Witchcraft as ontological designing: Assemblage and more-than-human relationality in Latin American brujería (Sixteenth–Eighteenth centuries)

This article explores witchcraft and brujería as ontological designing and as sites of protected knowledge held in common, the generative nature of which threatened operations of colonization in sixteenth- to eighteenth-century Latin America. Witches, both practitioners of the craft but also those whose marginalization and/or resistance to the onslaught of colonialism, capitalism, and Christianity designated them as witches, employed a more-than-human relationality toward transformative ends. Analysis through a design lens foregrounds these magical and healing practices as assemblages wherein agency is co-created with the more-than-human. One manifestation of this is the mundane to magical fluctuation of witchcraft objects, dependent not only on the will and desire of the practitioner but also on intra-actions with other things or phenomena. This plays out in the context of sixteenth- to eighteenth-century Latin American witch persecutions, where practices were variously gendered, racialized, and tied to ethnic, cultural, and spiritual identities, in a flux of contact and destruction. At times, the persecuted employed brujería as subversive power to negotiate everyday social, political, and economic tensions, particularly as African, African-descended, and Indigenous practitioners who sought to resist hegemonic Western power. They simultaneously protected the knowledge embedded in this relationality while creating a commons of witchcraft practice, accessible within broader communities. This is especially salient for designers who grapple with their relations to the more-than-human and the application of commoning practices to institutionalized and professional design.