Some time in the late 1990s or early 2000s, Marisol de la Cadena stumbled upon a box of documents in the possession of the photographer Thomas Müller. Müller was drawn to the box when he observed that his Quechua (runakuna) hosts in the Peruvian highlands were using its contents as kindling. As it turned out, the box contained over 600 records – including fliers, union meeting minutes, and official letters to various state authorities – that testified to the long history of struggles for political and communal rights that the runakuna had maintained with the Peruvian state over the course of the twentieth century. The box's last custodian had been Mariano Turpo, himself an important leader in the indigenous and peasant movement that brought about the Law of Agrarian Reform of 1969 which ended the hacendado era. By the time Müller found the box, however, it was no longer of any use to the Turpo family or to the local community, hence their using it for heating in the biting cold of winter.

Earth Beings tells the story of Mariano Turpo and his son Nazario, both well-known yachaq (healers/shamans) from the village of Pacchanta in the region of Cuzco, Peru. De la Cadena has written an impressive and multi-faceted ethnography, a text that is both attentive and generative, that moves between epochs and worlds, between analysis and storytelling, between the modern and the other-than-modern, and in so doing charts the complex alliances and displacements, the complicities and the equivocations, that have delineated the horizons of aspiration, obligation and dispossession in this indigenous Andean world during the twentieth century.

The book is organised around seven ethnographic ‘stories’ about the lives of Mariano and Nazario Turpo and two ‘interludes’ which introduce the two characters. The first story is dedicated to explaining how de la Cadena met the Turpos. The box that Müller found awakened her interest in the documents’ historical provenance, and more broadly in the role that indigenous archives might have played in the peasant struggles for land and communal rights in Peru. This is a story about the complex biopolitics of literacy and illiteracy, but also about the racial, ethnic and linguistic striations that still today inflect the legacies of colonialism and indigeneity in Latin America. To de la Cadena's surprise, however, Mariano Turpo made it clear from the outset that it was ‘not only’ (p. 13) the documents and what they stood for that had been eventful and important. The statement gave de la Cadena pause for thought. There seemed to be a ‘limit’ (p. 15) to the archive, at the other side of which ‘the historical [ceased to function] as the dominant register of the real’ (p. 57) yet where events were no less consequential or meaningful. This prompted her to work with Mariano and Nazario on a modality of ethnographic ‘co-laboring’ (p. 12) where they set to negotiate and circumnavigate the ‘intermittencies’ (p. xxvi) of translation, its limits and excesses. In this way, de la Cadena came to appreciate how Mariano's ‘not only’ gestured towards the existence of onto-epistemic spaces of disturbance and productive misunderstanding, a complex geometry of ‘partial connections’ (after Donna Haraway (Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, Routledge, 1991) and Marilyn Strathern (Partial Connections, AltaMira, 2004)), where words, meanings and events ‘occupied more than one and less than many worlds’ (p. 108).

This fractal sensibility inflects the paths and itineraries that de la Cadena follows in her ethnographic reconstruction of Mariano and Nazario's lives. Thus, in Stories 2 and 3 we hear of Mariano's involvement in a variety of peasant and workers’ movements during the 1950s and 1960s. In particular, she describes Mariano's travels to Cuzco and Lima, his meetings with lawyers, unionists and politicians as he ‘walked the grievance’ (p. 71) of the dispossession and violence that gamonalismo (Peru's own style of oligarchic corruption and despotism) and the state system have historically exacted upon runakuna communities. The story of ‘Mariano's archive’, as de la Cadena came to refer to the box of documents, comes next. The archive was no simple collection of legal files or property claims. ‘Mariano's struggle’, as de la Cadena puts it, ‘was not only for land’ (p. 97). The long lineage of archival custodians that Mariano joined were in fact responsible for nurturing the capacity of the ayllu – the community of human and other-than-human earth-beings or tirakuna – to ‘take place’ (p. 102). Rearing such in-ayllu relationality often demanded on the part of yachaq an attentive solicitousness towards tirakuna, involving ritual forms of communication (blowing on coca leaves), making offerings (despachos) or listening and talking to them. We read next about Nazario's work as an ‘Andean shaman’ for a tourist agency in Cuzco (Story 5), whilst his enlistment as a curator for the Quechua exhibit at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington makes up the gist of Story 6. The last story is dedicated to describing the ambiguous jurisdiction of the rondas campesinas, assembly-based institutions that have taken upon themselves the policing and sanctioning of criminal activities in the region. The politics that these assemblies harness stands in stark contrast to the ‘ownership of the will’ (munayniyuq) that characterises the representative nature of liberal democracies, yet the contrast is not antagonistic nor Manichean, for here, as elsewhere, partial connections disturb and mess up the ontology of the political.

Central to all the stories is the relationship that runakuna, and Mariano and Nazario in particular, have with tirakuna, the earth-beings that populate the landscape, most importantly of all Ausangate (a being that a Western gaze would describe as a ‘mountain’). De la Cadena builds on these stories and relationships to outline a scenery of ‘cosmopolitical moments’ (p. 279) where the modern liberal history of state politics has accomplished little except the ontological annihilation of runakuna livelihoods, yet where, occasionally, liberal and runakuna interests and aspirations have partially coincided in generative or complementary developments.

While the heuristic of partial connections offers a very productive placeholder for grasping the fortunes of translational equivocations, there are some passages where one wonders if the complicities through which Mariano and Nazario reckoned with the challenges they faced are adequately re-described by this idiom. Thus, we hear a number of times of Mariano's abilities to make ‘friends’ across class and racial lines, even when he did not speak Spanish (p. 50). In this sense, whilst ‘friendship’ may indeed be a partial connection, one could think of it also as the re-description of a specific type of complicity for a particular kind of complexity.

All in all, the stories of partial connections that Marisol de la Cadena, Mariano Turpo and Nazario Turpo have co-laboured for us in this book are a treasure trove of ethnographic sensibility, analytical solicitousness and anthropological imagination. They are also a fecund reservoir for and of political hope. Over the years the Andean world of the Turpos has been simplified for modern consumption in the languages of religious syncretism, of environmentalism, of peasant social movements, of commons-based ownership of the land. Yet these are all descriptions that leave unblemished the ontological matrix upon which they are founded. They are stories that shy away from the not-only. They reproduce the archive rather than unpack the box. In their place, Marisol de la Cadena has composed a series of ‘cosmopolitical moments [whose] capacity to irritate the universal and provincialize nature and culture’ (p. 279) opens up the ontology of politics to novel alliances and configurations.