The roles of the sky, heaven, forests, rivers and mountains in history. A look at the power dispositives shaping the territories

Abstract

This paper seeks to introduce and compare key aspects in the ways perception of environment and the cosmos was constructed, and people interacted with them, through various metastories or realities of power that have influenced the shaping of the territories now administered as Mexico. To this end, various types of literature were reviewed including the Borgia, Dresde and Nuttal codices. The methodological approach was similar to Foucault’s genealogy of ideas, focusing on the way Agamben and Graeber study power dispositives. The review of multiple historical realities shows that there are multiple ways to conceptualize and interact with the environment, use them to institute populations based on networks of power, whereby the different roles adopted by ecosystems depend on the power reality that is being configured. It was also found that while the domination of the first peoples required developing a technological scaffolding that allowed them to perceive and coordinate with the environmental cycles and the cosmos, western domination, developed technologies of power by learning to alter the patterns of energy circulating in the environment.