Being Paramuno: Peasant World-Making Practices in the Paramos [High Moorlands] of the Colombian Andes

Abstract In this paper we explore what campesino [peasant] livelihoods in the rural Andean mountains of Colombia offer to understandings of more-than-human co-existence and care. For, while new conservation paradigms promise to transform economic and social horizons, being “paramuno” [resident of the “paramo,” or high moorlands] in the small community of Monquentiva is already characterized by becoming-with-other-beings-and-practices; a disposition toward incorporation of elements that are at-hand, and an ethics of care toward other beings in the landscape. We draw on ethnographic data to present this case study, emphasizing the forms of social organization and persistence that have enabled the emergence of economically and ecologically sustainable livelihoods. We explore these processes in terms of what we call world-making practices, showing how relationships with Indigeneity and collectivity are being renegotiated, and arguing for modes of conservation that engage with existing forms of peasant innovation.


Introduction
Monquentiva is a vereda [settlement] located in a valley beside a p� aramo [high moorland] of the same name, surrounded by hills, at an altitude of 2500-3000 meters, at the eastern mountain range of the Colombian Andes.Connected as it is to the Chingaza National Natural Park, the people of Monquentiva remember that the area's history as a new place of conservation began with the arrival of the regional environmental authority (Regional Autonomous Corporation (CAR)) in the late 1990s.Today, Monquentiva is a rural community composed predominantly of one large family who has populated the surrounding valley over the past century.They are highly organized, with the economic and social life of the village centering around a dairy cooperative.At the margins of the vereda are large farms [fincas] owned by wealthy individuals from Bogot� a, established during the past 50 years in sites once populated by Indigenous groups.
Being a watery ecosystem that has recently been named vital to future ecologies of the wider region, the p� aramo brings water to the heart of this wider web of relationality.This, in turn, draws a line of continuity with the ancestral Indigenous Muisca, who organized their ways of life around the lakes and water systems of the wider landscape.
In this article we draw on ethnographic material collected through a four-year interdisciplinary project on forest resilience  to unpack what it means to be a paramuno and what this has to offer to contemporary reimaginings of conservation.Thus, we use the word p� aramo not as it appears in the conservation literature, but as the campesinos [peasants] of Monquentiva evoke it.We use it to capture the way that p� aramo is more than an ecosystem: the territory that these campesinos inhabit through world-making practices-everyday forms of doing that invest human-nonhuman relations with meaning.The demonym "paramuno" [inhabitant of the p� aramo], used by the campesinos, appeals to this recognition of the entanglements between place and people and other nonhuman beings. 1  In unpacking the practices of multispecies care embedded by being paramuno, we make two claims.Firstly, we show that, contrary to the ways campesinos are often framed in Colombian and international conservation policies, already existing conservation-care practices in the region offer rich potential as a starting-point for thinking about conservation.This is partly because of our second point: being campesino in the p� aramos has long been about survival-which is to say, noticing transforming economic and social landscapes and incorporating changes to stay alive.While the extended family we document in this paper cannot stand for all communities in the p� aramos of the high Andes, we argue that these aspects are linked with broader social transformations and pressures through which campesinos as subjects became historically established.Thus, understanding how multispecies care practices come together as worlding practices, and secondly, how being p� aramuno is situated historically, can help us rethinking incoming approaches to multispecies conservation in more convivial ways.
The analytical perspective developed in this article draws on debates surrounding the networked and interactive relationships in the emergence of more-than-human social life, and the spatialisation of human and nonhuman relationships (Lorimer 2008).To this scholarship, we contribute a thick description of the ethos of multispecies care developed by the campesinos living in Monquentiva, in which a relationship with the p� aramo is central, anchoring relationships with other native and non-native species.When we refer to these practices in terms of "care," we are thinking of the definitions put forward by Science and Technology Studies (STS) such as Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (2017, 121), who thinks of materials or collective commitments as (1) consensual, and (2) responsible within a set of mutually constituted obligations.This is not far from the notion of convivial conservation developed within adjacent political ecology debates-as developed, for example, by B€ uscher and Fletcher (2019; see also van Bommel andBoonman-Berson 2022 andDonati 2019).Convivial conservation is itself a gathering-point for scholars and activists rethinking the future of multispecies care and conservation beyond problematic nature/culture divides, and beyond capitalist organizations of social life.Thus, the associated literature challenges the fundamental (and neo-colonial) paradigm of conservation as it has operated from the late nineteenth century until now, being based in a dualistic ontology that separates "nature" from "culture," and justifies projects for economic gain as a guarantee for the protection of species (Latour 2004).What this new paradigm proposes is to move from an exclusionary vision of protected areas to an expansive vision of promoted areas; and to celebrate the historical intertwining of humans and nonhumans, while recognizing the power relations and the mutual need or curiosity that sustains them (B€ uscher and Fletcher 2019).
This is an important contribution because, as we document in the next section, approaches to biodiversity conservation since the 2000s have been scattered and disjointed in the Colombian high Andes and beyond, often failing to consider the existing knowledge-practices of inhabitants, the deep histories of inhabitants, or their long-term futures.For example, native animals and trees have been brought into the area without consideration of current species distributions, in projects that end after when the funding cycle closes.At the same time, failing to understand nonhumans as co-constitutive actors of biodiverse landscapes misses opportunities to explore how humans and nonhumans already enact care relations with each other prior to conservation interventions (Toncheva and Fletcher 2022).As we document multispecies life in the p� aramo of Monqentiva, we contribute to these emerging conversations in terms of how longer social and economic histories ground specific forms of connecting with and from landscapes, that provide a rich basis for future interventions.
Thought this way, the practices through which the campesinos of Monquentiva incorporate into their everyday lives elements of what is there already-native species and non-native alike-are not only pragmatic, but political (Green 2013).Such practices embody visions of sociopolitical living, even if not necessarily presented in antagonistic terms.This vision is strategic for those threatened with dispossession or enclosure, making room for social opportunities, and reworking incoming conservation agendas from different foundations.This can be seen through the way that Indigenous practices and place-names are being incorporated into everyday life in our case.Linking present practices to older traditions brings depth and consistency to rural life.Yet it is also important that, in the context of new green agendas arriving in the region over the past ten years, associating with Indigenous forms of guardianship offers new economic opportunities, for example, via the creation of eco-tourism celebrating these aspects.This does not mean the campesinos are "selling out" or being displaced by new economic practices.What we call a politics of incorporation refers to the way that incoming threats and opportunities are consistently reworked into an ethos of campesino being, redefining them in the process.While expanding on this incorporatory politics, as documented through (interdisciplinary) ethnographic methods, we unpack what this ethos has to offer to conservation practices more generally.Rather than demand a total change of livelihood, or a "purity" of approach in returning to native species, we show that such mosaics of practice embrace entanglement and conviviality as a starting-point.There is much to learn from campesino being, we suggest, even as we recognize it has been largely established through necessity.
The remainder of this article is structured in three sections.In the first part, we offer context on the arrival of new green agendas in Colombia articulated with a historiography of the Andean peasantry.In the second part we deepen our explanation of worldmaking practices in conceptual and methodological terms.In the third section, we unpack what it means to be paramuno through specific examples.This leads to our fourth section, where we show how other relationships with nonhuman species, such as cows and bogs, is configured to participate in the world-making practices that sustain paramuno lives.In the conclusion, we establish what is at stake in a politics of incorporation for the campesinos of Monquentiva, and what it could offer to a future dynamic of conservation in the region and beyond.

Being Campesino in New Green Landscapes
Regulatory conservation planning has had considerable impact on the lives of rural people across Latin America.What it means to be a peasant in such regions is, thus, partly configured by longer histories of the transformation of colonial history and of its environments through new practices such as agriculture, access to land, and specific environmental histories.New policy regimes entered the region through the signing of international treaties derived from the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro 1992, which focused on delimiting exclusive conservation areas in the form of reserves, parks, and other restricted areas, which were imagined separately from issues such as agricultural production and economies (leal Le� on 2019).The Ministry of Environment, established in Colombia in 1993, articulated this regime through attempts to have territorial control and conservation in disputed territories.Colombia's most biodiverse territories became battlegrounds where campesinos were repeatedly kept out of conservation.This started to change from the 2000s onward through the mobilization of the idea of settled campesinos as potential green subjects, who had the potential to become custodians of their ecosystems.
Here it is important to distinguish the interpellation of campesinos from another related group.What have, for several hundred years, been referred to colonos [internal migrant-settlers] share economic conditions of campesinos, but are more often framed in popular and policy discourses as social problems, or, more recently, as potential nature-destroyers.In fact, both terms lean on a much older historical distinction: as Taussig (2008) identifies, the Spanish colonial regime considered the peasants in the high mountainous areas as orderly, easy to govern, while the groups in the hot lowlands were repeatedly characterized as unruly and in need of policing.This historical distinction between the campesino and colono was later solidified in relation to preexisting political-topographical differences by directing economic resources and opportunities to the highlands, and armies and weaponry to the lowlands.The social division of peasants into these opposing categories reiterates these histories and provides a window on the ways state and private institutions have sought to establish distinctions between rural inhabitants in order to maintain formations of power.Without wishing to perpetuate these differences and their associated prejudices, we consider these analytical categories important to understand in terms of the social and political complexities rural subjects have navigated.When we employ the terms in this article, we use them in a critical register.

Campesinos and Green Logics in the Colombian Context
Campesinos and associated social transformations in Colombia have been studied since at least the mid-twentieth century by historians, anthropologists, sociologists and geographers.Virginia Guti� errez De Pineda (1975) was early to describe the vectors of what Taussig (2008) later called "the moral topography" of Colombia, or the geographic differentiation of the highlands and lowlands through stereotypes of people and nature, the former associated to civilization and the later to savagery.Colombian peasant studies, built uncritically on these vectors in the 1970s and 1980s by studying the rural poor through the challenges of how to escape "under-development" and bring "modernity" to Colombia.However, Fals Borda's (1979) contribution challenges this modality of thought, intervening on the way the campesinos of the eastern Andes generated innovative qualities.Fals Borda's work breaks with the idea of the peasantry as "backwards" in relation to a line of progress and instead reveals the way that campesinos have consistently survived by adapting to rapidly transforming conditions.
According to such social studies, the process of campesino formation in the highlands of Colombia (Cundinamarca and Boyac� a) began during Spanish colonialism, between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.In Broadbent's (1981) terms, campesinos emerged as a term to differentiate social groups through a process of "miscegenation"-the intermingling of Indigenous and non-Indigenous groups from poorer communities-but also from the elimination of indigenous reservations [resguardos] by the colonial regime, leading to new waves of dispossession.In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Republican government also played a role in the harassment against the Indigenous Muisca reservations, leading many communities to escape and settle in unexpected places such as on the p� aramos.The government of the time and scholars of these terms alike use the term campesino to differentiate them from related processes of dispossession and migration toward the lowlands, where the term colono was more likely to be used.
It is also important that these sociohistorical processes forced mobility and mixture onto rural communities, such that the Indigenous inhabitants of the p� aramo, the Muisca, subsequently became entangled with processes of peasantisation.Indigenous practices were not left completely behind, but new practices were instantiated through the implementation of the Spanish colonial regime and its wider categories of coloniality.De la Cadena (2000) emphasizes that this performative production articulates the campesino subject with a hybridity that is "fertile."By this she means that, despite the binaries through which campesinos were articulated, they are able to navigate within their subject formations across Indigenous and mestizo 2 categories, enabling new kinds of communication and survival within specific contexts 3 .Nonetheless, many Indigenous forms of identity, language, and practice were lost or marginalized in the process.Meanwhile, the colono category tends to be constituted without such options for political mobility.
This social history helps us appreciate how the notion of "green campesinos" became important in conservation policies from the 2000s onwards: simultaneously recipients of economic aids, green campesinos were nevertheless framed as being sufficiently organized and dynamic to warrant their inclusion as key actors in conservation planning.This inclusion has disciplinary effects, however (Ojeda 2012;Ulloa 2017).Being a green campesino implies conforming to the image of a peasant who remains in the past whose life fits with the idea of an imagined "native," in order to be considered a worthy recipient of economic incentives.On the other hand, it implies uncritically adopting the technologies that forestry engineers and ecologists transfer to peasants for conservation schemes, such as forest conservation in place of timber-cutting, or practising reforestation with native species.Thus, preexisting campesino knowledge practices of the Andean highlands can be eroded through the expansion of green logics-not necessarily all at once, but piecemeal, through the visits of agents, meetings with environmental entities and NGOs; state declarations; infrastructures, and media discourses.
By green logics, here, we refer to the practices and technologies that have been transforming places around the world as part of international conservation frameworks.Within such frameworks, which define key aspects of the natural world that require safeguarding along with models for protecting them, there is necessarily a stabilization of what counts as "nature."Deciding which kinds of models work to conserve forests or wildlife, and how to organize such efforts spatially and economically, is a global effort, leading to consensus over the making of protected areas and how to "zone" them (Brockington, Duffy, and Igoe 2008).This is problematic, in that models that work in one location are presumed to work in all locations, but further, because environmental histories reveal the spatial logics of such projects, which have systematically worked to entrench categories of race, and the privileges associated with "whiteness" (Merchant 2003).They also marginalize subaltern forms of knowledge; delegitimise rural peoples as custodians of places long inhabited, and, more recently, convert green spaces into sites of accumulation for private actors, leading to dispossession (Kelly and Ybarra 2016).In practice, such moveable models are also often introduced in areas of conflict with minimal consultation with local people, provoking further rounds of conflict and reifying existing inequalities (Sundberg 2004).
In Latin America more generally, and in the making of transnational movements and claims, the campesino category has also been vital in constituting a political subject that unites agrarian small producers who have shared common experiences of dispossession under neoliberal capitalism, to make common demands-for example under the banner of the large social movement La V� ıa Campesina (Wittman 2009).Partly because of such new social processes, the internal heterogeneity of campesino groups has been emphasized in more recent work on rural agrarianism.In Colombia, collective demands have also centered on agrarian reform and demands for consultation, expanding from the historical category of campesino distinctive rights (fajardo Montaña 2012).Such debates have also carried over into new formalized rights associated with the determination of ecosystem services arrangements, comprising protections established for rivers and mountains, but also affective relationships, including belonging and ancestry to a territory (Escobar 2020).
Such work brings a sense of international and enabling collectivity to the sense of being campesino, once a marker of (relative) abjection.Nevertheless, to be a campesino or paramuno today in the high Andes is still to be marginalized and isolated, and implicitly, to still be an "Indian".Doña Blanca, the wife of Don Elias Romero, who comes from the village of Guandita, told us how the communities surrounding the p� aramo considered the inhabitants of Monquentiva for many decades to be uncivilized, cut off from interactions with the surrounding environment, a community locked in the p� aramo: However, today, as for some decades, hiding in the p� aramo is no longer an option for the campesinos of Monquentiva, who have now consolidated an organized kincommunity around the bog, the cows, and other natures in the p� aramo.Instead of hiding or antagonizing to external practices, they see conservation as an opportunity to expand livelihoods, but especially to remain in the p� aramo.This disposition is an example of the politics of incorporation that can be dated to pre-Columbian times, still alive and ever transforming among campesinos.

Scattered Conservation in the High Andes of Colombia
In 2015, the Minister of the Environment liberated two felines into the p� aramo during a visit and installed a camera-trap there.The community of Monquentiva remembers this event enthusiastically.However, they wonder if the felines survived, since they were "abandoned" in the p� aramo without a care plan, and conjecture that the camera-traps were probably stolen.The event occurred without consultation of locals, and without subsequent monitoring.Conservation practices frequently arrive in the p� aramo with surprise, followed by acts of abandonment.Past conservation actions inhabit the memory of the people and the material space of the p� aramo as scattered infrastructural ruins. 4In Monquentiva, green logics tend to arrive from nowhere (the global) and insert practices that do not have disposition toward entanglement.
Scientists and conservationists arrived in Monquentiva as part of a host of scientific expeditions led by private and public actors throughout the 1990s, including Fundaci� on Natura and the Humboldt Institute.These actors developed the first fauna inventories of the area and evaluated the quality of the vegetation present in Monquentiva (p� aramos, Andean Forest, high Andean Forest, and peatlands; see Avella-M et al. 2014, 3), leading to the CAR's interest in the area for reforestation.Studies by Conservation International later supported the request to the Ministry of Environment of Colombia to declare the area a Regional Natural Park in 2016.However, from the first scientific visits until the involvement of conservation managers in the present, these organizations failed to share results with local inhabitants.Locals complain frequently about this and made interdisciplinary data-sharing a key mandate for our own research project.
Since 2017, the CAR has focused its efforts on reforesting the area with native species to variable success.Such programmes were popularized in the 1990s-after the creation of the Ministry of Environment in 1993-and the CAR initiated the purchase of pasture for reforestation in line with a wider trend associated with mitigating climate change across South America according to the Kyoto protocol.Under this policy, some previously abandoned lands were repopulated with species as diverse and fragile as the frailej� on [espeletia], a genus of perennial shrubs in the sunflower family that grows well in the high p� aramo.The future of the p� aramo has remained in question, however.During the first diagnosis of its conservation status, some scientists debated whether to refill the bog with water again, "restoring" it to its status as lake.Others argued that a new ecology had already been constituted in the area as a kind of mosaic of new and native elements, which should be preserved together (Avella-M et al. 2014, 3).However, conservation has, in practice, concentrated on reforestation with trees that belong to the lower Andean Forest, more than species proper to a p� aramo ecosystem.
P� aramo eco-systems have become a conservation priority in recent years in Colombia: the cloudy, deep green and rocky landscape that was once considered the "Badlands" of guerrilla warfare are now valued for their strategic role in holding water, and channeling it into the rivers and groundwater that sustain the Andean lands below.On the other hand, after the establishment of the Regional Park and the subsequent delimitation of the p� aramos (2018), productive activities were also restricted and, in some cases, criminalized.The resultant conflicts between environmental authorities and locals with the lack of consultation and involvement of inhabitants, revealing socioenvironmental dissonance in the way p� aramos are understood.Policies have been applied in a top-down manner by environmental state authorities with little understanding of rural people or their interactions with the surrounding ecologies.Based in critical analysis of the arrival of new models of conservation and their neo-colonial effects, calls for moves toward convivial conservation are necessary and urgent for such contexts.More-than-human political ecological scholarship seeks to support place-based processes by providing "richer explanations of the causes and conditions that underlie conservation conflicts" (De Silva and Srinivasan 2019, 189).
In Monquentiva, therefore, ancient and recently arrived conservation practices, species and concepts mix and mingle.While there are no living Muisca communities today, Muisca "worlding" practices are expressed in the toponym of the place.The name Monquentiva itself is a Muisca word meaning "Lord Captain of the Forest Bath" [Señor Capit� an del Baño de los Bosques], a phrase that still captures the sense of a place full of water and clouds that wrap around one's body.The toponymic memory embedded in the placename provides a connection between the past and the present of the landscape and surfaces ongoing human-nonhuman relationships.However, in Monquentiva, unlike other communities of Cundinamarca and Boyac� a, there have been few significant acts of violent opposition to incoming conservation imperatives.Rather, there is an active disposition on the part of communities to integrate these projects into their everyday life, expanding new possibilities for autonomous social life, and integrating new practices into existing forms of multispecies care.While it is not conflictive in nature, we argue that this disposition nevertheless grounds a basis from which to think and create convivial conservation alternatives.

World-Making Practices: A Conceptual and Methodological Approach
In exploring what it means to be paramuno in the high Andes of Colombia, we focus on world-making practices in the present rather than trying to distill what it is to be "Indigenous" from campesino histories.By world-making, we mean the practices through which a sense of collective identity is derived in relation to the articulation of exterior and nonhuman elements in daily life, that is, how the everyday becomes "worlded" (Blaser and de la Cadena 2018).This focus is part of our premise that specific acts of adapting to economic pressures, new species arriving through conservation efforts, changing political situations, and the changing climate have constituted survival and political resistance in this region over the past century.Following practices of what we call incorporation is a decision that carries its own politics: rather than narrating this place through a history of isolation and precarity-as both state and classic academic knowledge practices have tended to (see Gutierrez de Pinedo 1975; Fals Borda 1961)-we emphasize the forms of social organization and persistence that have enabled the emergence of economically-and ecologically-sustainable livelihoods.This, we claim, allows us to observe how they form together a situated relationality for convivial care (B€ uscher and Fletcher 2019).
This focus is also important because there is no surviving Indigenous community in the area; instead, the traditions survive in important ways such as place-names, myths, and practices.While the region was strongly characterized by the presence of Muisca civilization for centuries, 5 close to the settlement, for example, is a bog known as the Pantano Martos [Bog of Martos], which used to be a sacred lake of the Muiscas.The lake was drained several times by people looking for Muisca gold or to expand pastures for cattle-ranching, and today the bog remains the host of stable aquatic communities of rare perennial shrubs.However, peasants attribute mystical powers to the waterbody.
Our approach to world-making practices therefore involves the analytical tracing of forms of doing and naming that take place during everyday life.We are inspired by what the anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena (2015) terms "earth beings"-nonhumans emerging from deep relationships with place, for example the so-called spirits, sacred places, or things, which have agency in their own terms and are not reducible to biophysical process or beliefs.These beings also participate materially and semiotically in constituting a "worlding" through world-making practices (Tsing 2015).
These practices manifest implicit politics that participate both in creating a world and reflecting on its enactment.We are inspired by Donna Haraway's invitation to attend to the interdependence of species (including humans) that comprise the world without deliberately separating them into categories pre-established by disciplines, and rather tracing the practices that connect them, to explore other orders of relationality.
If we appreciate the foolishness of human exceptionalism, then we know that becoming is always becoming with-in a contact zone where the outcome, where who is in the world, is at stake.(Haraway 2008, 244) This quotation signals that the contact zone between humans and non-humans is full of practices that give form to materiality.While Haraway holds that fields of scientific study make claims on us-it behooves us to heed how microbes move or molecules weave and to adjust our accounts of the world accordingly-she also tells us that the stories we make the world with matter.The peasants of Monquentiva have "become"or co-evolved-with Muisca histories, practices, myths and toponymics; with the mountains, rivers, mist, cows, land-owners, potato-crops, and the cattle of their dairy cooperative.Throughout the presentation of our ethnography we will show how this relationality enables practices that exceed green logics and qualify campesinos to rearticulate them in their own terms.This is a particular kind of resilience that could be highly important to conservation strategies of the future.
Our methodological approach is inspired by the wider work of more-than-human political ecology and convivial conservation in the way we attend specifically to the ways that humans and nonhumans entangle prior to any nature/culture divides (Latour 2004).We do this firstly by identifying the contact zones between humans and nonhumans in their mutual becoming, which is to say, their affective entanglement in the expression of agency.This takes place, for example, through the expression of emotions, phenomenological experiences that contribute to the formation of bonds, and the making of memories (Van Bommel and Boonman-Berson 2022).We therefore unpack the ways that incorporation functions as an ethos of care, participating in the material and affective formation of the assemblage between paramunos and the p� aramo, and defining differential relations of attention toward and between different species.
Like anthropologist Mario Blaser, our use of world-making practices thus leans on the idea that there exist not one but multiple "ontologies" in the world-many ways of worlding, storying, and connecting the interiority of humans and nonhumans together, as underlined by post-structural anthropological work (see Kohn 2013).As in Blaser's (2014) account, this is an agenda for a "political ontology"; a recounting the landscape through struggles or acknowledging the interplay of distinct "worldings" within the p� aramo, which become evident in specific disjunctures and moments of reincoporation.
To understand peasant being in the p� aramo of Monquentiva through world-making practices, we developed an ethnographic attention to people and things through everyday practices, including the myriad rules that operate at multiple scales to govern practice.We also engaged in an extended dialogue with the people of Monquentiva that included many moments of joy, sharing and surprise.As our data collection took place within the context of the interdisciplinary project BioResilience (NERC-UK), we began this intervention through conversations with the local and family authorities, and a public meeting-known as a "socialisation" in Colombia-during which we informed the community of the objectives of our research and established mutually supportive agreements with the community.This ensured that our presence in the community was approved at many levels, as well as allowing current concerns and research interests among the residents to be integrated into our project.
The intensive part of our fieldwork lasted eight months.During ethnographic stays, we carried out twenty in-depth and fifteen informal interviews, two focus groups, and two diagnostic workshops concerning the history, current practices, and conservation activities.
As we present our ethnographic material, we frame the processes of incorporation through which campesinos are negotiating new models of conservation as profoundly political.Without being necessarily involving direct confrontation, the practices of multispecies care embodied by paramunos consistently attends to the semiotic systems of nonhuman species and human actors alike, incorporating them so as not to be incorporated by others.This leads us to critique accounts that frame the rural poor as the passive material of new, neoliberal forms of conservation.This, we suggest, is a surprising common element between those who market new green logics as a route to sustainable futures, and those who critique these logics from social science perspectives-both frame campesinos as unknowing actors in neoliberal forms of conservation.Our focus on world-making allows us to emphasize how, in the history of peasantry in Colombia, communities have persistently survived and thrived by entangling, negotiating, and escaping the challenging horizons presented by the coloniality of power, and decades of internal conflict.We show that histories of campesino action and resistance produce forms of conservation that are livelier and fitting to the current socio-ecological crises than those prescribed in neoliberal terms, incorporating non-native species (such as pine, cows); recent species (such as the frailejon) and native species alike into their horizons of care.We also make clear how relationships with Indigeneity and conservation are renegotiated in place to produce new senses of collectivity in contemporary ecological landscapes.

Being Paramuno: Between Bog and P� aramo
Walking out with us on the p� aramo, Don Jos� e Romero, an elder in the settlement [vereda], recalled his youth when he was a hunter in the p� aramo [high moorland].Back then, he said, he often slept in the p� aramo, surrounded by the mist, and he knew the secrets of the wooly plants with which he could make a fire quickly."The p� aramo is a maze ( … )," he recalls."From one moment to the next, a wall of dense white clouds rises, and on more than one occasion, visitors have been lost.The p� aramo is an immense labyrinth."While saying this, Don Jose indicates the frailejones [espeletia, or "big monks"]-plants that were given this name as they look like friars walking through mountain mist.Don Jos� e remembers a time he saw a mother bear and her cub on the path at the entrance of the vereda.Hunting is now forbidden.Now he entertains himself by taking care of his cows and helping the scientists who come to study the p� aramo.Perhaps ecotourism could be a new economic alternative that allows them to continue in relation with the p� aramo, he says.
As Don Jos� e's words suggest, ecotourism as a conservation strategy has, since 2016, and in the context of the Peace Agreement of the Colombian state with the Guerrilla FARC [Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia], posed a "promising" and profitable conservation approach for communities.The CAR, along with private environmental NGOs, has encouraged this move by suggesting that dairy cattle-ranching is incompatible with conservation, and that if locals do not shift toward eco-touristic livelihoods they will lose income, because outsiders will initiate their own projects.These suggestions sound, to many, like a threat.However, the campesinos of Monquentiva envision an ecotouristic enterprise emerging from within the already-existing dairy cooperative as something potentially coherent with their own aims.Mauricio Romero, a young inhabitant, says, jokingly, "Even if we have to learn to speak Muisca, we are going to, so then nobody cannot get us out of Monquentiva."The people in Monquentiva must rise to the challenge of learning how to be "native" and at the same time "modern" by acquiring the science of the p� aramo and the esthetics of Indigenous custodians-or risk not having a part in emerging conservation futures.However, as we will show, these campesinos insist on incorporating these options into their own terms.
Vereda means not only settlement but path; a path that connects points in the highlands to the slightly warmer middle-altitude lands of the Andean Mountain range.This path has existed, according to the archaeological record, since pre-Columbian times, and it manifests what Langebaek has called "microverticality" (1967): a subsistence strategy, through which Muiscas took advantage of different ecological niches at different altitudinal gradients to cultivate crops.Over time, the path has become a permanent settlement through practices of walking and connecting.In this sense, although colonialism sought to regroup Indigenous people around villages, reproducing the Spanish system centered on the local church, this was always subverted through the ways that people continued to walk between places, making the vereda (the path) their place of settlement, and expressing in the material configuration of space older and deeper histories.The placa huella [cobbled road] has been made over former Indigenous routes, which current peasants use, with acknowledgement of its ancestry.Monquentiva continues to be a point interconnecting the old Muisca markets with sacred sites in Guatavita, Guasca and Gacheta, and the colonial villages of Spanish conquerors.In this sense, the landscape is a historical process made by practices, including practices of worlding that underlie and enact territorial formation.
A similar parallel can be drawn in the waterways that remain vital both in the everyday life and mythology of place in and around Monquentiva.The p� aramos and lakes in the high Andean mountains of Colombia were venues of traditional ceremonies by Indigenous people about 400 years ago.Muisca cosmogony was heavily shaped around water-systems (Correa 2004), and thus their religious practices in the p� aramos.The path of the water guided the roads to the Muisca markets, as economic interaction rested on religious infrastructure.Meanwhile, the bodies of water-at different elevations-were the milestones in the spiritual worlding of Muisca microverticality.
While the paths today have been cobbled and the ancient Muisca Lake known as Pantano de Martos was transformed into a bog 6 , these names and mythologies are known and important to the people of Monquentiva and their vision of future conservation, as was made clear by the people at the workshops on ecotourism that we facilitated during our project.Surrounded by communities such as Sesquile, Gacheta, Guasca, Guatavita: places and names of Muisca origin, the peasants of Monquentiva propose ecotourism experiences related to Muisca dances they knew, food produced from corn and potatoes, and visits to sites considered "magical" by the Muisca but also by the farmers, although appropriated differently.However, the ethos of conservation the people of Monquentiva envision include changes in the landscape made more recently.The community are keen to know from visiting scientists the official names for all the plants that characterize the p� aramo as it is now, and to incorporate them into their education and future eco-touristic plans.
Oral memory of the Muisca inhabitation and subsequent transformation are vital to the forms of everyday conservation that are emerging.We learn about the transformation of the sacred lake into a bog from the elders in the community, who explainedto us, but also to young people learning to be its custodians-that the pantano was part of the web of lakes that constituted spiritual portals for the Muisca people, which enabled them to communicate with other worlds and with their gods.After being drained it was converted into pasture 7 but remained a spiritually important place.The aura of Indigenous past and paths thus provide a net of connections for elements incorporated and improvised subsequently.The campesinos of Monquentiva respect and attribute magical presences coming from the Muisca past to the bog.
In the bog, the Monquentiva peasants also invest and experience memories of work, livelihood, and youth.They recognize the sacredness of this place that has seen them grow as a community and in which they affirm their sense of being a collective, and the practices over the bog have shaped the landscape of this p� aramo.Currently, the bog is under conservation status; there are no livestock practices or extraction of natural resources.The campesinos feel that this is a desirable situation as they feel the bog deserves respect and care.Don Elias speaks of this with a voice of regret and trembling: "Before we used to let the sheep and cows graze on the bog; today this practice would be unthinkable."He said this not only because of the current environmental restrictions, but because the community appreciates the bog; they know and understand the ecological services it provides and admire its beauty as well as the sense of spirituality the body of water transpires into their lives.
This sense of being intertwined with the life of the bog, and through it, with the sacred lake of the Muisca people, does not lead to opposition to the conservation practices proposed to prevent further degradation of the bog.On the contrary, the revitalization of the bog is understood as a form of collective self-care, which orders the territory and respects a historical sense of sacredness in place.This care emerges from a network of more-than-human relationships that affirms mutual collaboration between humans and non-humans, partly through its persistence.Yet this attention underlines a key point that will be vital in wider efforts toward convivial conservation: many rich ethos of multispecies care are embedded in territorial identities and forms of belonging that also risk being displaced by incoming conservation policies.While the Monquentiva community consistently fold incoming policies into their own adaptive livelihood strategies, we also need to ensure that the practices of doing, caring, and loving between species are not extracted from the ground that separate them.Incipient conservation policies are increasingly being adopted as part of this ethos of care for the multispecies relationships and entanglements of the pantano-arguably in a more joined-up and less piecemeal way than that modeled by incoming institutions.However, they have not, so far, eliminated the (slow) violence (Nixon 2011) contained in scattered conservation practices.

Multispecies Care in and through P� aramo
Over time, the campesinos have worked to strengthen their autonomy around the dairy cooperative, simultaneously learning the administrative practices of the large landowners, and to establish some distance from these paternalistic relationships.This process of non-conflictive contestation can also be characterized as part of a politics of incorporation, where the need to "learn the rules" is accepted to lever patches of autonomy and freedom from domination.Campesinos circumnavigate hardship or conflict, and, in so doing, manifest a non-antagonistic ethos (Mouffe 2022).Among the younger generations of campesinos, this adaptability has been extended into the learning of new kinds of accounting, animal health, organic soil management and technical skills, which have been articulated with existing local knowledge in the community dairy cooperative, a rural cooperative that integrates the farmers with their cows, calves, and bulls, as well as with wider infrastructures of environmentally friendly milk production.In Monquentiva, the focus of this adaptive more-than-human livelihood has been a close kinship with cows, bulls, and calves.
Livelihoods with cows threads through the whole pattern of everyday life.The peasants get up at 4:00 am to milk their cows, who live in stables that are an extension of their houses.After milking and taking the milk to the dairy cooperative, which is at the center of the settlement, the campesinos meet to have tinto [black coffee] and breakfast at the home of the grandparents, the pioneers of the vereda.The grandparents' house is located just behind the cooperative.Relatives gather in the kitchen of the old house.A wood stove and a large table accommodate up to fifteen people: uncles, cousins, nephews, brothers, and grandparents share hot food prepared by Tia [auntie] Nelly.The kitchen of the family-community smells of freshly brewed coffee and of recently baked arepas.This encounter is repeated every morning.After the cows are milked, the meeting of the kin is warm, full of stories and laughter.This meeting is a ritual of commensality between those who ratify their sense of belonging and family among the people of this vereda.Although not all these relatives are biological family the repetition of this morning meeting and the sharing of work practices in the dairy farming supports the material and social infrastructure of the vereda.Here, caring for the cows plays an important role as part of the relationships of mutual support and care of this morethan-human paramuno collective.However, in this community, cattle are not slaughtered or consumed directly, instead they are sold when they reach old age, which causes tensions among the peasant families, who must detach from a loved being with whom they have developed a mutual exchange of benefits.
The kinship has been formed through everyday encounters, which includes other nonhumans as well; indeterminate encounters, as Tsing (2015, 46) calls them, refers to encounters that are never fully intentional yet are characterized by habitual care and qualities of attention that build fibers of relational connection.As Anna Tsing suggests: What if our indeterminate life form was not the shape of our bodies but rather the shape of our motion over time?Such indeterminacy expands our concept of human life, showing us how we are transformed by encounters (2015,47).
When a head of cattle dies or suffers an accident or when a calf is about to be born, the peasants accompany these processes with love and concern.The peasants address the cows by name, and they respond.In these routines there is affection, hugs, kisses on the heads of the cows, laughs at the antics of cows and scolds when they disobeyed or put themselves at risk.The campesinos' care for the cattle includes, but is not limited to, having good milk.But it has to do with reciprocity, as cows constitute a substantial part of life-they live together.The campesinos participate in forming the world of the cows, who also form part of their world.The mutual constitution of worlding here, through practices of care and reciprocities, also participates in the extension of ties of kin.Meanwhile, the claim for autonomy made by the campesinos through the dairy cooperative expresses a relationality with animals that is not extractive, but of care and gratitude toward them, as toward the wider landscape of an autonomous p� aramo.
Archaeologists argue that, since Muisca times, the eastern Andean p� aramos of Colombia have been inhabited ecosystems (Langebaek 1967), into which, by the middle of the twentieth century, the dairy farm became an established form of production.However, the speed of pasture expansion in these p� aramos has been slow, following the rhythm of the cooperatives formed by families rooted in the veredas, who practise dairy farming without detriment of other ecosystem services such as those coming from forests, rivers, and soils.In other regions in Colombia, livestock is rather an engine of deforestation, managed by expansive and predatory practices, and controlled by monopolies or by money laundry.This contrasts with the mosaic of relationships and vegetation cover that is observed in the territories of associative peasant economies like in Monquentiva.A conservation paradigm that attempts to integrate socioenvironmental practices that have historically looked after the ecosystems in which they live for their subsistence needs and bonds must highlight the importance of dwelling experience connected physically and emotionally to the territory in which they live.
The collective that has lived with and through this p� aramo has thus emerged through dynamic, emergent processes of incorporation with other species-native and nonnative-that also constitute the wider landscape.These examples illustrate the difficulty of drawing a line between "native" and "foreign," as they do not unfold a static oppositional relationship, but a dynamic process aimed at incorporation.Meanwhile, the paths of sand and water that connect Monquentiva with its Indigenous past illustrate that these practices of incorporation are not only present-based, but multi-temporal, capable of relating via place to other senses of the human and nonhuman to derive a capacious way of living in relation to place.Could Monquentiva campesino world-making offer clues for how to do conservation differently in the high Colombian Andes and beyond? 8

Conclusion: Being Campesino as a Politics of Incorporation
In this article, we have narrated aspects of being paramuno in Monquentiva that open onto a number of wider aspects of campesino world-making practices there: the vereda that been a permanent territory-making dynamic in practice since pre-Colombian times; the bog that was once a Muisca lake and that carries over its former sense of sacredness in the contemporary call to protect water in the land; the keeping of cows by campesinos as the basis for other interspecies care relationships.In doing so, we have shown that being campesino in Monquentiva is characterized by becoming-with-other-beingsand-practices, a process which manifests disposition toward incorporation expresses an ethics of care to the environment and other beings that have become part of the p� aramo.Thus, the p� aramo is in constant expansion through the incorporation of new beings and practices; its limits are mobile and expand beyond the criteria of ecology.Campesino becoming with the p� aramo is, a case of "becoming with" in Donna Haraway's sense (2008), in which the materiality of the environment with its animals, plants, and "earth beings" (as de la Cadena 2015 would put it), i.e., the mountains, rivers, forests, bog, Muisca Myths and things that still inhabit the place, which constitute the p� aramo's relationality.
This practice of incorporation can be characterized both as an ethical disposition-a mode for living-with and valuing-and a tactical politics-relating to so as not to be incorporated.Together, this ethos and politics actively makes p� aramo in an ongoing way.Care here is an interface between species, but it is also a pragmatic choice, allowing the campesinos to retain autonomy, as well as a relatively favorable position in national.Our contribution to the analysis of environmental conflicts consists in this sense of learning from and with communities that, despite physical and structural violence, have developed capacities to incorporate, recover, and transform new processes, including the remains of colonial projects.This ethical disposition might inform future strategies toward convivial conservation.
We argue that this offers an exciting model of conservation in many ways, for the fragile species of the p� aramo are as much a part of the landscape of livelihood and care as the cows, the pine and the bear.And indeed, campesinos in this region are keen to find ways of coexisting and remaining with their multispecies kin in the area.In contrast, the conservation practices arriving in the area that frequently imagine a place without history, or propose plans without consultation, nor without observing the potential in the practices of the area, seem to offer to repeat scattered and contradictory efforts at best.Without making of these practices of incorporation a new model or anything utopian, we do wish to show that when and if examples of eco-tourism emerge from this site, it is because the campesinos are incorporating the green logics arriving in their area, rather than vice versa.It is not always the case that neoliberal models arrive in rural areas and colonize everything, leaving versions behind that are impoverished and flattened.In some cases, and ours is one, longstanding processes of incorporation born out of the need to survive have led to interesting and hybrid forms that combine native and non-native species; ancient and contemporary practices; what appears to be "agriculture" and what appears to be conservation; what seems Indigenous and what seems campesino.And, we suggest, these longstanding adaptive patterns of incorporation and care may have much to offer in contemporary moments of impoverishment and ruination.

Notes
1.It is important to note that we are aware of the processes of racialization through which humans are ascribed to certain natures, often against their wishes (Sundberg 2004).However, we want to examine the becoming of the interactions that form the landscape to show their mutual constitutions, rather than anchoring them to any enduring cultural topographies.In this way, we aim to provide an understanding of nature-cultural relations beyond simple binaries and associations.2. mixed Indigenous and European background.3. Importantly, Indigenous and campesino identities would not be considered subsequent (in a linear idea of development) or opposed to one another in these schemes; rather the two categories are connected and co-constituted.4. For example, in 2010, CAR, CorpoGuavio (Autonomous Corporation of the Guavio Region), the Guavio Dam, and the Central Region Chamber of Commerce began implementing an environmental project revolving around conserving water and the Muisca tradition.The community was never informed regarding the purpose of this project.Today the metal columns that were installed at different points of the p� aramo and the road-which initially carried slogans about the importance of taking care of water and fragments of Muisca myths-are rusting in the humidity and do not serve any purpose for locals or visitors.Colombia, what we know today as the Bog of Martos was a lake that has taken this name at least since 1797.In the context of Spanish colonialism, the drainage and routing of these lakes of the Muisca began, with the aim of extracting the gold and other precious metals deposited there in the ritual worship.7. Don Eduardo Romero, one of the founders of the settlement, recalls that there were several efforts made to drain the pantano.The first was made by the foreign entrepreneur Martos, but afterwards five important landlords from Bogot� a successively tried to drain it for pasture.A few years later the land became temporarily dry, so the bog was converted into a green carpet ideal for keeping heifers.In the 1980s the CAR bought surrounding lands, including the pantano.However, this period was marked by a terrible forest fire that affected the p� aramo, as well as the beginning of the FARC guerrillas' occupation.According to the campesinos these negative events marked the degradation of nature.8.A photographic gallery of the field site, including images of the p� aramo; the community itself; dairy production and a map of Monquentiva, can be found at [anonymised web address].
5. the Early Muisca (c.1000 B.C. -1200 B.C.) and the Late Muisca (c.1200 B.C. -1538 B.C.), whose cosmology was heavily shaped around water systems.6.According to an eighteenth-century soil found in the General Archive of the Nation of They used to not go out at all … they were, what do you call them … montañeros [people of the mountain] [giggles].But later we got to know them.They started going to Guandita and they became a little more civilised [giggles].(Interview Blanca, August 2019)