ABSTRACT
This chapter surveys native ontologies in Spanish-speaking Latin North to South America with a special Mesoamerican focus. This chapter’s author is an anthropologist, specializing in Mesoamerican archaeology and ethnography, descended from Mexican Tarascan-Purepecha lineage and married to a Maya woman. Presented herein are three key ontological foci: one, indigenous Latin American cosmovisions anchor on worldviews intertwined with cosmology; two, indigenous Latin American cosmovisions, pre-Columbian to the present, conceptualize persons, whether animal (human and non-human), plant, and inanimate objects in potential kin-like relationship to one another; three, local ecologies are interwoven within indigenous cosmovisions where each “interbeing person,” animate and inanimate, organic and inorganic, participates in seen and unseen manner within relational communities composed of myriad entities.
