Seeking Togetherness at the Table: Missionaries Wrestling with Everyday Encounters with Parallel Worlds in Contemporary Capitalist Society in Cajamarca, Peru

Ross I. · Transdisciplinary Research Across Knowledge Worlds: Beyond Parallel Universes (2026) · DOI: 10.1007/978-3-032-19491-6_7

Resumen

This chapter explores radical pluralist currents in social science, like Arturo Escobar’s One World World and Pluriverse, through the lens of the everyday lived experiences of foreign Christian missionaries in Cajamarca, Peru. Two factors make missionaries in Cajamarca an interesting case through which to consider Escobar’s concepts. Firstly, contemporary missionaries’ livelihood and sense of belonging requires them to navigate a complex patchwork of parallelisms including post-colonial national stereotypes, overlapping moral landscapes, and unfamiliar geographies of class. Secondly, Cajamarca has a long history as a place of encounter because of the execution of the Inca Atahualpa by the Spanish conquistadors. The shared table emerges as an important locus for the negotiation of these parallelisms. The shared table is examined in three aspects: as a universal human practice, a Latin American cultural practice, and a Christian spiritual practice. The discussion suggests that the notions of encounter and togetherness are more fruitful avenues for seeking justice and ecological wholeness in contexts with complex, overlapping parallelisms than Escobar’s radical onto-epistemological pluralism. It also encourages closer attention to the shared table concept and the encounter with differences in contextual theology, lived theology and world-making practices. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2026.