Storytelling Globalization from the Chaco and Beyond

New Ecologies for the Twenty-First Century

by Mario Blaser

For more than fifteen years, Mario Blaser has been involved with the Yshiro people of the Paraguayan Chaco as they have sought to maintain their world in the face of conservation and development programs promoted by the state and various nongovernmental organizations. In this ethnography of the encounter between modernizing visions of development, the place-based “life projects” of the Yshiro, and the agendas of scholars and activists, Blaser argues for an understanding of the political mobilization of the Yshiro and other indigenous peoples as part of a struggle to make the global age hospitable to a “pluriverse” containing multiple worlds or realities. As he explains, most knowledge about the Yshiro produced by non-indigenous “experts” has been based on modern Cartesian dualisms separating subject and object, mind and body, and nature and culture. Such thinking differs profoundly from the relational ontology enacted by the Yshiro and other indigenous peoples. Attentive to people’s unique experiences of place and self, the Yshiro reject universal knowledge claims, unlike Western modernity, which assumes the existence of a universal reality and refuses the existence of other ontologies or realities. In Storytelling Globalization from the Chaco and Beyond, Blaser engages in storytelling as a knowledge practice grounded in a relational ontology and attuned to the ongoing struggle for a pluriversal globality.

Genres: Anthropology

320 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Mario Blaser is Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Aboriginal Studies at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador in Canada. He is a co-editor of In the Way of Development: Indigenous Peoples, Life Projects, and Globalization.

Reviews

[Jen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Storytelling Globalization: From the Chaco and Beyond by Mario Blaser is ambitious to a fault. Blaser attempts to tackle modernization and globalization, colonization and post-colonization, individual perspectives and international organizations’ goals, development and retaining culture, hegemonic views and pluriverses of realities, all while trying to disengage himself from a traditional ethnography while simultaneously adequately and “accurately” representing the views of indigenous people of the Chaco while criticizing others who do the same all in sentences more confusing and rambling than this one. At times I admired Blaser for his ambition, but at other times I mourned the multitude of books that could have existed if he were to have simply broken Storytelling Globalization into specific topics instead of attempting to jam all of them into this one.

[Klaire Hoang · Rating 1 out of 5]

The author wants to discover how to produce
applied and academic explanations that corresponded with each other; then he writes this "masterpiece" that only aliens can understand. Great job

[Masha · Rating 3 out of 5]

três estrelas e meia pela crítica à esquerda que foi feita na conclusão e que não estava no meu bingo para este livro. é fascinante mergulhar na ideia do pluriverso de um ponto de vista académico que em si própria desafia o quão académica a realidade tem de ser

[Simona · Rating 1 out of 5]

fuckass bob

edit: the book equivalent of TENET when I think abt it.