An Ecology of Difference. A Latin American Approach to

SustainabilityArturo Escobar

Department of AnthropologyUniversity of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA

And Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia, Bogotá.

Prepared for:

Panel on Ecological Threats and New Promises of SustainabilityFor the 21st Century

(Organised by Laura Rival) Queen Elizabeth House 50th Anniversary Conference,

New Development, Threats and PromisesOxford University, 3-5 July 2005.

Outline

1. Thinking from the Colonial Difference: An emerging Latin American framework

2. The nature of coloniality and the coloniality of nature

3. Political ecology from the perspective of the colonial difference.

4. Reconstructing environmentalist agendas

The Latin American Modernity/ColonialityResearch Programme

Thesis: Modernity cannot be understood without taking into account the colonial underside of modernity – the coloniality of power and knowledge which has determined the suppression of non-Eurocentriclocal histories and forms of knowledge (Dussel, Mignolo, Quijano).

The Latin American Modernity/ColonialityResearch Programme

Coloniality is, on the one hand, “what the project of modernity needs to rule out and roll over in order to implant itself as modernity and –on the other hand—the site of enunciation where the blindness of the modern project is revealed, and concomitantly also the site where new projects begin to unfold. Coloniality is [….] the platform of pluri-versality, of diverse projects coming from the experience of local histories touched by western expansion; thus coloniality is not an abstract universal, but the place where diversality as a universal project can be thought out, where the question of languages and knowledges become crucia.l”

Coloniality thus signals two parallel processes: the systematic suppression and exclusion of subordinated cultures and knowledges(the encubrimiento del otro) by dominant modernity; and the emergence, in the very encounter, of knowledges that have the potential to become the sites of articulation of alternative projects (enabling a pluriverse of social-cultural-natural configurations).

The Latin American Modernity/ColonialityResearch Programme

Border thinking entails moving beyond the categories imposed by Western epistemology (beyond eurocentrism) by focusing on subalternized knowledges from the side of the colonial differnce; it is a kind of thinking that moves along the diversity of historical processes

Thinking from the Colonial Difference

Proposition: “The colonial difference” is a privileged epistemological and political space for social transformation.

• Alternatives cannot be theorized only from inside modernity but from the perspective afforded by the colonial difference. The colonial difference exists in the spaces where Eurocentric knowledge and other knowledges meet, where new modes of thinking are created.

• The modernity/coloniality perspective is not only interested in “alternative knowledges” but also in “worlds and knowledgesotherwise.” It is not only interested in alternative modernities but also in alternatives to modernity (contra most intra-European views, from Giddens to Hardt and Negri); diversality instead of diversity within universality.

• Critical environmental/development studies practitioners need tobuild on the colonial difference by engaging in conversations with modernity from the perspective of difference and border thinking.

Modernity and the Coloniality of Nature

Proposition: It is in the nature of coloniality to enact a coloniality of nature.

• Classification into hierarchies (“ethnological reason”), with non-moderns, primitives, and nature at the bottom of the scale.

• Essentialized views of nature as outside the human domain

• Subordinating body and nature to mind (long-standing Judeo-Christian tradition; modern phallogocentrism).

• Seeing the products of the earth as the products of labor only, hence subordinating nature to human-driven markets

• Locating certain natures (colonial/third world natures, women’s bodies, dark bodies) in the exteriority to the Totality of the male eurocentric world.

• Subalternization of all other articulations of biology and history to modern regimes, particularly those that enact a continuity between the natural, human, and supernatural worlds –or between being, knowing, and doing.

Sustainability and Difference. Outline of a Political Ecology Framework

Expanded definition: Political Ecology as the study of ecological distribution conflicts (Martínez Alier).

• Yet three simultaneous transformations from imperial globality and global coloniality: economic, ecological, cultural. Consequently, three dimensions to thinking from the colonial difference:

—economic difference—ecological difference —cultural difference

• Hence political ecology becomes the study of economic, ecological, and cultural distribution conflicts.

• Resulting project: a pluriverse of economies, ecologies, cultures— diverse economies (JK Gibson-Graham)— diverse ecologies — diverse cultures/interculturality.

• Shifting talk of “diversity” to the distributive effects of difference.

The three dimensions of difference and diversity

A Diverse Economy (JK Gibson-Graham)

Reconstructing environmentalist agendas: The coloniality of nature as starting point for

thinking about sustainability

a) ethnographic investigation (After STS and anthro of development)

Proposition: Narratives of nature might provide a valuable standpoint for ethnographic studies of the coloniality of nature, particularly in the context of particular conservation-cum-development projects; they may provide basis for collaborative engagement with both local groups and environmental organisations and movements. Some questions to be asked include:

• What is the larger cultural worlds within which the narrative makes sense?

• How do communities and developers/conservationists understand nature, themselves and each other? How do development/environmental organisations mediate this understanding in contexts of power?

• These multi-sited, distributed studies entail development of near-native competence with both environmentalists/developers and local groups, including complex interpretation of the self-understanding and actions of both sets of actors within historical and cultural backgrounds.

Reconstructing environmentalist agendas: The coloniality of nature as starting point for

thinking about sustainability

b) some challenges• Based on the enriched knowledge of the ethnographer, how can environmental

organisations and communities be brought together into different dialogical situations and thus towards alternative collaborative approaches and projects?

• Issue of positionality: awareness of the political tasks the critical development/environmental practitioner takes on vis à vis both developers and communities.

• Negotiating the epistemological rift between anthropological interpretivism and development/conservation realism/positivism;

• Negotiating the epistemic rift between local groups’ episteme and organisation/ethnographer (modern) episteme (towards worlds and knowledgesotherwise, diversality)

• Performing the critique (questions of genre, strategy, destabilising and reconstructing policy; a network theory of output, entailing multiple translations and mediations )

• Reconciling modernist injunction to “organize” communities and “manage” the environment with non-modernist logics (place-based, non-logocentric or non-rationalist life practices); moving towards and ecology of difference approach.

Reconstructing environmentalist agendas:Summing up.

Provocation: Is gobalization the last stage of capitalist modernity or the beginning of something new? Remapping imperial globality and global coloniality through the politics of difference.

• Local models of nature are at the basis of many struggles struggles for the defense of economic, ecological, and cultural difference (e.g., ethno-ecological social movements). Here lies a type of critical border thinking that needs to be taken into account.

• Latin American political ecology’s ethical perspective entails a radical (epistemic) questioning of modernity and development. By privileging subaltern knowledges of the natural, this political ecology articulates uniquely questions of diversity, difference, and inter-culturality –with nature as central agent. At stake here is a politics of difference that aims at the cultural re-appropriation of nature through strategies such as those of social movements (Leff). An emergent Latin American environmental thought builds on the struggles and knowledges of indigenous, peasants, ethnic and other subaltern groups to envision the re/construction of local and regional worlds in more sustainable ways.

• Need to go beyond intra-European/modern perspectives on sustainability, to envision sustainability form the colonial difference. “Sustainability” becomes an instance of the de-colonial attitude: thinking from existing forms of alterity towards worlds and knowledges otherwise.