Arturo Escobar

Arturo Escobar presents a new vision of design theory by arguing for the creation of what he calls "autonomous design"--a design practice aimed at channeling design's world-making capacity toward ways of being and doing that are deeply attuned to justice and the Earth.

Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds

Designs for the Pluriverse

How did the industrialized nations of North America and Europe come to be seen as the appropriate models for post-World War II societies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America? How did the postwar discourse on development actually create the so-called Third World? And what will happen when development ideology collapses? To answer these questions, Arturo Escobar shows how development policies became mechanisms of control that were just as pervasive and effective as their colonial counterparts. The development apparatus generated categories powerful enough to shape the thinking even of its occasional critics while poverty and hunger became widespread. "Development" was not even partially "deconstructed" until the 1980s, when new tools for analyzing the representation of social reality were applied to specific "Third World" cases. Here Escobar deploys these new techniques in a provocative analysis of development discourse and practice in general, concluding with a discussion of alternative visions for a postdevelopment era. Escobar emphasizes the role of economists in development discourse--his case study of Colombia demonstrates that the economization of food resulted in ambitious plans, and more hunger. To depict the production of knowledge and power in other development fields, the author shows how peasants, women, and nature became objects of knowledge and targets of power under the "gaze of experts."

The Making and Unmaking of the Third World

Encountering Development

Ariel Salleh

Federico Demaria

Alberto Acosta

Ashish Kothari

Pluriverso: Un diccionario del posdesarrollo es una estimulante colección de más de 100 ensayos sobre alternativas transformadoras a los actuales procesos dominantes del desarrollo globalizado, incluidas sus raíces estructurales ancladas en los valores de la modernidad, el capitalismo, el dominio estatal y lo masculino. En el imaginario posdesarrollista, el "desarrollo" ya no sería el principio organizador de la vida social. El libro presenta cosmovisiones y prácticas de todo el mundo en una búsqueda colectiva de sociedades ecológicamente sabias y socialmente justas. También ofrece ensayos críticos sobre una serie de falsas soluciones que quienes detentan el poder están proponiendo, en un intento de "ecologizar" el desarrollo. Entre los más de 120 coautores del volumen encontramos activistas, académicos y profesionales con una vasta experiencia en sus respectivas áreas de investigación.

Un diccionario del posdesarrollo

Pluriverso

In Pluriversal Politics Arturo Escobar engages with the politics of the possible and how established notions of what is real and attainable preclude the emergence of radically alternative visions of the future. Reflecting on the experience, philosophy, and practice of indigenous and Afro-descendant activist-intellectuals and on current Latin American theoretical-political debates, Escobar chronicles the social movements mobilizing to defend their territories from large-scale extractive operations in the region. He shows how these movements engage in an ontological politics aimed at bringing about the pluriverse—a world consisting of many worlds, each with its own ontological and epistemic grounding. Such a politics, Escobar contends, is key to crafting myriad world-making stories telling of different possible futures that could bring about the profound social transformations that are needed to address planetary crises. Both a call to action and a theoretical provocation, Pluriversal Politics finds Escobar at his critically incisive best.

The Real and the Possible

Pluriversal Politics

This is a collection of over a hundred essays on alternatives to the dominant processes of globalized development, including its structural roots in modernity, capitalism, state domination, and masculinist values. The book presents views and practices from around the world in a collective search for an ecologically and socially just world.

A Post-Development Dictionary

Pluriverse

Manuel Zapata Olivella

Antonio García

Eduardo Restrepo

Nina S. de Friedemann

Ignacio Torres Giraldo

Axel Rojas

Jaime Arocha Rodríguez

Margarita Serje

Roberto Pineda Camacho

Carlos Alberto Uribe

Andrea Pérez

Gerarndo Reichel-Dolmatoff

Juan Camilo Niño

Hernán Darío Correa

François Correa

Hernán Henao

Alicia Dussán de Reichel

Luis Guillermo Vasco

Mauricio Caviedes

Rogerio Velásquez M.

Aquiles Escalante

María Clemencia Ramírez

Darío Fajardo

William Villa

Mauricio Pardo

Tomo I

Antropología hecha en Colombia

Wendy Harcourt

"This book analyzes the mobilization of women's economic and social justice movements by challenging traditional views"--Provided by publisher.

Women and the Politics of Place

Alf Hornborg

James Greenberg

Michael Dove

Andrew Gardner

Mette Brodgen

Hanne Svarstad

Anne Ferguson

Charles Stevens

Josiah Heyman

Fiona Mackenzie

William Derman

Environmental issues have become increasingly prominent in local struggles, national debates, and international policies. In response, scholars are paying more attention to conventional politics and to more broadly defined relations of power and difference in the interactions between human groups and their biophysical environments. Such issues are at the heart of the relatively new interdisciplinary field of political ecology, forged at the intersection of political economy and cultural ecology. This volume provides a toolkit of vital concepts and a set of research models and analytic frameworks for researchers at all levels. The two opening chapters trace rich traditions of thought and practice that inform current approaches to political ecology. They point to the entangled relationship between humans, politics, economies, and environments at the dawn of the twenty-first century and address challenges that scholars face in navigating the blurring boundaries among relevant fields of enquiry. The twelve case studies that follow demonstrate ways that culture and politics serve to mediate human-environmental relationships in specific ecological and geographical contexts. Taken together, they describe uses of and conflicts over resources including land, water, soil, trees, biodiversity, money, knowledge, and information; they exemplify wide-ranging ecological settings including deserts, coasts, rainforests, high mountains, and modern cities; and they explore sites located around the world, from Canada to Tonga and cyberspace.

Political Ecology Across Spaces, Scales, and Social Groups

Arturo Escobar V.

El desarrollo y la antropología de la modernidad - La problematización de la pobreza : la fábula de los tres mundos y el desarrollo - La economía y el espacio del desarrollo : fábulas de crecimiento y capital - La dispersión del poder : fábulas de hambre y alimento - Poder y visibilidad : fábulas de campesinos, mujer y medios ambiente.

construcción y deconstrucción del desarrollo

La invención del Tercer Mundo

Les avancées récentes de l'anthropologie l'ont amplement démontré : la partition nature/culture qui fonde l'ontologie moderne occidentale et qui s'est imposée partout n'est pas la seule façon d'être au monde, encore moins la forme ultime de la civilisation. Un tel dualisme, qui sépare corps et esprit, émotion et raison, sauvage et civilisé, acteur et chercheur, humains et autres qu'humains, nous empêche de nous vivre comme partie du monde et nous conduit à le détruire. Dès lors, le projet émancipateur ne saurait se limiter à " changer le monde ". Il s'agit aujourd'hui de changer de monde. Des mouvements indigènes du Sud aux "zones à défendre" (ZAD) du Nord, les conflits politiques renvoient à des visions divergentes quant à la composition du monde et aux façons d'en prendre soin. Autrement dit, à un conflit ontologique. Comment, à l'heure de la crise écologique et face à l'échec de la mondialisation, penser cette dimension ontologique de la politique ? Comment engager notre transition, en dialogue avec luttes des peuples non-occidentaux et les cosmologies non-modernes, pour habiter en conscience le plurivers, ce monde des mondes qu'est notre planète ? Arturo Escobar, d'origine colombienne, est professeur d'anthropologie à l'université de North Carolina aux États-Unis. Il est mondialement connu pour sa critique du développement et d'une domination occidentale responsable de l'appauvrissement des mondes (Encountering development, 1996 ; World Anthropologies, 2006). Texte adapté avec la collaboration de l'auteur, préfacé et traduit par Roberto Andrade Pérez, Anne-Laure Bonvalot, Ella Bordai, Claude Bourguignon et Philippe Colin (collectif l'Atelier La Minga), avec l'appui du Réseau d'études décoloniales. Postface par Anna Bednik, membre du collectif ALDEAH (Alternatives au développement extractiviste et anthropocentré) et auteure de Extractivisme. Exploitation industrielle de la nature (Le Passager clandestin, 2016).

Sentir-penser avec la Terre

Walter D. Mignolo

This is the first book in English profiling the work of a research collective that evolved around the notion of "coloniality", understood as the hidden agenda and the darker side of modernity and whose members are based in South America and the United States. The project called for an understanding of modernity not from modernity itself but from its darker side, coloniality, and proposes the de-colonization of knowledge as an epistemological restitution with political and ethical implications. Epistemic decolonization, or de-coloniality, becomes the horizon to imagine and act toward global futures in which the notion of a political enemy is replaced by intercultural communication and towards an-other rationality that puts life first and that places institutions at its service, rather than the other way around. The volume is profoundly inter- and trans-disciplinary, with authors writing from many intellectual, transdisciplinary, and institutional spaces. This book was published as a special issue of Cultural Studies.

Globalization and the Decolonial Option

Candace Slater

Dianne Rocheleau

DIVCollection of essays offers a multi-layered understanding of the social complexities of rainforest practice and representation,./div

In Search of the Rain Forest

Gustavo Lins Ribeiro

Since its inception, anthropology's authority has been based on the assumption that it is a unified discipline emanating from the West. In an age of heightened globalization, anthropologists have failed to discuss consistently the current status of their practice and its mutations across the globe. World Anthropologies is the first book to provoke this conversation from various regions of the world in order to assess the diversity of relations between regional or national anthropologies and a contested, power-laden Western discourse. Can a planetary anthropology cope with both the 'provincial cosmopolitanism' of alternative anthropologies and the 'metropolitan provincialism' of hegemonic schools? How might the resulting 'world anthropologies' challenge the current panorama in which certain allegedly national anthropological traditions have more paradigmatic weight - and hence more power - than others? Critically examining the international dissemination of anthropology within and across national power fields, contributors address these questions and provide the outline for a veritable world anthropologies project.

Disciplinary Transformations within Systems of Power

World Anthropologies

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.

Place, Movements, Life, Redes

Territories of Difference

Originally published: 1995. Paperback reissue, with a new preface by the author.

Arturo Escobar

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