and poignant questions. Among them, Ana Carolina Zamora asked for the motivation for our study of tzotzil ontology. She raised the question of why should we – meaning, presumably, westernized academic philosophers like Ángeles and myself – consider Amerindian ontologies.

I answered that the main motivation was not a purely theoretical one, as if we were considering the viability of an ontological proposal developed in the abstract context of academic philosophy, i.e., not in the same way we evaluate or are concerned with the ontological proposals authored by López de Sa or Torza. Instead, in the first half of our chapter, we develop the new that ontologies are not merely theories, but socially implemented conceptions of the world, that is, ways of being socially in the world. As such, they can be theorized in the abstract, as we do in our metaphysics seminars at the University, but they can also be just lived. As a matter of fact, to live socially entails to partake of a social ontology, so that the former cannot happen without the later. Thus, when we talk of an Amerindian ontology like, for example, the tzotzil ontology, we are genuinely talking of the way the tzotzil people live socially, i.e., about the social life of the tzotzil. It is because of them, because this is how they live that we ought to seriously take this ontology in consideration. 

And here to take in consideration means essentially to make the world (our world – the only one we can make) one where this ontology can fit: to fix our social practices, including those of academic philosophy, so that this ontology keeps being taken seriously.