Territories of Difference: Place, Movements, Life, Redes

New Ecologies for the Twenty-First Century

by Arturo Escobar

In Territories of Difference, Arturo Escobar, author of the widely debated book Encountering Development, analyzes the politics of difference enacted by specific place-based ethnic and environmental movements in the context of neoliberal globalization. His analysis is based on his many years of engagement with a group of Afro-Colombian activists of Colombia’s Pacific rainforest region, the Proceso de Comunidades Negras (PCN). Escobar offers a detailed ethnographic account of PCN’s visions, strategies, and practices, and he chronicles and analyzes the movement’s struggles for autonomy, territory, justice, and cultural recognition. Yet he also does much more. Consistently emphasizing the value of local activist knowledge for both understanding and social action and drawing on multiple strands of critical scholarship, Escobar proposes new ways for scholars and activists to examine and apprehend the momentous, complex processes engulfing regions such as the Colombian Pacific today.

Escobar illuminates many interrelated dynamics, including the Colombian government’s policies of development and pluralism that created conditions for the emergence of black and indigenous social movements and those movements’ efforts to steer the region in particular directions. He examines attempts by capitalists to appropriate the rainforest and extract resources, by developers to set the region on the path of modernist progress, and by biologists and others to defend this incredibly rich biodiversity “hot-spot” from the most predatory activities of capitalists and developers. He also looks at the attempts of academics, activists, and intellectuals to understand all of these complicated processes. Territories of Difference is Escobar’s effort to think with Afro-Colombian intellectual-activists who aim to move beyond the limits of Eurocentric paradigms as they confront the ravages of neoliberal globalization and seek to defend their place-based cultures and territories.

Genres: Anthropology, Geography, Philosophy, International Development, Ethnography, Sociology

456 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Arturo Escobar is the Kenan Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His most recent book is Territories of Difference.

Reviews

[Verónica Barreto · Rating 5 out of 5]

El multiverso es real, solo no es lo que nos imaginamos

[Stefan Laxness · Rating 5 out of 5]

Columbian anthropologist and development critic, Arturo Escobar provides a complex and in-depth examination of the encounter between global development and black social movements in the Columbian Pacific region. In the 1990s, global capital and investments project moved into the region, transforming nature and society in the process. As Escobar tells us, this is only half the picture. Too often do historical and scholarly narratives focus on global forces and the total domination of capitalism in transforming our reality. In the shadow and at the edges of these processes exist spaces of creative appropriation and even subversion in which translocal social movements and activist can enact other forms of culture and economy, produce other forms of knowledge and ecological relationships. The book is a study of the struggle of indigenous and black communities to articulate a "region-territory of ethnic groups" in the context of globalisation to retain and defend place.

By skilfully weaving ethnographic research with theory, Arturo excavates powerful concepts generated by social movements and proposes useful frameworks with which to continue to analyse our encounters with globalisation. To guide us through his thesis and the complex dynamics between global and local processes, networks, actors and concepts, Arturo divides his book into six concepts (or chapters): place, capital, development, identity, and networks. Together they provide a basis for a political ecology framework of difference. Each offers an important historic and conceptual perspective with which to understand the conflict between development and the defence of place. The theoretical debates might come across as lengthy for the non-academic reader. However, the book can be enjoyed without fully understanding them and, if anything, the poignant themes will help readers immerse themselves into these debates.

The book is part of Arturo’s critic of development that seeks to displace the Euro-centric conception of modernity in favour of a multitude of modernities interacting together and emanating at different times in different sites to provide a ground for the politics of difference. Perhaps one of the key points of the book is that the in black communities’ social movements we can find the seeds of other modernities and the grounds for the construction of alternative worlds.

[Hrabrina Nikolova · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most inspirational books I've read in a long time. Not an easy read but definitely highly recommended!

[Ella · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book changed my outlook on so many things! When I read it I had been studying colonialism, but had never heard of the coloniality of nature. This book literally changed the direction of my life and was the reason I began to understand climate breakdown as the natural result of colonialism. It made me want to devote the rest of my life to work to breakdown the human nature dualism. It left me broken hearted and what my ancestors had done and the way indigenous people are being treated today. But it also left me hopeful for humankind in a way that is interwoven with pain, but feels truly authentic. It is not a linear line of progress from past to future, but a tangled continuous web of life.