#They thought their Massuh | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

fatehbaz · 6 years ago

Text

"Territorial struggles” and defending “the pluriverse” of ecology in the Global South: Some commentary on the significance of Latin American communal worldviews, agroecology, and resistance to concepts like “development”

Basically, I’m plugging this text again, by Colombian-American anthropologist Arturo Escobar. This kind of material will sound like “old news” to a lot of people. It’s not groundbreaking or comprehensive, but it’s interesting.

Escobar - among other anthropologists, ecologists, and activists of the movement known as the ontological turn in anthropology- seems to suggest something like this: “Territorial struggles” are struggles to prevent intellectual colonization, which occur when Indigenous and non-Western cultures work to prevent the erasure of their unique environmental knowledge and their reciprocal, egalitarian, or communal worldviews. Euro-American powers promote concepts like “resource extraction” or “industrial development,” and this performs an “ontological occupation” of the mind, erasing communal worldviews and replacing them with dualist or development-oriented values. And, according to Escobar, “the knowledges produced by those engaged in struggles for the defense of territories and relational worlds” - as in, the experience of resistance itself - is “perhaps” a great source of models for organizing resistance in the imperial/Western world as well.

An excerpt on the importance of territorial struggles:

[T]he framework for the political ontology of territorial ��struggles in Latin America [can be] developed from a reinterpretation of the defense of their territories by indigenous, Afrodescendant, and peasant groups, particularly against large-scale mining and agro-fuels projects. It argues that these extractivist projects can be seen as strategies for the ontological occupation of the territories, and hence that struggles against them constitute veritable ontological struggles. (...)

The notion of the pluriverse, it should be made clear, has two main sources: theoretical critiques of dualism and so-called “post-dualist” trends stemming from what is called “the ontological turn” in social theory; and the perseverance of non-dualist philosophies (more often known as cosmovisions) that reflect a deeply relational understanding of life, such as Muntu and Ubuntu in parts of Africa; the Pachamama or Mama Kiwe among south American indigenous peoples; U.S. and Canadian American Indian cosmologies; or even in the entire Buddhist philosophy of mind; they also exist within the West, as alternative Wests or non-dominant forms of modernity (see, e.g., Santos 2014). Some of the current struggles going on in Europe over the commons, energy transitions, and the relocalization of food, for instance, could be seen as struggles to reconnect with the stream of life; they also constitute forms of resistance against the dominant ontology of capitalist modernity. Worldwide, the multiple struggles for the reconstruction of communal spaces and for reconnecting with nature constitute an indubitable political activation of relationality. Urban and rural territorial struggles and struggles over the commons are often examples of such activation. All of the above are important elements of the Epistemologies of the South project, particularly of the sociology of emergences. (...)

It should be pointed out that the ontological occupation of territories and worlds just described often takes place in the name of development, hence a renewed questioning of the civilizational imperatives of growth and development should be an important element of any transition. (...)

Territorial struggles, as it will be argued in this last section, are producing among the most insightful knowledges for the cultural and ecological transitions seen as necessary to face the crisis; these knowledges are also profoundly attuned to the self-organizing dynamics of the Earth. (...)

The very idea of development, however, has been questioned by cultural critics since the mid-1980s; they questioned the core assumptions of development, including growth, progress, and instrumental rationality (e.g., Sachs, 1992, p. 1; Rist 1997; Latouche 2009; Escobar 2011). These critics have argued that it is possible to imagine the end of development, emphasizing the notion of alternatives to development, rather than development alternatives, as goals for transition activists and policy makers. The idea of alternatives to development has become more concrete in South America in recent years with the notions of Buen Vivir (good living, or collective wellbeing according to culturally-appropriate ways) and the rights of Nature. Defined as a holistic view of social life that no longer gives overriding centrality to the economy, Buen Vivir “constitutes an alternative to development, and as such it represents a potential response to the substantial critiques of postdevelopment.” (...)

Buen Vivir and the rights of nature, resonates with broader challenges to the ‘civilizational model’ of globalized development. The crisis of the Western modelo civilizatorio is invoked by many movements as the underlying cause of the current crisis of climate, energy, poverty, and meaning. This emphasis is strongest among ethnic movements, yet it is also found, for instance, in peasant networks for which only a shift toward agroecological food production systems can lead us out of the climate and food crises (e.g., Via Campesina). Closely related is the ‘transitions to post-extractivism’ framework. Originally proposed by the Centro Latinoamericano de Ecología Social (CLAES) in Montevideo, it has be-come an important intellectual-activist debate in many South American countries (Alayza and Gudynas, 2011; Gudynas 2011; Massuh, 2012; Coraggio and Laville, eds. 2014). The point of departure is a critique of the intensification of extractivist models based on large scale mining, hydrocarbon exploitation, or extensive agricultural operations, particularly for agrofuels, such as soy, sugar cane or oil palm; whether in the form of conventional –often brutal—neoliberal extractivist policies in countries like Colombia, Perú or México, or following the neo-extractivism of the center-Left regimes, these are legitimized as efficient growth strategies. (...)

Epistemologies of the South and political ontology are theoretical-political projects that aim to reinterpret contemporary knowledges and struggles oriented towards the defense of life and the pluriverse. They highlight ecologies of knowledge and ontological struggles in defense of territories and for reconnection with nature and life’s self-organizing and always emergent force, arguing that they constitute a veritable political activation of relationality. (...)

Moving beyond ‘development’ and the economy are primary aspects of such struggles. They also show that in the last instance our human ability for enacting other worlds and worlds otherwise will depend on humans’ determination to rejoin the unending field of relations that make up the pluriverse.

This geopolitical epistemological and ontological reflection deconstructs and allows us to see anew the social and ecological devastation caused by dualistic conceptions, particular those that divide nature and culture, humans and non-humans, the individual and the communal, mind and body, and so forth.

(...)

Arturo Escobar. “Thinking-Feeling with the Earth: Territorial Struggles and the Ontological Dimension of the Epistemologies of the South.” 2015. [Full text; free]

Again, not a new perspective or comprehensive text, but still food-for-thought. The bibliography, at least, is useful.

#given recent chats about egalitarian ecological relationships and the ontological turn in anthropology #I thought it'd be nice to bring this up

2 notes · View notes