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Arabica Robusta

Dr. Walter Rodney: Revolutionary intellectual, socialist, Pan-Africanist and historian ... - 0 views

  • October 2016 marks the 48th anniversaries of the expulsion of Rodney from Jamaica and the subsequent Rodney Rebellion that took place as a reaction to his banning and the general exploitation of the African-Jamaican masses by the neocolonial regime.
  • Rodney was not an arm-chair revolutionary who sequestered himself on the academic plantation theorizing on what must be done to transform society. He waded into the messy, complicated and threatening world of practice to facilitate resistance to the violent forces of oppression.
  • “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” [4] The oppressed do not have the luxury of separating radical or revolutionary thought from the requisite transformative practices that are needed to create the just and emancipated society.
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  • Neoliberal capitalism has established a seemingly unchallenged ideological and political dominance in the current period. It has left many people believing that there is no viable alternative to capitalism. Rodney would have rejected this defeatist tendency that has induced many progressives to abandon their radical politics or commitment to socialism and accept liberal capitalist democracy as the only political game in town. Some former radicals have gone over to social democracy, which is essentially capitalism with a human face.
  • His mother, Pauline Rodney, was a seamstress and carried out full-time unpaid domestic work in the Rodney household. Rodney’s father, Percival Rodney, was a tailor, an independent operator, but he was forced by economic necessity, on occasions, to engage in wage labour with a big capitalist tailoring firm.[5] Percival Rodney was an active member of the Marxist, multiracial mass-based People’s Progressive Party (PPP).
  • Rodney did not pander to the use of race or class to explain all social phenomena that occurred in the public and private spheres. The hostility of certain households and even the church to the message and work of the PPP engendered an awareness of class or social differences and their influence on how members of the public responded to his offer of the PPP’s literature and other products. Walter did not frame this alertness as class consciousness but the experience as his “first real introduction to the class question.”[9]
  • Rodney co-authored the article The Negro Slave with a fellow student C. Augustus and was published in UWI’s flagship journal Caribbean Quarterly in 1964. Jamaica’s secret police or the Special Branch opened a file on Rodney and his activism in June 1961 and claimed that he had a radical leftist outlook.[12]
  • Rodney’s book highlights the class interests of the African rulers that informed their participation in the Atlantic slave trade, the nature of political rule with the governed and the negative impact of the alliance between African rulers and European capitalists-cum-slavers on the region’s development.[14]
  • Rodney was not into the business of being an apologist for the ruling groups in African societies that aided and abetted the dehumanizing and exploitative sale of the people to the capitalist enslavers. Unfortunately, there are still people who would like to absolve African leaders for their role in the capture and sale of Africans.
  • The urban poor, Rastafari, the progressive intelligentsia could be receptive to what Rodney was offering and the regime knew that it had nothing of substance to serve as an inoculant against the message of empowerment, dignity and justice.
  • The Jamaica Labour Party had an uneasy relationship and even hostile relationship with the academics at the University of the West Indies because they were not acting as mouthpieces and sanctifiers of the government’s policies and programmes.
  • It had already used the coercive power of the state to attack and destroy working-class squatter communities in West Kingston, which also had a strong Rastafari presence.[22] The neocolonial state had no reservation about using the power of the law to discipline and neutralize the impact of Rodney’s political education and mobilization. Rodney had the potential to unify the different political groupings with Jamaica’s Black Power Movement and even Jamaica’s secret police or Special Branch feared this real possibility. The government finally made its move against Rodney. On Rodney’s return from the Congress of Black Writers in Montreal on 15 October 1968, he was declared persona non grata and prevented from leaving the plane. On 16 October 1968, the Student Guild organized a protest march against Rodney’s expulsion from Jamaica. However, the ranks of the students were increased by residents from working-class communities in downtown Kingston and they initiated the Rodney Rebellion (aka the Rodney Riots or Rodney Affair).
  • The African-Caribbean petite bourgeois elements who captured state power after independence were mortally afraid of this revolutionary intellectual who unreservedly fraternized with the working-class and brought a materialist analysis to their experience of anti-African racism, social domination and capitalist exploitation. Racism and capitalism are major targets for Rodney because of the way they impact African lives.
  • Rodney was fortunate in resuming his academic career at the rank of a Senior Lecturer at the University of Dar es Salaam in 1969. He was an active participant and significant contributor to the theoretical activism at the university, which took place in the context of the Julius Nyerere regime’s Arusha Declaration. This policy document and the Ujamaa developmental programme were attempts at pursuing a path to socialism that the Tanzanian regime claimed was rooted in the values, history and sensibilities of Tanzanian society.
  • Rodney did not mince words on the solution to African and Caribbean development, which was grounded in the need to get rid of capitalism and embrace socialism.[29] Rodney saw the university as a site from which to explore and develop ideas that would advance revolutionary developments in Tanzania. He shares his experience at the university: “That was the situation in Tanzania. Briefly, it meant that we were able to teach and develop scientific socialist ideas, bearing in mind when I say “we,” I mean comrades like myself, people of like mind, because we  were part of a community and that was very important.
  • His status as a non-citizen was a political limitation on the level of involvement that he could effect in Tanzanian politics and his Jamaican experience likely influenced his sensibilities on this matter. However, the cultural challenges of not being fully conversant with the language, customs and habits of the masses were the decisive factors. According to Rodney, ‘‘… it’s virtually a lifetime task to master that language and then to master the higher level perception which normally goes into a culture.’’[32] He left Tanzania in 1974 with the expectation to continue his academic career and activism in the land of his birth – Guyana.
  • He said that, “It is now well-known that my appointment was approved through the regular academic channels and it was disallowed for supposedly political reasons.”[33] The university’s Board of Governors under the influence of the Burnham regime rejected the committee’s decision to offer Rodney the vacant professorial position as well as headship of the Department of History.[34]
  • The enemies of social transformation do not shy away from imposing economic sanctions such as the denial of jobs as a way to punish social malcontents or revolutionaries. Rodney did not have a stable or reliable source of income from the time of his return in August 1974 and his assassination on 13 June 1980.
  • The regime used political repression against WPA activists and leaders, including assassinations, economic victimization and trumped up arson charges.
  • Rodney called on the intelligentsia to use their knowledge and skills to challenge and undermine the lies and prejudices of imperialism and racism that are peddled about the people, extend themselves beyond the disciplinary boundaries and liquidate the ‘social myths’ that officialdom offers on society, and become immersed in the struggle of the people for liberation.[41]
  • If liberation is conceived, directed and executed by the usurpers-cum-vanguards of the people and their struggle, the people will end up with new masters on the morning after the “successful” revolution.
Arabica Robusta

Social sciences neglect leads to narrow development view by Wachira Kigoto / CODESRIA - 0 views

  • “Attempts to improve Africa’s development prospects by focusing on scientific advances and the benefits accruing from them have masked the critical role of social sciences and humanities as torchbearers of African values, systems of power, production and distribution,” said CODESRIA coordinator Professor Ibrahim Oanda Ogachi.
  • Scholars in the diaspora will mentor and conduct PhD supervision in order to alleviate shortages of academics in the social sciences and humanities in African universities, and to bolster institutions with valuable international experience and insights.“Currently there is under-enrolment in certain disciplines, as well as a prevailing perception that social sciences and humanities disciplines do not matter, especially in the debate on Africa’s development agenda,” Ogachi told University World News in Nairobi
  • In order to increase the numbers of scholars with PhDs in African universities, Langa stressed that deliberate efforts should be made to provide flexible conditions for teaching, research supervision and thesis examination.He also called for strengthening the academic culture in universities through joint research initiatives with scholars in the diaspora, as well as regional partnerships.
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  • Highlighting the premise that no sound society can be built on natural sciences and technology alone were Dr Winfred Avogo, associate professor of sociology at Illinois State University in the US, and Clifford Odimegwu, professor of population studies at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa.Outlining a proposed project on labour migration, social networks and HIV-Aids risk in South Africa, the researchers pointed out the importance of highly trained demographers if policy-makers are to understand the real causes of African migrations to Europe, environmental challenges imposed by climate change and causes of population increases.
  • “It is commonplace to find literature suggesting that African countries are now more unequal, and ethnically, religiously and economically more divided than they were in the context of colonialism,” noted a CODESRIA concept paper that formed the basis of the Nairobi forum.The crux of the matter is that social problems like insecurity, intolerance, environmental pollution and food insecurity are becoming more and more widespread, even as societies in Africa invest more in science and technology to try and alleviate these problems.The concept paper highlighted the fact that while African governments were putting trust in natural sciences and technology to curb labour migration and brain drain, as well as improve social cohesion, trade and gender relations, other countries – such as Brazil, China and India – had seen the importance of increasing the number of social scientists to address such issues.
  • CODESRIA has raised the red flag of neglect and discrimination against social sciences and humanities within Africa’s development agenda. There is sufficient testimony to suggest that the skewed emphasis on natural sciences and technology needs to be balanced by inputs from other areas of human interest.
Arabica Robusta

The public afterlife of ethnography - FASSIN - 2015 - American Ethnologist - Wiley Onli... - 0 views

  • Thus, Angelique Haugerud (2013) analyzes the difficulties faced by anthropologists who work to make alternative voices heard in the field of economics and finance,
Arabica Robusta

Three Contemporary Spinozas | The Los Angeles Review of Books - 0 views

  • For them, one of the most necessary critiques of liberalism hones in on the problem of recognition, the fact that our political and social systems function on the basis of definitions of personhood (sometimes citizenship, sometimes “humanness”) that often exclude many aspirants on the basis of their race, gender, sexuality, religion, mental or physical capacity, and so forth. Existentially spun, this yields the question of what kind of life is considered worthy of mourning when it is lost; politically spun, this yields a politics of identity, for which many march in the streets and which has become so familiar that certain of its basic assumptions can attain invisibility.
  • While Sharp is even-handed on Butler’s treatment of Hegel and Spinoza, her insistence on the distinctiveness of the conatus raises questions about what a practical politics of renaturalization would look like. The politics of recognition, after all, is not a merely theoretical matter but one in which we are always finding ourselves “thrown” by the very inequities of the civilization within which we live. It is unclear to me that a better appreciation of vital processes, and a displacement of the anthropos that sings at the heart of the political, is a replacement for recognition. Sharp herself doesn’t seem blind to the necessity of political struggle. Perhaps instead renaturalization is, as Sharp sometimes seems to suggest, a necessary supplement, a reminder that our natures can never be summed up by the terms recognition gives us.
  • Spinozism in 20th-century France yielded what Peden calls a philosophy of the concept, a striking alternative to the channel of French thought most familiar to Anglophone audiences: the philosophy of the subject. (Its best-known exponents include Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault.) While the lineage of subjectivity or consciousness can be traced back to Descartes, in the 20th century it was not just watered but soaked by the aquifer of phenomenology, originating in the Austro-German Edmund Husserl’s meditations on Descartes’s Meditations, revised by Heidegger’s “New Thinking,” and imported to France by thinkers such as Emmanuel Levinas.
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  • Peden has written an internalist book, more concerned with understanding the technical details of his protagonists’ work than in contextualizing it by reference to their political, social, and cultural surroundings. This works stepwise: sometimes the culture that mattered most to these thinkers, Peden reminds us, was the internal culture of the Sorbonne, but sometimes explanation via academic subcultures is still too contextual for Peden. As he puts it, glossing Spinoza’s own ahistoricist desire to see things “under the aspect of eternity,” “philosophical arguments have an integrity and transmissibility that are irreducible to their context, biographical motives, or strategic purposes.” But ahistoricism is a two-way street, a point that becomes part of Peden’s argument. Against those who would derive a political message from Spinoza’s thought, whether a liberal or a radically emancipatory one — and perhaps against Spinoza’s own claim that his politics were grounded by his metaphysics — Peden insists that Spinozist rationalism cannot provide metaphysical license for any politics at all: “Spinoza’s philosophy can be used to undermine the pretensions of any mode of political thought that seeks a metaphysical foundation — even if that metaphysics is Spinoza’s.”
  • pinoza for Our Time briefly mentions one historical reason for this conjunction of 17th-century philosophy and early-21st-century politics: in the 1970s the rediscovery of Spinoza offered new tools for radical critique at a “moment of farewell to traditional Marxism.” The question, of course, is what “radical critique” here means, and why Spinoza seemed available as a replacement for a traditional reading of Marx. Negri is hardly the only Marxist thinker to have turned toward Spinoza; Althusser, Étienne Balibar, and Pierre Macherey are often mentioned in this regard, too.
  • Perhaps the most damning aspect of Nairn’s review was not his critique of Negri and Hardt’s political-theoretical claims, but rather his suggestion that behind those claims lurked a surprising meta-project, namely, to secure a continuing role for intellectuals, like Hardt and Negri themselves, who are capable of linking the politics of the multitude to overarching or even totalizing philosophies. This is of course a classic picture of the task of the political intellectual, made enduring by the intellectual history of France from the Dreyfus Affair through the time of Cavaillès and up through the arc of Sartre’s prominence. But, as Peden’s work makes clear, the search for direct translations between rationalist philosophy and political practice often produces more noise than signal.
Arabica Robusta

We need more mainstream social science, not less. | Savage Minds Backup - 0 views

  • According to Christakis, “the social sciences have stagnated” because “They offer essentially the same set of academic departments and disciplines that they have for nearly 100 years.” To be sure, there are important links between the institutionalization of academic disciplines and their intellectual content. But to judge progress and development merely by these institutional measures is patently ridiculous.
  • Christakis claims that “One reason citizens…lack confidence in the social sciences is that social scientists too often miss the chance to declare victory and move on to new frontiers.” This is completely true. My discipline of anthropology has declared victory and moved on to new frontiers several times in the course of my career. However, we rarely have a chance to explain our findings to the public because the public finds them so unintuitive. As a result popular anthropology is left explaining again and again and again the most preliminary findings of our discipline — the low-hanging fruits regarding cultural relativism and the underdetermination of conduct by biology that we figured out in the 1920s. Anthropologists could do more, of course, to move public opinion by writing frequently for the public.
  • It has certainly done so in the past (think: Margaret Mead). But given the decreasing personnel and funding of our discipline, few of us have the time to do this. If only 1% of scientist are able and willing to write for the public, and that means there will be 2 anthropologists writing for the public and 200 in the natural sciences.
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  • The amazing thing about science is not its prestige, but how little people believe in it, despite the tremendous amount of time and money spent trying to get them to believe in it. To the extent that STEM gets traction in the broader public, it is because people believe (for reasons that may not be good) that somehow getting a degree in chemistry will lead to job security. As the credential arms race grows more intense, the natural sciences have become the new plumbing.
Arabica Robusta

Ayn Rand and Al Qaeda » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names - 0 views

  • why isn’t the FBI infiltrating the Ayn Rand Institute with agents trained in the art of provocation?  Why isn’t anyone concerned with the explicit calls to political terrorism in Rand’s writing?  Why is representative Bachmann focused on the imagined terrorist sympathies of Huma Abedin and not those of Leonard Peikoff?  The answer is simple: ideology.
  • Perhaps most striking is Rand’s depiction of her railroad baroness heroine’s cold-blooded execution of a fresh-faced, young United States soldier after what can only be described as an ideological rant that runs almost a hundred pages.  In this scene, Rand makes it clear that the murder is being committed for what amounts to a violent political disagreement, and she praises her character’s calm, remorseless, methodical execution of a uniformed member of the US military.  And this is just a sampling of the terrorist acts extolled in Rand’s novels.
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    "why isn't the FBI infiltrating the Ayn Rand Institute with agents trained in the art of provocation?  Why isn't anyone concerned with the explicit calls to political terrorism in Rand's writing?  Why is representative Bachmann focused on the imagined terrorist sympathies of Huma Abedin and not those of Leonard Peikoff?  The answer is simple: ideology."
Arabica Robusta

anthropologies: Climate Change, Power, and the Marginalization of Indigenous Adaptabili... - 0 views

  • the combined forces of crop diseases, deforestation, forest fires, and climate change have forced most farmers here to turn to subsistence farming. No longer able to produce high-value yields, farmers here now rely on the bare minimum to nourish their households and either store surpluses or send them to markets.
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    ""It just doesn't make sense anymore," she told me. "We used to plant cocoa and plantains on this very plot, and now it can't even sustain maize." Indeed, this part of the Volta Region used to be one of the highest-yielding areas for cocoa production in Ghana. However, the combined forces of crop diseases, deforestation, forest fires, and climate change have forced most farmers here to turn to subsistence farming. No longer able to produce high-value yields, farmers here now rely on the bare minimum to nourish their households and either store surpluses or send them to markets."
Arabica Robusta

anthropologies: Re-describing Diabetes:Toward A Political Ecology of Health and Bodies - 0 views

  • How does a society, a government, or the academy explain away eighteen years? In Arizona, eighteen years marks the disparity between the average life expectancies of American Indians and non-Hispanic whites (Arizona Department of Health Services, 2005; Indian Health Services, 2001). With what technologies and mythologies do we naturalize such a stunning gap?
  • Inequalities in the prevalence and experiences with this disease are unambiguous. Incidences in indigenous people exceed 200% of the national average, and some groups are grappling with astonishing rates at 700% the average (Warne 2006). That means for some native communities, half their population is afflicted. And their experiences with diabetes are more agonizing than their non-native counterparts. American Indians are more likely to suffer severe complications associated with adult onset diabetes—ischemic heart disease, retinal failure and blindness, lower limb amputation, kidney failure—and to die prematurely (Gohdes 2006). How we, as citizens, researchers, health workers, policy advocates, politicians, or fellow humans, respond to this health crisis is shaped by how it is narrated.
  • But is this a proliferation of hybrids that never finally resists nature-culture binaries? Do the society-nature couplings in their theoretical titles function by way of one term’s explanation for the other, the way socio-biology and human ecology tend to collapse culture into organicist explanatory frames? Or do they radically re-describe health as a kind of quasi-object, imagined from the beginning as networks of co-constituting processes—material, semiotic, and social?[2] If the practical and ethical impetus of most critical fields for health discourse is to build a social and environmental justice or human rights approach to disease and wellness, how we theorize health and bodies matters.
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  • In my research on indigenous North American experiences with and responses to disproportionate incidences of adult onset diabetes, I encounter another set of critical takes on health. Native counter-discourses are pushing back against disempowering and ahistorical explanations for modern health crises in their communities, and generating comprehensive prevention and treatment strategies aimed at community, culture, relationships with land, sovereignty struggles, public policy, and food economies.
  • Creating accountability for health disparities at the level of government and economy—and nurturing a society that defends disease prevention for all—means interrogating modern dualisms as they have been inherited by academic disciplinarity and dominant cultural narratives about health.
  • nthropologists and other social scientists have been critical of reified genetic explanations for group health profiles, for whom it vaguely (or clearly) smacks of scientific racism (Sheper-Hughes 2004; Krieger 2001).
  • When genes and biopathology research monopolize funding and public understanding of elevated incidences of diabetes and its complications in Native North Americans absent social or environmental context, it produces a narrow, racialized, and naturalized narrative that obscures accountabilities outside of the bodies of victims. Yet, genes are decidedly not what have changed since the 1930’s when diabetes was virtually non-existent in indigenous societies in North America.
  • Biomedical experts are not asking what, environmentally or socio-historically, has produced chronically sedentary bodies and created a limited menu in Indian Country of canned meat, packaged, processed and sugary foods, white flour, and lard. They are not asking what has produced extreme poverty, or what structural constraints poverty sets up to restrict healthy diets, bodily movement, and access to healthcare. Their unit of analysis is, primarily, individual bodies deracinated from society, environment, history and their integrations.
  • As a crisis of hunger ensued subsequent to reservation confinement, government commodity food schemes began to dump unhealthy foods onto reservations in order to minimally and cheaply fill bodies that could no longer be fed by traditional food economies.
  • Food as a commodity is itself a novel human-nature configuration that entails many social, environmental, cultural, bodily, and spiritual losses. For many tribes, food is conceived as a web of relations entailing many obligations to human and nonhuman life, not just matter to be consumed.
  • Political ecology is from the beginning a critique of the dualisms upon which (capitalist) modernity hoists itself: human/environment, individual/society, mind(spirit)/matter, human/nonhuman, nature/culture, modern/primitive. Discrete human bodies become embedded in and shaped by environmental and social histories. Bodies, environments, and socio-political structures are not distinct entities to occasionally consider in conjunction, but already co-constitutive.
Arabica Robusta

anthropologies: Integrating Agencement/Assemblage into Political Ecology - 0 views

  • Thus, while there exists a general consensus that political ecology involves some sort of interaction between nature and culture (loaded terms to be sure), there is no agreement as to what each of these spheres encompasses and how, when and where interactions occur.
  • This essay will specifically examine assemblage theory as a way to bring together these supposedly disparate political ecologies and to overcome the pitfalls of sticking too rigidly to one theoretical camp, concluding with an example of how I used assemblages and political ecology together in my own research.
  • Marxian political ecology has often been criticized for either ignoring the “agency of nature” or placing too much emphasis on global capitalist processes at the expense of “the local” (see Bryant 1998; Zimmerer and Bassett 2003), with many political ecologists turning to Latourian actor-network approaches in order to overcome the structure/agency problem (see Murdoch 1995; Castree 2002, among others).
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  • In order to avoid the problems inherent in both actor-network and Marxian political ecologies, I will argue that a more careful reading of assemblage theory will allow for the creation of a political ecology that is both responsive to various types of agency and considers the relationship between local and non-local processes.
  • While this is one meaning of the French term, agencement also implies that these things do not come together in a static arrangement (or network), but have the ability to participate in processes by virtue of assembling, not least of which is disassembling and coming together with different things to create new assemblages and new processes (Phillips 2006). This is perhaps a key difference from apolitical network ecologies, as a focus on the agency of assembled objects provides a point for a theoretical marriage with more traditional Marxist political economy without sacrificing relationality or fetishizing the global (indeed, many tend to forget that Deleuze & Guattari drew heavily on Marx).
  • Indeed, framing local energy production as an assemblage allowed me to relate discussion surrounding agricultural subsidies in Vermont to seemingly disparate topics such as climate change in Africa and the relationship between oil consumption and national security, an important step that allows a paper to speak to audiences beyond its purported subject.
  • Indeed, perhaps because assemblages are human theoretical creations, I found it difficult to create a truly distributed agency that actually gave the same weight to non-human and non-living things; i.e. while it was easy to say what roles dairy farmers and politicians played in shaping energy production, it was difficult to imagine a purpose for cows and electric generators beyond their crude material functions.
    • Arabica Robusta
       
      This is the core problem of political ecology in general.
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    "Thus, while there exists a general consensus that political ecology involves some sort of interaction between nature and culture (loaded terms to be sure), there is no agreement as to what each of these spheres encompasses and how, when and where interactions occur. As Brian Grabbatin has written previously, scholars from many disciplines and theoretical interpretations have approached political ecology in many different ways."
Arabica Robusta

anthropologies: On Political Ecology - 0 views

  • How to explain a summer of sliding up and down scales within China—the national in Beijing, the provincial in Kunming, the prefectural in Baoshan, then down to the township, the administrative village, the natural village and finally the particular households each with their own dynamics and situations. By what other justification would I follow the cascading translation and mutation of policy through actors at various levels down to its ultimate manifestation at the local level, as well as the variegated, unexpected ways in which experiences feedback upwards into international conversation? And the hearing of stories all the way.
  • With a particular bent on the environment, it’s how to take all of these everyday details (a choice to grow coffee this year, a new concrete courtyard), all of the narratives—from peasant farmers, but also from NGO employees, government officials and policy makers, private actors—and tie them back into broader structures and frameworks, understandings of concrete small things enriched by concepts of space and scale.
  • How do you understand the walnut you are eating in a small village near the Myanmar border in southwestern China as a physical manifestation of a participatory development approach to poverty alleviation and environmental degradation, an approach conceptualized in distant metropolises such as Beijing or as far west as Rome, implemented by agencies in places, still remote from the village, like Kunming or even Baoshan? How was this approach molded by, and also to, a specific place and time, by and to the particular environmental policies within a certain nation-state context?
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  • There is the blizzard of implications which tumble out from that and, also, everybody knows how when the walnut trees grow tall they will shade out the corn, which has its own consequences upon food security. So how do you deconstruct, in a useful way, a whole world unto itself?
  • They were the old variety, slower to mature with a harder shell, but decidedly better tasting and with a higher price than the new kind which the project introduced more recently. Unsure myself of how to get at the meat, I watched her take one and crack it between her teeth. I tried. If you are not rigorous enough in your bite, you simply puncture one side of the shell and are obliged to pick at the nut through a narrow window, extracting tiny, unsatisfying fragments of the meat. But with enough pressure from multiple angles, the shell breaks away, leaving you with the inside whole, the individual sections of the nut still distinct yet connected.
Arabica Robusta

anthropologies: Dimensions of Political Ecology - 0 views

  • The few books dedicated to surveying and summarizing political ecology do an excellent job of identifying important foundational texts and explaining political ecology’s diverse origins from political economy, to cultural ecology and natural hazards research (Robbins 2004, 2012; Neumann 2005). However, these texts are not written to policing boundaries. Instead, the authors search for common questions, while celebrating the ways that political ecologists continue to branch out into unexpected topical, theoretical, and methodological territories. We too embrace this dialectical approach to political ecology by appreciating these expanding dimensions on the one hand, while emphasizing moments of unification on the other.
  • More specific edited volumes and special issues reveal a similar diversity, but focus on persistent and emerging themes such as feminism (Rocheleau, Thomas-Slayter, Wangari 1996; Elmhirst 2011), regional approaches (McCarthy and Guthman 1998; McCarthy 2005; Schroeder et al 2006), historical analysis (Offen 2004), ethnographic methods (Biersack and Greenberg 2006), and science studies (Goldman, Nadasdy, and Turner 2011). The dialectical process of doing and making political ecology, however, runs deeper than the printed page.
  • As active participants and co-founders of the Dimensions of Political Ecology: Conference on Nature/Society (DOPE) and its organizing committee, the University of Kentucky Political Ecology Working Group (UK-PEWG), we reflect on how these efforts strive to celebrate the multiplicity of approaches in political ecology, while searching for common themes.
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  • The reading list included foundational texts in political economy, cultural ecology, and natural hazards research, which allowed us to draw on and share our own diverse backgrounds. While we represented only three fields of PhD study, students had previously studied in programs as diverse as: biology, planning, environmental studies, religious studies, Latin American studies, and business administration. Drawing on our assorted expertise and a familiarity with common foundational readings, Dr. Robertson then guided us in discussions of review essays and research articles covering persistent and emerging themes in political ecology.
  • Walker, Peter A. 2005. Political ecology: where is the ecology.? Progress in Human Geography 29 (1):73-82. -----2006. Political ecology: where is the policy? Progress in Human Geography 30 (3):382-395. -----2007. Political ecology: where is the politics? Progress in Human Geography 31 (3):363-369.
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    "The few books dedicated to surveying and summarizing political ecology do an excellent job of identifying important foundational texts and explaining political ecology's diverse origins from political economy, to cultural ecology and natural hazards research (Robbins 2004, 2012; Neumann 2005)."
Arabica Robusta

anthropologies: Introduction: Page 17 and then some - 0 views

  • Anyone who has read about the formation of this thing we call “political ecology” has undoubtedly seen more than one reference to Blaikie and Brookfield’s oft-cited passage on the seventeenth page of the groundbreaking text Land Degradation and Society. They write: “The phrase ‘political ecology’ combines the concerns of ecology and a broadly defined political economy. Together this encompasses the constantly shifting dialectic between society and land-based resources, and also within classes and groups within society itself” (1987:17).
  • along with a focus on the dialectical tensions between nature and society.
  • I really like this tool analogy. For me, political ecology is not some movement, theory, or “camp” to follow. I personally don’t “believe” in political ecology any more than I do political economy, actor network theory, or a hammer for that matter. As the UC Santa Cruz folks argue, it is indeed a took-kit: something to be put to use. Political ecology is not a church, or a club, or some group that meets every Wednesday night to talk about “the environment” and then goes home to regularly scheduled programming. It’s not a slogan, that’s what I’m saying. It is a set of ideas, practices, methods and, yes, tools that can be brought to bear upon serious contemporary issues.
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  • For me, at least, it’s a tool that has been forged, refined, and employed by various craftspeople that have come before us—from Wolf and the late Alexander Cockburn to more recent smiths such as Lisa Gezon and Paul Robbins.
Arabica Robusta

Social Construction of Race = Conservative Goldmine - 0 views

  • As this ritualized game is rehearsed and replayed, it is worth taking stock of an essential but overlooked fact: the social construction of race is a goldmine for conservative political positions. The social construction of race is the gift that keeps on giving, far more helpful for conservative politics than for a progressive-liberal front.
  • What’s puzzling here is that should one pause to resist the denunciation, there is yet another counterattack: Oh, yeah, of course race is a social construction. Everything is. Everyone knows that. Perhaps in some bland sense everything is socially constructed. But that misses several points. Social constructions are very real, and to say something is a social construction is not to be equated with illusion or fiction. It also misses the point that some social constructions are more powerful and with more far reaching consequences than others. Last, it misses the whole idea, that “the social construction of race” should have never been a stopping point, but as a way to analyze the particular circumstances that result in current configurations.
  • Trouillot was developing in Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History–navigating between the equally untenable extremes that history is merely the documenting of retrievable fact and that history is merely just another story: Between the mechanically “realist” and naively “constructivist” extremes, there is the more serious task of determining not what history is–a hopeless goal if phrased in essentialist terms–but how history works. For what history is changes with time and place, or better said, history reveals itself only through the production of specific narratives. What matters are the process and conditions of production of such narratives. (1996:25)
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  • labels for height–short, medium, tall–are cultural constructions imposed on continuous variation (Race and global patterns of phenotypic variation). However, the implications of racial assignment are quite different from height assignment.
  • there is more than enough to explain one standard deviation, regression to population mean, and all the rest of the fancy statistical observations used to justify the notion of irremediable gap. Given how much we are starting to know about the links between sleep and performance, especially on mental agility, the new findings of Sleep, Race, Socioeconomics may even be enough to explain the gap.
  • Moreover, of course, the explanation is that it’s the smart people who make money. No mention of intergenerational inheritance, the scrapping of the inheritance tax, the decline on taxes for upper-income brackets with rates far lower than the Eisenhower 1950s. No mention of one of the prime movers for average wealth, differences in residential housing prices, and the bank loan and insurance redlining that was standard practice through the 1990s.
  • But the main problem is the naïve assumption that since race is a social construction, with the end of de jure and legal policies, everything should just even out. That it obviously has not leads to hand-wringing, to questioning the social construction of race, but none of this would be necessary if there had been less naïveté and more concrete political action from the beginning.
Arabica Robusta

Latour on Anthropology | Struggle Forever! - 0 views

    • Arabica Robusta
       
      Ecology points to an unattractive condition.  Why?  What does this mean?
Arabica Robusta

More than Guns, Germs, and Steel - Anthropology 2.5 - 0 views

  • Diamond has almost nothing to say about the political decisions made in order to pursue European imperialism, to manufacture steel and guns, and to use disease as a weapon. As a results, accounts like Guns, Germs, and Steel end up supplanting the real historical accounts like Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History:
  • Europeans and Americans would never have encountered these supposed bearers of a pristine past if they had not encountered one another, in bloody fact, as Europe reached out to seize the resources and populations of the other continents. (1982:18; and see blog-post Anthropology is Necessary)
  • The Jared Diamond of Guns, Germs, and Steel has almost no role for human agency–the ability people have to make decisions and influence outcomes. Europeans become inadvertent, accidental conquerors. Natives succumb passively to their fate. But in 2005 out comes another book from Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Suddenly choice and agency are back!
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  • I have not seen any evidence for Diamond being uncomfortable with the determinism he previously embraced. On the contrary, Diamond claimed Guns, Germs, and Steel was not environmental determinism. I also do not see Collapse as investigating agency–it is rather, for most cases, depicting how people “choose” to fail. So when Europeans “succeed” at colonialism, that was not their doing, nor their fault; when other societies falter, that was a choice to fail: “Taken together, the two books struck Frederick K. Errington, an anthropologist . . . as a ‘one-two punch.’ The haves prosper because of happenstance beyond their control, while the have-nots are responsible for their own demise” (A Question of Blame When Societies Fall, Johnson 2007). Or, “note the subtle shift (or less charitably the contradiction) between the ‘accident’ of conquest in Guns and the ‘choice’ of success or failure among Diamond’s Anasazi in Collapse” (Wilcox 2009:124).
  • Mitt Romney may not have read Jared Diamond’s books. Maybe he just saw the movie. But Romney delivers the essence–that root success is accidental and then “culture” provides the rest. Diamond recapitulates this view in his broadside at Romney, describing that “institutions promoting wealth today arose first in Eurasia, the area with the oldest and most productive agriculture.” They may be on different sides of the political fence, but both Jared Diamond and Mitt Romney–in Diamond’s words–”fail to understand history and the modern world.” And that’s scary.
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    "Halfway through teaching Guns, Germs, and Steel, I blurted out that it was academic porn-the costumes change, the props change, but in the end it's the same repeated theme. I don't think I am entirely crazy, even about the porn."
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