The Antinomies of ‘Community’

Posted on July 5, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Watts, Michael J. “The Sinister Political Life of Community: Economies of Violence and Governable Spaces in the Niger Delta, Nigeria.” Creed, Gerald. The Seductions of Community: Emancipations, Oppressions, Quandaries. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.

Community is often posed as the warm, wholesome antithesis of the anonymous cold, monster of the state. In this sense, community is often the synonymous, roseate alibi of “civil society.” Michael Watts wants to present the more sinister face of community, its antinomies that he sees as “tightly bound up with capitalism and the operations of the market place as they are with and governance” (103). They are always political and represented and should be “read against the history of the modern state. Communities demand visibility, legibility, and enumeration as preconditions for claims-making and thereby for their entry into the modern universe of the political” (102). Continue reading →

Posted in Hegemony, Illegality, Insurgency/Counterinsurgency, Land, Law, Michel Foucault, Political Ecology, Political Economy, Power, Race & Ethnicity, Scale, Sovereignty, Spatiality, Territory, The State, Violence | 1 Comment

Intimate Enemies in Chiapas

Posted on July 5, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Bobrow-Strain, Aaron. 2007. Intimate Enemies: Landowners, Power, and Violence in Chiapas. Durham: Duke University Press.

This book has a perfect hook: What about the vilified landowners on the receiving end of the January 1, 1994, uprising by the Zapatista rebels in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas? Aaron Bobrow-Strain’s brilliant book seeks to give landed elites the same analytical depth and attention that has been given to “peasants” and their rebellions. He also seeks to veer the story of the uprising and elites’ quiescence away from mechanistic economistic explanations. By analyzing landowner-peasant relations through lenses of cultural politics of race, gender, and class; spatial relations; and landed estate production; Bobrow-Strain seeks to answer the following question: “Why would coffee planters and cattle ranchers with a long and storied history of violent responses to agrarian conflict react to [land invasions sparked by the Zapatista uprising] with quiescence and resignation instead of thugs and guns?” (7). Continue reading →

Posted in Agriculture, Antonio Gramsci, Boundaries, Frontiers, Gender, Hegemony, Henri Lefebvre, Historical-Geographies, Insurgency/Counterinsurgency, Land, Marxism, Nation/Nationalism, Political Ecology, Political Economy, Power, Race & Ethnicity, Scale, Spatiality, Territory, The State, Violence | 2 Comments

The Fate of the Forest

Posted on July 5, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Hecht, Susanna and Alexander Cockburn. 1989. The Fate of the Forest. London: Verso.

The first thing that stands out from Susanna Hecht and Alexander Cockburn’s classic Fate of the Forest is its mesmerizing writing style. The prose effortlessly moves the reader through centuries of history—social and natural—of the Amazon’s changing fate. From the dystopian Eden’s encountered by gold-crazed conquistadors to the modern day military fantasies and paranoia of Brazilian generals, the Brazilian Amazon pulses not only with biophysical life but also with a long history of social struggles—best of all, the authors manage to entwine these complex threads. Continue reading →

Posted in Agriculture, Boundaries, Forests, Frontiers, Historical-Geographies, Illegality, Insurgency/Counterinsurgency, Land, Political Ecology, Political Economy, Science & Tech., The State, Violence | 2 Comments

Marxism, Culture, and Political Ecology

Posted on June 30, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Moore, Donald. 1996. “Marxism, Culture, and Political Ecology: Environmental Struggles in Zimbabwe’s Eastern Highlands.” In Liberation Ecologies: Environment, Development, Social Movements. London: Routledge.

Donald Moore sets out to critique what he sees as political ecology’s emphasis on macro-structural dynamics whereby everything is determined by broad economic forces. “Global capitalism, from this perspective, not only shapes but also exactly determines heterogeneous local histories, cultures, and societies” (126). Cultural practices and beliefs in such accounts, writes Moore, are relegated to the dustbin of exotic derivate, ornamental trappings—(at most) second-order problems. Culture becomes the polite garnish of the meat and potatoes (political economy), which is where the work of “real men” and events occurs. A byproduct of these approaches is depictions of a monolithic state. While not at all dismissive of such structural forces, Moore claims that the overemphasis overlooks two fundamental processes: “(1) the micro-politics of peasant struggles over access to productive resources; and (2) the symbolic contestations that constitute those struggles” (126). Continue reading →

Posted in Agriculture, Antonio Gramsci, Dialectics, Frontiers, Gender, Historical-Geographies, Land, Marxism, Nation/Nationalism, Place, Political Ecology, Political Economy, Post-Colonial, Power, Race & Ethnicity, Spatiality, Territory, The State, Violence | Comments Off on Marxism, Culture, and Political Ecology

Coercing Conservation

Posted on June 30, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Peluso, Nancy Lee. 1993. “Coercing Conservation?: The Politics of State Resource Control” Global Environmental Change 3(2):199-218.

The premise of Nancy Peluso’s influential article “Coercing Conservation” is that “some state interests appropriate the ideology, legitimacy, and technology of conservation as a means of increasing or appropriating their control over valuable resources and recalcitrant populations” and that international conservation groups are (sometimes negligently) complicit in the resulting dispossession of indigenous peoples with resource claims. Peluso uses the examples of Kenya and Indonesia to show how the maintenance of state territorial control implies the militarization of conservation efforts and the consequent complicity of international conservation advocacy groups. Continue reading →

Posted in Agriculture, Forests, Land, Political Ecology, Post-Colonial, Spatiality, Territory, The State, Violence | Comments Off on Coercing Conservation

Political Ecology, II

Posted on June 30, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Watts, Michael J. 2000. “Political Ecology.” In A Companion to Economic Geography edited by Eric Sheppard and Trevor J. Barnes. Oxford: Blackwell.

Michael Watts says that political ecology “seeks to understand the complex relations between nature and society through a careful analysis of what one might call the forms of access and control over resources and their implications for environmental health and sustainable livelihoods” (257). The examples Watts uses to introduce political ecology include biotech/GMO soy, pollution-linked cancer rates, seizure of oil platforms by ethnic minorities, and a UN report on the growing instabilities caused by haves and have nots, raising questions of a UN agency to manage environmental commons. He says that these problems are geographical because they’re encompassed by the concerns of political ecology as defined above. The other reason the environmental problems are geographical is because they all involve the politics of scale. Continue reading →

Posted in Agriculture, Hegemony, Political Ecology, Political Economy, Power, Scale, Spatiality, The State | Comments Off on Political Ecology, II

Political Ecology, I

Posted on June 29, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Robbins, Paul. 2004. Political Ecology. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Paul Robbins’ Political Ecology offers a sweeping and surprisingly complete overview to this exciting body of work and practice. I like the way Robbins bills it as, more than a body of knowledge, political ecology is “something people do” (xviii). But the way he describes it, it seems that he limits this “doing” of political ecology as something limited to researchers working within its frameworks; I would expand this doing to also encompass the praxis of political ecology enacted by the putative subjects of this research as well. In this respect I found it surprising that Arturo Escobar’s work is never mentioned or cited in the book. That’s my only complaint about this tremendously useful book. Continue reading →

Posted in Agriculture, Gender, Governmentality, Historical-Geographies, Land, Networks, Political Ecology, Political Economy, Post-Colonial, Power, Race & Ethnicity, Science & Tech., The State, Violence | 3 Comments

Political Economy of Soil Erosion

Posted on June 28, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Blaikie, Piers. 1985. The Political Economy of Soil Erosion in Developing Countries. London: Longman. [Ch. 1-2]

Besides the uncertainties generated by scarce, long-term measurement and the difficulty of parsing out human impacts on environmental degradation, Piers Blaikie’s classic study on the political economy soil erosion focuses on a third problem: Degradation can be viewed in multiple ways and many of these ways carry implicit and unexamined political judgments. Blaikie sets out to make sense of all this regarding debates about soil erosion in poor countries. He positions soil erosion as an explicit political-economic and environmental concern in light of the social conflicts it generates. This nexus is what makes this text a seminal work in political ecology. Continue reading →

Posted in Agriculture, Land, Place, Political Ecology, Political Economy, Scale, Spatiality, The State | Comments Off on Political Economy of Soil Erosion

The Invention of Capitalism

Posted on June 28, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Perelman, Michael. The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. [Intro, Ch. 1-6]

Michael Perelman shows in The Invention of Capitalism how classical political economists were practically and ideologically complicit in the primitive accumulation that sapped the poor of their self-sufficiency. Not only did the promotion of dispossession contravene liberal economic claims of a laissez faire economy, in many cases they also obfuscated their plain awareness of the sheer violence and injustice of this process in their theories and public lives. Continue reading →

Posted in Agriculture, Forests, Historical Materialism, Insurgency/Counterinsurgency, Karl Marx, Land, Law, Marxism, Political Economy, Power, Primitive Accumulation, The State, Violence | Comments Off on The Invention of Capitalism

Caliban and the Witch

Posted on June 28, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Federici, Silvia. 2004. Caliban and the Witch: Women, The Body, and Primitive Accumulation. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia.

It’s become almost cliché to say that taking into account gender—and other forms of social difference—makes a real difference for how we build our theories, our analysis, and our political praxis. But few books that I’ve read recently have proven this rule of thumb so resoundingly as Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch. This is an extraordinary intervention in how we think about primitive accumulation and the origins of capitalism. Federici details how the onslaught against women’s social position—particularly, through repression as “witches”—was a historical precondition for the advancement of capitalism. She concludes, “Primitive accumulation has been above all an accumulation of differences [particularly, race, age, and gender], inequalities, hierarchies, divisions, which have alienated workers from each other and even from themselves” (115). Continue reading →

Posted in Agriculture, Gender, Historical Materialism, Historical-Geographies, Illegality, Karl Marx, Land, Law, Marxism, Political Economy, Primitive Accumulation, Race & Ethnicity, Science & Tech., The Body, The State, Violence | 2 Comments