Curatorial Text

Ontological Paradigms and the Political Economy of the Sacred

Wak’a examines three ontological paradigms as coexisting belief structures that organize power, extraction, and economic value simultaneously across time. Andean animism operates as a relational system in which the sacred regulates territory: mountains, minerals, and ecosystems exist as entities embedded within reciprocal obligations, subject to cosmological constraints that govern what can be taken and at what cost.
Evangelization introduces a radical epistemic rupture. The sacred is displaced from the territory and reterritorialized into doctrine, enabling land and matter to be redefined as inert, available, and ownable. This shift establishes the ontological conditions for extractivism by severing the relational accountability that had previously governed human engagement with place.
Contemporary technological systems extend this logic rather than break from it. Technology emerges as a new liturgical regime: it demands faith in progress, operates through opaque authority, and legitimizes sacrifice zones as necessary externalities of development. Its infrastructure is sustained materially and symbolically, through belief structures that mirror those it claims to have superseded.
The central argument of Wak’a is that sacrality functions as a governing infrastructure of economic systems. What a society defines as sacred determines what can be extracted, from whom, and at what cost. Tracing these three paradigms reveals that extractivism is, at its foundation, an ontological operation before it becomes a technical or economic one.