ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the notion of culture itself is historically defined by our understanding of nature. It presents a fragment of such a history by exploring how the idea of "having a voice" for political participation took form in the nineteenth century through the rise of the notion of orality developed in relation to the emergence of republican ideals that were forged in this postcolonial period. The chapter examines how specific notions of nature and culture were developed in Latin America and the Caribbean as central to the moderns' constitution of a political notion of the person. It discusses the term zoopolitics as it appears in Luduena instead of the more common biopolitics, derived from Foucault's work on the politics of life. In the colonial context of the Americas, which brought together peoples from different places and backgrounds, such a definition of life through the voice was certainly a contested political issue.
