Territorialidad as environmental communication

Abstract

ABSTRACT Territorio and territorialidad are concepts particularly elucubrated and embraced by Indigenous and Afrodescendant communities in Latin America as central to their struggles and demands. In this essay, I approach the concept of territorialidad as a pragmatic and constitutive environmental communication to argue that territoriality opens up ways to interrogate space and place, translation, and identity. I based this argument on my research with Awá, binational Indigenous people living at the border between Ecuador and Colombia. As a decolonial option from the Global South, territoriality (1) counters Western narratives that privilege the global over the local; (2) offers novel ways to understand translation as both a communicative practice and a historicist inquiry; and, (3) furthers the notion of ecocultural identity.