More-than-human conservation, models from the pluriverse: the example of biocultural diversity conservation from knowledge systems of the Maya Ixil in the Maya Ixil Territory

Abstract

Central to the more-than-human form of biocultural diversity conservation linked to Maya Ixil practising and living tiichajil and its txaa norms is a more-than-human identity that animates agency beyond the human. Drawing these terms and concepts together, the biodiversity conservation models that they create in their application to the land is an everyday performance and interaction of caretaking with and of diversities of life. This article explores the biocultural, spiritual and cosmological relationships of caretaking in the milpa according to one Indigenous knowledge system that manages the land from embodied, multispecies, networks of reciprocity, that are practised in a peopled, bottom-up model, built in equality, for biocultural diversity’s transmission to next generations. Emphasised in the analysis of data collected from multispecies ethnography with the Maya Ixil, I argue that expression of these embodied and more-than-human Maya Ixil knowledge systems not only ‘decolonises’ the Ixil from historical and globalised systems of oppression, thereby addressing historical inequalities, but that the other-than-human agencies implicit within them demonstrate a model of relationality articulated through local languages and transgenerational and multispecies biocultural expression in the very real local expressions of the global buen vivir, decolonial and rematriation movement. The Maya Ixil demonstrate not only the theoretical plausibility of forms of community beyond globalised anthropocentric society rooted in colonial structures of inequality, but that the living networks that tiichajil speaks to and txaa guides the human right relation within, provide an alternative model for human behaviour to preserve biodiversity from food systems generating food sovereignties.