Semantic Abstraction, Nonhuman Personhood, and the Limits of Decolonial Critique: The Case of the Mother Earth Metaphor

This article examines how semantic abstraction operates in academic discourse, and takes the translation of Indigenous cosmological notions into legal and philosophical categories as its central case. The analysis focuses on how predominantly decolonial scholarship has handled the incorporation of Andean relational ontology into constitutional law – most notably in Ecuador and Bolivia – and into broader theoretical debates about the rights of nature. The article draws on an integrative review of philosophical, legal, and activist texts, and reconstructs the tensions between the symbolic recognition that such translations produce and the material conditions they leave unaddressed. It proposes that when the constructive force of language is treated as sufficient for political transformation, independently of the structural arrangements that govern land, extraction, and capital, critical discourse may obscure rather than illuminate the conditions under which ecological destruction is organized and reproduced.