Territories of Difference: Place, Movements, Life, Redes 9780822389439

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T e r r i to r i e s o f D i f f e r e n c e

N e w E co lo g i e s f o r t h e T w e n t y- F i r st C e n t u ry

Series Editors: Arturo Escobar, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Dianne Rocheleau, Clark University

A John Hope Franklin Center Book

Arturo Escobar

Territories of Difference

place, movements, life, redes

D u k e Un iversit y Press  Durham and London  2008

© 2008 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞ Designed by C. H. Westmoreland Typeset in Quadraat with Magma Compact display by Achorn International, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

Some material in chapter 5 previously appeared in David Nugent and Joan Vincent, eds., A Companion to the Anthropology of Politics (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 248–66, and is reprinted here with permission of Blackwell.

Frontispiece and title page art: page ii: based on an illustration from Los sistemas productivos de la comunidad negra del r’o Valle, Bah’a Solano, Choc—, by Carlos Tapia, Roc’o Polanco, and Claudia Leal, 1997. page iii: based on an engraving produced by the Gente Entintada y Parlante project, Tumaco, early 1990s.

contents about the series  vii preface  ix acknowledgments  xiii

introduction 

1

1  place  27 2  capital  69 3  nature  111 4  development  156 5  identity  200 6  networks  254

conclusion 

299

notes  313 references cited  381 index  417

About the Series This series addresses two trends: critical conversations in academic fields about nature, sustainability, globalization, and culture, including constructive engagements between the natural, social, and human sciences; and intellectual and political conversations among social movements and other non-academic knowledge producers about alternative practices and socio-natural worlds. Its objective is to establish a synergy between these theoretical and political developments in both academic and non-academic arenas. This synergy is a sine qua non for new thinking about the real promise of emergent ecologies. The series includes works that envision more lasting and just ways of being-in-place and being-in-networks with a diversity of humans and other living and non-living beings. New Ecologies for the Twenty-First Century aims to promote a dialogue between those who are transforming the understanding of the relationship between nature and culture. The series revisits existing fields such as environmental history, historical ecology, environmental anthropology, ecological economics, and cultural and political ecology. It addresses emerging tendencies, such as the use of complexity theory to rethink a range of questions on the nature–culture axis. It also deals with epistemological and ontological concerns, building bridges between the various forms of knowing and ways of being embedded in the multiplicity of practices of social actors worldwide. This series hopes to foster convergences among differently located actors and to provide a forum for authors and readers to widen the fields of theoretical inquiry, professional practice, and social struggles that characterize the current environmental arena.

preface This book has been twelve years in the making. It has grown and stalled over this period in tandem with the demands and vicissitudes of my intellectual, personal, and professional life. I started on the journey that resulted in this book in 1991–92, when I first developed the proposal which took me to Colombia in January of 1993 for a year of field research, then simply entitled “Afro-Colombian Responses to Modernization and Development.” During that initial year, I assembled a small research team to work in the southern Pacific region, at that point still custom­ arily described as a poor, forgotten, hot, humid forest crisscrossed by innumerable rivers and inhabited by black and indigenous groups—a litoral rec—ndito, as Sofon’a Yacup, a local author and politician, put it in the 1930s. By 1993, the region was fully immersed in an ambitious strategy of development that had started in the mid-1980s; armed with the tools given to researchers by the discursive critique of development of the 1980s, I set out to investigate ethnographically both the cultural and ecological impact of the various projects and the forms of resistance they faced from the black groups of the river communities. Or so I thought. What I discovered soon after my arrival was that the situation was far more complex than I had realized from a distance. Indeed, it has not ceased to grow in complexity, posing unprece­ dented challenges to research method, politics, and understanding. First, two or three months into the project, we recognized that besides state-sponsored development and nascent capitalist enterprises (chiefly African oil palm plantations and industrial shrimp farming), albeit closely linked to them, there were two crucial factors in the struggle over the representation and fate of the region. The first was the concern with the region’s biodiversity; the region was identified as one of the most important “biodiversity hot spots” in the world, and our arrival there coincided with the beginning of a novel, internationally funded conservation strategy of ambitious scope. As in other hot spots of this kind, la conservaci—n de la biodiversidad had become the battle cry of the state, nongovernmental organizations (ngos), academics, and local leaders alike. Closely related to conservation was a small but highly committed and articulate social movement of black communities. Our initial conversations with activists in this movement, while not immediately trusting, were nevertheless auspicious. In mid-June of that year (1993), our small research team held the first daylong workshop with a group of

these activists and a handful of black intellectuals from the Pacific who were close to the movement. Our explicit intent was to discuss concrete ways of articulating our project with the interests and agenda of the movement. From this meeting on, the group of activists known as Proceso de Comunidades Negras (Process of Black Communities, pcn) became our closest interlocutor. On January 3, 1994, we concluded our first year of research with an intense, productive daylong interview with about ten pcn leaders on issues ranging from ethnicity, environment, and cultural dif ference to gender, strategy, and movement heterogeneity. The result of this first year of work, plus five additional months in 1994, was a collective volume, Pac’fico, desarrollo o diversidad? Estado, capital y movimientos sociales en el Pac’fico colombiano, published in Bogot‡ in 1996, with contributions from academics, intellectuals, and activists from the region. My relation to pcn remains close to this day. Indeed, this book owes as much to this group’s knowledge and acute political sensibility as to scholarly fields. The book can be seen, in fact, as an ethnography of the practices, strategies, and visions of this particular group of activists, including their own knowledge production. While the book is largely conceived from this perspective, however, it is more than that. Infused with pcn conceptualizations and engaging various strands in critical scholarship, the book proposes a way of analyzing some of the most salient social, cultural, and ecological issues of the present day. How does one examine and understand the momentous, complex processes engulfing regions such as the Pacific today? I should say at this point that finding biodiversity, the social movement, and activist knowledge was not the end of the complexification of the investigation. Further layers of complexity came from both social (“real world”) and scholarly sources. Setting the social and the scholarly into productive dialogue is rarely an easy task, unless one decides to adopt a relatively straightforward framework of interpretation. But here the sources of complication were multiple. For instance, how does one go behind and beyond the forceful emergence of black identities of the 1990s to illuminate both historical processes of subalternity and possible ways forward in the struggles over difference? Second, particularly given the spread of armed conflict into the southern Pacific after 2000 and the ensuing massive displacement of local peoples from the region, how do events in the Pacific reflect and enact in distinct ways forces and conditions that go well beyond the region? To cite another example, the transnationalization of the region’s social movements after 1995 certainly raised issues that could not be accommodated   PREFACE

within the original research design and called for a more complex approach to both the movements and the region. What resulted from this process was a series of nested frameworks that are articulated in the book in various ways and at several levels—not so much as in the proverbial layered onion, although the frameworks did grow somewhat organically, but in the fashion of a hypertextual formation. These include frameworks concerning political ecology, social movements, development, political economy, modernity and coloniality, science and technology, cultural politics, space and place, identity, networks, globalization, and complexity. This means the book is profoundly interdisciplinary or, as I explain in one of the chapters, it follows the trend toward “undisciplinarity” proposed by the Latin American group on modernity/coloniality/decoloniality. One might argue that this multiframing is the kind of approach that anthropology or cultural studies allows one to develop today; this is true up to a point but with clear limits since, after all, anthropology, particularly in the United States, wants to remain a discipline. Over the past ten years, I have written a series of largely theoretical papers that constituted bits and pieces of the framework presented here in a more comprehensive and integrated manner. In 1999, I started thinking about this book in terms of six key concepts: place, capital, nature, development, identity, and networks. This representation—the one in this book—interweaves both ethnographic research and theory around each notion. At the time, my decision to structure the text around these six concepts suggested to me that the book could be seen as a treatise in political ecology; today, I find it difficult to reduce it to this one field—or to any other, for that matter. Another aspect of the book’s character is that many of the frameworks summoned here have been developed collectively. These include the frameworks of “politics of place” (developed with the “Women and the Politics of Place,” wpp, project since the late 1990s, which I have coordi­ nated with Wendy Harcourt, of the Society for International Development in Rome); “modernity/coloniality/decoloniality,” or mcd (developed by the Latin American mcd group); “diverse economies” (originally proposed by J. K. Gibson-Graham and elaborated in specific ways within the wpp project and the Cultures of Economies group at Chapel Hill); world anthropologies (out of the World Anthropologies Network, wan, project); and a particular analysis of social movements (which I owe to my work with both the loose research group on Latin American social movements, maintained throughout the years with Sonia E. Alvarez and Evelina Dagnino, and the vibrant interdisciplinary Social Movements PREFACE xi

Working Group, smwg, at Chapel Hill since 2003). Even my political ecology approach has important collective dimensions in terms of groups in both Latin America and the United States. One thing these projects have in common is that they take the production of knowledge itself as a problematic; in a way, they all represent a social movement within the academy for a different kind of knowledge production. My own processing of these frameworks for this book, again, owes a lot to my ongoing engagement with the collectivity called pcn. This engagement has been an important aspect of the interface between theory and ethnographic research, as I have tried to articulate the production of knowledge by pcn with those arising more explicitly from academic sites, although in the process the boundary between academic and activist worlds and knowledges is blurred. I am convinced that this collective dimension of framework building in the social sciences pays off in terms of theoretical grounding, interpretive power, social relevance, and sense of politics. It is a far cry from the persona—particularly accentuated at the level of the doctoral experience—of the lonely academic laboriously building a framework from literatures he or she has mastered by him- or herself. The collective approach might not follow the rule of one book every three years imposed on its practitioners by the maddening pace of the neoliberal academy in the United States, but it allows for plenty of creativity and, if one wishes, output, without being driven exclusively by the latter. The practice of working groups bringing together faculty and graduate students has become more common in recent years (certainly at Chapel Hill), and it is a way to bring this collective dimension of framework building to the fore.

xii  PREFACE

acknowledgments An explicit, built-in collective dimension to a book means that the influences and hence the debts of intellectual and personal gratitude multiply in ways one can never account for to complete satisfaction. I would like to highlight, however, the main ones, and I ask for the indulgence of the many more I should have mentioned and do not in order to make this task manageable. My deepest gratitude goes to the Proceso de Comunidades Negras, pcn; without their support and engagement this book would have been drastically different and poorer, in that the intellectual input of pcn thought has been definitive to the work. My thanks partic­ ularly to Libia Grueso and Carlos Rosero, my main pcn collaborators, with whom I have shared many experiences and conversations in activ­ ist, institutional, and academic milieus in Colombia and elsewhere over the years. Thanks also to other members of pcn (most of whom remain with the organization to this day), including Hern‡n CortŽs, Leyla Arroyo, Victor Guevara, Julia Cogollo, Alfonso Cassiani, FŽlix Banguero, Edelmira Mina Roses, JosŽ Absalom Su‡rez, Konti Bikila Cifuentes, Mario Angulo, Yellen Aguilar, and, in Washington, D.C., Marino C—rdoba and Charo Mina. A number of black intellectuals from the region were important sources of insight, knowledge, and information in the early stages, especially the scholar and activist of popular communications Jaime Rivas, the Guapi poet and expert in oral traditions Alfredo Van’n, the educator from Timbiqu’ (located on one of the legendary gold mining rivers of the Pacific since colonial times) Mary Luc’a Hur­tado, the cultural activist from Tumaco Dayra Qui–ones, the anthropologist from Tumaco Ofir Hurtado, and the cooperative leaders Arismendi Aristiz‡bal, and RubŽn Caicedo. Our 1993–94 research team included my good friend Alvaro Pedrosa, whose remarkable work on popular education and communications at the Universidad del Valle in Cali was essential to understanding the early development initiatives in the Pacific; Jesœs Alberto Grueso, the anthropologist from Timbiqu’; and Betty Ruth Lozano, the sociologist from Cali, who started to think about black perspectives on gender and ethnicity in the early 1990s, when it was still a taboo subject. Also in Colombia, I am pleased to thank the staff of the biodiversity conservation project,partic­ularly Enrique S‡nchez and Juan Manuel Navarette, for sharing their grounded yet critical understanding of the project; and Margarita Fl—rez and Germ‡n VŽlez, of ilsa and Grupo Semillas in Bogot‡, whose

critical work on biodiversity and intellectual property rights provided a much-needed counterpoint to the early economistic approaches to the “benefits” of biodiversity. My understanding of alternative perspectives on biodiversity has also been enriched by exchanges with Timmi Tillman and Maruja Salas (Indigenous Knowledge and People’s Network for Capacity Building, Chiang Mai, Thailand), V’ctor Manuel Toledo in Mexico, Mar’a Fernanda Espinosa of iucn in Quito, Nelson Alvarez and Henk Hobbelink (grain, Barcelona), and the postings by Silvia Ribeiro of etc Group in Mexico. More recently, I have benefited from my participation in the project to discuss science–policy interfaces in biodiversity governance, particularly the workshop on the subject in Leipzig in October 2006, and I thank the conveners and participants. Among the pacific—logos none has contributed more substantially to this study than Eduardo Restrepo, my good friend and fellow anthropologist. Eduardo’s prolific writings are the single most important oeuvre on the Pacific at present; besides, his solidarity knows no limit. Much of what I know about the Pacific I have learned from those anthropologists, ecologists, geographers, historians, communicators, and so on who entered a field of Pacific studies that by the mid- to late 1990s was burgeoning with activity. I can mention here only the few scholars and intellectuals with whom I have interacted most directly: Juana Camacho, Manuela Alvarez, Mauricio Pardo, Claudia Leal, Peter Wade, Kiran Asher, Michael Taussig, Jeannetee Rojas Silva, Jaime Arocha, Astrid Ulloa, Carlos Tapia, Alberto Gaona, Jesœs Alberto ValdŽs, Aurora Sabogal, Sonia del Mar Gonzalez, Claudia Mosquera, Oscar Almario, Luis Carlos Castillo, and Ulrich Oslender. Many others in Colombian anthropology, ecology, and other social and human sciences, including some working in ngos, have also been important to this book. The debts incurred beyond Colombia are also immense—as large as the networks that have produced the frameworks that inform the book. Over the years, I learned much about ecology from Enrique Leff, Dianne Rocheleau, Joan Mart’nez Alier, and James O’Connor. I would also like to mention those with whom I worked most closely in the collective projects mentioned above: Wendy Harcourt, J. K. Gibson-Graham, and Smitu Kothari (Women and the Politics of Place); Walter Mignolo, Santiago Castro-G—mez, Edgardo Lander, An’bal Quijano, Agustin La—, and Catherine Walsh (Modernity/Coloniality/Decoloniality); Marisol de la Cadena, Eduardo Restrepo, Gustavo Lins Ribeiro, and Susana Narotzky (wan); and, for the social movements field, Sonia E. Alvarez, Evelina Dagnino, and a number of doctoral students with whom I have worked closely on social xiv  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

movements, including Mary King and Chaia Heller (University of Massachusetts, Amherst), Juliana Fl—rez (Universitat Aut—noma de Barcelona), and, at Chapel Hill, Michal Osterweil, Maribel Casas-CortŽs, Elena Yehia, Juan Ricardo Aparicio, Dana Powell, Catalina CortŽs Severino, and the one-time postdoctoral fellows Mario Blaser and Xochitl Leyva. These students’ acute sense of the need to combine intellectual and political life places them in an outstanding group of intellectuals who are transforming the social movements research field. I want to mention also Jeff Juris and Harry Halpin, who provided feedback on the chapter on networks. To my former colleagues in anthropology at the University of Massachusetts and my current colleagues at the University of North Carolina, my deepest thanks for creating a nourishing climate for academic work. My life at unc has been enriched by many people, of whom I would like to highlight colleagues from the various working groups, including Dorothy Holland, Charles Price, Don Nonini, Peter Redfield, Karla Slocum, Charles Kurzman, and Wendy Wolford; Larry Grossberg and John Pickles, with whom I have shared the exciting and trying aspects of transforming cultural studies at unc at a time when the public university is under strong normalizing and privatizing pressures; and Joseph Jordan, for his sense of vision about the meaning of Afro–Latin American struggles and identities. Thanks to Natasha McCurley, Juan R. Aparicio, and Catalina CortŽs for their careful assistance in proofreading and preparing the manuscript for submission. Throughout the years, I have presented bits and pieces of the chapters that make up this book in many places and in many countries. I thank all of those who invited me to share with them the fragments of a work in progress. Besides those in Colombia, which include universities and research centers in several cities, such as the Instituto Colombiano de Antropolog’a e Historia, and ngos such as Fundaci—n Habla/Scribe and the World Wildlife Fund, both in Cali, I would like to highlight groups in Helsinki, Barcelona, and Quito and in Mexico, England, and Brazil for repeated invitations. The intellectual and often personal input of many friends and colleagues has been very important on a number of subjects over the years, and I can mention only a few here: Cristina Rojas, Orlando Fals Borda, Claudia Steiner, Ana Mar’a Ochoa, Ingrid Bol’var, Maria Fernanda Espinosa, Anthony Bebbington, Lynn Stephen, Jacqueline Urla, Brooke Thomas, Orin Starn, David Slater, George Yœdice, David Hess, Daniel Mato, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Jesœs Mart’n Barbero, Eduardo Gudynas, Mart’n Hopenhayn, Shiv Visvanathan, Jordi Pigem, Pie­ ter de Vries, Monique Nuijten, Manuel de Landa, Brian Goodwin, Peter ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xv

Waterman, Jai Sen, Jeremy Gould, Elina Voula, Andreu Viola, Subir Sinha, and S¿ren Hvalkof; thanks to S¿ren also for helping us to obtain Danish funding for projects in the Pacific proposed by pcn, and to Denise Bebbington and Beto Borges in the United States for the same reason. I would like to make very special mention of those friends who supported us repeatedly in times of personal hardship over the past few years in Colombia and Chapel Hill/Carrboro, but the list would be too long, and they know, I am sure, of our deep gratitude. The 1993–94 research period was funded by grants from the Social Science Research Council, the Heinz Endowment, and the Arts and Humanities Division of the Rockefeller Foundation (now the Culture and Creativity Program). I also received funding from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1997), the MacArthur Foundation’s Global Security and Sustainability Program (2000), and the University of North Carolina. I am grateful to these funding sources for enabling various phases of research and writing. My thanks, finally, to Valerie Millholland, senior editor at Duke University Press, with whom I have been working for over five years on our series New Ecologies for the Twenty-First Century. This has been a most rewarding endeavor and working relationship, and I thank her for her advice and decided support of the present book ever since I talked to her about it for the first time many years ago. Thanks also to the copyeditor Lawrence Kenney and Mark Mastromarino, Assistant Managing Editor at the Press, for his care in shepherding the manuscript through the production process. This book is dedicated to the memory of my mother, Yadira, and of my younger brother, Chepe, both of whom left this world hardly within a year of each other, in Cali, but whose presences continue to be with me; to my compa–era, Magda, con todo el amor del mundo, and my sister Maria Victoria, for their steady support; and to the black, indigenous, and otherwise environmental and cultural activists in the Pacific, who day in and day out and against all odds continue their struggle to make of the Pacific a livable and joyful socionatural world—in pcn activists’ conceptualization, a Territorio de Vida, Alegr’a y Libertad (a territory of life, happiness, and freedom).

xvi  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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