• About Us
    • About the platform
    • Editorial Collective
  • Essays
    • Short Essays
    • Longer Reads
    • Reviews
    • Interviews
  • Series
    • Italian Political Ecologies
    • Reimagining, remembering and reclaiming water
    • Political Ecologies of the Far Right
    • Green inequalities in the city
    • Authoritarianism, populism and political ecology
    • Ecology after Capitalism
    • Ecomodernist socialism and comunist futurism
    • Political Ecology for Civil Society
    • World Press Photography Awards
    • Authoritarianism, populism and political ecology
    • Green inequalities in the city
    • Political Ecologies of Pesticides
    • Political Ecologies of the Far Right
    • Political Ecology for Civil Society
    • Ecomodernist socialism and comunist futurism
    • World Press Photography Awards
    • Ecology after Capitalism
    • Reimagining, remembering and reclaiming water
  • Resources
  • Events and Calls
  • Art & multimedia
  • Contribute
  • About Us
    • About the platform
    • Editorial Collective
  • Essays
    • Short Essays
    • Longer Reads
    • Reviews
    • Interviews
  • Series
    • Italian Political Ecologies
    • Reimagining, remembering and reclaiming water
    • Political Ecologies of the Far Right
    • Green inequalities in the city
    • Authoritarianism, populism and political ecology
    • Ecology after Capitalism
    • Ecomodernist socialism and comunist futurism
    • Political Ecology for Civil Society
    • World Press Photography Awards
    • Authoritarianism, populism and political ecology
    • Green inequalities in the city
    • Political Ecologies of Pesticides
    • Political Ecologies of the Far Right
    • Political Ecology for Civil Society
    • Ecomodernist socialism and comunist futurism
    • World Press Photography Awards
    • Ecology after Capitalism
    • Reimagining, remembering and reclaiming water
  • Resources
  • Events and Calls
  • Art & multimedia
  • Contribute
  • About Us
    • About the platform
    • Editorial Collective
  • Essays
    • Short Essays
    • Longer Reads
    • Reviews
    • Interviews
  • Series
    • Italian Political Ecologies
    • Reimagining, remembering and reclaiming water
    • Political Ecologies of the Far Right
    • Green inequalities in the city
    • Authoritarianism, populism and political ecology
    • Ecology after Capitalism
    • Ecomodernist socialism and comunist futurism
    • Political Ecology for Civil Society
    • World Press Photography Awards
    • Authoritarianism, populism and political ecology
    • Green inequalities in the city
    • Political Ecologies of Pesticides
    • Political Ecologies of the Far Right
    • Political Ecology for Civil Society
    • Ecomodernist socialism and comunist futurism
    • World Press Photography Awards
    • Ecology after Capitalism
    • Reimagining, remembering and reclaiming water
  • Resources
  • Events and Calls
  • Art & multimedia
  • Contribute
Naming the radical movement for alternative economics: D.E.growth
October 25, 2016
True colors of the USA: personal reflections on race and the American elections
November 7, 2016

Encountering Arturo Escobar

Published by Undisciplined Environments on November 2, 2016

Cover of Encountering Development. Source: Princeton University Press

By Isabella M. Radhuber*

Workshops were recently held in Barcelona with Arturo Escobar to discuss two of his key texts. Isabella shares some important reflections on the social and political role of researchers, what it means to place oneself as an academic and how we, more broadly, understand and relate with the world.

I felt very lucky to be part of the group of people who participated in the two workshops Arturo Escobar, the famed Colombian anthropologist, held at the Autonomous University of Barcelona’s (UAB) Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA) on 19 September and 3 October. In these workshops we discussed his two books, Territories of Difference: Place, movements, life, redes (2008) and Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (1995). In this post I will give a brief overview of each book and then share the reflections and key points of discussion that emerged in our workshop.

Workshop with Arturo Escobar in ICTA. Photo credit: Isabel Lopera.

Workshop with Arturo Escobar in Barcelona. Photo credit: Isabel Lopera.

Territories of Difference offers an impressive account of how it is possible to think complex relations and realities from the perspective of specific places, understood as “co-productions between people and the environment” (p. 42). The author takes as an exemplary illustration of this perspective the Colombian Pacific region. In the words of political geographer Ulrich Oslender, the Colombian Pacific is an “aquatic space”, in the sense that aquatic environments are of continued importance for many local groups. This is an example of how places can be seen as socio-natural co-productions.

This complexity of relations, the book reveals, can be captured through the notions of place, capital, nature, development, identity and network. Each of these notions are elaborated in a chapter of the book. Arturo Escobar insists on a perspective ‘from below’, which emphasises “subalternity” and “difference”. He describes “politics of place” as subaltern practices of difference that intend to create alternative socio-natural worlds. They reveal discourses of desire and possibility and provide us with an apt imaginary for thinking about the ‘problem-space’ defined by global coloniality.

terr-differ-front

Cover of ‘Territories of Difference’ (2008). Source: http://www.bibliovault.org/

The same perspective ‘from below’ motivates Encountering Development. In this book, the author focuses on how discourse is produced under conditions of unequal power. Such power disparities stem from colonial history and persist within colonialist understandings and practices. Power works in discourse through “the yardstick by which to encode and represent cultural Others”. This is what postcolonial scholar Chandra T. Mohanty has termed ‘the colonialist move‘.

A perspective ‘from below’ turns around previous narratives, in which the allegedly objective observer actually ‘enframed’ reality in a very colonialist manner. That is, the observer framed reality according to European categories, claiming to be detached and objective, while actually being immersed in local life. Thereby, subjectivity and particularity were masked as objectivity, fixing global coloniality and unequal power relations.

The author deconstructs discourses of modernity and development and contrasts them with Other, existing or to-be-imagined ways. He does so by telling four tales: the Tale of Three Worlds and Development, Tales of Growth and Capital, Tales of Food and Hunger and Tales of Peasants, Women and the Environment. He concludes then with reflections on Imagining a Postdevelopment Era.

One of the issues with far reaching academic, political and social repercussions that the book raises is the modern “separation of social life into functional spheres” (p. 60). As one quintessential aspect of modernity, each of this spheres—the economy, the polity, society, culture, nature and the like—is attributed laws on its own. Academic disciplines such as political economy and political ecology partially try to overcome this separation, amidst a more general relational shift in science (observable also in disciplines such as physics or biology). Arturo Escobar’s plea is to reconnect these fragmented parts in social and political life as well as in academic reflection.

k9564

Cover of ‘Encountering Development’. Source: Princeton University Press

The discussion in our reading group focused on one phenomenon that illustrates the separation of economic and socio-political spheres and shows the necessity of their re-connection. The way places are produced by capital stems from a separation of an abstract sphere of economics that can exert power over places. Demands for strengthening local economic forms that are embedded in these places’ social and political relations, in turn, imply a re-connection of economic, social and political spheres. Our critical discussion has shown that this particular phenomenon has the potential, and necessity, to be further developed through constituting an open research field.

Our reading groups agreed that academics and researchers are interrelated with their social and political environments. Therefore, it would be recommendable that they are aware about their relations with and influence on such environments (and vice versa). Three ways to interrelate with the social and political environment were suggested by Arturo Escobar in our discussion. First, it is possible to do mere academic work; second, we can bring academic and activist work into dialogue, which would correspond to what has been called ‘investigación y acción colectiva‘ (‘collective action research’); third, it is possible to adopt Other (for instance, local) categories and try to displace academic-modernist categories.

Placing oneself as an academic, moreover, relates to profound ontological and epistemological issues. Argentinian-Canadian anthropologist Mario Blaser elaborates on them. Focusing on how different worlds come into being leads us to ask question such as: what kinds of worlds are enacted through what kinds of practices? What (power-driven) negotiations occur among and across worlds? Ontology refers to assumptions, practices through which premises are performed, and narratives that people tell themselves, leading to different “onto-epistemic formations”.

Relational ontology, finally—as adopted in Buddhist thought for over 2000 years—reveals not only how things are related, but also how things are mutually constituted. When it comes to socio-natural formations or society-nature relations, relational ontology can imply shifting viewpoint. Specifically, according to Arturo Escobar’s explanation, this refers to the natural environment understood as part of a ‘pluriverse’ of political ecologies. A mountain, for example, is often considered as a bundle of inert rocks, whereas an ecologist positioning considers it a site of socio-natural interactions. A relational ontologist’s position goes further: it takes it literally that mountains are alive.

* Isabella M. Radhuber is a Postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), Marie Curie Fellow by the Austrian Science Fund.

Share
Undisciplined Environments
Undisciplined Environments

Related posts

Artwork by V'cenza Cirefice for the Journey for Life and Making Relatives visits. Source: author's own

May 23, 2023

Making Relatives and the Journey for Life


Read more
April 18, 2023

How Neoliberal Conservation Fails Forward


Read more
March 28, 2023

Wild mushrooms and the political ecology of commercial foraging in the American West. A review of the documentary film Up On The Mountain


Read more

1 Comment

  1. Who can say? Reflections on the unknown in Valle de Cauca, Colombia | ENTITLE blog – a collaborative writing project on Political Ecology says:
    March 2, 2017 at 12:04 pm

    […] rights to indigenous and afro-Colombian groups, acknowledging the formal basis for a pluri-national politics of difference. The creation of Zona Reserva Campesina (ZRC) awarded rights to non-ethnic peasants in 1994. […]

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Search this site

✕

Subscribe to our Newsfeed

We keep your data private and share your data only with third parties that make this service possible. See our Privacy Policy for more information.

Check your inbox or spam folder to confirm your subscription.

Tags

Agriculture Alternatives Anthropocene Art Brazil Capitalism Cities Climate change Climate crisis Climate justice Colonialism, Post-colonialism & Decolonization Commoning Commons Conflicts Conservation & Biodiversity COVID-19 Culture Decolonial Political Ecologies Degrowth Democracy Development Disaster Energy Environmental Change Environmental History Environmental Justice Environmental movements Extractivism Food Forests Green inequalities Indigenous Peoples Land Methodologies Mining & Extractivism Movements & Resistance Neoliberalism Post-colonialism Post-colonialism & Decolonization Social Movements & Resistance Urban Violence Waste Water water governance

Visit WEGO

wegoint.org
This website is co-funded by WEGO

Popular Posts

  • Making Relatives and the Journey for Life 243 views
  • What can degrowth bring to food system transformation beyond capitalism? 215 views
  • Carbon Colonialism: Unmasking the global factory 191 views
  • What does virtual water conceal? 133 views
  • Indigenous Science 127 views
  • Jason W. Moore: Political Ecology or World-Ecology? 81 views

Recent Comments

  • April 24, 2023

    Undisciplined Environments commented on When honesty is not the best policy: the ethical dilemma of sharing research findings

  • April 24, 2023

    Undisciplined Environments commented on When honesty is not the best policy: the ethical dilemma of sharing research findings

  • April 19, 2023

    Dbytes #568 (19 April 2023) | Dbytes commented on How Neoliberal Conservation Fails Forward

  • March 31, 2023

    INVS Logistics commented on From a New Deal to Projekt Deal: Time for solidarity with German scholars

  • March 23, 2023

    Jasper Howlett commented on When honesty is not the best policy: the ethical dilemma of sharing research findings

  • February 9, 2023

    About refrigerators – Thoughts in words commented on About refrigerators

✕

Tags

Agriculture Alternatives Anthropocene Art Brazil Capitalism Cities Climate change Climate crisis Climate justice Colonialism, Post-colonialism & Decolonization Commoning Commons Conflicts Conservation & Biodiversity COVID-19 Culture Decolonial Political Ecologies Degrowth Democracy Development Disaster Energy Environmental Change Environmental History Environmental Justice Environmental movements Extractivism Food Forests Green inequalities Indigenous Peoples Land Methodologies Mining & Extractivism Movements & Resistance Neoliberalism Post-colonialism Post-colonialism & Decolonization Social Movements & Resistance Urban Violence Waste Water water governance

Follow us

facebook       twitter
E-Mail Us : undisciplinedenvironments@gmail.com

Contribute

If you want to contribute send us your text at undisciplinedenvironments@gmail.com
Find our posting guide here

About Us

We are a collective of scholars and activists oriented towards a common horizon of emancipatory social and ecological transformation. With this platform, we aim to animate a space to share, debate and critically reflect on research and activist experiences, observations, methodologies, news, events, publications, art, music and other themes and objects related to political ecology.
powered by andromedia
  • About Us
  • Essays
  • Series
  • Resources
  • Events and Calls
  • Art & multimedia
  • Contribute
go