Every political movement tells a story. Take the recent movement for “The Defense of Water and Territory” in Mexico. In May 2015, the Yaqui tribe called the public to join in country-wide caravans to protest “toxic mining, fracking, dams, wind farms, gas pipelines, thermoelectric power plants, the devastation of forests, unbridled urbanization, highways, privatization of energy, industrial water systems, agrochemical and industrial pollution, and the destruction of our seeds by transgenics” (La Tribu Yaqui Reference Tribu Yaqui2015). The caravans would crisscross the country and converge in the town of Plan de Ayala, so named in honor of the revolutionary plan launched by Emiliano Zapata and his army in 1911. The gathered forces would write a new revolutionary plan before heading to Mexico City. By invoking Plan de Ayala, the movement linked itself to the Chiapas Neo-Zapatista movement of the 1990s, to the Mexican Revolution, and to countless other Indigenous uprisings across 500 years of colonial rule: the movement not only told a story about water, but also about Indigenous peoples’ resistance against the power of the state.
In every political movement, no matter its size, leaders, activists, people on the street carrying signs, communicate and organize by telling each other a common account of how something happened, or how it happens.Footnote 1 Although movements always refer to facts (in this case, displacement and ecological devastation), they organize them as stories, because storytelling can “bridge the experience of being wronged and political arguments about justice” (Young Reference Young2002, 73). To draw these bridges, these stories share features with the tales we were told as children, they follow the patterns in novels, plays, and myths that most of us would recognize. Like those tales, political stories also refer to a set of main characters: they often have a hero, and they have a plot; they focus on conflicts, and difficulties that must be overcome; and they follow events that unfold one, after the other, towards a resolution. They are part of a “social imaginary” that is carried in “images, stories, and legends” (Taylor Reference Taylor2004, 23).
But if every political movement tells a story, unfortunately not every important cause has a good story. This seems to be one of the limitations of environmental politics and movements that demand climate action. To stop the worst consequences of climate change people must come together and demand action from those who govern. But to build coalitions that rival the power of those who profit from oil extraction or industrial cattle ranching, the movement needs motivation. Besides economic incentives, people need a story that spurs them to action, a narrative line that organizes their efforts, gives them a part in the plot, and explains why they should extend their cooperation with creatures and things beyond the human world. It is true that many such stories already exist (Harris Reference Harris2021), and some, like the Yaquis’, may have even shifted the direction of policy (Hajer Reference Hajer1997), and connected humans to other creatures and things in wide activist networks (Lejano et al. Reference Lejano, Ingram and Ingram2013). However, they have not spread widely enough to spur the type of action that is required to prevent the worst consequences of climate change, and they have not always connected respect of the nonhuman world to democratic institutions, both of which are required to face the dangers that threaten life on earth. In fact, our present political concepts and institutions may be “inadequate for addressing present crises” including establishing the relations with the nonhuman, and “these inadequacies are less about the institutions themselves and are more about symptoms of failing politico-cultural stories” (Aslam et al. Reference Aslam, McIvor and Schlosser2024, 4). So, this is our challenge here: To understand what type of stories might connect democracies to nonhumans, and thus support the flourishing of humans and nonhumans together.
For many scholars, such flourishing could only happen when there are adequate economic conditions to produce corresponding ideas and institutions: in their view, storytelling only matters once we can force or entice powerful interests into changing practices and then the narrative may follow (Battistoni Reference Battistoni2024). While I concede that ideas can only go so far, and also that ideological critique is not sufficient to instantiate social change, stories remain necessary for change to happen, because they weave the networks that spur action (Lejano et al. Reference Lejano, Ingram and Ingram2013, 20). And the stories that connect democracies and nonhumans, and thus allow flourishing, I will argue, have a particular shape. They are myths about becoming strong with others while respecting each one. Those stories show that when we accept the limitation of human individuals, and the complexity of the networks of relations on which they depend, people can act together without undermining each other or their environment. Such stories, already exist in literature, in folklore and in contemporary politics (Harris Reference Harris2021; Hajer Reference Hajer1997; Lejano et al. Reference Lejano, Ingram and Ingram2013). Many already circulate widely in mainstream media, and they are powerful. Yet, they face an uphill battle to become a unified political narrative, because they compete with other influential accounts that tell people that individuals should dominate others, that humans are superior and exceptional, and nature must be conquered and tamed.
The stories where individuals must dominate nature are so embedded in most people’s imagination that they are seldom noticed or seen as stories: for example, many believe that property is an individual natural right, closely connected to political freedom, yet, that belief is part of a wider story about individuals having a “right to take possession, in a seemingly unlimited way, over everything external to them” (Celermajer et al. Reference Celermajer, Schlosberg, Wadiwel and Winter2023, 44). Stories such as that one, have become part of prevailing myths, they linger in a person’s cultural background, and filter most of their ideas by default. So, this paper starts there: it begins with myths that have shaped mainstream thinking about nature since the early days of European colonial expansion, and then, it turns to the alternative ways of narrating which disturb the concepts and assumptions embedded in those mainstream accounts. These other stories are often framed as critique: they are meant to unveil the falsities and the prejudices embedded in the dominant myths. But a few of those go beyond critique. They seek to coin new myths and thus build the world anew. They encourage people to join with the land or the territory as reluctant partners in the struggle against their own destruction and then use this nexus as a scaffold to sustain economic and political change. Many of these stories have been inspired by contemporary Latin American political thought and activism in the 21st century.Footnote 2
In what follows, I turn to stories where the territory is not the background of the action, but rather, one of the tale’s main characters. I first examine dominant accounts of land and territory by turning to Robinson Crusoe—the novel about a man stranded on a desert island, which is the origin of the whole literary genre of “the robinsonnade”, and, as I will discuss, is also a core myth of modern individualism (Watt Reference Watt1951, 95; Reference Watt1996, 228). In this story, the island appears as antagonist, whom the protagonist must defeat to survive. “The Island of Despair,” as Robinson calls it, is not the novel’s background, it is a character that represents nature which must be tamed for the hero’s benefit. In the second part, the paper examines a critical and postcolonial retelling of Robinson Crusoe in Michel Tournier’s 1966 novel Friday. Here Robinson falls in with the land; and then becomes the island’s lover and mentee. However, this story does not connect nonhumans to democracy because it remains an individualist response to the myth. In the third part, I find echoes of both, the myth and its reversal, in contemporary ecopolitical narratives from Latin America, but I also find new directions. In the recent film documentary The Territory, and the Podcast “Mujeres de Fuego” (Women of Fire), territory is also a character; however, the main character is not a solitary hero that defeats or protects the land, it is instead a collective built on solidarity, which acts as one with the territory. The collective protagonists build power to resist violence with the territory’s help—and despite the terrible pressure that Indigenous communities and their forests face today, this alliance helps to end the stories in a high note.
These stories are promising. Although stories alone cannot transform the structures that frame human action, they are necessary to start and to sustain change. A story alone cannot change the economic interests that animate political processes; however, a good story can organize people to resist destruction and violence, and to sustain the fire of the resistance as they try to transform structures by other means. Stories are not sufficient, but they are necessary. So, unearthing and distinguishing the narrative patterns, particularly those that have become myths, can help us understand the conditions where such change could become widespread and have a wider effect in politics and economics.
Territory as a main character: the myth of Robinson Crusoe
In Economics 101, students are often given a simple model of a single consumer and producer and two goods. The model helps students understand the relationships in a closed economy without buyers or sellers, but with choices that the producer must make between dedicating his time to production or leisure, for example. This is often called the Robinson Crusoe Economy—the name is a reference to Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel about the man who survived a wreckage and lived for almost 30 years alone in a desert island in the Caribbean. The model simplifies so much (only one producer!) that it could not refer to any real economy, it is explicitly modelling a fiction. But the model remains useful to economists, because the fiction in question shares plot and characters with many other stories that explain or justify institutions in modern society. They rely on an individual, who relates to himself, to the land, and to others as if it were alone on a desert island. Just as it does in economics, in politics the story connects us to core myths of modernity, including individualism and the idea that the territory should be conquered and controlled.
The novel Robinson Crusoe tells the story of the character of the same name, the son of a German merchant who started a successful business in York. Robinson escapes from home, against his family’s wishes, and eventually finds himself shipwrecked on an island in the Caribbean; and there he spends 27 years, alone. The core of the story is about Robinson’s ingenuity surviving on the island. He uses the ship stores to get tools, which allow him to hunt and fish. In the early days of his adventure, he finds a cave to store his possessions; and he keeps track of the days by making notches on a stick. Eventually, he learns to grow food, tame animals, bake bread, and even to make clothes, and he manages the island as a successful “little kingdom” (Defoe Reference Defoe, Owens and Furbank2016, ch.10). When, after fifteen years, he sees a footprint on the sand, he is “terrified to the last degree,” (Defoe Reference Defoe, Owens and Furbank2016, chapter 11). His fears become true when, years later, he realizes that the footprints were of cannibals who came to sacrifice their victims on the island. In one of these incursions, he helps a victim of the slaughter escape. Robinson gives him the name of Friday, and he becomes Robinson’s servant. After living with Friday for some years, Robinson decides to sail, but he does not need to build a boat because a ship reaches the island by chance. Taking advantage of a mutiny on board, Robinson manages to capture the ship and set the terms of his escape. He arrives back to England after 35 years, and there he finds that thanks to the good stewardship of his estate’s trustees, he has become a very rich man.
Why does this adventure story, light entertainment for the 18th century English reading class, help students understand the workings of the economy today? One would expect a model to work by reducing a complex real situation to its basic components, but here it clarifies by disclosing the basic parts of a common story. One about individuals who own their selves, their work and their property—without owing society anything in return (Macpherson Reference Macpherson1962). The economic model lays bare a narrative structure: it gives us the main character, and the main relations, some obstacles, and possible outcomes. By connecting to the novel, the model also connects with many other stories we tell about our society, and with symbols of those. The model also shows that economic thinking is deeply embedded in our culture, sustaining a normative scheme of relations, and forming part of comprehensive view of the world. Already in Capital, Marx noticed the model of Robinson Crusoe, and declared it too coarse a fiction, but necessary to understand the directives of political economy: in a community of free individuals Robinson’s relations contain “all that is essential to the determination of value.” (Marx 1867, I, 1, 4). That is, the story frames what we see as reality, and everybody knows the story even before they read the book: it is a myth.
Robinson Crusoe, according to Ian Watt, is a core myth of modernity. In his view, a myth is “a traditional story that is exceptionally widely known throughout the culture, which is credited with historical or quasi-historical belief, and embodies or symbolizes some of the most basic values of a society.” (Watt Reference Watt1996, xvi). Robinson Crusoe, the novel, fits this account of “quasi-historical” belief, because (as I will discuss in the next section) it was originally sold as a tale based on a true story. So, the idea of the individual that can control his world without outside help is credited with historical accuracy. But Robinson Crusoe’s status as myth also comes from other features. For Barthes, a myth is “a type of speech… a mode of signification” (Barthes Reference Barthes1972), and that mode tends to refer to unnamed stories that naturalize the meanings of signs. In this case, the image of Robinson on the island, with his parrot, his goat suit and umbrella, becomes a stand-in for what a modern self-reliant individual can achieve. But myths are more than common stories because they furnish a set subconscious frameworks; so, they are similar to an ideology or a “social imaginary,” that is, “a common understanding that makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy” (Taylor Reference Taylor2004, 23). They give meaning to symbols. According to Chiara Bottici, this mode of signification is crucial to understanding myth, but cannot be enough, because it is true that all myths are symbolic narratives, but there are many well-known symbolic narratives that don’t reach the status of myth. So following Hans Blumenberg, she argues that the difference between a myth and a symbolic story is that a myth creates order in the world and gives significance to facts. A myth clarifies meaning by making that meaning important to us (Bottici Reference Bottici2007, 123). So, Robinson Crusoe, the novel, becomes the myth of Robinson, when the narrative acquires symbolic meaning as it is passed down the generations, when it becomes intractable and resistant to critical examination (Keum Reference Keum2025, 3), and most importantly, when it can ground significance. A reference to Robinson in an economics textbook makes a children’s tale important to us, because it silently informs us about the workings of the economy, about the status of man in relation to nature, and about how we organize and justify political power.
The myth of Robinson connects to the wider myth of individualism, which nurtures beliefs of self-reliance, ownership and profit. But it also centers state sovereignty and colonialism. It does so because, “though set on an isolated island, Defoe’s novel deals with the most significant and controversial political issue of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the nature, origin, and reproduction of sovereign power” (Braverman Reference Braverman1986). The island symbolically connects Robinson to the Lockean state of nature, the individual’s inalienable right to property and other ideas about the justification of power in the Whig ideology that Defoe defended (Pocock Reference Pocock1975, 434). And this connection can be found in the narrative when we focus on territory and see the importance of the island in the story.
In Robinson Crusoe, the territory is a character. At first, it seems that Robinson is the main (or perhaps the only) important character in the novel, because the story is almost entirely about him. Although the preamble and the conclusion involve other people, for most of the novel Robinson is alone in the island; and he only finds Friday very late. So, it may seem that Robinson is indeed alone. However, it very soon becomes clear that the island is more than a background: the island opposes or enables the protagonist’s designs, and the relations between Robinson and the island provide the novel’s narrative arc. In this story the island is also a character.
The island becomes a character through its relation to Robinson. And the island is not any character. It is the enemy! The action unfolds as a conflict between them, where the island starts in control but is eventually defeated. As the story progresses, the island goes from complete power to subjection. At the beginning, the island treats Robinson as it wishes. After the wreck, the island throws Robinson around like a rag doll: “I saw the sea come after me as high as a great hill, and as furious as an enemy, which I had no means or strength to contend with: my business was to hold my breath, and raise myself upon the water if I could” (Defoe Reference Defoe, Owens and Furbank2016, chapter 3, my emphasis). It takes Robinson many new attempts to escape the waves and reach the shore until the sea, and the island benevolently lets him go: “[the wave] brought me so near the shore that the next wave, though it went over me, yet did not so swallow me up as to carry me away; and the next run I took, I got to the mainland” (Defoe Reference Defoe, Owens and Furbank2016, chapter 3).
However, as the story progresses, the island changes—and it yields to Robinson’s will. The island goes from having full command and throwing Robinson around, to being a faithful servant. For example, the island helps the seeds germinate without Robinson’s intervention:
I saw some few stalks of something green shooting out of the ground, which I fancied might be some plant I had not seen; but I was surprised, and perfectly astonished, when, after a little longer time, I saw about ten or twelve ears come out, which were perfect green barley, of the same kind as our European -nay, as our English barley (Defoe Reference Defoe, Owens and Furbank2016, chapter 5).
But Robinson doesn’t credit the island: he sees this as Divine Providence, commanding nature to provide for him. He says:
after I saw barley grow there, in a climate which I knew was not proper for corn, and especially that I knew not how it came there, it startled me strangely, and I began to suggest that God had miraculously caused His grain to grow without any help of seed sown, and that it was so directed purely for my sustenance on that wild, miserable place (Defoe Reference Defoe, Owens and Furbank2016, chapter 5).
So the nature that had been his enemy is now taken for granted, and by the end of the novel, the island has become Robinson’s slave. At that point, Robinson does not consider himself a shipwreck, but an owner of private property, and the sole commander of the territory of which he was king:
…it was a merry reflection, which I frequently made, how like a king I looked. First of all, the whole country was my own property, so that I had an undoubted right of dominion. Secondly, my people were perfectly subjected -I was absolutely lord and lawgiver. (Defoe Reference Defoe, Owens and Furbank2016, chapter 16).
Robinson’s island was at first an antagonist hindering his plans, but Robinson resists and overcomes the enemy. He uses his reason and his will to conquer the land; he first surveys, measures, disciplines, and rules. His colonization makes his surroundings fit for profit. This then allows him to accumulate, build stores, and create power. He becomes a sovereign.
Robinson’s story, then, nourishes the myth of the self-reliant individual who commands the gifts of nature for profit and uses his economic resources to build political power. Territory is broken and tamed, conquered and owned. The land—which was originally “wild, miserable place” and like an “enemy”—only becomes good when Robinson cultivates it. And his act of possession entitles him to dominate creatures, places and peoples. In the novel, these colonial enterprises are symbolized by Friday, the “savage” whom Robinson saves, and never considers anything but a servant or a slave.
The elements in this story can also be found in other accounts of political and economic development, which have determined how people relate to territory in modernity. Just as in the novel, and in the economic model of the Robinson Crusoe Economy, in theories of economic development and in political philosophy, the territory is either ignored, used for profit, or considered hostile. The theories also tell stories where the territory’s role is to provide economic resources once it has been dominated and controlled, or where it remains the unnamed background of colonial political power.
In Robinson Crusoe, the island is a character, and its presence helps to transform the novel into myth. The myth of Robinson Crusoe helps to sustain a wider view of economic relations, profit, and political domination of the land. The myth of the evil island also participates in the view of territory as the source of profit, which leads to over-exploitation and ecological breakdown.
Speranza: Michel Tournier’s critique of the Robinson myth
When we say that Robinson Crusoe is a myth, we also agree with Michel Tournier, who claimed that a myth is “a story that everybody knows” (Tournier Reference Tournier1988, 157). Because the story is so widespread, it is also the pattern for other stories, and other political accounts: it tells you what to expect. Just as in Robinson Crusoe, in many other stories territory first seems only the background of the action, but it is soon revealed as a character. In fact, it is the adversary that must be defeated and dominated for the individual to survive. So, the setting alone tells you that the individual is justified in conquering nature. The story is a foundational myth of modernity: it sustains the idea of self-reliance, technological success, human ingenuity; it also explains accumulation and profit for the sake of security, and it uses survival to justify colonialism and ecological exploitation.
Given that Crusoe’s story sets the standard for how people should relate to the natural world, it is not surprising that it is also a favorite subject of ideological critique. In 1967, Michel Tournier published a postcolonial retelling of Robinson Crusoe: Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique, (translated as Friday, and also as The Other Island in 1969); where Tournier reverses the myth. Tournier was explicit about his view of Robinson, and sought to bring light to Defoe’s “complacent colonialism in his treatment of Friday” (Tournier Reference Tournier1988, 188, cited by Watt Reference Watt1996, 255).
In the novel, Tournier draws from the historical events that inspired Defoe, and instead of setting the story in the Atlantic, he sets it in the Pacific, almost a hundred years after the original. This allows him to highlight the connections to the Enlightenment. He sets it in the island of Más a tierra, in the Juan Fernandez Archipelago off the coast of Chile, the historical place where a mutineer, Alexander Selkirk was left for dead but survived 4 years alone. This setting allows Tournier to make visible the original novel’s assumptions, and the claim to historical accuracy that sustains the myth.
At first, just as in the original story, Robinson seeks to dominate the island and master his environment. Yet, in here, the plot focuses on his inward journey, as he fights with himself—and loses. Robinson soon realizes that it is impossible for him to control nature, and falls into despair. Without hope and all alone, he also loses his mind, and literally, wallows in the mire. He lies down in a swamp without any desire to live or die. In his days in the swamp, he forgets time: “he lived on unmentionable foods, gnawing them with his face on the ground. He relieved himself where he laid […] and his brief excursions always ended with his return to the mire. Here, in its warm coverlet of slime, his body lost all weight while the toxic emanations of the stagnant water drugged his mind” (Tournier Reference Tournier1969, 40). Unlike Defoe’s island who quickly yields to his commands, here the island puts the man back in his place.
However, the island as a character is also benevolent in this version, and eventually helps him out of his despair. After an episode of madness where he ends in the ocean, the sea “flungs him a second time on the same stretch of beach.” He finally stands up and sees the island “lay behind him, huge and untrodden, filled with limited promises and harsh lessons” (Tournier Reference Tournier1969, 43). So, while the original Robinson had called it “The Island of Despair,” this Robinson calls the island “Speranza,” the place of hope. Robinson comes out of the mire and seeks to grow corn looking for his host’s acceptance, “[a]nd he felt that the bread yielded by the soil of Speranza would be tangible proof that he accepted him” (Tournier Reference Tournier1969, 48). But although Robinson recognizes that he must have a connection to Speranza, the terms of the relationship remain abusive: he still wants to conquer her. For him, security requires accumulation, and this, in turn necessitates measuring, time keeping, ritual, and power. All of this demands a discipline, that he rigidly imposes on himself, and on his relationship with the island.
Unlike Defoe’s Robinson, Tournier’s character does not impose a harsh discipline on the island only because he seeks material welfare; rather, his desire to impose order on Speranza is a psychological mechanism of self-control that saves him from despair. The discipline and ordering is designed to keep him away from the mire. Because the mire remains a temptation for him: a soothing drug where he can literally submerge himself to forget his miserable loneliness. He returns to the mire when he lacks self-discipline, and there he flees the terrible punishments that he imposes on himself, when he lacks the ability to control his environment and succeed over it. So, for Robinson, the relation to Speranza is a binary choice of either, total control, or absolute despair. He does not know how to relate to the island unless it is by mastery or defeat. For Tournier, Robinson represents modern man’s reaction to existential solitude—on the one hand, the frantic self-consuming work of efficiency and the rat-race, or, on the other, the narcissistic wallowing in despair.
Yet, in between these extremes, Robinson discovers that he could have a different relation to Speranza: “In his new life[…] Speranza was no longer a territory to be exploited, but a being, unquestionably feminine,” toward whom he directed his love (Tournier Reference Tournier1969, 97). One day when he forgets to reset his water clock, he loses track of time. He takes a brief unplanned vacation—a temporary break from his self-discipline that allows him to rest—without falling back into the mire. In this brief interlude, Robinson also falls in love with the Earth. Speranza opens to him and he accepts her. “In the very breath of the world. He was in that other island, the one he had glimpsed but never seen again. He felt as never before that he was lying on Speranza as though on a living being, that the island’s body was beneath him” (119). The metaphor of a loving relation to Speranza propels the novel forward. The two characters change in their relations, and grow together, without destroying each other.
In this retelling, Robinson remains the main character, but he’s not the hero of the story—as the title Friday indicates. Friday, who in Defoe’s story was a savage slave, almost irrelevant to the story, is now the hero. Here, he is an Araucanian teenager who shows Robinson how to play. It is thanks to him that there is a change in the relation that Robinson had established with the Island. In this version of the novel, Friday is not at Robinson’s service, he is instead an equal, and even a teacher. In Tournier’s telling, Friday shows Robinson that he can survive in the island without subduing nature or submitting to forlornness. This becomes clear the day when Friday blows up Robinson’s stores by mistake. Robinson loses all the material and symbolic links to the social order of this early life. Now he stands almost naked before Speranza, just as Friday does. But Friday is much better than Robinson at living in peace with the animals, the plants, the water, and the air, whom he respects. So he can teach Robinson to live collaboratively with Speranza. When Robinson’s colonial and patriarchal structures are literally blown up, “Friday would now show him the way to something else, substituting for an existence he had found intolerable a new order which Robinson longed to discover” (Tournier Reference Tournier1969,180).
This reversal of the roles is meant to unmask the original story of profit and self-reliance as a myth. Robinson did not have to force his will on the island in order to survive, his accumulating habits were only required for the survival of his self-image as sovereign, entitled to control and dominate others. “Under [Friday’s] influence, and the successive blows he dealt me, I have traveled the road of a long and painful metamorphosis.’ Tournier’s Friday is a spirit of the wind, who lets the island free and also liberates Robinson.
The myth of Robinson Crusoe illustrates the modern individual’s relation to territory as only a subject of exploitation. But territory is also a mirror for the individual, and it reflects his ideology’s contradictions: Territory is a thing to be dominated for the sake of power and profit; but the attempt to control shows the individuals’ weakness. In his critique, Tournier shows how the myth is also about the relation of individuals with themselves: it is about work, discipline, and self-denial, all traits that allow the individual to mask his limitations. So Friday is an explicit critique of that way of thinking about the self. It seeks to debunk the myth and expose its dangers. Tournier’s critique deals mostly with the existential problem of the modern individual’s solitude, and it offers a philosophical solution for individuals: Robinson works on himself, changes his form of knowledge, and decides to drop out of the society that caused him and Speranza so much pain. When the Heron reaches the shores of Speranza and offers Robinson an escape from his solitude, he decides to stay in the island.
From a political perspective, this story offers insights about the individual’s relations to others. But it is not a solution to the wider problem of how to relate democratic politics with nonhuman creatures and the more-than-human world. Tournier retains the myth as an explanation, not a solution. As Marx noted: Robinson’s island is not accurate when used as a model, but it is still the best model to understand how economists think, and how they try to organize the material world, so it is not easy to let go of it. True, we need this type of critique to debunk political myths, and to re-assess the moral simplifications that cover up the economic reality of extraction and depletion of the capacity to reproduce society, but political movements also need to go beyond ideological critique to provide an alternative story that gives weapons against the disciplining powers of the state and the violence of extraction.
Tournier’s Friday is a postcolonial metropolitan tale, it is representative of 1960s counterculture, and it carries its limitations too. Tournier unmakes traditional forms of authority, he denounces capitalist accumulation, and is concerned with the fragility of the planet, and the psychological and existential isolation of modern man. Friday is the symbol of the liberated colonial man, the child of peace whose image would become widespread after 1968. The countercultural moment and its ideological critique (also represented in the second wave feminism and early ecological movements) may not be sufficient to spur structural change; but just as they debunked some myth, they tried to recover and recreate other older myths of the relation of people to their environment. Tournier tries to resuscitate the myth of the spirits the air (Deleuze Reference Deleuze1977). Like others authors in this period, he sought to revive pagan cults or to invent them. In this period, neopaganism also turned to the image of the Green Man, witches, and the cult of Mother Earth to address environmental anxieties (Stoll Reference Stoll2012). All these myths, as they get resurrected and repurposed, carve their way back into politics.
Yet, to go beyond critique, the myths must be recast so that the story connects people (including all its nonhuman creatures and relations) with the land, so that it can lead to political action and structural change. To become such political solution, the stories must include examples of how to become strong with others. So, like Tournier’s Robinson, the heroes of the new the stories cannot simply be magical creatures like Friday. The stories must not only show how to accept the limitation of human individuals and highlight the complexity of the networks of relations on which individuals depend, but they also have to show how people and things can act together without undermining others in the world.
The novel as an allegory is initially promising but eventually disheartening. Friday, as a spirit of the air, could have been a counter-story to Robinson. But, like other examples of 60s counterculture, it does not go beyond critique. Friday is the Indigenous spirit of the air who would save Robinson, but the novel ends when Robinson stays on the island and Friday leaves. Friday joins the ship’s crew, and then he is sold to slavery.
The territory as character and its Latin American “indigenous defenders”
The 2022 documentary The Territory directed by Alex Pritz (Pritz Reference Pritz2022) zooms into a strip of Amazon forest under attack by a rapidly growing Brazilian society and state. The Uru-ew-wau-wau people, who live there, must defend their ancestral territory against settlers encroaching on their land. The camera follows Bitaté, a young leader who organizes community patrols to keep out of the reserve people who use slash and burn methods to open the forest for cattle ranching. This happens amid constant threats of violence, which become a reality when Ari, one of the patrol leaders, is murdered. Bitaté, hand in hand with Nadihna, an environmental activist, use modern technology (cameras, drones, GPS devices) to organize the people inside and outside the territory to protect the forest, and their resolute efforts and the search for justice for Ari inspire others to change.
The territory is a documentary about contemporary Brazilian Politics. But it is aimed at a Northern audience, and it uses a story that is common to environmental movements worldwide. This is the story of the “defense of territory” or the “land and water defenders.” When activists, across the Americas, initiate legal action or take to the streets, demanding the stop of urban development, resource extraction, pollution they often focus on Indigenous collectives—and those who stand together often use the term “defenders” or “protectors” rather than “protesters.” The term became widespread in the United States and Europe after the 2016 movement against the Dakota Access Pipeline, which threatened the Dakota Sioux water resources in the USA. But the idea that “water is life” and “life must be defended” as political slogans, as well as the rhetorical association of Indigenous people with the pristine environment, was common in Latin America, and it is much older. Stories of the “defense of territory” are often set in concrete places: a river, a forest, a mountain. Here the places and the territories also become characters, and the action centers around their defense: people defend water against a pipeline, a forest against industrial cattle ranching, a mountain against strip mining. The stories that activists and journalists narrate, often tell of a community that lived in peace in harmony with nature, but their peace was disrupted by greedy men with machines, who destroy their land and extract benefits for short-term profit. The Indigenous community then organizes to defend their territory (represented by water or the water source), but they are violently rebuked by settlers and their powerful backers in the cities. The water defenders are threatened, and their leaders are often murdered. In the stories, the murdered activists become tragic heroes. Their memory is tied to the movements’ slogans and their songs and narratives in direct action, and legal challenges. Once the community comes together under their name, the new leaders organize, take the movement forward, and seek to recover what was taken from them.
The Territory is this kind of story, as well as the inheritor of the countercultural critique. Like Friday, the documentary is a reversal of the Robinson myth. Like Friday, the documentary makes the playful witty Indigenous youth—Bitaté—the trigger of change (his face is in the documentary’s poster). And just as it happens in Friday, the forces that Bitaté must fight are those embedded in the original Robinson’s way of looking at the world: early in the documentary one of the cattle ranchers says: “the Indians don’t work on the land and they don’t use it, they just live there.” Also, the ranchers tap into the Robinson myth when they justify their actions by insisting that they work on the land, and their work makes them deserve private property. The attackers value the forest canopy only as wood (one of the slash burners is particularly greedy for red cedar), and like Tournier’s Robinson, the place where the story develops is a remote, exotic, isolated place, alien to “us,” the viewers. Like it happens in Friday, the tragic Indigenous characters are portrayed as a breed destined to disappear, and they remind the viewer of her existential solitude, and her helplessness standing before the forces of development, or progress gone awry.
However, in The Territory, there is a twist that brings glimpses of hope to the audience. Unlike Robinson Crusoe, or Friday, this is not a novel. It is not a story of an individual man, instead the hero is a collective. So, in this sense, the story, picks up from where Tournier’s Robinson left off. The ideological critique in the 1960s debunked the Robinson myth and opened up the space for new stories, reviving or inventing alternative tales about life with the more-than-human. The new 21st century narratives start with the end of progress. They are born at the time that the limitations of development and the excesses of extraction and capitalism are obvious. In this new story, the hero rejects domination and finds a partner in the land. However, the hero is not a solitary man—it is a collective.
This collective action is clearly seen in the movie, partially due to the medium of its production. Unlike the novels discussed in the previous sections, here the film does not rely on a narrator who speaks directly to the reader. Instead, the video recording comes from the different perspectives: the points of view of the Indigenous people, the environmental activists, and the film makers. The collective is not only seen by the camera, but is also created in action, as the Uru-ew-wau-wau take over the recording in the moment where they must close the borders to protect the community and ask the filmmakers to leave. The documentary allows us to see the collective emerging from the collated images and voices.
The Territory also highlights and seeks to debunk the myth of possessive individualism by zooming in on the loggers’ desire and felt need to own the land. In contrast, the Indigenous people are seen as collaborating with the forest, creating an “everybody” that includes the place. The images of the river and the canopy pull the viewer in, allowing the audience to identify with the forest, and constructing—through the film—a collective more expansive than the closed Indigenous community. Even though the Uru-ew-wau-wau seek to exclude outsiders, by including the forest in their collective they also include the viewer into the community. While the Brazilian farmers are depicted as only caring about themselves and their possessions, when the Uru-ew-wau-wau appear on camera we see the forest as part of the common good (which includes the viewer).
So due partially to the medium of production, The Territory gives us a new story meant to inspire hope. Although the Amazon is still being lost to logging, and we have many reasons to feel depressed when we watch this documentary, The Territory ends in a high note. The tone is hopeful because it shows the community fighting together. However, even though it presents itself as a true story, it cannot fully tap into old myths or consciously create a new myth of a democratic collective that includes the nonhuman because the Uru-ew-wau-wau remain distant and exotic.
The simultaneous attraction and distance from the community is also forefront in the documentary Mujeres de Fuego [Women of Fire] (Giraldo et al. Reference Giraldo, Liceaga and Rabasa2021), a podcast in eight episodes, which tells of the events leading to the liberation of the Indigenous town of Cherán from the grip of illegal loggers—part of the epidemic of organized criminality that plagues Mexico since the turn of the century. The documentary relies on many female voices to narrate the events which shook this small city in 2011. The “uprising” against the criminals made the front pages of all Mexican newspapers, because for the first time, the coming together of the townsfolk led to an effective communal movement that expelled criminal loggers, and the corrupt officials who harbored them, from the territory. The town managed to set up a democratic autonomous government to guarantee its safety.Footnote 3
Cherán is an Indigenous town in the state of Michoacán, in Mexico’s southwest. The townsfolk felt threatened when illegal loggers associated with organized crime began to clear-cut the forest surrounding the town. The land that the loggers abused was the communal forest for the locals: people who had ancestrally used the forest for hunting, for wood, and most importantly, for water. Facing the devastation of the forest, and particularly the green areas surrounding the spring that provides the town with water, a group of women “wrapped themselves in their rebozos,” or their traditional shawls (Giraldo et al. Reference Giraldo, Liceaga and Rabasa2021, episode 4), and took to the streets to rebel against the loggers. The women stood in front of the trucks, “putting their bodies” (Giraldo et al. Reference Giraldo, Liceaga and Rabasa2021, episode 4) between the criminals and the forest. The townsfolk detained the drivers and sought to keep the corrupt authorities who protected them out of the town. But this effort soon also required keeping the police out. So, the town lacked elected authorities, and it was effectively surrounded by the police and under death threats of the criminal gangs. The townsfolk had to place themselves in an auto-siege to close ranks, maintain the community together, and protect themselves from outsiders. They managed to survive this self-imposed blockade by pooling resources and organizing all neighbors in groups of mutual aid and self-defense. Over several years of self-organizing and of legal and political activism, they obtained official recognition of Indigenous autonomy from the Mexican federal government. Thanks to their official autonomy and their democratic institutions the town managed to keep violence and organized crime out of their territory.
The podcast presents these facts, but unlike a traditional news report, it tells the story using the voices of about a dozen women who participated in the uprising. Through this braid of female voices, the documentary makes the whole town its main character. The town—an Indigenous pueblo—does not only consist only of people, but it is also made by the relations to water, forest, mountains, and the songs and stories told around the fire (Ochoa Espejo Reference Ochoa Espejo2023). So, as the story is told, the territory—particularly the forest—is one of the main characters.
The forest brings people together, provides food, water, medicine, and it tells women when to act. One of the women, a traditional healer, describes the role of the forest in her craft. She tells of how in her youth she once boasted of having cured a patient by given her a herbal compound, but her grandmother laughed and corrected her: “…don’t ever go around saying that you cured her. For things to work that way you need the plant, and the water, and the sun, and the air [that grew the plant]. All of that is what cured her”Footnote 4 (Giraldo et al. Reference Giraldo, Liceaga and Rabasa2021, episode 3). So, it is “all of that”, the forest, who cures. Similarly, it is the forest, that tells the women when to act. The insurrection was about defending the forest, but the forest participates in its self-defense. When they ask one of the women to define the forest, she claims “the forest, is everything in it, it is its people too” (Giraldo et al. Reference Giraldo, Liceaga and Rabasa2021, episode 3).
Also the fire—the fire in the podcast’s title—is a character in the story. In the early days of the uprising the collective had to keep the loggers out, but this required constant vigilance. Every street had to be surveyed to block all the access to the town and the forest. The neighbors gathered around bonfires at each crossroad in the town, and they stood watch, night and day. These bonfires gave people security, but also allowed people to be together, get to know their neighbors, and renew bonds of community (Giraldo et al. Reference Giraldo, Liceaga and Rabasa2021, episode 5). The stories, the solidarity, communal cooking, and the retelling of local myths grounded a new political order. The bonfires became so central to their political narrative that the community radio was named Radio Fogata: “Radio Bonfire” (Giraldo et al. Reference Giraldo, Liceaga and Rabasa2021, episode 5).
So, in the podcast’s narrative, the women, the water, the forest and the fire together rebelled against the violence of loggers and organized crime. The podcast is produced such that the voices, the names, and the sounds of nature, all blend with each other: they are a composite character that fights against anonymous criminals who were destroying the forest. The main character is a collective which includes the nonhuman world. In the documentary, the themes of forest, water and bonfires, both evoke and instantiate community through narration. The women tell the story of an ancient connection of the town to its source of water, this evokes the town’s Indigenous roots, and associate this account with a wider political narrative about the Indigenous origins of the country.
This story (which took a well-known form in official 20th century indigenismo) has been alive in Mexico since colonial times, it was rekindled several times in the 19th century and during the Revolution—to the point that one may call it a myth. The Indigenous community organized as a pueblo or an autonomous town, became the locus of politics during early colonial times. The places where the community organized were granted legal rights and some autonomy by the early state and remained spaces of communal landholding and autonomous organization after independence (Garcia Martinez Reference García Martínez1987). Over the centuries, the idea of the Indigenous town also acquired inherited symbolic meaning (Ochoa Espejo Reference Ochoa Espejo2023). The town as an ideal was central part of the armed struggle led by Emiliano Zapata during the Mexican Revolution, and some of his movement’s agrarian demands were incorporated into the Constitution. The idea of communal holdings and Indigenous community became mythical, as it became intractable and resistant to critical examination, and it also became a ground of significance (Bottici Reference Bottici2007; Keum Reference Keum2025). Agrarian struggles are thus important in the Mexican imaginary, because they can connect a political movement to the memory of the Mexican Revolution, to Zapata, to the 1990s Neo-Zapatismo and prior revolutionary struggles. So, Cherán also became symbol and source of inspiration for many during an uncertain political moment. As the podcast tells us, the neighboring towns, and outsiders, began to call the city “Cherán K’eri” or “the big Cherán,” both to refer to its size and strength, and to add a term of respect and reverence (Giraldo et al. Reference Giraldo, Liceaga and Rabasa2021, episode 5). The story enlists the “defense of the water and territory”, and in so doing, it also interpellates all Mexicans who seek a common cause which includes feminism, ecological activism, and the defense against organized crime—and who also reject the sovereign national state as sole protector.
The idea of autonomous Indigenous communities, moreover, is not exclusively a Mexican or Latin American idea. The organized Indigenous community against the state has universal resonance (Tomba Reference Tomba2019). And the narrative of “water defenders” makes a common cause with the ecological movement and the movements for the rights of women, and the rights of Indigenous people, and the human rights of all against the abuses of organized crime and generalized violence. This narrative of “defense of water and territory” can also be found across central and south America, and it is a source of inspiration at a global level because it connects human and nonhuman nature and it mobilizes democratic ideals. In both The Territory and Mujeres de Fuego, the communities strengthen democratic institutions when they gather around the fire to discuss. In both cases, they include the forest in their communities, and also in both cases, including the nonhuman also requires closing the community to the outside, because borders provide limits to democratic institutions and define the scope of the common good in relation to the land (Ochoa Espejo Reference Ochoa Espejo2020). This boundary also makes accountability possible and allows institutions to become resilient (Forestal Reference Forrestal2022). This closure reminds participants of their individual limitations and allows them to close ranks as a community. As the people in Cherán say: autonomy requires endless individual effort that draws strength from the whole: They call that force “juchuri huinapicua: our common strength” (Girlado et al Reference Giraldo, Liceaga and Rabasa2021, episode 5). This closure, paradoxically, makes the community more welcoming for sympathetic outsiders (the viewers and listeners) who identify with the forest and with the cause of a community of resistance against organized crime. In sum, the type of stories of which The Territory and Mujeres de Fuego are good examples manage to connect democracies to nonhumans, such that they can support the flourishing of humans and nonhumans together.
However, this new type of story—narratives of democratic collectives of human and nonhumans associated with the land, particularly women and Indigenous people—is powerful, but is not a panacea. Political movements that resist the effects of individualist economies and politics represented in the Robinson story, may mobilize the new myth, but not without danger. The main problem is that this alternative myth carries with it another Friday. In these stories there is also a new version of the “Noble Savage” or the “Ecological Indian” myths. The “defender” story gets traction in the world beyond the community by reenchanting nature, but it enlists Indigenous people to do the job. This can bring back old stereotypes that cast Indigenous people as savages. In the stories, Indigenous people are sometimes recognized only as those whose concerns and rituals are impenetrable to city dwellers and capitalists (the same folk that the other stories associated with Robinson). But like it happens in Friday, highlighting that difference, while a dominant myth stays in the background does not so much debunk the beliefs as perpetuate the stereotype of the Indian as a savage and a barbarian. Like the two Fridays in the myth and in its reversal, these stories can also be interpreted as saying that Indigenous people are either savages to be conquered, or otherworldly magical spirits. As the stories highlight how, for Indigenous people, the Earth is alive, and the territory is a partner, they also emphasize that the connections between people and the nonhuman are real for them, that is, not for us. Thus, the stories can turn modern Indigenous people into mythical Indians, not real partners with the audience of the movies and the podcast, but part of nature instead. As in all Robinson myths, the Indigenous person can become Friday: a stand-in for a part of the world without reason and without rights. This Indian-as-part-of-nature is central to the Robinson myth, both for the original, and for its reversal. Moreover, it feeds the associated myth of the “Vanishing Indian”: the idea that Indigenous people are dead or dying, always at the brink of losing their culture and disappearing. So, the new narrative always runs the risk of reproducing this story where Indigenous people are valiantly fighting the last battle, they are magical creatures fated to disappear.
Is the story of “water defenders” a new myth? Is the story circulating in popular movies, documentaries and podcasts just a tale that provides some comfort to the rich and powerful, while masking economic structures, and political unwillingness to prevent the worst consequences of climate change? Yes, all myths can be a form of evasion and wish-fulfilment—and this is true of Robinson and its offshoots (Stein Reference Stein1965). But myths can also open spaces for social and economic change. These new stories are promising because they focus on collective action, and they exemplify what can be done through rituals such as sitting around the fire to talk and cook, and how things other than people participate in these practices. The new myths show how partnering with the Earth requires that we first partner with each other, and this solidarity can give forests and rivers a fighting chance against the economic forces and the political structures that give protection to destructing criminal rackets. It also matters that these stories travel in electronic media: the images and the voices make it obvious that the women in Cherán and the Uru-ew-wau-wau are not alien magical creatures. The way these stories are told can also convey that they are us—and we are all in the same boat. The stories give us a path to recognize the territory where we live, and the conditions in which we can find groups of people with whom to stand in solidarity and provide mutual aid. The new stories are not yet myths, but as the conditions become more difficult, they may become stories “that everybody knows,” and that are meaningful to us.
Conclusion
This paper has only focused on narratives (novels, documentaries, and a podcast) where the territory is a character. I have argued that these stories are necessary to change the trajectory of destruction which most societies are following—however, they are not enough. The Earth can always become an “Island of Despair,” as most people justify their search for short term profit with stories about hierarchy, entitlement, and mastery. But the material conditions that surround us have become such, that we are constantly pushed into a position like Robinson’s in Tournier’s Speranza: must we discipline and dominate ourselves and others to keep up in the rat race and win? Or are we simply losing hope and wallowing in a mire of despair? These new stories offer a way out of the dilemma by showing that a different path opens in action, with and through others. We can escape the dilemma by organizing efforts to provide mutual aid and stand in solidarity with others (including animals, plants, and some things around us). But we still need a good story that shows us how local efforts scale up—and this effort must go in hand with new economic models that simplify, explain, and guide our imagination, so that economic and political stories can also tap into the myth.
The new stories that connect democracies and nonhumans tell us how to become strong with others while respecting each one, and they may become widespread. Humans are never alone, and individuals cannot fully master their environment. Only by observing how we connect with others, and why we depend on those connections, can people act together without undermining each other. The stories that account for those relations have been around for a long time, and they may even become dominant as it becomes obvious that the narrative of individual mastery and command leads to despair. Some political movements have used the alternative stories effectively: Cherán, for example, managed to use the story of the defense of territory to obtain official recognition of the town’s autonomy, while it organized to resist the violence of organized crime which bedevils the rest of Mexico. The Territory made it to most mainstream festivals and streams on commercial channels, and it gave a real lifeline to the Uru-ew-wau-wau. The Yaqui restored some of their rights to water. They may become the kind of story “that everybody knows.”
Yet, this kind of story is not widespread in politics, and it must compete with the stories of individualism, mastery, and control that dominate most people’s imagination. The internet is crawling with ideas of self-reliance, domination, and hierarchy of races and species; these ideas are also embedded in the political and economic theory that most people learn at school. Those are the stories that we often encounter in economics or administration, in the natural sciences, commerce and business. They tap into wider dominant myths—they are the water where we swim.
Are there signs that the color of these ideological waters is changing? In the paper, I could not get into the question of why or when these stories change, and what precisely happens when they do: Do dominant myths change by design or force of will? Do they spread like fashion or disease? Or is it because the economic and political structures that prevail favor a given narrative? It may be that the resurgence of these stories since the 60s is the result of education and consciousness raising, and the effective debunking of older myths. Or it may be the result of inevitable changes in the form of production due to limited resources and the strains of population growth, depletion of resources and the warming of the Earth. But whether ideology critique is sufficient to lead towards emancipation, it is always important to be clear about ideology and its alternatives because myths may not be sufficient, but they are necessary for change.
Paulina Ochoa Espejo is The John L. Nau III Professor of the History and Principles of Democracy in the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia (USA). She is the author of On Borders: Territories, Legitimacy and the Rights of Place (Oxford University Press, 2020), The Time of Popular Sovereignty: Process and the Democratic State (Penn State University Press, 2011); she co-authored Political Theory: A Global and Comparative Introduction (SAGE, 2025) and co-edited the Oxford Handbook of Populism (Oxford University Press, 2017). At present, she is working on a monograph: Rights of Place: Territory, Property, and Jurisdiction in the Americas.
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