Earth Beings is the fruit of Marisol de la Cadena's decade-long conversations with Mariano and Nazario Turpo, father and son, runakuna or Quechua people. Concerned with the mutual entanglements of indigenous and non-indigenous worlds, and the partial connections between them, de la Cadena presents how the Turpos' indigenous ways of knowing and being include and exceed modern and non-modern practices. Her discussion of indigenous political strategies—a realm that needs not abide by binary logics—reconfigures how to think about and question modern politics, while pushing her readers to think beyond "hybridity," and toward translation, communication that accepts incommensurability, and mutual difference as conditions for ethnography to work.

Marisol de la Cadena is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis, and the author ofIndigenous Mestizos: The Politics of Race and Culture in Cuzco, Peru, 1919–1991, also published by Duke University Press.