BIBLIOTECA DE ANTROPOLOGÍA


la ‘cooperación’ entre campesinos y guerrilleros? ¿Qué efecto tiene en la forma en que
ven el mundo por el cual luchan?
En la lucha por Zimbabue (1966-80), cientos de miles de campesinos proporcionaron
a los guerrilleros ayuda y apoyo práctico. Pero fueron mucho más allá. A lo largo del
país, numerosos médiums espirituales brindaron un apoyo activo a la resistencia. Con
su participación, la escala de la guerra se expandió en un asombroso acto de
colaboración entre ancestros y sus descendientes, el pasado y el presente, los vivos y
los muertos.
Este libro es un estudio detallado de una zona ‘operacional’ clave en el valle del
Zambezi. Muestra que para entender el significado que la guerra y la independencia
tienen para el pueblo de Zimbabue, debemos tener en cuenta no solo a los guerrilleros
y políticos nacionalistas, los portadores de armas, sino también a los médiums de los
espíritus de los ancestros reales Shona, los que traen la lluvia.
David Lan, dramaturgo y antropólogo social, nació en Sudáfrica en 1952 y ha estado
radicado en Inglaterra desde 1972. Obtuvo su doctorado en la London School of
Economics (LSE). Sus obras para el teatro incluyen ‘Painting on a Wall’, ‘Red Earth’, ‘The
Winter Dancers’, ‘Sergeant Ola and his Followers’; y para televisión, ‘The Sunday Judge’.
“Este libro nos hace entender un evento histórico de importancia mundial, la liberación
de Zimbabue, desde el punto de vista de la gente común… No es solo un estudio
específico de gran brillantez, sino también un modelo que muestra cómo la
antropología puede contribuir a la política y la historia.” Maurice Bloch, Profesor de
Antropología, London School of Economics, en su prefacio a este libro.
“El estudio de Lan ofrece un relato sistemático de la política de la tradición en la
resistencia al estado hasta el período posterior a la guerra… Sobre todo, está la lección
de que la antropología clásica tiene algo importante que decir sobre lo que importa a
la gente incluso cuando están inmersos en una aparente revolución.” Richard Werbner
Ante las crecientes oleadas de represión estatal, resulta difícil orientarse entre los altibajos. ¿Cómo se han visto afectados los horizontes sociales y políticos por la aplicación interna de la contrainsurgencia? ¿Cómo pueden los rebeldes y radicales construir estrategias más inteligentes para resistir la represión estatal? Life During Wartime es un conjunto de textos que surgen de varios años de investigación colectiva sobre la historia, la teoría y la práctica de la contrainsurgencia. Si bien la contrainsurgencia suele asociarse con conflictos de baja intensidad en las llamadas periferias del imperio, esta colección analiza críticamente cómo los aparatos de seguridad interna de los Estados Unidos están adaptando las estrategias, técnicas y tecnologías de la contrainsurgencia. Debido a que el movimiento contemporáneo hacia la contrainsurgencia es en gran medida descentralizado, esta colección aborda su tema desde varios ángulos diferentes. Los capítulos introductorios exponen la teoría y la lógica interna de la contrainsurgencia. Los diálogos y análisis intergeneracionales aclaran cómo han cambiado las estrategias de represión interna durante el último cuarto de siglo. La investigación específica del sitio muestra la planificación e implementación de operaciones de seguridad que se basan explícitamente en la contrainsurgencia. Los análisis críticos de varias luchas activas diferentes ofrecen una perspectiva de las posibilidades de resistencia en medio de un terreno social y político cambiante. Muchos de los colaboradores se conocieron por primera vez en la Convergencia de Contrainsurgencia de 2011 en Portland, Oregón. La Convergencia entrelazó tres objetivos. Abrió el espacio para un encuentro con fundamento histórico entre investigadores y activistas que trabajan en cuestiones de seguridad, represión y la naturaleza cambiante del Estado. La Convergencia trabajó "para trazar los contornos de la contrainsurgencia transnacional mientras diseñaba estrategias que cuestionaran, confundieran y confrontaran tanto a la contrainsurgencia como al imperio". 1 Varias charlas y presentaciones de investigación de la Convergencia aparecen en las páginas siguientes. EL CICLO DE LA MONEDA Según la Corporación RAND, las revoluciones (y por lo tanto las contrarrevoluciones) pasan por tres etapas: una protoinsurgencia, una pequeña insurgencia, pero el punto álgido de la campaña, hasta ahora, estuvo marcado por la "Operación Backfire", una serie de arrestos coordinados lanzados en diciembre de 2005. Los acusados ​​de Backfire fueron acusados ​​de una serie de incendios provocados por el Frente de Liberación de la Tierra y el Frente de Liberación Animal a fines de los años 1990, actividades que el FBI caracterizó como "terrorismo doméstico". 48 En total, dieciocho personas fueron acusadas. Dos siguen en libertad, quince fueron enviadas a prisión por hasta 13 años y uno, William Rodgers, se suicidó poco después de su arresto. 49 La investigación sobre el ELF comenzó a ganar fuerza en 2001 cuando una mujer en Eugene, Oregon, llamó a la policía para denunciar el robo de su camioneta. Ella nombró a su compañero de cuarto, Jacob Ferguson, como el probable ladrón, y la policía, al notar que el robo coincidió con un incendio provocado en un concesionario de todoterrenos, dedujo que Ferguson podría haber iniciado el fuego. Tanto el compañero de cuarto como los policías estaban equivocados, pero el error resultó ser una suerte para las fuerzas del orden. Ferguson fue llamado dos veces ante un gran jurado y, en 2004, cuando los policías finalmente lo amenazaron con procesarlo, les ofreció información sobre más de una docena de acciones del Frente de Liberación de la Tierra y el Frente de Liberación Animal, nombrando a las personas involucradas. Finalmente, proporcionaría detalles sobre 22 actos separados de sabotaje. Ferguson pasó meses viajando por el país y usando un micrófono para recopilar evidencia para los procesos. Grabó 88 horas de audio, que representan 40 conversaciones. Después de cada nuevo arresto, la policía presionó a los sospechosos para obtener información sobre otros. Algunos de los arrestados impugnaron los cargos o se declararon culpables sin implicar a nadie más; la mayoría, sin embargo, dio evidencia contra sus camaradas a cambio de una sentencia más leve. 50 Backfire tuvo éxito en gran medida gracias a un único golpe de suerte, seguido de un esfuerzo sistemático para convertir a los activistas en informantes. Pero para poder aprovechar su buena suerte, la policía necesitaba una cantidad sustancial de información general sobre la comunidad que estaban investigando. Ese esfuerzo comenzó al menos en 1999. La revista anarquista Rolling Thunder describe el enfoque: Lo que sabemos de la investigación inicial de Backfire apunta a una estrategia de seguimiento e infiltración generalizados. Mientras que los informantes: "la información sobre los individuos puede ser necesaria para persuadir a cada uno de ellos para ayudar al gobierno en lugar de ayudar a los insurgentes". Este último punto muestra algo de la relación recursiva entre inteligencia y coerción. En una insurgencia, ambos bandos dependen de la cooperación de la población; por lo tanto, compiten por ella, en parte a través de medios coercitivos. Como escribe el investigador de RAND Martin Libicki: "Aquellos que no están comprometidos con ninguno de los dos bandos deben sopesar la posibilidad de que el acto de informar o incluso interactuar con un bando pueda provocar la ira del otro". Quien mejor pueda cumplir con esta amenaza, sostiene Libicki, recibirá
Vuestra lucha es una grieta en el muro del sistema. No permitáis que Ayotzinapa se cierre. Vuestros hijos respiran por esa grieta, pero también respiran los miles de desaparecidos en todo el mundo. Para que la grieta no se cierre, para que la grieta se profundice y se amplíe, tendréis en nosotros los zapatistas una lucha común: una que transforme el dolor en rabia, la rabia en rebelión y la rebelión en mañana. -SUBCOMANDANTE GALEANO, "La grieta en el muro: Primera nota sobre el método zapatista", sobre los 43 estudiantes desaparecidos de Ayotzinapa Estamos, en este momento, nadando en un mar de dolor. Ese mar incluye la muerte, pero también es mucho más grande, y encierra todo tipo de dolores. En un mundo mejor, muchas de estas desapariciones serían evitables, incluso inimaginables. Por ahora, dadas las aguas llenas de pérdidas que habitamos, ¿cómo navegar mejor por ellas y sin ahogarnos? ¿Cómo cambiar de rumbo, acercándonos a un yo y una sociedad más humanos? Semejante pérdida no es nueva, de ningún modo. Pero resulta aún más imperiosa en una época marcada globalmente por el ascenso del fascismo y el autoritarismo, el mayor desplazamiento de personas en la historia de la humanidad y la mayor devastación estructural de la base misma de la vida, el ecosistema en su conjunto. Llego a esta antología a través de mi propio dolor, pero es inseparable del dolor de este mundo. He atravesado "lo peor", a veces hábilmente, a menudo no; a veces con otros, con demasiada frecuencia solo. Este dolor puso al descubierto mucha crueldad, parte de ella sistémica, parte de ella debida a la socialización. Sin embargo, una de las afrentas más crueles fue la expectativa de que el dolor debía ocultarse, enterrarse, privatizarse, una mentira fabricada para enmascarar y mantener el orden social que produce nuestras numerosas e innecesarias pérdidas. Cuando, en cambio, nos abrimos a los lazos de la pérdida y el dolor, atenúamos lo que nos debilita; reafirmamos la vida y su belleza. Nos abrimos a los lazos del amor, entendidos de manera expansiva. De manera crucial, tenemos una manera, juntos, de hacer un duelo más cualitativo y luchar para deshacer las estructuras mortales y paralizantes que intentan destruirnos. Aparecen grietas en el muro. Rebellious Mourning reúne historias de primera mano, obras de ingeniosa redacción y pensamiento ágil, que hablan de cómo se ve cuando las personas, colectiva pero personalmente, se inquietan por siglos de pérdida. Pide a sus colaboradores y lectores que viajen sin respuestas, con curiosidad, caminando directamente hacia nuestro dolor. Ve el trabajo del duelo, y los espacios para él, como algo que, similar al agua y las bibliotecas, debería estar disponible de manera gratuita, saludable y pública para todos. De esta manera, precisamente porque podemos experimentar más abiertamente con compartir el * Cuando invité a las personas a contribuir a Rebellious Mourning, no me di cuenta del todo de lo que les estaba pidiendo a ellos, o a mí mismo, para el caso. Era una invitación, en esencia, no solo a abrirse a viejas heridas, sino también a hurgar incesantemente en el tejido cicatricial. Escribir sobre el duelo es recordarlo y desmembrarlo también, descubriendo así todo tipo de dolores y penas que uno no había visto en el momento original de la pérdida y el duelo. O que no había sentido. Escribir para Rebellious Mourning se volvió prismático, refractando la variedad de heridas nuevas y heredadas que pueden extenderse a lo largo de la vida de uno. Los colaboradores tuvieron que elegir una sola historia para contar en este libro, pero entre líneas, entre toda la reelaboración y edición, se vieron obligados a lamentar viejas pérdidas una y otra vez y a menudo desenterrar otras nuevas. Y potencialmente sufrir más heridas de batalla. Muchos de ellos también experimentaron más pérdidas durante el curso de su escritura, a menudo mucho peores y numerosas. Así que mi más profundo respeto va para todos los que contribuyeron a estas páginas. Sé que significó arriesgarse a ser nuevamente "deshecho", tomar prestado de nuevo de La vida precaria de Butler, sin saber dónde terminaría eso o cómo podría transformarte. Se necesitó fortaleza para arrancarse las vendas y hacerse vulnerable a su propio dolor, a mí y ahora a sus lectores. Mi corazón y mi gratitud están con ustedes. El libro que usted, querido lector, ahora tiene en sus manos se gestó durante mucho tiempo. Innumerables personas, conversaciones e incluso encuentros casuales sacudieron su forma, una y otra vez. Es una obra completamente diferente pero mucho mejor para esos desafíos. De hecho, el hecho de que esta antología haya pasado por varios comienzos y torpezas, derivas y desvíos, solo contribuyó a un proceso más generativo y, como confío que sea una lectura abundante y a veces llorosa, poderosa. A todos aquellos que generosamente me regalaron sus sugerencias, ideas, ayuda mutua y/o amor de innumerables maneras hacia lo que ahora ha nacido como Rebellious Mourning, les devuelvo el regalo con un gran agradecimiento y/o mucho amor, en orden alfabético, a
3.1 Major categories of spirit types and their characteristics 3.2 Symbolic characteristics of ancestral spirits 4.1 A simplified royal genealogy 4.2 The relationship between chief medium and mhondoro 4.3 The relationship between medium, mutapi and chief 4.4 The sources of authority as they seem when the system breaks down 5.1 Ties of kinship between the main mhondoro of Dande 5.2 The journey from Guruuswa to Dande: 1 5.3 Kin relations in Myths 1 to V 5.4 Affinal relations and the control of rain 5.5 The source of royal lineages 5.6 The journey from Guruuswa to Dande: 2 5.7 The journey from Guruuswa to Dande: 3 8.1 The fission of a royal lineage 8.2 Post-colonial sources of authority in the relationship between chief medium and mhondoro 9.1 The changing sources of political authority in Dande 10.1 The descendants of Mutota 179 10.2 The changing lines of communication between ancestors and people 199 IX Maps 2.1 Dande in relation to South Central Africa 2.2 The chiefs and the major mhondoro. c. 1980 3.1 The mhondoro of southern Dande, c. 1960 5.1 Main tributaries of the Zambezi River in northern Zimbabwe 7.1 Guerrilla infiltration into Dande Plates Between pp. 118-19 1 Charwe, the medium of Nehanda, with the medium of Kagubi in prison, 1898 2 A village committee chairman possessed by the hunting spirit, Kapori 3 Two village wives dancing while possessed by their recent ancestors 4 A young woman in trance wearing the ritual half-black, half-white cloth 5 Nationalist leaders Joshua Nkomo and Robert Mugabe being greeted at Salisbury airport in 1962 by a veteran of the 1896 uprising 6 The medium of the senior rain spirit Musuma 7 The medium of Nyamapfeka 8 The medium of Chivere 9 The medium of Madzomba wearing his spectacles 10 The mediums of Chipfene and Chidyamauyu 11 The medium of Chiodzamamera 12 Fragment of a military map found in an ex-Rhodesian army camp 13 George Kupara, the medium of Mutota 14 Enos Pondai, the medium of Chiwawa 15 The medium of Nehanda, hanged in 1895, bequeaths the authority of the ancestors to the first prime minister of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe x
The editors of this remarkable collection ask, 'After the smoke clears, who will remember the dead?' Their answer, and that of their dozens of writers, poets, journalists, and analysts, is "We will." We, they said, Palestinians of Gaza who survived the slaughter, we Palestinians from elsewhere in Palestine and refugees in far-flung exile, we allies and friends from around the world, we will not let the world forget. During the 50 days of Israel's 2014 assault on Gaza, Tel Aviv's best efforts to keep the world in the dark and to keep the West believing the lie of self-defense, all failed. They failed because Palestinians did not all die, and those who lived were determined to tell their story in their own voices: their poetry, their memories, and their children. This extraordinary book joins the narrative of Palestine's witness-of oppression, brutality, and death, but also of life reaffirmed and resistance reclaimed."-PHYLLIS BENNIS Institute for Policy Studies "Readers will find this rich anthology highly informative, evocative, and inspirational. They will find in it culture, creativity, and commitment. And they will also find it painful, emotional, and overpowering, such is the unremitting cruelty with which Palestinians are treated. But read it they must.... It enables us to communicate, even more powerfully, why justice is needed and needed now, and why Israel must be brought to justice. If any book is a must-read by the Prosecutor and judges at the International Criminal Court, this book is it."-NADIA HIJAB Executive Director, Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network "Gaza Unsilenced is an outstanding collection of short essays that discuss different aspects of Israel's murderous assault on Gaza in the summer of 2014. Given the ability of Israel and its American defenders to propagandize and distort the historical record, it is imperative that books like this be published and widely read. Israel cannot be allowed to create a false history about the horrors it has inflicted on the people of Gaza and the Palestinians more generally."-JOHN J. MEARSHEIMER R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science, University of Chicago "Israel takes the hammer to Gaza, but it cannot snuff out Palestinian voices. These continue to testify to the inhumanity of the Israeli occupation. There are also silences-the book ends with a list of the names of those killed in Israel's 2014 bombing of Gaza, human beings who cannot tell us their stories. This book tries to fill that gap."-VIJAY PRASHAD Editor, Letters to Palestine: Writers Respond to War and Occupation Just World Books exists to expand the discourse in the United States and worldwide on issues of vital international concern. We are committed to building a more just, equitable, and peaceable world. We uphold the equality of all human persons. We aim for our books to contribute to increasing understanding across national, religious, ethnic, and racial lines; to share more broadly the reflections, analyses, and policy prescriptions of pathbreaking activists for peace; and to help to prevent war.
Although Seibutsu no Sekai (The World of Living Things), the seminal 1941 work of Kinji Imanishi, had an enormous impact in Japan, both on scholars and on the general public, very little is known about it in the Englishspeaking world. This book makes the complete text available in English for the first time and provides an extensive introduction and notes to set the work in context. Imanishi's work, based on a wide knowledge of science and the natural world, puts forward a distinctive view of nature and how it should be studied. Ecologist, anthropologist, and founder of primatology in Japan, Imanishi's first book is a philosophical biology that informs many of his later ideas on species society, species recognition, culture in the animal world, cooperation and habitat segregation in nature, the "life" of nonliving things and the relationships between organisms and their environments. Imanishi's work is of particular interest for contemporary discussions of units and levels of selection in evolutionary biology and philosophy, and as a background to the development of some contributions to ecology, primatology and human social evolution theory in Japan. Imanishi's views are extremely interesting because he formulated an approach to viewing nature that challenged the usual international ideas of the time, and that foreshadows approaches to study of the biosphere that have currency today. Contents List offigures Note on tlze tr"ans1ators Foreword (Hiroyuki Takasaki) Foreword (Shusuke Yagi) Pr>eface to tlze JAWS RoutledgeCu?zo~z series Editor's preface Acknowledgments Note on Japanese names Introductiorz Seibutsu no Sekai The World of Living Things by Kinji Irnanislzi Author's preface 1 Similarity and difference 2 On structure 3 On environment 4 On society 5 On history List of ternzs irz the original irzdex Bibliography of publications in Western languages by Kirzji Imanishi Index viii ix xi xiii xvii xix xxiv xxvii xxix li liii Street in the Shimogamo area of Kyoto leading to Imanishi's house Ground floor door to Imanishi's study where he wrote The Wovld of Living Things The Takano River, a tributary of the Kamo River, Kyoto, east of Imanishi's home View of the Kamo River, Kyoto, where Imanishi began his studies of mayfly larvae, west of Imanishi's home View of the Kamo River, Kyoto, showing the swift current, west of Imanishi's home Mayfly larvae lifeforms studied by Imanishi in the 1930s (original drawings by Yonekichi Makino): (1) Ephemer"a lineata; (2) Ephemer"e1la basalis; (3) Arneletus montanus; (4) Cinygma hivasana; and (5) Epeovus hienzdlis Mayfly larvae species that segregated into different habitats in response to the river current studied by Imanishi in the 1930s (original drawings by Yonekichi Makino): (1) Ecdyonurus yoshidae; (2) Epeorus latifoliurn; (3) Epeovus cuwatulus; and (4) Epeovus uenoi
xiii rock-hard existence, as do the noun-phrases Glissant uses to push at the limitations of French. Part of controlling the substance of one's future would lie in controlling its nomenclature. Agents-d'éclat is a terse example of the merging of various discourses in Glissant's work. Agents-has resonance in everyday language (agents de presse, etc.) but also carries overtones of political agency. Éclat (and éclater; the verb) is frequently repeated throughout Glissant's poetry and prose. Éclat in the case of agents d'éclat has a somewhat prejorative sense. It is the sort of dazzle that can cause a people to lose its footing. In numerous other instances, hm,vever, it represents the sudden movement, the explosion onto the contemporary scene of "marginal" peoples, and the possible brilliance of their future. Always it is metaphorical and poetic. Another word complex, the verbal phrase: donner-avec, relays the concept of understanding into the world of Relation, translating, contesting, then reconstituting its elements in a new order. The French word for understanding, comprendre, like its English cognate, is formed on the basis of the Latin word, c01nprehendere, "to seize," which is formed from the roots: con-(with) and prendere (to take). Glissant contrasts this form of understanding-appropriative, almost rapacious-with the understanding upon which Relation must be based: donneravec. Donner (to give) is meant as a generosity of perception. (In French donner' can mean "to look out tmvard.") There is also the possible sense of yielding, as a tree might "give" in a storm in order to remain standing. Avec both reflects back on the cornof comjJTendr-e and defines the underlying principle of Relation. Gives-ort-and-with is unwieldy, but unfamiliar tools are ahvays awkward. Balking at the task of translation is a questionable practice for a translator, but, along with totalité-monde, certain of Glissant's coinages remain here in French. * In sorne cases, no *Untranslated French v,rords are fmther discussed in lhe notes to the text or glossary. XIV 1 APPROACHES One way ashore, a thousand channels The Open Boat For the AfrÏcans who lived through the experience of deportation to the Arnericas, * confronting the unknown with neither preparation nor challenge was no doubt petrifying. The first dark shadow was cast by being wrenched from their everyday, familiar land, away frorn protecting gods and a tutelary community. But that is nothing yet. Exile can be borne, even when it cornes as a boit from the blue. The second dark of night fell as tortures and the deterioration of person, the result of so many incredible Gehennas. Imagine two hundred hurnan beings crarnrned into a space barely capable of containing a third of them. Imagine vomit, naked fIesh, swarming lice, the dead slumped, the dying crouched. Imagine, ifyou can, the swirling red ofmounting to the deck, the ramp they clirnbed, the black sun on the horizon, vertigo, *The Slave Trade came through the cramped doorway of the slave ship, leaving a wake like that of crawling de sert caravans. It might be drawn like this: ~ Mrican countries to the East; the lands of America to the West. This creature is in the image of a fibril. Mrican languages became deterritorialized, thus contributing to creolization in the West. This is the most completely known confrontation between the powers of the written word and the impulses of orality. The only written thing on slave ships was the account book listing the exchange value of slaves. Within the ship's space the cry of those deported was stifled, as it would be in the realm of the Plantations. This confrontation still reverberates to this day.
Discernment of spirits and Possession nancy Caciola, Breath, Heart, Guts: The Body and Spirits in the Middle Ages renata mikolajczyk, non sunt nisi phantasiae et imaginationes: a Medieval Attempt at Explaining Demons moshe sluhovsky, Discerning Spirits in Early Modern Europe sophie houdard, Mystics or Visionaries? Discernment of Spirits in the First Part of the Seventeenth Century in France Éva Pócs, Possession Phenomena, Possession-systems. Some East-Central European Examples Contacts with the other World Wolfgang behringer, How Waldensians Became Witches: Heretics and Their Journey to the Other World tok Thompson, Hosting the Dead: Thanotopic Aspects of the Irish sidhe roberto Dapit, Visions of the Other World as Narrated in Contemporary Belief Legends from Resia Divination, shamanism Christa tuczay, Trance Prophets and Diviners in the Middle Ages Peter buchholz, Shamanism in Medieval Scandinavian Literature rune blix hagen, The King, the Cat, and the Chaplain. King Christian IV's Encounter with the Sami Shamans of Northern Norway and Northern Russia in 1599 viii Contents oF the First anD the thirD volume WitChCraFt mythologies anD PerseCutions (DEMONS, SPIRITS, WITCHES 3) mythologies martine ostorero, The Concept of the Witches' Sabbath in the Alpine Region (1430-1440) Text and Context round-table discussion on Ecstasies by Carlo ginzburg (with the participation of Wolfgang behringer, Carlo ginzburg, gustav henningsen, gábor Klaniczay, giovanni Pizza and Éva Pócs) gábor Klaniczay, Learned Systems and Popular Narratives of Vision and Bewitchment adelina angusheva, Late Medieval Witch Mythologies in the Balkans Per sörlin, Child-Witches and the Construction of the Witches´ Sabbath: The Swedish Blåkulla Story legal mechanisms, social contexts Péter tóth g., River Ordeal-Trial by Water-Swimming of Witches:
Chapter Contestational Robotics 115 Chapter Children as Tactical Media Participants 135 Chapter The Financial Advantages of Anti-copyright 161 this is a clue as to why this practice has remained unnamed for so long. Since the avant-garde was declared dead, its progeny must be dead too. Perhaps this brood is simply unrecognizable because so many of the avant-garde's methods and narratives have been reconstructed and reconfigured to such an extent that any family resemblance has disappeared along with its public face. To intensify matters, participants are neither fish nor fowl. They aren't artists in any traditional sense and don't want to be caught in the web of metaphysical, historical, and romantic signage that accompanies that designation. Nor are they politi-concerned with issues of intervening in television, theorizing the structure and dynamics of video culture, modeling representations of political causes that further social justice, creating alternative models of distribution, and so on. The event was small (around three hundred people) , but it indicated that a new kind of coalition was beginning to form. Event organizers quickly realized that tactical television was too limited in its scope, because there were people with a similar sensibility who were doing tactical work in all constantly reconfigured to meet particular social demands. Tactical media is not a monolithic model, but a pliable one that asks to be shaped and reshaped. It contains many different and often contradictory conjectures, but it has a few principles that seem to have general value (although there are always exceptions). * By "digital" CAE means that tactical media is about copying, recombining, and representing , and not that it can only be done with digital technology. Please see Chapter 5, Part I, for a more detailed discussion of the issue. or even worse, movements, coalitions, campaigns, or programs that become bureaucracies) , the trace is stratified in its interpretive structure, so no matter how quickly and profoundly it is assimilated, it still contains the possibility of radical action. This possibility redeems the trace because it can offer the makings of minor histories that render credible the beliefs that something different from the inhumanity of capital is possible, and that a continued capacity for direct autonomous action and its initiation can lessen the intensity of authoritarian
Social Nature and the Limits to Capital PART IV: THE RISE AND DEMISE OF CHEAP NATURE 9. Cheap Labor?: Time, Capital, and the Reproduction of Human Nature 10. The Long Green Revolution: The Life and Times of Cheap Food in the Long Twentieth Century CONCLUSION: The End of Cheap Nature? INDEX This book is an invitation. It is offered as an opening to conversation, and an incitement to serious debate, over humanity's place in nature, and how our thinking about this place in nature shapes our view of history, our analysis of the present crisis, and the politics of liberation for all life. Capitalism in the Web of Life is, perhaps more than most, the product of an extended and sustained global conversation. There are many fingerprints on this book. Some are more obvious than others. Observations and reflections from a great many colleagues-many encountered through gracious invitations to give talks at universities in North America, Europe, and China-have made their way into the book. Audiences forced me to think in new ways; even when we have not agreed, their questions and critiques sharpened this book's clarity in unexpected, and deeply appreciated, ways. So too the extraordinary contributions of the intellectual fields on which I build: environmental and economic history, world history and world-systems analysis, political ecology and critical human geography, Marxist feminism, global political economy, agrofood and critical development studies, and many, many more. It is with great respect and admiration for a half-century of radical scholarship that I have sought to build out and synthesize the dialectical implications of these fields (and not just these) for the study of humanity-in-nature. Capitalism in the Web of Life reflects two decades of reflection and study at the nexus of two great concerns: the history of capitalism and environmental history. It has been a long, productive, exciting, and often tumultuous, journey. This book's ideas were formulated on both coasts of North America, on both sides of the Atlantic, at eight universities. Diana C. Gildea, my wife, best friend, and co-conspirator, has been with me for all of it. You would not be reading these words-or any of those that followwithout Diana's affirmation that world-ecology, and this book in particular, was a project worth pursuing, and her insistence that the project be pursued with intellectual creativity and rigor. This journey towards a "unified" theory of historical capitalism and historical nature first took shape out of conversations with John Bellamy Foster two decades ago. Although many of this book's formulations are at odds with John's arguments today, my and Giovanni Arrighi, I learned the strange arts of world history. Terry saved me from taking theory as a substitute for history; Giovanni helped me to see that world history is indispensable to our analysis of the present crisis. Richard Walker-known affectionately as DW to his friends-finally convinced me that geography matters. (I mean: Geography. Really. Matters.) And, equally, that the "endless accumulation" could not simply be invoked; a theory of capital accumulation had to be central to thinking capitalism's world histories. More than that, DW's rare combination of rigorous scholarship, elemental kindness, and academic good sense has contributed mightily not only to the book's intellectual clarity, but to the conditions under which the book was written. Henry Bernstein encouraged me to do the book with Verso, and his sustained critique-and encouragement-allowed me to sharpen my arguments well beyond what I thought possible. Numerous colleagues read and commented upon various incarnations of my argument in this book. I am especially grateful to Sharae Deckard, Michael Niblett, Stephen Shapiro, and their wonderful colleagues in the "Warwick diaspora" of world literary studies. They have been a constant source of inspiration and encouragement. In addition to those already mentioned, thanks also to
When Indigenous activists showed up at Parliament Hill in Ottawa in 2011 to oppose treaty rights violations, it was not the first time they had done so. Nor, in 2016, was it the first time they told their stories to the Canadian Parliament about missing and murdered women and police violence. Indigenous activists in the United States did not show up for the first time in 2016 at Standing Rock to oppose oil extraction. They did not appear for the first time in 2015 before the U.S Congress to urge legislation addressing violence against women. Indigenous peoples have been protesting the imperial forces of invasion, occupation, land theft, extraction, exploitation, and sexual violence for centuries. And so, too, have they been represented by state and corporate officials (who are sometimes one and the same) as terrorists out to destroy national security and social Scared Red The Anishinaabe of the Great Lakes region have many stories about Thunderbirds, deemed among the most powerful of beings. Able to bring about renewal and destruction, Thunderbirds have a unique and protective relationship with humans. The Anishinaabe also have many stories about the Great Lakes, which are understood to be the center of Turtle Island, the source of all life. One story tells of a future when a great black snake will threaten to swallow the land and all the waters. 1 This cautionary prophecy is similar to other Indigenous teachings. The Lakota, for example, tell of a black snake that, moving underground, will destroy the earth. 2 These are not fated predictions, however. The prophesied future can be changed. The future is about the choices we make now. So many Indigenous peoples throughout the United States and Canada have pitted themselves against imperialist ideologies and extractive capitalism, most powerfully embodied by the oil and gas industry and the neoliberal valuations of water, land, and life that that industry represents. 3 This struggle has involved both local and international actions against the expansion of pipelines within and across the United States and Canada-the
Culture: the ecological crisis of reason is a much needed account of what has gone wrong in our relationship with the environment. Written by one of our leading environmental thinkers, it is a compelling exploration of the contemporary ecological crisis, its origins, and the cultural illusions that lie behind it. Val Plumwood argues that historically-traceable distortions of reason and culture have resulted in dangerous forms of ecological denial. They have had a widespread effect in areas as diverse as economics, politics, science, ethics, and spirituality, and appear in the currently dominant form of globalisation. Cutting through the 'prudence versus ethics' debate that has stunted environmental philosophy, Plumwood analyses our ethical and spiritual failures as closely linked to our perceptual and prudential failures to situate ourselves as ecological beings. The further and more radically we separate ourselves from nature in order to justify its domination, the more we lose the ability to respond to it in ethical and communicative terms. Plumwood argues that in the process, we also gain a false idea of our own character and location, including an illusory sense of independence from nature. The results can be dangerous, making us insensitive to ecological limits, dependencies and interconnections. Environmental Culture: the ecological crisis of reason presents a radically new picture of how our culture must change in order to develop an ecologically rational society. Drawing on a range of ideas from feminism, democracy, globalisation and post-colonial thought, it is essential reading for anyone interested in the environment and our place in it.
Recuperarse de una historia del mundo Construida por autodecretados inexistentes Es hacer frente a esta historia Sin miedo, con persistencia y paciencia, Hacer frente a una historia del mundo Construida por autodecretados invisibles Es enfrentarse a esta historia Sin miedo ni vergüenza Por temor a la vergüenza y el dolor La conciencia atemorizada y vergonzosa De enfrentarse a los que han decretado Inútil por lo que valen Incalculable y no sólo porque es incalculable Ha sido la riqueza generada Hacer frente a esa pérdida con dignidad y respeto Es la llamada de una historia que pide respeto Dignidad, seriedad, implacable dedicación Para la labor de curar a los peor heridos Las sanguijuelas, los genocidas y los liquidados Liberado de venganza Liberado de violencia Liberado de hábitos inculcados Mediante la tortura Mediante los crímenes contra la humanidad La recuperación por un crimen tan negado Reparándolo de m anera creativa al margen de la Caridad humanitaria Con solidaridad Requerirá un extraordinario Cambio de mentalidad De la deificada barbarie de las llamadas Leyes del mercado y sus letales Industrias y accesorios Judiciales, políticos, culturales, religiosos Publicitarios Tomando en serio la historia de uno mismo Podría ayudar, si se toma en serio, A sanar la conciencia de un mundo Que ha perdido el juicio La decisión a reciclar la barbarie Diciendo firmemente no Se ha hecho eco a través de los siglos Los Kimpa Vitas: , Boukm ans', Zumbis'1, Gerónimos', tíeloveds6, MLKs', Nehandas", Hermanas y hermanos Desde todos los rincones del Planeta La labor no ha cambiado Pero el cuerpo, la mente y el alm a cansados Nos apacigua y nos hace dudar de que Tal vez, sólo tal vez. Los ecos de la sanación estaban equivocados Tal vez las interferencias provocaron malas escuchas Pensar que la violencia es correcta Que podría ser la mejor forma de avanzar Sin mirar Quién quedó atrás Cuánta sangre ha costado Convencidos los genocidas de su victoria Hiroshima y N agasaki no se repitieron Pero cómo decimos I^o que es peor de algo mejor Lluvia negra de lluvia ácida de lluvia regular Nube de hongo de una normal Que nos impide Ver, sentir lo malo Que realmente ha sido Esperando las consecuencias Cielo despejado Saber si nos dirigimos Hacia el final de la humanidad O su despertar Pronunciando las mismas palabras Escuchadas una y otra vez De un crimen al siguiente Cómo pueden los seres humanos Causar tanto sufrimiento A otros seres Todavía no escuchan Se niegan a escuchar Debido a que no está expresado En la último idioma de Colón Y' peor, no lo pronunció Un descubridor certificado Escribo esta introducción en el contexto de lo que se ha venido en llamar "crisis económica" (en el último de los idiomas de Colón).
This book is an outstanding collection of classic writings on anarchism … a great scholarly resource on the history of alternatives to punishment, prisons, and punitive justice."-Dr. Erik Juergensmeyer, Editor, Green Theory and Praxis Journal "Classic Writings in Anarchist Criminology is must-read book for those who know the criminal justice system is broken, and wants effective solutions. This collection lays out the theoretical foundation for scholars, politicians, practices, and activists to create sound solutions, sure to challenge the failing criminal justice system."-Dr. Amber E. George, Editor, Journal for Critical Animal Studies "Classic Writings in Anarchist Criminology is a book that every person that is interested in criminology must read."-Madelynne Kinoshita, Save the Kids "This book shows that there is a long brilliant history of people working to dismantle domination, control, and punishment."-Poetry Behind the Walls "A rich and provocative collection of writings that contribute to current abolitionist movements-examining past thinkers enables us to better examine our current problems and imagine alternative solutions!"-Dr. Jason Del Gandio, co-editor of Spontaneous Combustion: The Eros Effect and Global Revolution "Classic Writings in Anarchist Criminology brings together an outstanding collection of essays written by some of the most intelligent and influential anarchists that have ever walked the earth. Importantly, their arguments continue to burn with a ferocious intensity, bringing new understanding and insight as to why social justice alternatives to crime and punishment are needed. My hope is that this powerful book will spark-or reignite-a beautiful spirit of revolt, resistance, and commitment to freedom for all, within those fortunate enough to read it."-Dr. Richard J. White, Sheffield Hallam University Dedication This book is dedicated to everyone, human and nonhuman, that is locked up, tortured, and confined in every jail, detention, prison, cage, tank, handcuff, cell, padded room, unit, and chain. We, the editors, would like to thank everyone at AK Press for believing in and supporting this book. We could not think of a better press to publish this book with than AK Press. We would also like to thank our academic departments for their support and friendship. Thank you to our human and nonhuman family and friends. Nothing is possible without others. We are all dependent on others; no one is an island. Thank you also to those today and through history who identified as anarchists and fought for the liberation and freedom for all. Finally, we would like to thank
For Nature the promise of synthetic biology was not that the field might once and for all define "life, " but rather, perhaps counterintuitively, that it might provide "a welcome antidote to chronic vitalism. " 9 "Synthetic biology's view of life as a molecular process lacking moral thresholds at the level of the cell, " Nature elaborated, could serve as a counter to worries about biotechnology researchers "playing God" and might even "be invoked to challenge characterizations of life that are sometimes used to defend religious dogma about the embryo. " 10 Not quite noticing that their attempt to diffuse moral arguments about human conception and procreation was itself a moral argument, Nature's editors swore off life as a metaphysical idea, concluding, "We might now be permitted to dismiss the idea that life is a precise scientific concept. " 11 But where would biology be without "life"? In 2010, Science published a paper claiming that microbes might be able to employ arsenic-in place of phosphorus-as one of the six chemical building blocks of life. 12 The geomicro biologist Felisa Wolfe-Simon, a lead researcher on the project, suggested at a televised NASA news conference on astrobiology that her team, which isolated a microbe from Mono Lake and fed it in an arsenic broth, had "cracked open the door to what's possible for life elsewhere in the universe. " "This microbe, " she said, "if we are correct, has solved the challenge of being alive in a different way. " 13 Far from dismissing life as a scientific concept, this declaration amped up "life" as a frame within which ever-more expansive claims might be made. As it happened, in 2012, other scientists proved unable to replicate Wolfe-Simon's result, and microbe GFAJ-1 vanished as a candidate for life-as-it-could-be. 14 But another scientific claim about the capaciousness of life then arrived in 2013, when Nature announced in a headline that the sequencing of the "genome of the largest viruses yet discovered hints at [a] 'fourth domain' of life" 15-that, in addition to Eucarya, Bacteria, and Archaea, biologists might need to nominate a whole new domain (a higher-level classification than the more familiar kingdom) in order to account for the genetic distinctiveness of mega-viruses. Life, precise or no, would not, it seemed, be waved away so easily as Nature had proposed back in 2007. Even the boundary figure of the virus-usually designated as not quite alive, wriggling between animate and inanimate-could be invited into life's dominion. The scientists who sequenced the outsized, new-to-science, viral genome at first named this entity simply "new life form. " When they considered the unexpected directions toward which the virus might point biology, they dubbed it Pandoravirus. "Life" seemed to be bursting out of the box, yes, but also remained contained within the frames of bioscience. Life, ever the vexingly imprecise concept for biologists, seems today to have entered a fresh identity crisis. Should life be cut down to size, scaled down from any metaphysical, special status? Or should life be scaled upward and outward to embrace and explain the unexpected and as-yet unknown? The answer, for scientists, seems to be both. Life, for those biologists operating at the edges of their conceptual categories, is in a volatile state, pragmatically and theoretically.
INTRODUCTION focuses critical attention on present interests in ecological communities as well as their possible futures. Do ecosystems exist in the world? Are they figments of the mind? If destroyed, will multispecies communities predictably reemerge? The roots of these questions go back to a contentious debate between two early twentieth-century biologists: Clements and Gleason. Frederic Clements, who led the botany department at the University of Minnesota, understood ecological associations as natural units of vegetation. A 1916 monograph by Clements described ecological units, like rain forests, marshes, or riparian woodlands, as "complex organisms." These superorganisms, according to Clements, involve stable associations of plants and animals. Following major ecological disturbances and destruction, he found some evidence that these complex associations would come back. Henry Gleason, of the New York Botanical Garden, published a paper in 1926 challenging the influential ideas championed by Clements. Gleason understood ecological associations as relationships in constant flux, arguing that they should not be understood as "an organism, scarcely even a vegetational unit, but merely a coincidence." According to Gleason, ecological communities are not part of the natural order of things, but instead are bounded by artificial lines that reflected the tendency of the human species "to crystallize and classify [our] knowledge." 4 A. G. Tansley, who coined the term "ecosystem" in 1935, made arguments allied with Gleason: "The systems we isolate mentally are not only included as parts of larger ones," he wrote, "but they also overlap, interlock and interact with one another." While Tansley himself assumed that these systems were in constant flux, many contemporary ecologists have made his idea of the ecosystem unnecessarily concrete. 5 In 1981 Paul and Anne Ehrlich compared ecosystems to airplanes. They argued that it would be terrifying to ride on a partially disassembled flying machine: "As you walk from the terminal toward your airliner, you notice a man on a ladder busily prying rivets out of its wing. Somewhat concerned, you saunter over to the rivet popper and ask him just what the hell he's doing." Ehrlich and Ehrlich think that we should be terrified to live in ecosystems where essential parts, species, are being driven extinct-being popped out of finely tuned systems like rivets. 6 Popular metaphors are being questioned as a new generation of biologists are describing the emergence of what they term "novel ecosystems." Joseph Mascaro, a plant biologist, rejects the airplane comparison, writing, "Ecosystem function does not solely reflect species loss, as implied by the popping of rivets, it also reflects species additions." 7 Novel eco-INTRODUCTION 5 keys that are constantly moving among worlds, deciding which ontology they would like to inhabit. 24 Alongside endangered forms of life, I found a swarming multitude that was constantly creating new symbiotic associations, taking advantage of exploits in emergent ecosystems, and going wild along unexpected trajectories. 25 Wild creatures are often understood as having an "existential independence" from human worlds. 26 Rather than treating wildness as a phenomenon that exists only beyond the reach of civilization or domestication, this book also focuses on the risky and out-of-control dynamics that emerge amid intimate entanglements with other species. 27 Contagious excitement and fear often accompany moments of capture, when humans involve and enfold other creatures into a new association. Mixed emotions are also at play when we release others from our care, allowing them to escape our tentative grasp. While some cultural critics have characterized conservationists as "misanthropes," as melancholics who see humans as inherently destructive while regarding other species as essentially good and innocent, my aim is to offer a more nuanced characterization of the desires, affective attachments, and dreams motivating people to care for wild things and living systems. 28 Novel ecological assemblages are being created by expert practitioners, as well as by amateurs embracing a Do-It-Yourself (diy) ethos, people who are experimenting with new ways of living responsibly with other critters in multispecies worlds. 29 Human interactions with animals have driven recent ethical debates in anthropology, history, and contemporary philosophy. 30 Departing from "the question of the animal," the polemic by Jacques Derrida arguing that "the human-animal distinction can no longer and ought no longer be maintained," Emergent Ecologies also engages with "the question of the fungus" and "the question of the plant." 31 Fungi illustrate "practices that thrive in the 'gap' between what is taken as wild and what is taken as domesticated," according to the Matsutake Worlds Research Group. "Thinking like a fungus" opens up questions like, Who is doing the domesticating? And to what end? Plant Thinking, by Michael Marder, regards plants as "collective beings," as "non-totalizing assemblages of multiplicities, inherently political spaces of conviviality." 32 Other beings who have "strivings, purposes, telos, intentions, functions, and significance" come together in Eduardo Kohn's book, How Forests Think. 33 Following plants, animals, and microscopic fungi as they became caught in temporary entanglements, and then escaped, Emergent Ecologies uses the methods and tactics of multispecies ethnography to trace the contingencies of unexpected connections. 34 Conventional ethno-FIGURE 2.1. Peter Sloterdijk claims that having a face is a key part of being human. "Human faces have pulled themselves out of their animal form simply by looking at one another," Sloterdijk asserts. The "turning of faces towards other faces among humans became face-creating and face-opening, because the welcome qualities of faces for the eyes of the potential sexual partner inform generic processes via selection-effective preferences" (Sloterdijk, Bubbles, 164). Gazing into the eyes of an actual animal, even a creature with very different eyes like Ectatomma, I find it difficult to deny that she has a face. Certainly social mammals, who use their faces for all sorts of communication, have particular kinds of faces. Mammal faces are likely unimportant and unintelligible to ants. At the same time, ant faces may create openings toward one another that are difficult for mammals to understand. "The term interface," in the words of Juno Parreñas, "implicitly recalls the sense of face developed by Emmanuel Levinas.. .. An ethical obligation to the other is made when one perceives the other's face." If ant faces are frozen in an exoskeleton, lacking muscles to create expressions that might produce empathy in humans, our faces lack antennae-fingeryeyes that enable insects to taste, grope, and smell one another. Being pulled into the distinctive forms of animal faces is an opportunity to consider the radical specificity and limits of the human umwelt in interfaces involving other species (Parreñas, "Producing Affect," 675; Rose, "What If the Angel of History Were a Dog?"). Microscopy and photograph by April Nobile. FIGURES 2.2 AND 2.3. Scanning electron micrographs of the tip of the antenna in the African driver ant (Dorylus helvolus). The tongue-shaped structures are among the many kinds of sensillae trichoidea, the hairlike sensory organs that enable ants to detect heat, humidity, touch, and a diversity of chemical compounds. Microscopy and photographs by Roberto A. Keller / American Museum of Natural History, New York.
To receive special offers, bonus content, and info on new releases and other great reads, sign up for our newsletters. Or visit us online at us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup For email updates on the author, click here. 1987 CRISPR, or clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, is discovered by Yoshizumi Ishino in bacteria. The function is unknown. 2000 President Bill Clinton unveils preliminary findings from the Human Genome Project, saying, "Human beings, regardless of race, are 99.9% the same." 6.2012 Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier demonstrate how to modify DNA with CRISPR. PRESENT 4.2015 Genetically modified human embryos created with CRISPR are reported from Junjiu Huang's laboratory in Guangzhou, China. 6.2016 The first CRISPR clinical trial in the United States secures initial approval from a government panel. 2016 Stranger Things, describing secret government experiments on children with uncanny powers, debuts on Netflix. 9.2016 The China National GeneBank opens with the goal of collecting DNA from every human on earth. 10.2017 President Jinping Xi gives his "China Dream" speech, calling on the country to prioritize innovation with "cuttingedge frontier technologies." 2018 Dr. Jiankui He implants a genetically engineered embryo into its mother's womb in January, but it fails to take. After a number of attempts, a woman known as P6 becomes pregnant in March. 10.2018 Lulu and Nana, the world's first "edited" babies, are born in mainland China. 12.2018 News of the birth leaks as the Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing opens in Hong Kong. 12.2019 Dr. He's three-year prison sentence is announced. sentenced him to three years in prison for practicing medicine without a license, denouncing his pursuit of "personal fame and profit." After a sleepless night, I caught up with Jennifer Doudna the next day at a gala reception hosted by a Hong Kong billionaire. Rubbing shoulders with international financiers and the scientific elite, I felt a bit out of place. I was still jet-lagged from being in San Francisco, where I'd met with HIV-positive community activists a few days before. Sipping a glass of champagne with Doudna on the sidelines of this event, I interviewed her. With my digital recorder rolling, I invited her to reflect on Jiankui He's experiment. Jennifer Doudna said that targeting the HIV resistance gene was "not the worst thing he could have chosen," since earlier experiments in the United States had already yielded promising results. But she quickly added, "I am not condoning the study at all." Even so, she speculated that He could be vindicated in the near future. "Imagine some period of time from now," she said. "Two years from now, let's say. Those girls are now healthy two-year-olds and they seem fine.… People will look back in retrospect and say, 'Maybe the process wasn't correct, but the outcome was fine.'" Doudna found fault with the "process" because she thought it was a carefully choreographed publicity stunt. Results were announced via YouTube videos rather than in a peer-reviewed academic publication. "The announcement dropped like a surprise Beyoncé album," reported STAT News. Later I learned that Dr. He had submitted his embryo editing research to the prestigious journal Nature just weeks before. The plan was to keep the experiment secret until an established journal accepted the article. However, an investigative reporter-Antonio Regalado from MIT Technology Review-ferreted out key facts and broke the story as the curtains opened on the summit. The prerecorded YouTube videos were released as the controversy piled on. Amidst the hullabaloo, Nature rejected the article. Dr. He's story is a gateway into a much bigger enterprise: the tale of CRISPR and the emergence of genetic medicine. The gala was quietly abuzz with news of other efforts to genetically modify humans. When the summit organizing committee unveiled their statement to the world the next morning, they roundly condemned Jiankui He. At the same time, they also opened the door to a "rigorous, responsible" pathway for creating more genetically modified babies. They insisted that clinical trials on embryos should proceed, but only in situations with "strict independent oversight, a compelling medical need, an absence of reasonable alternatives, a plan for long-term follow-up, and attention to societal effects." 13 While singling out He for breaching scientific and societal norms, the committee insisted that the field could responsibly proceed. The communiqué stressed the need for prudence and caution. But it also signaled that the race to genetically modify humans had begun again. A small group of elite researchers-including some with serious conflicts of interest-had decided to forge ahead at a moment when global public opinion was clearly telling them to slow down. grail, the book, the code, the blueprint, the text, the map, the secret of life itself. "Thinking of DNA as a language," Roof argues, "implies that DNA is readable, translatable, writable, editable, and copyrightable, analogies that make DNA seem far more transparent, malleable, accessible, and ownable than it is." 5 Mixed metaphors were everywhere in the China National GeneBank, in displays oriented to nonscientists. Up on the wall a timeline gave an overview of historical landmarks in genetics and genomics that showed a trajectory from famous moments in science to BGI's recent achievements: 1953 Watson and Crick describe the double helix structure of DNA. 1972 Rudimentary genetic engineering techniques are pioneered by Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer, enabling scientists to manipulate DNA.
The ocean is strange. For those of us settled in down-to-earth common sense and facts-on-the-ground science, the ocean symbolizes the wildest kind of nature there is. It represents a contrast to the cultivated land and even, sometimes, to the solid order of culture itself. Although many peoplh ave tried to capture this sea-whalers, painters, poets, politicians-marine biologists have offered some of the most authoritative accounts of the ocean and the life it sustains, particularly for publics compelled and captivated by the explanatory stories of science. Marine biologists' visions of the ocean are today in transformation. These scientists are learning to see the sea not only as the home medium for marine mammals, fishes, and seaweeds but also as a realm inhabited, maintained, and modulated by an extraordinary mix of microbes, many of which live at astonishing extremes of light, temperature, pressure, and chemistry. Using molecular biological techniques, gene sequencing, bioinformatics, and remote sensing, marine biologists are coming to view the ocean as a web of microbial life joining the sunniest surface waters to the dimmest depths of the sea floor. Novel configurations of technology and theory are leading them to conceptualize the ocean as a site in which the object of biology-life-materializes as a networked phenomenon linking the microscopic to the macrocosmic, bacteria to the biosphere, genes to globe. Microbes are key figures in this new scientific ocean, pointers to the origin of life, climate change, and promising biotechnologies. This book offers an anthropological account of how one cluster of marine biologists, marine microbiologists, are making such microbes meaningful-to themselves, to other scientists, and to broader publics. It examines how marine microbes are becoming items of interest and contest among such varied players as environmentalists, biotech entrepreneurs, I embarked on my ethnographic work at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), where Judith Connor, director of information and technology dissemination, made my presence possible. I am grateful to Ed DeLong for inviting me to participate in the work of his MBARI lab, to Steven Hallam for leading me through the technical and ethical seascapes of today's marine biology, and to Pete Girguis for directing me aboard the research vessel Point Lobos. I also thank
Ultimo día del despotismo y primero de lo mismo (The last day of despotism; the first day of the same thing). 1 We are always being told that we are living in a time of dramatic, sweeping political and social change. On the one hand this is undoubtedly true. Everything from relatively recent collapse of communist systems in Russia and Eastern Europe, the emergence of a distinctly European political identity, and the explosive growth of new technologies and forms of communication, to the widespread revival of national and ethnic identities, and the wars and genocides that seem to be the consequence of this, would all seem to suggest that ours is a time of radical change. But on the other hand, one could be forgiven for thinking that things have not really changed that much at all. The same forms of domination and institutional hierarchies seem to appear time and time again, only in different garbs and ever more cunning disguises. With every popular uprising against the state and with every overthrow of some repressive regime or other, there always seems to be a new and more subtle form of repression waiting to take its place. There is always a new discourse of power to take the place of the old. For instance, what does it matter to the Australian Aboriginal, or the township dweller in South Africa, or the prisoner in a Russian jail, or the Latino "illegal immigrant" in the United States, whether he or she has a new set of masters? One is still dominated by a series of institutional practices and discursive regimes which tie him to a certain marginalized and, therefore, subjugated identity. Increased technology seems to go hand in hand with intensified social control and more sophisticated and complex ways of regulating individuals. Freedom in one area always seems to entail domination in others. So there is still, despite these profound global changes, the raw, brutal inevitability of power and authority. Maybe Friedrich Nietzsche was right when he saw history as merely a "hazardous play of dominations." 2 This is not say, of course, that there have not been significant advancements on a world scale. Nor is it to say that all regimes and modes of political and social organization are equally oppressive. To argue that the postapartheid regime in South Africa, or the now not so new governments in the former Soviet bloc, are as dominating as the ones they replaced, would be ludicrous and insulting. Moreover, we must once and for all stop falling into the pernicious error of advocating a purer or more universal revolutionary theory that would 2 The Return of Power 3 over ethnic identities indicates, in a most violent and brutal manner, how much we are still tied to the idea that it is best for ethnic and national identities to have their own state. Perhaps in this sense, then, the idea of the state may be seen as a manifestation of the place of power. Moreover, we are still, quite clearly, trapped in essentialist ethnic identities. The idea that one is essentially Croat or Serb or Albanian or Hutu or European, and that one defines oneself in opposition to other, less "pure," less "educated" or "enlightened," less "rational," less "clean," less "hardworking" identities, is still all too evident today. The "changes" that are ceaselessly promulgated have only succeeded in solidifying these essentialist nationalist ideas. However, the problem of essentialism is broader than the problem of nationalism. Essentialist ideas seem to govern our political and social reality. Individuals are pinned down within an identity that is seen as true or natural. Essentialist identities limit the individual, constructing his or her reality around certain norms, and closing off the possibilities of change and becoming. There is, moreover, a whole series of institutional practices which dominate the individual in a multitude of ways, and which are brought into play by essentialist logics. One has only to look at the way in which social and family welfare agencies and correctional institutions operate to see this. The identity of the "delinquent," "welfare dependent," or "unfit parent" is carefully constructed as the essence of the individual, and the individual is regulated, according to this essential identity, by a whole series of rational and moral norms. The changes that have taken place on a global scale seem only to have denied the individual the possibility of real change. Not only does essentialist thinking limit the individual to certain prescribed norms of morality and behavior, it also excludes identities and modes of behavior which do not conform to these norms. They are categorized as "unnatural" or "perverse," as somehow "other" and they are persecuted according to the norms they transgress. The logic of essentialism produces an oppositional thinking, from which binary hierarchies are constructed: normal/abnormal, sane/insane, heterohomosexual, etc. This domination does not only refer to individuals who fall outside the category of the norm [homosexuals, drug addicts, delinquents, the insane, etc]; it is also suffered by those for whom certain fragments of their identity-for identity is never a complete thing-would be condemned as abnormal. We all suffer, to a greater or lesser extent, under this tyranny of normality, this discourse of domination which insists that we all have an essential identity and that that is what we are. We must not think, though, that this domination is entirely forced upon us. While this is no doubt true to a certain extent-think of prisons, mental institutions, the army, hospitals, the workplace-an essentialist identity is also something that we often willingly submit to. This mode of power cannot operate without our consent, without our desire to be dominated. So not only will this discussion examine the domination involved in essentialist discourses and identities-the way they support institutions such as the state and the prison for example-it will also look at the ways in which we participate in our own domination. 4 The Return of Power 5 language of this world. It is based on essentialist ideas about humanity, ideas which render it nothing more than that-a dream, and a dangerous one at that. While there is no moving completely beyond power, there are, however, possibilities of limiting power, or at least organizing it in such a way that the risk of domination is defused. One of these ways, I will argue, is through a critique of essentialist and totalizing logics. The idea that we can be completely free from power is based on an oppositional Manichean logic that posits an essential division between humanity and power. Anarchism is a philosophy based on this logic. It sees humanity as oppressed by state power, yet uncontaminated by it. This is because, according to anarchism, human subjectivity emerges in a world of "natural laws" which are essentially rational and ethical, while the state belongs to the "artificial" world of power. Thus man and power belong to separate and opposed worlds. Anarchism therefore has a logical point of departure, uncontaminated by power, from which power can be condemned as unnatural, irrational, and immoral. In the past, radical political theory has always relied on this uncontaminated point of departure in order to present a critique of power, whether it be the power of the state, the power of the capitalist economy, the power of religion, etc. Without this point of departure, it would seem that any kind of resistance against power would be impossible. Where would resistance or revolution come from if this were not the case? Surely it must come from a rational, ethical form of subjectivity which is somehow uncorrupted by the power it confronts. Now here is the problem-the problem that will haunt our discussion. Let us imagine that the natural human essence, the essential, moral, and rational subjectivity supposedly uncontaminated by power, is contaminated, and indeed, constituted, by the power it seeks to overthrow. Moreover, not only is this subjectivity, this pure place of resistance, decidedly impure; it also constitutes, in itself, through its essentialist and universalist premises, a discourse of domination. To put it simply, then, would this not mean that the place of resistance has become a place of power? Using the argument that one needs a pure agent to overthrow power, the possibility of a contaminated agent would only mean a reaffirmation of the power it claims to oppose. In anarchist discourse humanity is to replace the state. But if we were to suggest that humanity is actually constituted by this power and that it contains its own discourses of domination, then the revolution that the anarchists propose would only lead to a domination perhaps more pernicious than the one it has replaced. It would, in other words, fall into the trap of place. This would seem to leave us at a theoretical impasse: if there is no uncontaminated point of departure from which power can be criticized or condemned, if there is no essential limit to the power one is resisting, then surely there can be no resistance against it. Perhaps we should give up on the idea of political action altogether and resign ourselves to the inevitability of domination. However, the question of the possibility of resistance to domination is crucial to this discussion. The work will explore, through a comparison of anarchism and poststructuralism, the paradox of the uncontaminated place of resistance. I will suggest that the point of departure central to anarchist advance the argument, while, at the same time, using the argument to explore the thinkers. But it is never intended to be an exposition of these thinkers, and there are certainly other important aspects to these thinkers that I have deliberately left out because they do not reflect on the issues I am discussing. This does not mean that I sweep under the carpet ideas that are problematic for the argument. These objections are not...
En lin momento de Ia dcmocl'acia chilena en que cI gobierno comienz:l a percler Sll "agenda", en que cI con sensa prucha su obsolesccncia ante las dClllandas socialcs que el mismo ha generado, leer a Jacques Ranciere es ta mar contacto con 10 cscncialmentc dcmocdrico de 10 politico, a saber, con 10 incalculable. La democracia chilena quiso. tras 511 retorno, aflanzarsc mediante lin cOllscnso basado CII una rcrorica Ill.is 0 me nos ehcn del pago de cuentas. Suministrando aquf y all,\ III medidtl de su posibilidad, al punta incluso de pasar a Itl eue1Jf.a :11 "detenido dcsaparccidd' en 1:1 fOI'I11:1 de Ia admi nistraci6n objctivfl de Sli resto, b democracia chilena debra terminal' pOl' convcnccrse de que 10 incalculable solo po dra provenir de tina mala maniobl'a suya de 10 reprimido. Pero por una paradoja solo de Ia politica democrarica, a 10 calculable Ie es inherente 10 incalculable, no ya Ia falta de dlculo. Pasa", rodavfa mucho tiempo para que Ia de mocracia chilena sepa realmcnte 10 que Ie slIccdc. Es en cstc contexto que 1:1 Iccrura de cste tcxto de Ranciere po dda ayudar al menos a que ella no pretenda ocultar su ignorancia can su falta de mancjo. Para nosotros ha sido un agrado traducir nucvamente a un Ranciere del que hemos aprendido que solo en los bor des de 10 polftico se puede saber que Ia cuestion del compromiso polftico es tam bien Ull compromiso con su incalculable. Una de las mayores dihcultades de Ia traduc ci6n de Ia palabra franccsa dissensus, es que si no pudicsemos traducirb 110 podrf:l.Inos ramal' contacto can cI desac\lcr do que rige b producci6n de lin lIluncio comun.
On a spring morning in 2009, Matthew Lawrence dropped the anchor of his small boat at a random spot in the middle of a blue ocean bay on the east coast of Australia, and jumped over the side. He swam down on scuba to where the anchor lay, picked it up, and waited. The breeze on the surface nudged the boat, which started to drift, and Matt, holding the anchor, followed. This bay is well-known for diving, but divers usually visit only a couple of spectacular locations. As the bay is large and typically pretty calm, Matt, a scuba enthusiast who lives nearby, had begun a program of underwater exploration, letting the breeze carry the empty boat around above him until his air ran out and he swam back up the anchor line. On one of these dives, roaming over a flat sandy area scattered with scallops, he came across something unusual. A pile of empty scallop shells-thousands of them-was roughly centered around what looked like a single rock. On the shell bed were about a dozen octopuses, each in a shallow, excavated den. Matt came down and hovered beside them. The octopuses each had a body about the size of a football, or smaller. They sat with their arms tucked away. They were mostly brown-gray, but their colors changed moment by moment. Their eyes were large, and not too dissimilar to human eyes, except for the dark horizontal pupils-like cats' eyes turned on their side. The octopuses watched Matt, and also watched one another. Some started roaming around. They'd haul themselves out of their dens and move over the shell bed in an ambling shuffle. Sometimes this elicited no response from others, but occasionally a pair would dissolve into a multi-armed wrestle. The octopuses seemed to be neither friends nor enemies, but in a state of complicated coexistence. As if the scene were not sufficiently strange, many baby sharks, each just six inches or so long, lay quietly on the shells as the octopuses roamed around them. A couple of years before this I was snorkeling in another bay, in Sydney. This site is full of boulders and reefs. I saw something moving under a ledge-something surprisingly large-and went down to look at it. What I found looked like an octopus attached to a turtle. It had a flat body, a prominent head, and eight arms coming straight from the head. The arms were flexible, with suckers-roughly like octopus arms. Its back was fringed with something that looked like a skirt, a few inches wide and moving gently. The animal seemed to be every color at once-red, gray, blue-green. Patterns came and went in a fraction of a second. Amid the patches of color were veins of silver like glowing power lines. The animal hovered a few inches above the sea floor, and then came forward to look at me. As I had suspected from the surface, this creature was big-about three feet long. The arms roved and wandered, the colors came and went, and the animal moved forward and back. This animal was a giant cuttlefish. Cuttlefish are relatives of octopuses, but more closely related to squid. Those three-octopuses, cuttlefish, squid-are all members of a group called the cephalopods. The other well-known cephalopods are nautiluses, deep-sea Pacific shellfish which live quite differently from octopuses and their cousins. Octopuses, cuttlefish, and squid have something else in common: their large and complex nervous systems. I swam down repeatedly, holding my breath, to watch this animal. Soon I was exhausted, but I was also reluctant to stop, as the creature seemed as interested in me as I was in it (in him? in her?). This was my first experience with an aspect of these animals that has never stopped intriguing me: the sense of mutual engagement that one can have with them. They watch you closely, usually maintaining some distance, but often not very much. Occasionally, when I've been very close, a giant cuttlefish has reached an arm out, just a few inches, so it touches mine. It's usually one touch, then no more. Octopuses show a stronger tactile interest. If you sit in front of their den and reach out a hand, they'll often send out an arm or two, first to explore you, and then-absurdly-to try to haul you into their lair. Often, no doubt, this is an overambitious attempt to turn you into lunch. But it's been shown that octopuses are also interested in objects that they pretty clearly know they can't eat. To understand these meetings between people and cephalopods, we have to go back to an event of the opposite kind: a departure, a moving apart. The departure happened quite some time before the meetings-about 600 million years before. Like the meetings, it involved animals in the ocean. No one knows what the animals in question looked like in any detail, but they perhaps had the form of small, flattened worms. They may have been just millimeters long, perhaps a little larger. They might have swum, might have crawled on the sea floor, or both. They might have had simple eyes, or at least light-sensitive patches, on each side. If so, little else may have defined "head" and "tail." They did have nervous systems. These might have comprised nets of nerves spread throughout the body, or they might have included some clustering into a tiny brain. What these animals ate, how they lived and reproduced-all are unknown. But they had one feature of great interest from an evolutionary point of view, a feature visible only in retrospect. These creatures were the last common ancestors of yourself and an octopus, of mammals and cephalopods. They're the "last" common ancestors in the sense of most recent, the last in a line. The history of animals has the shape of a tree. A single "root" gives rise to a series of branchings as we follow the process forward in time. One species splits into two, and each of those species splits again (if it does not die out first). If a species splits, and both sides survive and split repeatedly, the result may be the evolution of two or more clusters of species, each cluster distinct enough from the others to be picked out with a familiar name-the mammals, the birds. The big differences between animals alive nowbetween beetles and elephants, for example-originated in tiny insignificant splits of this sort, many millions of years ago. A branching took place and left two new groups of organisms, one on each side, that were initially similar to each other, but evolved independently from that point on. You should imagine a tree that has an inverted triangular, or conical, shape from far away, and is very irregular inside-something like this: Now imagine sitting on a branch on top of the tree, looking down. You are on the top because you're alive now (not because you are superior), and around you are all the other organisms alive now. Close to you are your living cousins, such as chimpanzees and cats. Further away, as you look horizontally across the top of the tree, you'll see animals that are more distantly related. The total "tree of life" also includes plants and bacteria and protozoa, among others, but let's confine ourselves to the animals. If you now look down the tree, toward the roots, you'll see your ancestors, both recent ones and those more remote. For any pair of animals alive now (you and a bird, you and a fish, a bird and a fish), we can trace two lines of descent down the tree until they meet in a common ancestor, an ancestor of both. This common ancestor might be encountered just a short way down the tree, or further down. In the case of humans and chimps we reach a common ancestor very quickly, living about six million years ago. For very different pairs of animals-human and beetle-we have to trace the lines further down. As you sit in the tree, looking across at your near and distant relatives, consider a particular collection of animals, the ones we usually think of as "smart"-the ones with large brains, who are complex and flexible in their behavior. These will certainly include chimps and dolphins, also dogs and cats, along with humans. All these animals are quite near to you on the tree. They are fairly close cousins, from an evolutionary point of view. If we're doing this exercise properly we should also add birds. One of the most important developments in animal psychology over the last few decades has been the realization of how smart crows and parrots are. Those are not mammals, but they are vertebrates, and hence they are still fairly close to us, though not nearly as close as chimps. Having collected all these birds and mammals, we can ask: What was their most recent common ancestor like, and when did it live? If we look down the tree to where their lines of ancestry all fuse, what do we find living there? The answer is a lizard-like animal. It lived something like 320 million years ago, a bit before the age of the dinosaurs. This animal had a backbone, was of reasonable size, and was adapted to life on land. It had an architecture similar to our own, with four limbs, a head, and a skeleton. It walked around, used senses similar to ours, and had a well-developed central nervous system. Now let's look for the common ancestor that connects this first group of animals, which includes ourselves, to an octopus. To find this animal we have to travel much further down the branches. When we find it, about 600 million years before the present, the animal is that flattened worm-like creature I sketched earlier. This step back in time is nearly twice as long as the step we took to find the common ancestor of mammals and birds. The human-octopus ancestor lived at a time when no organisms had made it onto land and the largest animals around it might have been sponges and jellyfish (along with some oddities I'll discuss in the next chapter). Assume we've found this animal, and are now watching the departure, the branching, as it happened. In a murky ocean (on the sea floor, or up in the water column) we're watching a lot of these worms live, die, and reproduce. For an unknown reason, some split off from the...
and all their breeders for keeping those genetics coming and making them available to all. well help cannabis to once again be seen in the proper light it deserves. In the 1970s many cannabis growers believed that their only hope in bringing cannabis back from the brink of uncertainty was to establish home breeding projects using landrace strains that had been illegally imported from around the world. The US government had already blindly destroyed its own landrace reserves in a foolish attempt at marijuana extinction. Australia and Europe and many other countries followed suit to some degree. The problem with destroying landrace cannabis is that all that's being damaged is the actual breeding behind specific cannabis strains that were created for various growing environments, and not the cannabis species itself. Imagine for a moment that you develop a new type of apple tree that grows apples that are tasty, nourishing and grow perfectly in your climate. Maybe you have also created a tree that is resistant to pests and can withstand certain common diseases that are found in your area. One day the government comes along and says that apples are bad for people and all apple trees must be destroyed. Does this mean that apple trees will no longer exist? It certainly does not. It just means that your special breed of apple tree is removed. In the early 1930s the US government was hesitant to entirely destroy cannabis, out of fear that it might be needed someday for some technical use. That fear proved correct. The dawn of WW II flung the US agricultural community into panic when it was discovered that fiber reserves were too low to meet demands and external resources were cut off because of the war. Cannabis cultivation was reintroduced to help with the war effort and it met many fiber demands. However, since WW II taxpayers have increasingly found themselves funding the 'war on drugs,' and the US landrace cannabis strains that once saved America have now been lost due to neglect from federal reserve laboratories, which have failed to maintain these strains. Recent medical discoveries have shown that cannabis is indeed a beneficial herb and, more importantly, that human beings have cannabinoid receptors for processing cannabis chemicals naturally. Since most US landrace strains have been destroyed, the people of the United States are now facing a loss on the medical side of cannabis development. Canada, Alaska, the United Kingdom, Spain, Germany, Holland, Belgium and Switzerland are all making headway in this field of study. Without doubt, to this author's mind, medical cannabis will be widely available to everybody else before the American population takes control of the herb from the federal law enforcers-who are merely playing a game to ensure their share of the tax budget. Recent failures by federal authorities to preserve landrace strains have set the new cannabis breeding standards for today. The individuals of the new cannabis breeding movement have taken it upon themselves to breed, produce seeds, traffic seeds and share genetics. The results over the past ten years of breeding have been revolutionary. Nowhere in the world can any government-sponsored agriculture body, pharmaceutical firm or plant genetics lab lay claim to such new discoveries, varieties or selections as the domestic cannabis breeding community. They have shown their strength in numbers, production values and efficiency. It is because of their efforts that cannabis remains one of the most sought after plant species in the world today. The Cannabis Grow Bible went to some lengths to show readers how they can effectively produce and breed cannabis. The following presentation will provide further information to potential breeders as to how they can effectively participate in this process, with all the practical applications and cultivation principles that are necessary to produce high-end cannabis plants. For the professional biologist it will serve to reinforce propagation standards and set about standardizing procedures for the cannabis breeder to adhere to. We are now entering a stage in which genetic manipulation is becoming ever more readily available. We hope to guide the breeder and researcher through the many pitfalls and misconceptions about genetic manipulation that can lead to future problems with the cannabis population. Let this book provide you with standards to adhere to, ones we promise will be both virtuous and profitable. from point A to point B and if the clone does not survive transport, then what happens? Does the buyer get his/her money back? How does he prove that the clone did not make it? Who is to blame? Is this really a viable business plan? Will the consumer want to buy clones if he lives far away from the business that sells the clones? In reality no one sells clones unless the clone is only going to be sent over a short distance or can be handed over to the buyer in person. The risks involved in shipping clones for money simply does not make good business sense. The only time clones are shipped over long distances is if the parties involved are not too concerned with loss or damage to that clone. Clandestine clones are sent to people in the post all the time. The clone is usually inserted into a small plastic tube no thicker than a pen (A test tube will do just fine). Inside the tube is a tiny amount of water to keep the clone alive. A small piece of wet rockwool is inserted into the plastic tube, blocking the water. A cutting is taken and inserted into the rockwool, with an air-pocket at the top. A thin thread is used to tie the clone's leaves at the top if needed. The tube is then corked or sealed. The tube is then wrapped in a ziplock baggy and a standard A4 bubble envelope is used to send it through the post. This is how cuttings have been transported by growers around the world. You can experiment with this method using non-proscribed plant cuttings. The success rate though is very poor. A better way to ship clones is to root the clone first in rockwool (CGB, p. 167). After a few weeks the clone will take root in the rockwool. The grower then cuts the piece of rockwool down to a smaller size which can easily be inserted into a tube as mentioned above and the same packaging process is repeated. If the sender believes that no moisture will spill from the cloning medium they can choose to leave the tube open and create air pockets in the envelope with a pin to allow the cutting to breathe. This is less secure because of possible smell problems and contamination but should improve the cutting's survival rate. Rooted clones tend to survive transport better than just cuttings. These are not just cuttings. These are clones. Note the developed roots on the clone lying down. Hard video boxes can be used to pack more than 1 clone. Lying the clones down in opposite arrangement prevents overcrowding. Seal the container with tape to prevent it from opening. Wrap the container in a plastic zip lock bag and seal it to keep any smells or leakage contained. Procedure and photos by www.Newlines.nl Obviously clones are not the best option available for breeders to pass on their work. Also finding a good clone mother plant does not revolve so much around breeding techniques as it does just having good growing experience and an eye for spotting worthy plants in large populations, i.e., sizeable selections to choose from. The other option breeders have of making their work available is through seeds. This is a much more feasible process for getting the product to the consumer undamaged and in good condition. Because of these factors seeds have become the standard method of shipping cannabis genetics around the world. Top breeders and Cannabis Cup winners like Paradise Seeds use large populations for that all-important mother plant selection. What are the pros and cons of these propagation sources? Let's look at a few important differences between clones and seeds. Clones 1. Growers must know how to clone if they want to generate more plants from this strain. Most new growers do not know how to clone. 2. Non-hybrid seeds of the clone cannot be made from a female clone without obtaining a male clone of the same strain. 1 A hybrid can be created by finding any male donor. 3. Clones do not have any diversity. If the clone is from a great mother plant then the clones will also be great female plants. This follows through with our next point. 4. Clones will always carry the same traits through continued cuttings from the original clone. 5. Clones require little to no breeding procedures in order to replicate the mother plant's characteristics. If you find a mother plant that is good then all you need to do is take cuttings from her. 6. Clones can be easily stolen from a breeder and labeled as someone else's produce. 7. If a disease kills a single clone in a grow room, then all the other clones will probably fail too. Clones share the same flaws. Exceptions to the above statements can occur if a clone suffers some form of mutation. Mutations will be discussed in detail further in this text. Seeds 1. Growers do not need to know how to clone if they want to generate more plants. 2. Non-hybrid seeds can be made by breeding male and female plants of the same strain during flowering although-3. Seeds will have variations, losing some traits and gaining some new ones, unless they are true breeding (see chapter 2). 4. Seeds require a lot of work if you want the strain to have little or no variations in their offspring. 5. Seeds can be bred in such a way that it is hard to reproduce the mother plant that the seeds came from. This makes the work harder to steal. 6. Most seeds do contain some variations and some might be able to deal with cultivation problems better than others. These points will give you an idea as a breeder and a consumer of what the market is like and what people prefer. As a breeder, you should not be interested too much...
Gyeonggi province, Korea. He graduated from Suwon Highschool and Aju University (chemistry), and completed master's degree in horiculture at Chungnam University. Ater compleing his military service at the 706 Special Forces, he started organic farming and raised animals himself from 1991 in Asan, Chungnam province. He went on to establish "Jadam Organic Farming" and started to promote this farming system through books and website (www.jadam.kr). He established "Jadam Natural Pesicide Insitute" in 2002 from where he coninued his research while integraing knowledge from many experienced farmers which led to the compleion of the system of ultra-low cost Jadam organic farming. He invented and developed many technologies for natural pesicide which he voluntarily did not patent but rather shared through books and website. His "Natural Pesicide Workshops" teaches the essence of ultra-low cost Jadam organic farming. Lectures, too, are disclosed on Jadam website and Youtube. About the translator and principal researcher Rei Yoon believes that farming is a means to empower people and heal the environment. He studied in Seoul Naional University and worked in the Foreign Ministry and Defense Ministry of Korea. He is in Canada, in charge of internaional operaions of JADAM. He pracices Tai Chi. JHS: JADAM herb soluion. Made by boiling herbs in water and is used mostly for its insect-controlling effect. JHS pesicide: Pesicide made with JHS + JWA. JMS: JADAM microorganism soluion. Made by culturing microorganisms from leaf mold in water, feeding them potatoes (or other medium). It is a powerful soil quality improver and can also be used for keeping pathogens in check. JMS pesicide: Germicide made with JMS + JWA JMS-JHS pesicide: Pesicide made with JMS + JHS + JWA JMW: JADAM mineral water: Made by immersing leaf mold in water with rocks in it. JNP: JADAM natural pesicide. Made by combining JWA, JS and JHS. JS: JADAM sulfur. Made by meling sulfur in causic soda with water, combined with red clay powder, phyllite powder and sea salt. It is a powerful germicide. JS germicide: Basic pesicide made by combining JS and JWA. JS-JHS pesicide: Pesicide made with JS + JHS + JWA JWA: JADAM weing agent. Made with canola oil, causic potash and water. The most important ingredient in making pesicides. JWS: JADAM water sotener. This machine changes hard water to sot water. You must use sot water for pesicides and foliar applicaion. This book is available in different languages in e-book at amazon.com Or you can order paper books at our homepage: en.jadam.kr Join as member at en.jadam.kr, you can access informaion, share your findings and ask quesions. JADAM Organic Farming The way to Ultra-Low-Cost agriculture Written by Youngsang Cho Translated by Rei Yoon Farm at $100 per acre a year A revoluionary farming method based on oriental philosophy Everything you need to know to: Go completely organic Boost quality and yield Save huge, huge, HUGE costs Make all-natural fertilizer, pesticide and microorganism inputs yourself en.jadam.kr
This work started as a redress to the White Geology of the Anthropocene and found the guts of its mattering in the critical black feminist work of Sadiya Hartman's Scenes of Subjection and the alluvial subjectivity of the Martinique poets Aimé Césaire and Édouard Glissant. Hanging out in the interdisciplinary spaces opened and sustained by these works, many other feminist black scholars have been crucial to the approaches developed in this book. While unable to give this work its full due here, I am particularly grateful for the courageous analytical and politically poetic work of N. K. Jemisin's bringing together of race and geology across the rifts of broken earths, Sylvia Wynter's metamorphosis of a black biopolitics, Tina Campt's quiet futurity of images, Hortense Spillers's grammars of dissent, Katherine McKittrick's commitment to liberatory black geographies, Denise Ferreira da Silva's location of the foundational inscriptions of race in global geography, Tiffany King's ecologies, Michelle Wright's challenge to linear time-space, Elizabeth Povinelli's indigenous analytics that refuse redemption, Angela Last's critical Caribbean geopolitics, Christina Sharpe's atmospheres, and Fred Moten's writing in the blur. Through the completion of this work, it was Dionne Brand's writing that kept me company at 2:00 A.M. Her poetic relation, given without the possibility of resettling, insists that you must stay with and in the displacement. In that poetics, in its most material geographies, I found the new languages and structures of thought that a turn of epoch, the end of the world of Empire, seems to require. If there is what Brand (2001) calls a Ruttier-an oral poem that functioned as a map for sailors-recited throughout this text, its diasporic yearnings are listing toward the possibility of a gravity that defies antiblackness (in all its guises, across the black and brown commons forged in the afterlives of invasion, genocide, slavery, and settler colonialism). It is from Brand that I take an understanding of Blackness as a material vector that opens out new geographies of space and time that make fierce departures from the subjugating cuts in geography exorcised by imperial conditions. Blackness is understood as a state of relation (in Glissant's sense of the word) that is assigned to difference through a material colonial inscription, which simultaneously enacted the
This book began on September 11, 2001: "The day the world changed." Hyperbole, of course. There is no event that changes everything. Still, something changed, and the change was significant. In the aftermath of 9/11, many aspects of contemporary life reconfigured themselves around a new dominant: preemption. It is the thesis of this book that the doctrine of preemption that was the hallmark of George W. Bush's "war on terror" became the driving force for a reconfiguration of powers that has survived his administration and whose full impact we have yet to come to terms with. More than a doctrine, preemption has taken on a life of its own. It launches into operation wherever threat is felt. In today's multidimensional "threat environment," that is everywhere. This book will argue that preemption, as it operates today, lies at the heart of a newly consolidated mode of power. A new mode of power deserves a new name. In the chapters that follow, it is dubbed "ontopower." Ontopower does not replace prior powers. Rather, it reorganizes and reintegrates them around the new fulcrum of preemption, changing their object and mode of operation in the pro cess. Ontopower designates a changing "ecol ogy of powers." The way in which this ecol ogy of powers pivots on preemption brings new urgency to what can only be called metaphysical problems. Preemption is a time concept. It denotes acting on the time before: the time of threat, before it has emerged as a clear and pre sent danger. What is this time of the before? How can it be acted upon? How can that acting upon already constitute a decision, given the ungraspability of that which has yet to eventuate and may yet take another form? Preemption does not idly pose these problems concerning the nature of time, perception, action, and decision: it operationalizes them. It weaponizes them. Paradoxically, it weaponizes them in a way that is productive.
T r a d u c c ió n d e V íc t o r G o l d s t e in * * * En el original: "la prise ou la maltrise conceptuelle". (N. del T.) 10El idioma (idiomc) es una lengua particular, y el término remite por extensión a la manera de expresarse propia de una época, de un grupo social, de una persona. Según Jacques Derrida, lo idiomático es "una propiedad de la que no es posible apropiarse. Lo rubrica sin pertenecerle. Solo se le aparece al otro y a uno le vuelve únicamente en destellos de locura que reúnen la vida y la muerte", en Points de suspension, oh. cit., p. 127. [En francés, idiomc no es una palabra muy utili zada, y significa lo que É. Roudinesco expresa en la primera oración de la nota. Normalmente se emplea bngue N. del T.] " Véase Jacques Derrida, Uécriture et la différence, oh. cit. 16 Y MAÑANA, QUÉ. proviene esa situación que describió hace un rato: en tal o cual m om ento de un proceso, las alianzas se desplazan y me veo com o el aliado de L acan y de Foucault, lo dije explícitam ente, en ciertos contextos. La siniestra mueca del libro grotesco que, en efecto, fue entonces L a pensée 68 (¿realm ente es preciso seguir hablando de eso? ¿Le interesa?), distinguió claram ente los campos. A veces ocurre que señale mi reticencia respecto de tal o cual m om en to del pensamiento de Lacan o de Foucault, sabiendo que, a pesar de todo, por ejem plo ante ofensivas tan oscurantistas, permanezco a su lado en el m ovim iento general de lo que se llama la experiencia o la exigencia del pensam iento. Por eso la idea de herencia implica no solo reafirm ación y doble exhorta ción, sino a cada instante, en un con texto diferente, un filtrado, una elección, una estrategia. U n heredero no es solam ente alguien que recibe, es alguien que escoge, y que se pone a prueba decidiendo. Esto es muy e xp lícito en Espec tros de M arx.12 Todo texto es heterogéneo. Tam bién la herencia, en el sentido amplio pero preciso que doy a esa palabra, es un "te x to ". La afirm ación del heredero, naturalmente, consiste en su interpretación, en escoger. El discierne de manera crítica, diferencia, y eso es lo que explica la movilidad de las alian zas. En ciertas situaciones soy el aliado de Lacan contra otros; en otras, objeto a Lacan. No veo en esto ningún oportunismo, ningún relativism o. É. R.: Usted trata ese tema del enemigo, el amigo y el adversario más particu larmente en un seminario donde deconstruye la obra de C arl S c h m itt.13 Usted subraya que, según Schm itt, la diferencia política procede de una discrim ina ción entre el amigo y el enemigo. S in esta discrim inación no hay política. A esto opone una concepción más freudiana de la política, la que "inscribiría el odio en el propio duelo de nuestros amigos". 14 Y cita la famosa historia de los erizos que Freud había tomado de Schopenhauer. U n os puercoespines renun cian a apretarse unos contra otros para luchar contra el frío. Sus pinchos los
Rio O ri n o c o KARINYA MAKUSHI  . Map of the Guyana Highlands and Surrounding Region. spite their tiny populations, these lone settlements may also have a deep historical resonance (e.g., Wandapàtoi). Such relatively isolated settlements once provided the context for kanaimà activity, but periodic warfare might sometimes have led to the formation of larger villages. Such aggregations would have split up eventually as the threat of raiding faded and people reverted to the ''ideal'' household context of Introduction  Introduction  Paramakatoi, Region , Guyana. Looking north with Kowatupu to the east. with a view to delineating the nature of kanaimà ideas and practices among the Patamuna and neighboring peoples. Chapter  presents further ethnographic and historical materials relevant to shamanic warfare between kanaimà, piya, and alleluia prophets, as well as the Christian missionaries. This analysis of the war for the souls of the Patamuna is intended to draw out the historical changes in the meaning and practice of shamanic rituals and how those changes were connected to, and reciprocally influenced by, Christian evangelism and other forms of colonial intrusion. I also present an account of a particular shamanic battle between a piya and a kanaimà. Chapter  then moves consideration of occult violence and its cultural meanings to a global stage. I suggest that, however unique South American kanaimà shamanism may be, it is still comparable to other resurgent forms of occult violence, assault sorcery, and even state-led campaigns of terror. The way in which the state itself co-opts occult magic is thus an important theme in the discussion, as is the way in which the advent of modernity relates to the expression of hypertraditionality in the form of kanaimà. In particular, I argue that kanaimà violence is an authentic and legitimate form of cultural expression and is mimetically linked to the violence of economic and political ''devel- Dark Shamans opment.'' The ethnographic materials for this chapter include accounts of alleluia, discussion of the mining frontier and its effect on the practice of kanaimà, current representational practices, and the making of a ''snuff film'' dealing with kanaimà. Chapter  provides a comparative ethnological discussion of kanaimà and other forms of assault sorcery and also reviews current literature on warfare and violence in Amazonia, thus bringing together two bodies of theory-that of European and that of North American anthropologists-that have in large part developed independently. Examination of the kanaimà presents opportunities for both forms of analyses that makes use of the strengths of both schools of thought.
"«Comunidades imaginadas» es ya una obra de referencia obligada para los estudiosos de las identidades nacionales y de los procesos de construcción de una nación. Anderson ha replanteado las bases para el estudio de la identidad nacional con un estudio teórico y empírico sistemático y profundo. Aquí Anderson plantea a las comunidades nacionales como el producto de un proceso de construcción política, social y cultural que tiene como resultado la generación de un vínculo imaginario de los ciudadanos con sus semejantes en los contornos del estado-nación. La recuperación del concepto de imaginación lo deslinda de las acepciones peyorativas del término, que lo oponían a la realidad (imaginación vs realidad). Anderson estudia las bases materiales de la imaginación para comprender cómo se conforma una comunidad nacional. Tiene un papel clave la imprenta, que posibilita la difusión masiva a través de los medios de comunicación permite establecer relaciones entre grupos y personas situadas a la distancia. Pero no sólo permite establecer relaciones, sino que habilita además para imaginar relaciones y para figurarse una comunidad abarcadora dentro de los límites del estado nacional. La circulación de los periódicos, y más adelante de la televisión, tienen un papel constituyente de los imaginarios nacionales. Anderson estudia el proceso de construcción de las naciones europeas, para continuar luego con el proceso histórico de las naciones de América Latina. Esta obra clave ha planteado un programa de investigación sobre los estados-nación, pero además es recuperada por cientistas sociales como modelo para la construcción de estudios sobre las identidades y los procesos sociales contemporáneos. "
Vivemos em um mundo de paisagens em ruínas einesperadas catástrofes ambientais. As mudançasclimáticas são uma das grandes pautasda ciência e da política contemporâneas, e perdas de biodiversidade nos levam ao que vem sendo chamado de a Sexta Extinção. Nas últimas décadas, cunhou-se o termo Antropoceno parase referir ao impacto de proporções geológicas quea jornada humanateve sobre transformação da dinâmica ambiental do planeta. É um debate que tem transformado também os estudos ambientais, tanto nas Ciências da Natureza, quanto nas Ciências Humanas, sob o desafio de observaresse processo em andamento. Na antropologia, em particular, essa é uma questão que causa certo desconforto, pois o termo retoma um universalismo que generaliza a figura humana nos moldesdo capitalismo transnacional industrial e em sua maneira derelacionar-se com a vida e a matéria no planeta: comorecurso natural. Uma primeira resposta da antropologia tem sido mostrara diferença, a alteridade de outros modosde relação com seres vivos e materiais não vitais. Uma resposta que não escapa ao desafio de entenderos efeitos dessas transformações em escala planetária nesses modos devida. Outra resposta possível é compreender como humanose outros modosdevida se entrelaçam e constroem condições para viver nasruínas dos imperialismosindustriais e das plantations de ecologias simplificadoras, para usar palavras de Anna Ting. Publications)v 3% n. 2-3, p. 221-241, 2014. 5 Original publicado em: Occupy theruins. Society and Space, Quebec, 18 now. 2011. On-line. Disponível em: http://societyandspaceorg/2011/11/18/0ccu py-the-ruins-anna-tsing/ 6 Original publicado em: In the midst of disturbance: symbiosis, coordination, history landscape.In: Association of Social Antrhopolegists (Asa) Annual Conference 2015. 13-16 abr. 2015, University of Exeter.
vi
THEMED ARTICLES. The G-factor of anthropology: archaeologies of kin(g)ship
Edited by Giovanni da Col (Cambridge) and Stéphane Gros (CNRS)
David Graeber (Goldsmiths), The divine kingship of the Shilluk: on violence, utopia and the human condition or, elements for an archaeology of sovereignty
1
Marshall Sahlins (Chicago), with the assistance of Philip Swift, Twin-born with greatness: the dual kingship of Sparta
63
Gregory Schrempp (Indiana), Copernican kinship: an origin myth for the category
103
Alberto Corsín Jiménez (CSIC Spain), Daribi kinship at perpendicular angles: A trompe l’oeil anthropology
141
Roy Wagner (Virginia), The chess of kinship and the kinship of chess
Preface by Tony Crook and Justin Shaffner, Roy Wagner’s “The chess of kinship”: an opening gambit
159
Chris Gregory (ANU), Skinship. Touchability as a virtue in East-Central India
179
VARIA
Laura Nader (Berkeley), Ethnography as theory
211
Anna Mann (Amsterdam), Annemarie Mol (Amsterdam), Priya Satalkar, Amalinda Savirani (Gadjah Mada), Nasima Selim (BRAC), Malini Sur (Amsterdam) and Emily Yates-Doerr (Amsterdam), Mixing methods, tasting fingers. Notes on an ethnographic experiment
221
UNEDITED SCHOLARSHIP
Marilyn Strathern (Cambridge), What is a parent?
245
Edmund R. Leach, Kingship and divinity. The unpublished Frazer Lecture, 1982.
279
FORUM
Nicholas Thomas (MAA, Cambridge), Von Hügel’s curiosity. Encounter and experiment in the new museum
299
TRANSLATIONS
Maurice Godelier (EHESS), Bodies, kinship and power(s) among the Baruya culture
315
Maurice Godelier (EHESS), Begetting ordinary humans
345
Maurice Godelier (EHESS), Begetting extraordinary humans
391
REPRINTS
E. E. Evans-Pritchard, The divine kingship of the Shilluk
407
Julian Pitt-Rivers, The place of grace in anthropology
423
David M. Schneider, Some muddles in the models: or, how the system really works
Ultimos tftulos publicados 50. G. G ard a, Elpsicoandlisisy los debates culturales 51. A. G iunta y L . M alosetti Costa, Arte y posguerra. Jorge Romero Bresty la revista V er y E stim ar 52. L . Arfuch (comp.), Rensar este tiempo 53. A. N egri y G. Coceo, GlobAL 54. H . Bhabha y J. T. M itch ell (comps.), Edward Said: Continuando la conversation 55. J. Copjec, El sexo y la eutanasia de la razon 56. W . Bongers y T. O lbrich (comps.), Literatim, cultura, enfermedad 57. J. Butler, Vidaprecaria 58. O. M ongin, La condition urbana 59. M . Carm an, Las trampas de la cultura 60. E. M orin , Breve historia de la barbarie en Occidente 61. E. G iannetti, ^ Vicios privados, benefitios publicos? 62. T. Todorov, Introduction a la literatura fantastica 63. P. E ngel y R. Rorty, iPara que sirve la verdad? 64. D. Scavino, Lafilosofia actual 65. M . Franco y F. Levin (comps.), Historia reciente 66. E. W izisla, Benjamin y Brecht, historia de una amistad 67. G. G iorgi y F. R odriguez (comps.), Ensayos sobre biopoHtica 68. M . M ellin o , La criticaposcolonial 69. D. R. Dufour, El arte de reducir cabezas 70. S. Zizek, Como leer a Lacan 71. E. D ipaola y N. Yabkowski, En tu ardory en tufrio 72. J. B utler y G. Spivak, £Quien le canta alEstado-nation? 73. G. V attim o, Ecce comu 74. J. K risteva, Esa increible necesidad de creer 7 5. M . J ay, Cantos de experiencia 76. A. H ounie (comp.), Sobre la idea del comunismo 77. S . K racauer, La novela policial 78. L. Sabsay, Fronteras sexuales 79. B. Latour, Cogitamus: seis cartas sobre las humanidades cientificas 80. B. Stiegler, La quietud en movimiento 81. A. Badiou, Elogio del amor 82. M . A uge, La vida en doble 83. S. Zizek, El mas sublime de los bistericos 84. T. E agleton, Marxismoy critica literaria 85. G. C. Spivak, En otraspalabras, en otros mundos 86. R. C astel, G. Kessler, D. M erklen y N . M urard, Individuation, precariedad, inseguridad 87. B. Latour, Investigation sobre los modos de existencia Ti'tulo original: Enquete sur les modes d ' existence, de Bruno Latour Publicado originalmente por La Decouverte, Paris, 2012 Diseno de cubierta: Gustavo Maori Latour, Bruno Investig ation sob re lo s m odos de e xiste n tia / Bruno Latour; adaptado por Alcira Bixio -1a ed.-Ciudad Autonoma de Buenos Aires: Paidos, 2013. 480 pp.; 23x15 cm. ISBN 978-950-12-6587-3 1. Antropologia. I. Alcira Bixio, adapt. II. Titulo CDD 306__________________________________________________________________________ l a edition, julio de 2013
Feminism and the Mastery of Nature draws on the feminist critique of reason to argue that the master form of rationality of western culture has been systematically unable to acknowledge dependency on nature, the sphere of those it has defined as 'inferior' others. Because its knowledge of the world is sytematically distorted by the elite domination which has shaped it, the master rationality has developed 'blind spots' which may threaten our survival. The future depends increasingly on our ability to create a truly democratic and ecological culture beyond dualism. The book shows how the feminist critique of dominant forms of rationality can be extended to integrate theories of gender, race and class oppression with that of the domination of nature. Val Plumwood illuminates the relationship between women and nature, and between ecological feminism and other feminist theories. Exploring the contribution feminist theory can make to radical green thought and to the development of a better environmental philosophy, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature challenges much existing work in green theory and environmental philosophy, and engages with the heavily masculine presence which has inhabited many accounts of the area. It will be essential reading for those working in these areas, and for all those seeking to understand the historical, philosophical and cultural roots of the environmental crisis and the culture of denial which blocks response to it. Val Plumwood teaches in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Tasmania, Australia.
La antropología aborda el sentido que la colectividad humana da a su existencia. Sin embargo, las cosas han cambiado mucho tras la edad de oro de las investigaciones de campo: en nuestras sociedades liberales, tan sumisas a la más acelerada masificación, nuestros semejantes, muy próximos en apariencia, se revelan, ya sea por sus creencias o por sus hábitos, más alejados de nosotros que el más lejano de los interlocutores de los etnólogos africanistas; en las sociedades más tradicionales, en cambio, la universalización de los intercambios económicos, políticos y simbólicos -en breve: el final del exotismo- ha variado enormemente los procedimientos mediante los que los hombres controlaban intelectual y prácticamente el mundo. De una punta a otra del planeta, en fin, la interferencia de los signos va acompañada de la disolución de los vínculos sociales: una relación solitaria con el entorno que es la característica principal de la modernidad contemporánea.
v Indigenous Australians have helped to create the landscape. Through their continuing relationship with the land, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have developed a comprehensive knowledge of its resources and needs. Their land management practices are complex techniques that rest on a vast body of knowledge which is now being incorporated into biological research, land management, language, art and many other facets of contemporary Australian life. Indigenous people's wisdom and rights in relation to country are now widely appreciated. Australians of European descent increasingly appreciate that what they have called and cherished as 'wilderness' has a long history of human use, and these areas continue to be the 'nourishing terrains' of Indigenous Australians. This has resulted in a shift in the understanding of wilderness to reflect the human history of those landscapes. As Deborah Bird Rose says 'There is no place without a history; there is no place that has not been imaginatively grasped through song, dance and design, no place where traditional owners cannot see the imprint of sacred creation'. The role of the Australian Heritage Commission is to identify heritage places which are part of Australia's National Estate. The Commission recognises that Indigenous values and knowledge are important in the management of heritage places, and encourages understanding between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. Within this context, the Commission asked Deborah Bird Rose to write this book to explore Indigenous views of landscape and their relationships with the land. This book provides an overview of Indigenous perspectives, and captures the spiritual and emotional significance of the land to Aboriginal people. The poems, songs and words of Indigenous people included in this book testify the undeniable strength of their feeling and connection with their land. I hope this book will foster a greater understanding amongst non-Indigenous Australians of the significance of Aboriginal connections with country. Such as understanding is essential if we are to develop better relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people.
La traducción es el acto más íntimo de lectura' Prefacio Mi propósito, en principio, era rastrear la figura del Informante Nativo a través de varias prácticas: filosofía, literatura, historia y cultura. Pronto descubrí que tal rastreo revelaba un sujeto colonial que se separaba del Informante Nativo. Después de 1989, empecé a percibir que determinado sujeto poscolonial estaba a su vez recodificando el sujeto colonial y apropiándose de la posición del Informante Nativo. A día de hoy, en pleno despliegue de la globalización, la informática de las telecomunicaciones intercepta directamente al Informante Nativo en nombre del saber indígena y promueve la biopiratería. Por lo tanto, el repudio lforeclosure] que descubro en marcha en el capítulo I se mantiene e incluso se hace más agresivo. La Encyclopedia o] Llfe Support Systems [Enciclopedia de los Sistemas de Sostén de la Vida] proyectada por la UNESCO «define» la época aborigen de la historia humana como el «periodo de tiempo del pasado remoto [... ] asociado con planteamientos inactivo.'; sin ningún interés por la degradación del medio ambiente ni por su sostenibilidad». Como es evidente, era tan imposible para los aborígenes pensar en la sostenibilidad como lo era para Aristóteles descifrar «el secreto de la expresión de valor», debido a la «limitación histórica de la sociedad en que vivía[n]»l Sin embargo, ahora, la filosofía práctica de una vida que sigue el ritmo del ecobioma se debe desechar como algo «sin interés».
Parias urbanos es una colección de ensayos y artículos publicados entre 1993 y 1999 en diversas revistas y libros a ambos lados del Atlántico, y constituye una interesante aproximación al pensamiento de Wacquant respecto de las desigualdades urbanas y de las nuevas formas que adquiere la pobreza y la exclusión en las sociedades urbanas avanzadas. El libro consta de cinco textos, los cuales -a través de una metodología que combina la aproximación etnográfica a un gueto negro estadounidense y a una banlieue parisina, el análisis de fuentes secundarias y una sólida argumentación teórica- intentan perfilar con la mayor precisión posible las formas socioes-paciales que adquieren la exclusión y la marginalidad en las grandes ciudades europeas y estadounidenses, así como los procesos sociales y políticos que se encuentran a la base de la "nueva pobreza urbana", en el horizonte de una agudización de las desigualdades y una profundización de la pobreza en el seno de las sociedades más ricas. Un rasgo común a todos los escritos lo constituye el esfuerzo de Wacquant por desmentir y denunciar como ideológicamente sesgadas las aproximaciones dominantes que hacen foco en estos tópicos, en particular la teoría de la "infraclase" (underclass), muy en boga en los estudios sociales del mundo anglosajón desde la década de los ’80, y que para el autor no constituye sino la actualización de un darwinismo obsoleto, reduc-cionista y psicologista, cuya función es menos dar cuenta de los acelerados procesos de descomposición urbana que encubrir con una pátina "científica" los discursos de las elites dominantes al respecto.
Anthropologist David Graeber undertakes the first detailed ethnographic study of the global justice movement. The case study at the center of Direct Action is the organizing and events that led to the one of the most dramatic and militant mass protests in recent years—against the Summit of the Americas in Québec City. Written in a clear, accessible style (with a minimum of academic jargon), this study brings readers behind the scenes of a movement that has changed the terms of debate about world power relations. From informal conversations in coffee shops to large “spokescouncil” planning meetings and tear gas-drenched street actions, Graeber paints a vivid and fascinating picture. Along the way, he addresses matters of deep interest to anthropologists: meeting structure and process, language, symbolism and representation, the specific rituals of activist culture, and much more. Starting from the assumption that, when dealing with possibilities of global transformation and emerging political forms, a disinterested, “objective” perspective is impossible, Graeber writes as both scholar and activist. At the same time, his experiment in the application of ethnographic methods to important ongoing political events is a serious and unique contribution to the field of anthropology, as well as an inquiry into anthropology’s political implications.

"AK Press is a worker-run collective that publishes and distrib utes radical books, visual/audio media, and other material. We're small: a dozen people who work long hours for short money, because we believe in what we do. We're anarchists, which is refl ected both in the books we publish and the way we organize our business: without bosses. Currently, we publish about twenty new titles per year. We'd like to publish even more. Whenever our collective meets to discuss future publishing plans, we find ourselves wrestling. with a list of hundreds of projects. Unfortunately, money is tight, while the need for our books is greater than ever. In Oakland, California on March 24, 2015 a fire destroyed the AK Press warehouse along with several other businesses. Please consider visiting the AK Press website to learn more about the fundraiser to help them and their neighbors."
"Pathologies of Power uses harrowing stories of illness, of life—and death—in extreme situations to interrogate our understanding of human rights. Paul Farmer, a physician and anthropologist with twenty years of experience studying diseases in Haiti, Peru, and Russia, argues that promoting the social and economic rights of the world’s poor is the most important human rights struggle of our times. A thoughtful memoir with passionate eyewitness accounts from the prisons of Russia and the beleaguered villages of Haiti and Chiapas, this book links the lived experiences of individual victims to a broader analysis of structural violence. Farmer challenges conventional thinking within human rights circles and exposes the relationships between political and economic injustice, on one hand, and the suffering and illness of the powerless, on the other.Farmer shows that the same social forces that give rise to epidemic diseases such as HIV and tuberculosis also sculpt risk for human rights violations. He illustrates the ways that racism and gender inequality in the United States are mirrored in pathology, plague, disease and death. Yet this doctor’s autobiography is far from a hopeless inventory of human suffering. Farmer’s disturbing examples are linked to a guarded optimism that new medical and social technologies will develop in tandem with a more informed sense of social justice. Otherwise, he concludes, we will be guilty of managing social inequality rather than addressing structural violence. Farmer’s urgent plea to think about human rights in the context of global public health and to consider critical issues of quality and access for the world’s poor should be of fundamental concern to pathologists, medical students, and humanitarians in a world characterized by the bizarre proximity of surfeit and suffering."
"Todo el mundo parece saber con qué tipo de fuerzas y en qué tipo de materiales está hecho el mundo social. Yo siempre he estado arraigado, en lo contrario, por la enorme brecha entre la vasta variedad de apegos con que la gente elabora sus diferentes mundos y el limitado repertorio que poseemos en la ciencia social para explicarlos. Encontré que esta brecha se ensanchaba aún más cuando comencé, hace treinta años, a proporcionar una explicación social de la práctica científica. Mientras la mayoría de la gente dijo que tal empresa claramente no tenía sentido; mientras tanto algunos de mis colegas cercanos afirmaron que esto era, si no fácil, al menos factible dentro de los límites normales de las ciencias humanas, unos pocos amigos y yo decidimos tomar las enormes dificultades de esta tarea como la ocasión de repensar las nociones de sociedad y de explicación social. Partiendo de las nuevas perspectivas de los estudios científicos, hemos explorado, desde entonces, muchos otros dominios de la tecnología: de la salud a las organizaciones del mercado de arte, de la religión a la ley, de la gestión a la política. Esta forma alternativa de practicar la sociología ha sido llamada Teoría del actor-red o ANT (por sus siglas en inglés). Aunque ha sido ampliamente utilizada, también ha sido largamente incomprendida — en parte por la ambigüedad de la palabra 'social'.  Para clarificar esos malentendidos, me pareció útil escribir una introducción a esta pequeña escuela de pensamiento — o más bien proponer mi propia versión de la misma. En este libro muestro por qué la sociología puede ser interpretada como la ciencia de las asociaciones y no sólo como la ciencia de lo social." -  Bruno Latour
Según Tiqqun, vivimos en el tránsito entre el paradigma soberano del poder (vertical, estático, centralizado) y el cibernético (horizontal, dinámico, distribuido). El orden cibernético es un orden que alimentamos entre todos, con nuestra participación, feedbacks y datos. El modelo serían Google o Facebook, pensados como formas de gobierno y no solo como inocentes páginas de contactos o buscadores. El poder cibernético extrae y procesa información, gestiona lo vivo entendido como información, aspira a gobernar el mundo como Facebook o Google gobiernan las redes. Un poder radicalmente distinto, pero no menos opresivo. ¿Qué pedimos entonces cuando reclamamos más transparencia, comunicación, participación y contacto entre gobernantes y gobernados? Tiqqun apuesta más bien por devenir ingobernables: opacos a la visión cibernética, ilegibles para sus códigos, imprevisibles para sus máquinas de computación y control. Por un lado, aprendiendo a discernir lo que escapa a la racionalidad fría y el tiempo «real» del orden cibernético: los cuerpos y sus encuentros, las palabras errantes, la temporalidad que implica toda duración. Por otro, buscando inspiración en los más diversos campos para subvertirlo: el ritmo del free jazz, la interferencia de Burroughs, el caos fecundo de Ilya Prigogine, el pánico según Canetti, la revuelta invisible de Alexander Trocchi, la guerrilla difusa de Lawrence de Arabia, la línea de fuga de Deleuze y Guattari, la niebla narrada por Boris Vian...
Society no longer exists, at least in the sense of a differentiated whole. There is only a tangle of norms and mechanisms through which THEY hold together the scattered tatters of the global biopolitical fabric, through which THEY prevent its violent disintegration. Empire is the administrator of this desolation, the supreme manager of a process of listless implosion.—from Introduction to Civil War Society is not in crisis, society is at an end. The things we used to take for granted have all been vaporized. Politics was one of these things, a Greek invention that condenses around an equation: to hold a position means to take sides, and to take sides means to unleash civil war. Civil war, position, sides—these were all one word in the Greek: stasis. If the history of the modern state in all its forms—absolute, liberal, welfare—has been the continuous attempt to ward off this stasis, the great novelty of contemporary imperial power is its embrace of civil war as a technique of governance and disorder as a means of maintaining control. Where the modern state was founded on the institution of the law and its constellation of divisions, exclusions, and repressions, imperial power has replaced them with a network of norms and apparatuses that conspire in the production of the biopolitical citizens of Empire. In their first book available in English, Tiqqun explores the possibility of a new practice of communism, finding a foundation for an ontology of the common in the politics of friendship and the free play of forms-of-life. They see the ruins of society as the ideal setting for the construction of the community to come. In other words: the situation is excellent. Now is not the time to lose courage
California driver'.S' license. One of us has a written record of her ancestors for twenty generations; one of us does not know her great grandparents' names. One of us, product of a vast genetic mixture, is called ''pure bred." One ofus, equal�y product of a vast mixture, is called "white." Each of these names desi gn ates a racial discourse, and we both inherit their consequences in our flesh. One of us is at the cusp offlaminp;, youthfu l, phys ical achievement; the other fr lusty but over the hill. And we play a team sport called ap;ility on the same expropriated Native land where Cayenne S ancestors herded merino sheep. These sheep were imported . from the already colonial pastoral economy of Australia to feed the California Gold Rush 49ers. In layers of history, layers of biology, layers of nr,turecultures, complexity is the name of our game. We are both the freedom-hungry offspring of conquest, products of white settler colonies, leaping over hurdles and crawling through tunnels on the playinp; field. I'm sure our genomes are more alike than they should be. There must be some molecular record of our touch in the codes of living thr,t will leave traces in the world, no matter that we are each reproductively silenced females, one by age, one by surgery. Her red merle Austrr,/ian Shepherd's quick and lithe tonp;ue has swabbed the tissues of my tonsilr, with all their e11ger immune jystem receptors. Who knows where my chem ical receptors carried her messages, or what she took from my cellular system far distinguishing self from othe, ,: and binding outsi de to inside? ', We have had forbidden conversation; we have had oral intercourse; we are bound in telling story upon story with nothing but the facts. We are training each other in acts of communication we bare{y understand. We are, constitutively, companion species. We make each · other up, in the flesh. Significantly other to each other, in specific difference, we signify in the flesh a nasty developmental infe,tion called love. This love is an historical aberration and a naturalcultural legacy.··

"Every year, leading social anthropologists meet in Manchester to debate a motion at the heart of current theoretical developments in their subject. Key Debates in Anthropology collects together the first six of these debates, spanning the period from 1988 to 1993. For each debate there are four principal speakers: one to propose the motion, another to oppose it, and two seconders. These debates give unprecedented insight into the process of anthropological theory in the making, as the many contributors both engage with each other's positions and respond to wider intellectual currents of the time. The first debate addresses the disciplinary character of social anthropology: can it be regarded as a science, and if so, is it able to establish general propositions about human culture and social life? The second examines the concept of society, in relation to such terms as individual, community, nation and state. In the third debate the spotlight is turned on the concept of culture, and on the role of culture in people's perception of their environments. The fourth debate focuses on the place of language in the formation of culture, highlighting the problematic distinction between verbal and non-verbal communication. The fifth takes up the question of how we view the past in relation to the present, touching on the difference between history and memory. Finally, in the sixth debate, the concern is with the cross-cultural applicability of the concept of aesthetics. Can there be an anthropology of aesthetics, or is the term so wedded to Western standards of evaluation as to make any such endeavour hopelessly ethnocentric? With its unique format, Key Debates in Anthropology addresses issues that are currently at the top of the theoretical agenda, and registers the pulse of contemporary thinking in social anthropology. The presentations, by leading anthropologists of both older and younger generations, are clear, original and provocative. Tim Ingold is Max Gluckman Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester."
Sophie Caratini es una antropóloga francesa que trabaja con las tribus nómadas de Mauritania y el Sahara Occidental, lugar y pueblos que llevan algunas décadas en conflicto, en el contexto de la lucha del pueblo saharaui a través del Frente Polisario, por su independencia y autodeterminación, primero ante los españoles y franceses, y ahora ante el Reino de Marruecos. En este contexto peligroso y complicado, la joven  antropóloga primeriza hace su primer trabajo de campo sin saber muy bien en donde se mete (bueno, nadie sabe nunca demasiado bien en donde se mete),  al mismo tiempo en que se debate en el rito de iniciación que suponía el "trabajo de campo" para la antropología francesa baby boomer, se percata de que sin darse cuenta se vuelve una pieza más en un tablero de ajedrez geopolítico.
Caratini habla desde sí misma, en un su presente más maduro rememorando sus experiencias introductoria al trabajo de campo en una reflexión crítica e íntima del ejercicio etnográfico y lo hace con buena pluma, y eso se agradece, pues como bien dice el libro,  el tema de la experiencia del antropólogo, desde una perspectiva relacional y emotiva, es algo de lo que no se  dice con suficiente frecuencia en la Antropología y por lo general se invisibiliza en los libros y clases de teoría y metodología, quizás como observa astutamente la autora, para proteger el status del "antropólogo constituido" por ese filtro legitimante, como quien protege un trauma. Este librito junto con "La invención de la cultura" de Roy Wagner, es uno de esos libros que exploran la ambigüedad de la antropología académica y de la experiencia del "trabajo de campo", con el plus de estar escrito desde las emociones y entrañas.  Además, cuenta con un anexo en el que la antropóloga discute con su profesor y vaca sagrada de la antropología económica Maurice Godelier sobre ese tema.
"¿Qué tienen en común las sociedades llamadas «primitivas» y las comunidades hacker de principios del siglo XXI? De acuerdo con las conclusiones de este ensayo, ambas comparten, pese a estar separadas por cientos de años, un gran número de rasgos organizativos. Los «maestros hacker» de nuestra sociedad post-industrial y planetaria, habitantes de Internet y expertos en tecnologías de la información, se parecen a aquellos jefes kwakiutl que debían redistribuir sus riquezas en grandes fiestas o «potlachs». El maestro hacker está también obligado a redistribuir el conocimiento generado por la comunidad si quiere mantener su estatus y prestigio social. Así, el recorrido intelectual que Pau Contreras nos propone en Me llamo Kohfam nos conduce desde el ciberespacio hasta los territorios más clásicos de la Antropología, pasando por la televisión digital, las tarjetas pirata y el sabotaje industrial, con el objetivo de comprender como el hacker construye su identidad y crea conocimiento en el marco de la sociedad-red. Para Pau Contreras la identidad hacker debe ser entendida como un proceso y no como una esencia. La identidad-red hacker se reinventa de manera continua a través de una acción colectiva consistente en la creación de conocimiento dirigido a la resolución creativa de problemas técnicos. Las configuraciones sociales hacker constituyen, en palabras del autor, una inteligencia-red: una comunidad virtual caracterizada por su creatividad y su capacidad de innovar. Con una aproximación teórica interdisciplinar, que une la «era de la información» de Manuel Castells con los «nuevos movimientos sociales» de Alberto Melucci y los «bandoleros» de Eric Hobsbawn, y una aproximación metodológica novedosa, basada en el uso de identidades múltiples por parte del investigador, Me llamo Kohfam constituye, además de un interesante retrato etnográfico de las comunidades underground de la televisión digital, una reflexión sobre las nuevas formas de sociabilidad y las nuevas concepciones del yo en los entornos virtuales de la sociedad planetaria."
"En el Chile actual, las nuevas formas de opresión y control subjetivo están extraordinariamente desarrolladas y, sin embargo, pasan ampliamente desapercibidas para la crítica política habitual. Su éxito es tal, que hemos llegado a considerarlas como una parte relativamente secundaria e inevitable de nuestra vida cotidiana. Entre estos dispositivos naturalizadores de la opresión subjetiva, el más poderoso es el de la somatización y medicalización del malestar y la rebeldía. Una buena parte de su poder proviene del aura de saber científico que lo rodea. La psiquiatría imperante apoya y promueve ampliamente esta naturalización y ha logrado imponerla al sentido común como una tendencia general a medicalizar los malestares que surgen de contradicciones sociales muy visibles. La mercantilización galopante de la medicina no hace más que reforzar esta tendencia y convertirla, de paso, en un excelente negocio. En Europa y en Estados Unidos, desde los años 90, han surgido grandes movimientos de usuarios y de víctimas de estas nuevas formas de disciplinamiento social que constituyen un frente de liberación no convencional que, en la práctica, trabaja y protesta en torno a los mecanismos que impiden, en la construcción misma de la subjetividad, la emergencia de la protesta social. Estos movimientos han creado una nueva antipsiquiatría, heredera y enriquecedora respecto de la antipsiquiatría clásica de los años 60, centrada en el enorme impacto y difusión de las técnicas de control psiquiátrico en las personas comunes, en la vida cotidiana. En este libro se critican las bases conceptuales, médicas, neurológicas y psiquiátricas de esta masiva medicalización del sufrimiento subjetivo. Se examinan sus raíces en la mercantilización de la medicina y en la historia de la psiquiatría. Se proponen bases prácticas y conceptuales para su crítica en su forma organizada, como protesta de los usuarios, y de los ciudadanos en general, en nombre del derecho a la libertad y a la autonomía personal que hacen posible el ejercicio real de la ciudadanía."
Las más renombradas autoridades del mundo en la botánica y la química de los alucinógenos han elaborado un estudio exhaustivo de la flora psicoactiva. El botánico Richard Evans Schultes y el químico Albert Hofmann examinan con detalle las propiedades de estas plantas y el uso que ha hecho el hombre de ellas. Su texto está acompañado de muchas ilustraciones, de las cuales más de cien son en color. ¿Qué son los alucinógenos? ¿De dónde vienen? Las respuestas a estas preguntas preceden a un léxico de más de noventa plantas alucinógenas que han influido la visión del mundo de muchos pueblos que consideran estas plantas como regalo de los dioses. Para complementar este léxico botánico hay una guía de referencia que indica dónde se usa cada alucinógeno, quién lo usa y en qué circunstancia, cómo se prepara y qué efectos tiene. En una investigación etnográfica, Schultes y Hofmann, examinan el uso de catorce plantas alucinógenas importantes entre personas de sociedades no industrializadas que han conservado sus ritos religiosos de generación en generación. El doctor Schultes describe vividamente los peregrinajes que se hacen para recolectar las plantas sagradas, así como los ritos, oraciones, canciones y danzas asociados a su uso; describe también la conducta de los usuarios. Por otra parte, las lúcidas explicaciones de la química de estas plantas que ofrece el doctor Hofmann son una contribución única en la bioquímica de las sustancias psicotrópicas.
"Lejos de la atención mediática que suele prestarse a los refugiados fruto de determinados conflictos bélicos, los movimientos de población forzados por las diferentes formas y niveles de degradación ambiental son ignorados de manera flagrante.  Jesús M. Castillo define como migrante ambiental a «toda persona que abandona su territorio de residencia habitual debido principalmente o de forma muy importante a impactos ambientales, ya sean graduales o repentinos, y ya se mueva dentro de un mismo Estado o atraviese fronteras internacionales». A partir de esta definición, ofrece una detallada síntesis de las causas globales y locales, directas e indirectas, que repercuten en la vida y el futuro de poblaciones enteras en diferentes partes del planeta. La desertización, la sobreexplotación de las aguas de riego o de bancos pesqueros, las secuelas de la construcción de grandes infraestructuras, la deforestación, la subida del nivel del mar o los fenómenos meteorológicos extremos fruto del cambio climático, los impactos de las armas químicas utilizadas en las guerras, el procesamiento y depósito de residuos tóxicos o las pruebas nucleares son solo algunas causas de destrucción ambiental; todas ellas asociadas a la hegemonía del modelo capitalista de explotación de recursos.
En un mundo cuyas instituciones estatales e internacionales presumen del más alto grado de conciencia ecológica y donde los derechos humanos llenan páginas y páginas de discursos y declaraciones solemnes, nos encontramos con que más de 200 millones de personas cada año se ven expuestos a desastres naturales muchas veces consecuencia del cambio climático, del cual ellas no son las causantes, pero sí las víctimas principales. Esto está provocando un éxodo de migrantes ambientales que en la actualidad se cifra en torno a los 25-50 millones, pero que en el 2050 puede llegar a los 200 millones. Migraciones ambientales denuncia así la hipocresía y, justamente, la insostenibilidad de un orden económico y político global que ondea la bandera del desarrollo sostenible, mientras acaba con los ecosistemas y las formas tradicionales de existencia y vida en vastas zonas del planeta, de las que hace tierra quemada, muerta y despoblada."
del mercado global. A este fin, están siendo necesarios determinados cambios en la propia estructura del territorio: por un lado, la concentración de la población en las ciudades para industrializar la producción y concentrar y mercantilizar el consumo; por otro lado, los espacios metropolitanos deben transformarse para ser funcionales y competitivos en la red global de ciudades (aparatos logísticos, servicios a la producción, mano de obra flexible y adaptada, mercados internos solventes y operativos). Y para lograr esto es necesaria la conexión de los distintos espacios económicos mediante una potente red de telecomunicaciones y una densa y rápida red de transportes de personas y mercancías, basada en los combustibles fósiles. La globalización capitalista está generando también otras transformaciones de muy diversa índole, a gran velocidad y a escala creciente en las sociedades humanas y, en general, en todos los ecosistemas, por su necesidad constante de incremento de la producción y del consumo, las cuales están generando graves desequilibrios.  En este libro vamos a poner especial atención en las transformaciones territoriales, por considerarlas un elemento clave en el modelo de desarrollo neoliberal que, al destruir las culturas locales y concentrar la población y los recursos en un puñado de aglomeraciones urbanas, están desestructurando las bases de una eventual reconstrucción de las sociedades humanas desde lo comunitario, la diversidad y la ecología."

“¿Hay alguien más parecido a un esclavo que un enamorado? ¿Cómo uno puede ser verdaderamente libre cuando ama?
La noción de amor libre apunta más alto: no a la mera posibilidad de tener múltiples relaciones sexuales sino a la de amar a varias personas al mismo tiempo. Reintroduce la noción de camaradería, de compañerismo afectivo. Afirma que se puede querer bien a (querer el bien de) dos o más seres simultáneamente. Insiste en que uno siempre está amando a varios al mismo tiempo, aunque con diferentes intensidades y propósitos. Apuesta, por lo tanto, a una nueva educación sentimental.”

ÍNDICE
Prólogo. Eros y anarquía
1. La unión libre
2. El matrimonio es inmoral. Rene Chaughi
3. Carta a Pablo. Mijail Bakunin
4. Lo único y la pluralidad. Luigi Fabbri
5. Mal de amores. Errico Malatesta
6. La mujer y el amor libre. Evelio Boal
7. Consejos para una adúltera. CrimethInc
8. Maternidad libre. Paul Robin
9. La trampa de la protección. Emma Goldman
10. No os caséis. Pepita Guerra
11. Feminófobos y feminófilos. María Lacerda de Moura
12. El marido y el amante. Roberto De Las Carreras
13. El amor entre anarcoindividualistas. E. Armand
14. Una experiencia en camaradería amorosa. Grupo Atlantis
15. La colonia Cecilia. Juan Rossi (Cardias)
16. Comunas de la contracultura. Los Diggers
17. Cuando dos seres se aman. América Scarfó
"Escribir en los albores del siglo XXI acerca de experiencias de gobierno local y regional, de formas de gobierno indígena o de políticas para la "gobernabilidad" resulta más que relevante cuando vemos que a lo largo de toda América Latina nuestros sistemas políticos pasan por grandes dificultades para tener instituciones realmente democráticas y para hacer avanzar políticas públicas más equitativas y justas en contextos multiculturales. En ese marco, a finales del 2003 pusimos en marcha el proyecto que nutre el presente libro y que en su forma inicial se llamó Gobernar la diversidad: experiencias de construcción de ciudadanía multicultural. Una investigación colaborativa (Leyva, Burguete, Speed 2003). El primer objetivo del presente libro es reflexionar acerca de los desafíos que enfrentaron comunidades, organizaciones y movimientos indígenas cuando se hicieron gobierno local o co-gobierno nacional. El segundo objetivo es sistematizar la forma en que dichas comunidades, organizaciones y movimientos indígenas hicieron frente a las políticas públicas de los Estados nacionales de América Latina. Políticas lanzadas para gobernar en contextos en donde la diversidad interpelaba la sociedad en su conjunto. Por varias razones que vamos a explicar a continuación, nos era imprescindible llevar a cabo la sistematización y el análisis de esos temas conjuntamente con los grupos y organizaciones indígenas involucrados en los procesos que se estudiaron. Por ello, nuestro proyecto epistémica y metodológicamente lo concebimos y lo construimos como un proyecto de co-labor en el que trabajamos conjuntamente académicos no-indígenas, académicos indígenas e intelectuales indígenas miembros de comunidades y organizaciones independientes de cinco países de América Latina (Chile, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Guatemala y México). "
La moderna filosofía de la ciencia ha prestado gran atención al entendimiento de la práctica científica, a diferencia de su anterior concentración en el «método científico». Los trabajos de Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn e Imre Lakatos han aportado una diversidad de planteamientos sobre lo que es la práctica. Paul Feyerabend supera esta posición: sostiene que la mayor parte de las investigaciones científicas de éxito nunca se han desarrollado siguiendo un método racional. Examina en detalle los argumentos que utilizó Galileo para defender la revolución copernicana en el campo de la física, y muestra que semejante éxito no depende de un argumento racional, sino de una mezcla de subterfugio, retórica y propaganda. Y llega a una conclusión: «Galileo hizo trampas». Afirmando que el anarquismo debe reemplazar ahora al racionalismo en la teoría del conocimiento, Feyerabend arguye que el progreso intelectual sólo puede alcanzarse poniendo el acento en la creatividad y en los deseos del científico más que en el método y la autoridad de la ciencia. En la segunda mitad del libro examina el «racionalismo crítico» de Popper y el intento de Lakatos de construir una metodología que reconozca al científico su libertad sin amenazar «la ley y el orden» científicos. Descartando ambas tentativas de apuntalamiento del racionalismo, pone toda su esperanza en el «arrollador alejamiento de la razón» y mantiene que «el único principio que no inhibe el progreso es el de todo pasa».
¿Es otra Cosmopolítica posible? La cosmopolítica es ahora la situación común para todos los colectivos. No existe un mundo común, y aún así, no obstante, debe ser compuesto. [Cosmopolitics is now the common situation for all collectives. There is no common world, and yet it has to be composed, nonetheless.] Bruno Latour-Anthropology at the Time of the Anthropocene. El 28 de Enero de 2013 el Gobierno de Terranova y Labrador anunció la prohibición de la caza de caribú (o renos) durante cinco años. 1 Esta prohibición fue impuesta después de que numerosos estudios mostraran que la población de la manada del Rio George (GRH, por sus siglas en inglés) había mermado vertiginosamente, de 800.000 individuos en 1990 a solo 27.000 en 2012. 2 Aunque sin estar seguro de las causas, el gobierno provincial entendía que la continua captura de caribúes ('el recurso') no era sostenible, incluso para las comunidades indígenas Innu e Inuit que viven en Labrador. El día siguiente al anuncio, Prote Poker, el Gran Jefe de la Nación Innu, declaró que la prohibición era injustificable; que los ancianos Innu no estaban de acuerdo con ella porque constituía una amenaza a su modo de vida; y que las comunidades iban a continuar cazando como lo habían hecho siempre. 3 Entre otras preocupaciones, la negación de los Innu a aceptar la prohibición estaba basada en la insistencia de los cazadores y ancianos expertos, quienes veían la caída de la población de la manada como un síntoma del deterioro de la relación entre los Innu y Kanipinikassikueu, el 'señor' o 'espíritu guardián' de los atîku (la palabra que los Innu usan para referirse a lo que los Euro-Canadienses llaman caribú [caribú en español]). 4 El grado en el que los protocolos de caza-tales como el uso y descarte de los huesos y el reparto de carne del atîku, entre otras prescripciones-se cumplen determina la salud de la relación y la voluntad de Kanipinikassikueu de continuar entregando animales, y en general de 'bendecir' a los Innu. En ese punto, cazadores y ancianos llevaban quejándose durante varios años de que las generaciones más jóvenes de Innu no estaban siguiendo estos protocolos y les reclamaban que se volvieran a comprometer con ellos. En este contexto, para cazadores y ancianos, la prohibición haría imposible reparar la relación con atîku y su espíritu guardián. En síntesis, mientras que para los encargados de vida silvestre en el gobierno provincial cazar podría significar la desaparición del caribú, para los cazadores y ancianos Innu el no poder cazar siguiendo sus propios protocolos casi seguramente significaría la desaparición del atîku. 5 1 Ver 4 El señor puede ser llamado Papakashtshihku y Katipinimitautsh (ver Armitage 1992). 5 Como mostraré, la desaparición del atîku implica una amenaza toda una serie de relaciones y prácticas que muchos Innu ven como fundamentales para su existencia.
Más tanto Flaherty como Rouch soslayaron la situación colonial en que se hallaban inmersos “sus personajes” , al igual que la antropologia clásica. Un cine así entendido n0 sirve más que para extender por anticipado a esos pueblos un certificado de defunción. ¿Por qué no cuestionar las razones de Occidente que fundan siempre la necesidad del etnocidio, y ayudar a esos oprimidos a sobrevivir, desarrollando sus propios valores y posibilidades? No puede justificarse ya un cine antropológico cebado en lo exótico, que se desentienda del colonialismo. El cineasta deber integrar la búsqueda estética con una búsqueda ética, que lo comprometa con la realidad conflictiva que quiere documentar. Este libro se propone ilustrarlo sobre las trampas que deberá sortear para hacer un film autentico, no deformado por el etnocentrismo, y tambien alentar a los científicos sociales a perder el miedo al cine como técnica de investigación y eficaz vehículo para desatar procesos colectivos de consciencia.”
2. Que la verdadera catástrofe es existencial y metafísica. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
3. Que el apocalipsis decepciona. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Nos quieren obligar a gobernar, no vamos a caer en esa provocación 19
1. Fisionomía de las insurrecciones contemporáneas. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
2. Que no existe ninguna insurrección democrática. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
3. Que la democracia no es más que el gobierno en estado puro. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
4. Teoría de la destitución. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
El poder es logístico. ¡Bloqueemos todo! 34
1. Que el poder reside ahora en las infraestructuras. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
2. De la diferencia entre organizar y organizarse. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
3. Del bloqueo. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
4. De la investigación. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
Fuck off Google 42
1. Que no hay “revoluciones Facebook” sino una nueva ciencia del gobierno, la cibernética. 42
2. ¡Guerra a los smarts! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
3. Miseria de la cibernética. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
4. Técnicas contra tecnología. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
Desaparezcamos 54
1. Una extraña derrota. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
2. Pacifistas y radicales: una pareja infernal. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
3. El gobierno como contrainsurrección. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
4. Asimetría ontológica y felicidad. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
Nuestra única patria: la infancia 68
1. Que no hay “sociedad” a defender ni a destruir. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
2. Que hay que volver la selección en secesión. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
3. Que no hay “guerras locales”, sino una guerra de los mundos. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
Omnia sunt communia 78
1. Que la comuna vuelve. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
2. Habitar como revolucionario. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
3. Acabar con la economía. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
4. Formar una potencia común. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84
2
Today Lybia, tomorrow Wall Street 87
1. Historia de quince años. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
2. Sustraerse de la atracción por lo local. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
3. Construir una fuerza que no sea una organización. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
En este breve ensayo discuto ciertos aspectos de la cosmología Makuna que directamente influencian el uso que hacen del medio ambiente de la selva tropical. Las ideas que los Makuna tienen acerca de la naturaleza se erigen en un tipo de ecosofía, por la cual entiendo una actitud moralmente cargada hacia la naturaleza, que informa y guía sus prácticas de manejo de recursos 1. El carácter particular de la ecosofía Makuna en el uso de los recursos que quiero ilustrar en este artículo, implica un sistema integral cuidadosamente regulado. Se ha escrito tanto sobre la cosmología y ecología de los Tukano, que sería inevitable dar profusas referencias en un trabajo como éste 2 , pero en lugar de examinar el material publicado, se partirá de un texto indígena recogido por mí en 1989 en la aldea de Santa Isabel, cerca del río Comeña, cuyo texto original contiene un recuento del hábitat Makuna: la selva, las colinas y ríos, y los seres vivientes que los habitan-hombres, animales y "espíritus"-. El narrador es Ignacio, un anciano e influyente chamán (kumu), de los Makuna del Comeña 3. Aquí solo introduzco pasajes seleccionados traducidos libremente, del largo texto que a mi juicio describe de modo elocuente la forma Makuna de pensar la naturaleza y la relación entre la cultura y la naturaleza, los hombres y los animales. Los Makuna son uno de los 15 o más grupos indígenas hablantes de lenguas Tukano oriental de la región del Vaupés colombiano; son unos 600 habitantes de las partes bajas de los ríos Pira-Paraná y Apaporis, una extensa área de gran variedad ecológica ocupada apenas por grandes malocas y pequeñas villas nucleadas (tal vez 8-10) dispersas a lo largo de las riberas de los ríos. Como otros grupos Tukaño de la región del Vaupés, los Makuna subsisten del cultivo itinerante, la pesca, la caza y la recolección; en los primeros años de los ochenta, toda el área del Pira-Paraná estuvo fuertemente afectada por el comercio de cocaína, ahora eclipsado pero reemplazado desde mediados de la década por la explotación aurífera en los lados de la frontera brasilera, a lo largo del río Taraira, la cual se ha convertido para los Makuna en fuente de adquisición de dinero y mercancía;. Muchos jóvenes y adultos de mediana edad permanecen por períodos en las minas buscando oro o trabajando para mineros y comerciantes blancos, y en muchas comunidades se produce un excedente sustancial de harina de yuca para el comercio. Sin embargo, pienso que se puede decir que la economía Makuna aún está predominantemente dirigida hacia la subsistencia. El nombre Makuna es de origen Geral y es utilizado ambiguamente en la literatura etnográfica y en el español local, en relación con un grupo exogámico y con una unidad de lengua (o comunidad de habla). Entre los grupos Tukano de la región del Vaupés estas dos unidades coinciden idealmente y con frecuencia, pero no en el caso de los Makuna. Por razones expuestas en otro trabajo 4 , prefiero utilizar el término para referirme a una unidad de lengua, es decir, a aquellas', unidades exogámicas que hablan la lengua Makuna. De acuerdo con esta definición, los Makuna comprenden dos conjuntos de clanes intermatrimoniales relacionados mutuamente como "hermanos mayores" y "hermanos menores"; un conjunto incluye los Ide Masa o "gente agua", y se subdividen en varios
“Considerar la subjetividad desde el ángulo de su producción no implica ningún retorno a los tradicionales sistemas de determinación binaria, infraestructura material-superestructura ideológica. Los diferentes registros semióticos que concurren a engendrar subjetividad no mantienen relaciones jerárquicas obligadas, establecidas de una vez para siempre. Puede ocurrir, por ejemplo, que la semiotización económica se haga dependiente de factores psicológicos colectivos, según permite constatarlo la sensibilidad de los índices bursátiles a las fluctuaciones de la opinión. De hecho, la subjetividad es plural y polifónica, para retomar una expresión de Mijail Bajtin. No conoce ninguna instancia dominante de determinación que gobierne a las demás instancias como respuesta a una causalidad unívoca.
Ante el actual estado de cosas, la sociología, las ciencias económicas, políticas y jurídicas parecen bastante mal pertrechadas para explicar semejante mezcla de arcaizante apego a las tradiciones culturales y, no obstante, de aspiración a la modernidad tecnológica y científica, mezcla que caracteriza al cóctel subjetivo contemporáneo. Por su parte, el psicoanálisis tradicional no está mejor ubicado para poder afrontar estos problemas, a causa de su manera de reducir los hechos sociales a mecanismos psicológicos. En estas condiciones parece oportuno forjar una concepción más transversalista de la subjetividad que permita responder a la vez de sus colisiones territorializadas idiosincrásicas (Territorios existenciales) y de sus apreturas a sistemas de valor (Universos incorporales) con implicaciones sociales y culturales.
¿Deben considerarse las producciones semióticas de los mass media, de la informática, la telemática, la robótica, al margen de la subjetividad psicológica? No lo creo. Así como las máquinas sociales pueden ser ubicadas en el capítulo general de los Equipos colectivos, las máquinas tecnológicas de información y comunicación operan en el corazón de la subjetividad humana, no únicamente en el seno de sus memorias, de su inteligencia, sino también de su sensibilidad, de sus afectos y de sus fantasmas inconscientes. La consideración de estas dimensiones maquínicas de subjetivación nos mueve a insistir, en nuestra tentativa de redefinición, sobre la heterogeneidad de los componentes que agencian la producción de subjetividad.”
Félix Guattari

Fecha de recepción: 29 de abril de 2016 Fecha de aceptación: 25 de mayo 2016 [ ] Resumen Desde un enfoque decolonial, este artículo recupera el concepto de extractivismo, a través de una revisión crítica de las prácticas del capitalismo y del colonialismo, am-bas inherentes, originarias de una misma raíz: el pensamiento occidentalo-céntrico. Las mutaciones del extractivismo económico en su expansión planetaria resultan evidentes en este texto, en las formas que describe de pillaje cognitivo (epistémico) y de constricción de la existencia (ontológico), además del desastre medioambiental que han ido provocando la aceleración de captación de recursos y materias primas, así como las imposiciones cada vez más violentas, armadas y genocidas, de ese ca-pitalismo colonial, especialmente en el continente americano. El artículo, desde la voz de las víctimas, ofrece paradigmas y alternativas partiendo de la crítica de esas prácticas epistemicidas y de las resistencias indígenas al no-ser. Abstract From an decolonial approach this article recovers the extractivism concept through a critical review of the practices of capitalism and colonialism, both inherent and originating from the same root: the Western-centric thinking. Mutations of economic extractivism in its global expansion are evident in this text, in the described forms of cognitive pillage (epistemic) and constriction of existence (ontology), and also in the environmental disaster that have been caused by the accelerated uptake of resources and raw materials, as well as the increasingly violent impositions, armed and genocide, of that colonial capitalism, especially in the Americas. he article , from the voice of the victims, ofers alternatives and paradigms based on the criticism of those epistemicides practices and indigenous resistance to non-being.
Este artículo se publicó en su version original en inglés en Pragmatics & Cognition 22:1 (2014)-Pages: 124-139. John Benjamins Publishing Company. Amsterdam/Philadelphia. 1 La traducción se ha realizado con permiso del autor y del editor de la publicación original. La traducción se ha realizado dentro del Grupo de Investigación de la Universidad de Alicante Proyectos Arquitectónicos: Pedagogías Críticas, Políticas Ecológicas y Prácticas Materiales. El equipo ha estado coordinado por Ester Gisbert Alemany y han participado Joaquín García Marín, Jose Carrasco y Enrique Nieto. Resumen En muchas ocasiones se presenta la creatividad como un factor enigmático que explica la emergencia espontánea de lo radicalmente nuevo. La obsesión con la novedad supone, sin embargo, un enfoque hacia los productos finales y una atribución retrospectiva de sus formas a ideas sin precedentes surgidas en la mente de los individuos. Esta obsesión impide reconocer el potencial de generación formal de las relaciones y procesos en los que cosas y personas se hacen y crecen. En estos procesos se acostumbra a pedir a los practicantes que copien las obras de maestros pasados. A pesar de dejarse guiar por un guión o partitura al hacerlo, cada individuo ha de improvisar su propio camino a través de la variedad de tareas que supone cualquier práctica. Con ejemplos extraídos de los ámbitos de la música, la caligrafía y el encaje de bolillos, muestro que las fuentes de la creatividad no residen en la cabeza de la gente, sino en su atender a un mundo en constante formación. Para este tipo de creatividad, experienciada en lugar de hecha, la imaginación no consiste tanto en la capacidad de topar con nuevas ideas como en el impulso aspiracional de una vida que no es únicamente vivida, sino también guiada. Pero hacia un destino aún no fijado. Al abrirse a lo desconocido, al resultar expuesta, la imaginación no guía a través de la maestría, sino de la entrega. Por tanto la creatividad que se experiencia, la de la acción sin agencia, es la de la vida misma. Abstract Creativity is often portrayed as an X-factor that accounts for the spontaneous generation of the absolutely new. Yet the obsession with novelty implies a focus on final products and a retrospective attribution of their forms to unprecedented ideas in the minds of individuals, at the expense of any recognition of the form-generating potentials of the relations and processes in which persons and things are made and grown. In these processes, practitioners are characteristically called upon to copy the works of past masters. However, though they may be guided by a script or score, every practitioner has to improvise his or her own passage through the array of tasks the performance entails. With examples from music, calligraphy and lace-making, I show that the wellsprings of creativity lie not inside people's heads, but in their attending upon a world in formation. In this kind of creativity, undergone rather than done, imagination is not so much the capacity to come up with new ideas as the aspirational impulse of a life that is not just lived but led. But where it leads is not yet given. In opening to the unknown-in exposure-imagination leads not by mastery but by submission. Thus the creativity of undergoing, of action without agency, is that of life itself.
"La fábrica de la infelicidad como realidad, nada virtual, de un cuerpo social hiperexplotado, estresado, reducido por la estrategia belicista que adoptan hoy los poderes mundiales. Los acontecimientos jalonados, de forma privilegiada, por la crisis de la nueva economía digital a partir de la primavera del año 2011, los atentados del 11 de septiembre y la guerra de Irak tienen como elemento común la quiebra de la promesa de "felicidad" (trabajos interesantes y creativos, expectativa de beneficios inmediatos, euforia bursátil) que se había ofrecido a los trabajadores del conocimiento, la fuerza motriz del último ciclo de crecimiento económico. Por el contrario, la crisis descubre una realidad marcada por nuevas formas de neurosis: el pánico, como colapso subjetivo frente a la hiperestimulación contenida en el trabajo digital y en la vida en las grandes ciudades; la depresión, la anestesia neuronal, ante la crisis de sentido derivada de la prolongación de situaciones sometidas a un altísimo estrés. La crisis se describe,a sí también, como crisis de la subjetividad, crisis psíquica a un tiempo que social y económica. En palabras del propio Bifo: "Este libro se propone señalar y cartografiar un nuevo campo disciplinar que se encuentra en la intersección de la economía, la tecnología comunicativa y la psicoquímica. Una cartografía de este nuevo campo disciplinar es imprescindible si queremos describir y comprender el proceso de producción del capital y la producción de subjetividad social en la época que sigue a la modernidad industrial mecánica y, por tanto, si queremos elaborar estrategias de sustracción".
Los pensadores occidentales no desempeñaron su función social adecuada. La ciencia y la filosofía simplemente copiaron los caminos institucionales ya tomados por la religión occidental y se mistificarón, de modo que una de las máximas de la civilización occidental reciente ha sido declarar que algo es "académico", lo que significa que las soluciones inteligentes a los problemas son de hecho ilusorias, porque fueron ideadas por personas protegidas de las realidades de la vida cotidiana.
Los occidentales prefieren soluciones políticas, rechazan los principios involucrados y eligen una solución práctica, a menudo comprometedora del problema. Esta tradición, tal como la experimentamos hoy, es la tendencia a autorizar o financiar una cantidad asombrosa de estudios cuyas conclusiones son finalmente rechazadas para que podamos idear una solución política que nos permita evitar entender o enfrentar el problema por completo y que generalmente no es satisfactorio para nadie.
La institucionalización de la ciencia tomó muchas formas: la tendencia creciente de las personas a buscar explicaciones confiables sobre el mundo en los científicos, el desarrollo de universidades y colegios, el patrocinio de investigaciones científicas por parte de mecenas adinerados y, finalmente, el Estado.
Xochitl Leyva, Jorge Alonso, R. Aída Hernández, Arturo Escobar, Axel Kohler, Aura Cumes, Rafael Sandoval, Shannon Speed, Mario Blaser, Esteban Krotz, Susana Piñacué, Héctor N ahuelpan, Moma Macleod, Juan López Intzín, Jaqolb'e Lucrecia García, Mariano Báez, Graciela Bolaños, Eduardo Restrepo, María Bertely, Abelardo Ramos, Sergio Mendizábal, Laura Mateos, Gunther Dietz, Juan Ricardo Aparicio, Joanne Rappaport, María Patricia Pérez, Jenny Pearce, Luis Guillermo Vasco, Charles R. Hale, Ángela Ixkic Bastian, José Antonio Flores, Lina Rosa Berrío, María José Araya, Sabine Masson, Virginia Vargas, Harma Laako, Mariana Mora, Gilberto Valdés, María Isabel Casas, Retos, Michal Osterweil, Joao Pacheco de Oliveira, Dana E. Powell, Rocío Salcido, Marcio D'Olne Campos, Mónica Gallegos, Mercedes Olivera, Rodrigo Montoya, Sylvia Marcos, María Lugones y Walter Mignolo Presentación de Arturo Escobar Prólogo de Boaventura de Sousa Santos

La obra colegiada que usted tiene en sus manos, compuesta por tres tomos, no está desvinculada del momento histórico en que vivimos, por el contra­ rio, es fruto de él pues cuando cada uno(a) de los y las co-autores(as) nos preguntamos sobre el eje que estructura esta obra-producción/creación de conocimientos ¿ desde dónde, desde quién, para qué, para quién, con quién y cómo?-lo hicimos desde alguna posición crítica y reflexiva que incluía el actuar de cara a situaciones puntuales de crisis o guerra. En el tomo I, investigadores(as) con diferentes raíces (indígenas, acadé­ micas, activistas, etc.) nos comparten cómo ellos(as) retan aspectos medu­ lares del régimen moderno de saber/poder. Nos invitan a explorar, desde diferentes aristas, la relación entre poder y conocimiento(s) tomando como punto de partida experiencias concretas sucedidas sobre todo en las últimas décadas (1980-2014) en Ecuador, Guatemala, Colombia, el país mapuche y México. Experiencias que nos han obligado a cambiar nuestras prácticas académicas a contraluz de la forma en que los(as) miembros de los pueblos originarios y afrodescendientes vuelven central las dimensiones episté­ micas, éticas, políticas, ontológicas y teóricas en sus luchas personales y co­ lectivas. Con estos tres tomos y la colección que ellos arrancan, buscamos contribuir a visibilizar y cartografiar la actual insurrección de saberes para con ello motivar a más y más personas para llevar a cabo, o continuar llevando a cabo, acciones concretas en direcciones opuestas a las que nos ofrece el capitalismo académico y las epistemologías y ontología dua­ listas de la modernidad occidental.
tico y económico. El peligro de esta crisis es total porque
abarca su hegemonía y a la humanidad y a la naturaleza.
¿De qué alternativas disponemos para superar este fin de
milenio y su hecatombe? Es evidente que estamos viviendo
los “tiempos póstumos” o de “filosofía finisecular” de
una Modernidad que luce, por otra parte, rebasable desde
otra episteme histórico-cultural que reconozca la relación
ecosistema del hombre en el conjunto de la diversidad
existencial de los seres vivos que pueblan este planeta.
Esta otra epistemología que tiene su génesis en la Teoría
Crítica y se recrea en América Latina, desde el Sur, se asume
desde la praxis de un logos emancipador que fractura
los límites hegemónicos del “capitalismo sin fin” y del
“colonialismo sin fin”, ya que hace posible recuperar desde
la “sociología de las emergencias”, la presencia de los
pueblos milenarios que han logrado la recreación de su
habitat a través de una relación simbiótica directa, con los
ciclos o procesos de génesis y muerte de la Madre Tierra
(Pachamama). La sabiduría ancestral que porta el pensamiento
de estos pueblos originarios, expresados por sus
tradiciones, ritos, magias, hasta sus representaciones antropomórficas
de la realidad, son síntomas de que el ocaso
de la civilización, no muere con Occidente, sino que renace
Mientras vastas regiones del mundo permanecieron total o parcialmente al margen de la modernización, las demás sociedades las veían como zonas capaces de absorber el excedente de población de los «países desarrollados». Se buscaban --y se hallaban de forma temporal-- soluciones globales a los problemas de superpoblación producidos localmente. Pero, a medida que la modernización ha ido alcanzando las áreas más remotas del planeta, se ha generado una gran cantidad de «población superflua», y ahora son todas las regiones las que han de cargar con las consecuencias.. Por lo tanto, nos enfrentamos a la necesidad de buscar soluciones locales a problemas producidos globalmente. La propagación global de la modernidad ha dado lugar a un número cada vez más elevado de seres humanos que se encuentran privados de medios adecuados de subsistencia, y a la vez el planeta se está quedando sin lugares donde ubicarlos. De ahí las nuevas inquietudes acerca de los «inmigrantes» y los que piden «asilo», así como la importancia creciente del papel que desempeñan los difusos «temores relativos a la seguridad» en la agenda política contemporánea.
1 Es notorio que ha existido, según se dice, un autómata construido de tal manera que resultaba capaz de replicar a cada jugada de un ajedrecista con otra jugada contraria que le aseguraba ganar la partida. Un muñeco trajeado a la turca, en la boca una pipa de narguile, se sentaba a tablero apoyado sobre una mesa espaciosa. Un sistema de espejos despertaba la ilusión de que esta mesa era transparente por todos sus lados. En realidad se sentaba dentro un enano jorobado que era un maestro en el juego del ajedrez y que guiaba mediante hilos la mano del muñeco. Podemos imaginarnos un equivalente de este aparato en la filosofía. Siempre tendrá que ganar el muñeco que llamamos «materialismo histórico». Podrá habérsela-sin más ni más con cualquiera, si toma a su servicio a la teología que, como es sabido, es hoy pequeña y fea y no debe dejarse ver en modo alguno. 2 «Entre las peculiaridades más dignas de mención del temple humano», dice Lotz, «cuenta, a más de tanto egoísmo particular, la general falta de envidia del presente respecto a su futuro». Esta reflexión nos lleva a pensar que la imagen de felicidad que albergamos se halla enteramente teñida por el tiempo en el que de una vez por todas nos ha relegado el decurso de nuestra existencia. La felicidad que podría despertar nuestra envidia existe sólo en el aire que hemos respirado, entre los hombres con los que hubiésemos podido hablar, entre las mujeres que hubiesen podido entregársenos. Con otras palabras, en la representación de felicidad vibra inalienablemente la de redención. Y lo mismo ocurre con la representación de pasado, del cual hace la historia asunto suyo. El pasado lleva consigo un índice temporal mediante el cual queda remitido a la redención. Existe una cita secreta entre las generaciones que fueron y la nuestra. Y como a cada generación que vivió antes que nosotros, nos ha sido dada una flaca fuerza mesiánica sobre la que el pasado exige derechos. No se debe despachar esta exigencia a la ligera. Algo sabe de ello el materialismo histórico. 3 El cronista que narra los acontecimientos sin distinguir entre los grandes y los pequeños, da cuenta de una verdad: que nada de lo que una vez haya acontecido ha de darse por perdido para la historia. Por cierto, que sólo a la humanidad redimida le cabe por completo en suerte su pasado. Lo cual quiere decir: sólo para la humanidad redimida se ha hecho su pasado citable en cada uno de sus momentos. Cada uno de los instantes vividos se convierte en una cita À I'ordre du jour, pero precisamente del día final.
Ponencia presentada en el IV Encuentro de la Asociación Latinoamericana de Investigadores de la Comunicación. ALAIC. "Ciencias de la Comunicación: Identidades y Fronteras". Grupo de Trabajo "Comunicación, identidad y cultura urbana". Universidad Católica de Pernambuco, Recife, Brasil, 11-16 de septiembre de 1998. 2 Imaginarios globales, miedos locales: La construcción social del miedo en la ciudad 1 Para Juan Pablo Rosell, hombre sabio y paciente Los hombres y las mujeres que vivieron hace mil años son nuestros antepasados. Hablaban casi nuestro mismo lenguaje y sus concepciones del mundo no estaban tan distantes de las nuestras. Existen analogías entre las dos épocas, pero también diferencias y éstas son las que más nos enseñan. Georges Duby Muchos de los imaginarios de fin de siglo se acercan a las visiones milenaristas 2 , pero resulta insuficiente referir los miedos, la incertidumbre y el desconcierto actual a un regreso cíclico del "apocalípsis", o de la idea del "fin", como explicación unívoca y directamente causal del conjunto de movimientos, prácticas y discursos sociales que en el umbral del año 2000 están sacudiendo a las sociedades urbanas. Es decir, no basta argumentar que la indudable reemergencia de las "religiones invisibles" (Berger y Luckmann, 1997) y el aumento en la búsqueda de alternativas de todo tipo para oponer al miedo y a la 1 Este trabajo tiene muchas deudas. En primer lugar debo no sólo agradecimiento, sino reconocimiento al trabajo incansable de Arsinohé Quevedo y Alejandra Navarro, jóvenes profesoras e investigadoras que asumieron conmigo la conducción del Seminario de Cultura Urbana y Comunicación, del Departamento de Estudios Socioculturales del ITESO; a mis estudiantes-investigadores en este Seminario, que se lanzaron incondicionalmente a la aventura del conocimiento, de manera especial a Irene, Maga, Daniela y Afra. Los y las "informantes" todos, que nos abrieron sus casas, sus corazones, sus temores. Rosa Esther Juárez, crítica implacable e interlocutora insustituible. Y a los demás, a los que ayudaron, mi agradecimiento; a los que estorbaron, así es la vida. 2 Se conoce por milenarismo a la doctrina que planteó que el año 1000 concicidía con el fin del mundo. La espera del milenio se transmitió con los autores cristianos de los primeros siglos (Justino y Tertuliano) y animó distintos movimientos de carácter escatológico que sobrevivieron al paso de los siglos. Para una visión abreviada de esta doctrina, consultar Lamberto Boni, Enciclopedia de la filosofía. Asesor Gianni Vattimo. Garzanti Editore , Barcelona, 1992. 3 incertidumbre y el avance de las ideologías fundamentalistas que clausuran de entrada cualquier contacto con lo diferente, encuentra su explicación en una especie de continuidad histórica en la que inevitablemente se reproducen los temores ocasionados por el cambio de siglo.

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