is escobar’s territories of difference good political ecology? on anthropological engagements with...

Social Analysis Volume 58 Issue 2 Summer 2014 78ndash107 copy Berghahn Journalsdoi103167sa2014580205 bull ISSN 0155-977X (Print) bull ISSN 1558-5727 (Online)

REVIEW ESSAYS

Is Escobarrsquos TerriTories of Difference Good PolItIcal EcoloGyOn Anthropological Engagements with Environmental Social Movements

Staringle Knudsen

Arturo Escobar Territories of Difference Place Movements Life Redes (Durham NC Duke University Press 2008) 465 pp ISBN 9780822343448

Arturo Escobarrsquos book Territories of Difference has rapidly attained a position as an authoritative and exemplary work about activist ethnography and social movements In it Escobar creatively summarizes and employs progressive theories to address larger issues such as modernization development and political ecology This extended review engages particularly with the bookrsquos ambition to address political ecology in the Colombian Pacific In what follows I challenge both readings of Escobar and arguments made in his book in order to propose alternative ways in which a political ecology can be conceptualized within anthropology

Territories of Difference has been met with considerable scholarly interest across the fields of anthropology geography sociology development studies and Latin America studies and it has largely received positive reviews and much acclaim Although most reviews note that it is a demanding read they generally praise the book for being a ldquomonumental achievementrdquo (Juris 2011 172) for providing ldquoa theoretically sophisticated and ethnographically rich anal-ysisrdquo and being an ldquointellectual tour de forcerdquo (Routledge et al 2012 143 145) for being ldquoan epic account of a social movementrdquo (Hale 2009 826) and ldquoan amazing book of scholarly dexterity and breadthrdquo (Flora 2011 201) and finally for providing ldquoan innovative method to the study of social movementsrdquo (Hamel 2010 1606) Cooper (2010 498) seems to summarize all this when he contends that ldquoTerritories will serve as an abundant and exemplary theoretical resource for activists and academics alikerdquo In this review I will spell out reasons why

Escobarrsquos Territories of Difference | 79

we should perhaps not consider it an exemplary work in terms of theoretical sophistication and ethnographic detail

The book obviously makes some very significant contributions and pushes some important agendas especially concerning the work of social movements in Colombia and the ways in which anthropology can engage with activism Territories is also a courageous attempt at integrating very different strands of thinking and an astonishing variety of thematic issues The first chapters in the book outline the context and ground for the work of social movements whose activities are more directly described and analyzed in the second half In addition to an introduction and conclusion the book has six chapters each with one word titles Chapter 1 titled ldquoplacerdquo is about place making and region making (partly as an antidote to much recent focus on lsquomovementrsquo and lsquoflowrsquo) The next chapter ldquocapitalrdquo draws on new Marxist theory to explore the workings of capital on the Colombian Pacific In the third chapter ldquonaturerdquo Escobar counterpoises ldquoplace-based ecological practicesrdquo to the ldquocoloniality of nature in modernityrdquo (8) He takes this dichotomous thinking further in the next chapter ldquodevelopmentrdquo where he argues that seen against a backdrop of development projects generated from the outside alternative development initiatives linked to social movements can be analyzed as ldquoacts of counterwork by locals hellip producing alternative modernitiesrdquo (10) Chapter 5 ldquoidentityrdquo sur-veys the ldquoknowledge about identities produced by the social movementsrdquo (11) while the last substantive chapter ldquonetworksrdquo focuses on how different social networks may have different characteristics In particular Escobar considers that most modern organizations are hierarchical and centralized while the social movements he has worked with can better be seen as ldquoself-organizing meshworksrdquo (34) Biodiversity is a recurring thematic throughout the book There is no separate theory chapter Instead longer theory discussions are interspersed with ethnography with major sections on economy (in ldquocapitalrdquo) epistemological positions (in ldquonaturerdquo) modernity and development theories (in ldquodevelopmentrdquo) and flat ontology (in ldquonetworksrdquo)

Reading and reflecting on Territories motivated me to ponder some general issues concerning anthropological writing knowledge production and the question of how anthropological knowledge can advance (if not lsquoprogressrsquo) and mature My discussion of this in the context of Escobarrsquos book is about what place we make for ethnography in our texts about reflexivity concern-ing the ethnographerrsquos role in lsquodialogicalrsquo or lsquoactivistrsquo projects like this about the use and interpretation of theory and about what criteria we should use to assess the quality of ethnographies of political ecology This is thus not another conventional review and I will not be discussing in detail all of the bookrsquos contributions Territories first caught my attention because I am myself currently working on biodiversity and social movements and was interested in finding exemplary texts on political ecology Since Escobar explicitly pres-ents Territories as a contribution to political ecology (6 21ndash22) I have read and assessed it as a work on political ecology For a review of the bookrsquos contribution to the issues of development and modernization I will refer the reader to Cooper (2010)1

80 | Staringle Knudsen

ldquoEthnographically Rich Analysisrdquo

The first issue that I want to broach is the place of ethnography in the book It is a long book 450 pages in all the main body of text being 312 pages How-ever this length does not translate into the rich ethnography one might have expected The main ethnographic story is about the work of PCN2 a social movement in which Escobar has somehow himself been involved Most of the ethnographic material presented is in the form of substantive generalizations Presentations on lsquoterritoryrsquo by black organizations at a lsquolandmark meetingrsquo in 1995 are conveyed by the following text ldquoAmong the elements emphasized were the river-based models of appropriation with their longitudinal and trans-versal dynamics (see chapter 3) the organizational process for the defense of the territory and the local knowledge patterns of mobility kinship and gender relations Their declaration of principles highlighted their right to a territorial strategy that built on traditional appropriation models in order to resist the onslaught by capital and the dominant culturerdquo (58)

There is of course nothing wrong about such a summary in and of itself It becomes problematic however when this is the general tone or mode of pre-senting ethnographic material throughout the entire book Put differently the ethnographic information we are provided with is already highly interpreted and generalized to the point of oftentimes obscuring when Escobar moves from ethnographic lsquofactrsquo to analysis Did the black organizations themselves express directly ldquotheir right to a territorial strategy hellip built on traditional appropriation models in order to resist the onslaught by capital and dominant culturerdquo (58) or is this an interpretation made by Escobar Without more concrete ethno-graphic description and evidence the line between ethnography and commentanalysis becomes blurred

The presentational mode exemplified above is by far the dominant mode of ethnographic exposition in this book Pieces of what I consider concrete evi-dence consist of the following individual narrativesinterviews (89ndash90 95ndash97 98ndash99 220 230ndash232 237ndash239 242 265) an individualrsquos role in early oil palm cultivation (76ndash78) myths and ritual (111 113mdashbut these are not really Escobarrsquos own observations) textsdocuments (156ndash158 184 187ndash195 223 251 302) e-mail (299ndash300) one extended case (177ndash179) and descriptions of meetings (254ndash258 267ndash268) In between there are certainly small snippets of concrete evidence typically presented as one-sentence statements by activists (in chapter 5 211ndash212 225 226 228 251) All in all the substantial chunks of concrete ethnography amount to only about 25 pages

Moreover except for six generalized schemes designed by PCN (60 134ndash137 148) and two standard topographical maps of the larger region there are no images figures or photographs in the book Although the politics of territo-ries and map making play an important role especially in chapter 1 we do not get a sense of what the maps produced by lsquoparticipatory mappingrsquo look like beyond Escobarrsquos generalized textual description of them (56)

The development and work of PCN is arguably the strongest and most cap-tivating ethnographic story in the book Yet except for the description of PCN


itself of the oil palm entrepreneur Don Primitivo (76ndash78) and of PCN activ-ist participation in one international and one national meeting there are no accounts of actors interaction or practice I will here especially focus on lsquoprac-tice in placersquo since this is important to Escobarrsquos own argument He devotes a whole chapter to place stressing the importance of ldquoplace-based cultural economic and ecological practicesrdquo (106) noting that ldquothere is an embodi-ment and emplacement to human life that cannot be deniedrdquo (7) Escobar further mobilizes Varelarsquos phenomenology3 to argue that ldquowhat most defines PCN is a continuous engagement with the everyday reality of Afro-Colombian groups grounded in the last instance hellip in the experience of the Pacific as a placerdquo (234) Alas how place and territory come to mean something to people through their daily practices is something we do not learn much aboutmdashthe only glimpses are through what a couple of individuals relate in ldquobrief personal vignettesrdquo (234) or narratives which Escobar himself in the introduction to the section considers sufficient evidence ldquoIn the personal narratives of activists the personal dimension of collective action starts with their early experience of difference discrimination and the sense of injusticerdquo (229)

In the fifth section in the ldquonaturerdquo chapter Escobar claims that ldquoterritory hellip embodies a communityrsquos life projectrdquo and that ldquofor activists biodiversity equals territory plus culturerdquo (146) Yet these assertions are not backed up by ethnographic evidence I find the whole section (145ndash153) suffused with such unsubstantiated claims and gross generalizations Considering the importance of the place-based conception of region-territory in Escobarrsquos overall argument this shortage of evidencemdashthe absence of a phenomenological sense of how practices in places are experienced and form the foundation for identities and politics and the lack of description as to what kind of activities and situations actors are involved inmdashis surprising At one level this surely is a question of style of writing Nonetheless one need also to consider what is sufficient evidence to support a claim The argument in the ldquocapitalrdquo chapter hinges on Escobarrsquos claim about there being ldquoalternative paradigms of productionrdquo (104) (other than capitalism) in the region but only one very shallow examplemdashthe ASOCARLET communitymdashis provided as evidence of this Reading his text I get the impression that what Escobar says about this community is based on informantsrsquo idealizing statements only

Overall my contention is that the way ethnography is presented in this book makes it difficult to see whether or not ethnography is primarily used to lsquoillustratersquo preconceived and ideologically informed conceptions Escobarrsquos previous work on lsquopost-developmentrsquo has received similar criticism Olivier de Sardan (2005 5) argues that the lsquodeconstuctivistrsquo approach of Escobar and others ldquotend[s] to pro-duce a caricature or reductio ad absurdum of the developmentalist configuration hellip [which] is not based on unbiased empirical enquiry hellip and leaves the door open to hellip risk-free generalizationsrdquo Pieterse finds that ldquoEscobarrsquos perspective on actual development is flimsy and based on confused examples with more rhetoric than logicrdquo (Pieterse 2000 180 cited in Cooper 2010 503)

My reading of Territories supports such a line of critique as overall discov-ery analysis and formulations of new insights are not driven by ethnography


but by theorymdasha point I underline below While the bookrsquos approach is explor-ative ethnography plays a surprisingly limited role in Escobarrsquos exploration of territories of difference Although lsquoconcrete ethnographyrsquo can never be neutral representations and may entail strategic choices to create authority in an anthro-pological text such a presentationmdashof interviews interactions life stories doc-uments rituals or mapsmdashallows for more interpretive openness In Territories the readers are given little material to think with Often in good monographs it is the rich presentation of concrete observations that take the reader in make alternative realities lsquograspablersquo and open new avenues for analysis

ldquoInnovative Method to the Study of Social Movementsrdquo

The claim about Escobar applying an innovative method to the study of social movements is related to his mediating between activistsrsquo views and critical theory ldquo[T]his book stands in favor of seeing social movements as important spaces of knowledge production about the world and of recognizing the value of activist knowledge to theoryrdquo (306) I will here rather consider this a tri-angle with critical theory Escobar and PCN in each corner and explore how a few challenges produced by this configuration are managed in the book First to what extent does Escobar reflect on his own role What seems clear is that Escobar considers it his role to facilitate dialogue between PCN knowledge and scholarly debates Also he is himself both a scholar and an activist with an ideological stance and a normative positionmdasha conflation that makes it dif-ficult to differentiate between Escobarrsquos views and those of PCN It remains unexplored in the book how Escobarrsquos own ideas and assumptions enter into both the empirical field and the larger ldquocollaborative projectsrdquo as he refers to them (307) To what extent is Escobar observing knowledges and ideas that he himself has fed into the social movement He writes that ldquomy relation to PCN remains close to this dayrdquo (x) and in the acknowledgments section he makes clear that he has long-standing and close relations to a number of PCN activ-ists He stresses how much he has learned from them but how much have the activists learned from Escobar and critical theory We learn too little about the character of this relationship between Escobar academic collaborators and activists to be able to assess this Further to what extent do the activists lsquomoldrsquo their views to fit popular agendas of lsquocritical scholarshiprsquo global environmental NGOs and so forth In sum the book is methodologically unclear since we learn very little about the authorrsquos role as an activist

To get a sense of Escobarrsquos very normative and dichotomous perspective I refer the reader for example to the last paragraph of the ldquocapitalrdquo chapter where he contrasts ldquomeshworks of activists local groups ecosystems and other actorsrdquo with ldquothe most recalcitrant and anachronistic forms of capital devel-opment and the staterdquo (109ndash110 see also 32) The whole text is so suffused with normative imprint that at certain points it moves from being irritating to amusing as when Escobar writes that ldquoscientific definitions of biodiversity emphasize the various levels of destructionmdashgenetic species and ecosystemrdquo


(139ndash140 emphasis added) The standard scientific definition of biodiversity focuses instead on there being three levels at which biological diversity is orga-nized (see eg Farnham 2007) Many scientists may lament the lsquodecreasersquo in biological diversity but they do not define biodiversity by its destruction

All in all using a very idealistic politically charged and fashionable vocab-ulary Escobar expounds a very simplistic and dichotomist conception of good-versus-evil forces in society ldquoPolitics of place is a discourse of desire and possibility that builds on subaltern practices of difference for the construction of alternative socionatural worlds it is an apt imaginary for thinking about the lsquoproblem-spacersquo defined by imperial globality and global colonialityrdquo (67) While this pretty much sums up the bookrsquos analytical argument it also poten-tially impacts the authorrsquos interpretation of ethnography resulting for exam-ple in a consistent idealization of activists and their views And if the intention is to let political ecology be informed by informantsrsquo voices I think Escobar does not succeed in showing this through the ethnography he presentsmdashsimply because we hear so little of the informantsrsquo voices as noted above

Another facet of the triangle (critical theory-Escobar-PCN) is the relation between critical theory and PCN Escobar repeatedly identifies congruence and overlap between PCN and ldquocritical scholarshiprdquo (x) or ldquoprogressive thinking in ecologyrdquo (149) He writes ldquoHere again one finds a high degree of consistency between the expertsrsquo view and that of social movements such as PCNrdquo (152) But what does this mean What are the implications What if the Escobar-the-ory-informants triangle had been constituted otherwise What if Escobar held other norms or if he had mobilized lsquoliberal theoryrsquo in place of lsquocritical theoryrsquo or if the social movement had supported very different views How much does the activist view actually challenge anthropological knowledge when it is seemingly already largely congruent with it

We would probably all like to see ethnographic practice as somehow engaged and having an imprint on the world as having the potential for mak-ing a difference But the ethics of engagement is not necessarily self-evident Nancy Scheper-Hughes (1995) lashed out at anthropologyrsquos inability to engage with political issues to take a stance on the conflicts observed in the field She held that as social beings we exist in the world as ethical beings and that ethics therefore exists prior to culture even making it possible (ibid 419) She envi-sioned a ldquonew cadre of lsquobarefoot anthropologistsrsquordquo (ibid 417) who would not be pacified by cultural and moral relativism and she exemplified this with her own engagement during her fieldwork in Brazil and South Africa

Scheper-Hughesrsquos position has been criticized for being a vision that ldquois vaguely Marxist in inspiration but diluted as well as transformed into descrip-tive categories good guys and bad buysrdquo (Friedman 1995 422) On the same note Robins (1996) argues in his critique of Scheper-Hughesrsquos intervention that it is not easy to be sure that one takes the lsquorightrsquo side (see also Ramphele 1996) In my ongoing work on social movements protesting against various power plant projects in the Black Sea region of Turkey I have identified three differ-ent views among activists and environmental NGOs one anti-capitalist (fairly similar to PCNrsquos views) one nationalistanti-imperialist (especially seeing the


development of energy projects as the machinations of the US and Israel to get control of Turkish land and water) and one urban professional-business-friendly perspective (Knudsen 2014a) If I were to collaborate along the lines suggested by Escobar with one of these groups which one should I choose Were I to take Escobarrsquos dictum ldquothinking about the project in terms of the valu-ation and analysis of the movementrsquos thoughtrdquo (307) seriously what would my collaborative analyses with the nationalists look like

In his comments on Scheper-Hughesrsquos intervention Friedman further con-tends that the primacy of ldquo[e]thical first principles hellip is not at all apparentrdquo and that ldquo[e]ngagement demands analysis of the way the world worksrdquo (ibid) Scheper-Hughes does not present enough evidence to assess whether her activ-ism is well-founded or not which is related to ldquoher apparent indifference to the question of methodologyrdquo (Harris 1995 424) A Turkish partner whom I cooperated with in my work on energy projects and social movements has become increasingly involved with left-leaning groups whose ideological posi-tion she largely shares However I think that it is important to keep a distancemdashto see the left-leaning groups as positioned and their theories and concepts (also) as objects of analysis For instance when they invoke the specter of lsquoneo-liberalismrsquo as they often do what do they mean by that Where do their ideas come from What is the effect How does that mobilize some actors but also prevent cooperation with others Furthermore their interpretations of events intentions and structures as with those of other actors should be scrutinized and held up against evidence Theories of conspiracy abound in all camps and it can be poor science to select some and elevate them to lsquotheoryrsquo

Returning to the Colombian Pacific are there other groups holding different views with whom Escobar could have cooperated If so why did he choose PCN What are the interactions between different groups and relations between perspectives The way I read Escobarrsquos text he shows no critical distance to PCN He is for example either unable or unwilling to analyze documents produced by PCN (103ndash104) as an ideological statement Rather he focuses on how this PCN text contains a ldquoremarkably similar notionrdquo about ldquosustainable developmentrdquo as a scholarly text by a Mexican ecologist (103) One effect of Escobarrsquos ideological stance and lack of distance is his tendency to romanti-cize PCN and the Pacific black population taking a lsquonoble savagersquo perspective on their knowledge and practices ldquoThese traditional production systems hellip have had a built-in notion of sustainabilityrdquo (9) This of course is a concept problematized extensively within anthropology (Hames 2007) and his earlier work has been criticized for the same tendency (Cooper 2010 503) Escobar has recently admitted in his authorrsquos response in a book review symposium ldquothat the choice of what is lsquodifferentrsquo is not without problems hellip Of particular interest to Power hellip would have been a fuller account of lsquocompeting visions from belowrsquordquo (Routledge et al 2012 151) Again however Escobar chooses not to discuss the rationale for and implications of his choice

I engage the debate about activist anthropology here because it demon-strates that such activism clearly comes with challenges concerning ethno-graphic practice and analysis Although Scheper-Hughesrsquos engagement was


different from Escobarrsquosmdashthe former focused on direct intervention in the field the latter on promoting dialogue between activistsrsquo views and scholarly theorymdashboth make assumptions about lsquogoodrsquo and lsquoevilrsquo forces assumptions that are not allowed to be challenged because the researcher has taken a stand that privileges some interpretations over others Analysis thus becomes lsquostraightforwardrsquo and does not confront much resistance as it lapses into simple dichotomous explanations of how lsquopeoplersquo fight against lsquocapitalrsquo and the lsquostatersquo Does this not violate core anthropological principles such as the importance of trying to avoid preconceptions and of tracing the complexities of social life

ldquoTheoretically Sophisticatedrdquo

Escobar engages an impressive amount of theoretical approaches and epistemo-logical positions in Territories of Difference As he has demonstrated before for example in ldquoAfter Naturerdquo (Escobar 1999) he has an enviable capacity to draw together various strands of emerging lsquoprogressiversquo theories Many will find his review of lsquoepistemologies of naturersquo (122ndash128) very helpful I find however that he often stumbles when he moves from programmatic statements to a level of operationalization of theory I will here particularly argue that his interpretation and use of theory in discussion and analysis of materiality nature-culture and networks is inconsistent with the sources to which he refers I will also contend that it is a problem that many important analytical concepts remain undefined

Both in his discussion of epistemologies and toward the end of the book Escobar argues in favor of an emerging lsquoneorealistrsquo or lsquonew materialistrsquo position This trendmdashexemplified I think by the non-representational theories of Latour Law Mol DeLanda and others and more extremely by Henare et al (2007)mdashis part of the lsquoontological turnrsquo in anthropology and social sciences in general In this view the nature-culture dichotomy is thought to be deconstructed and the material is accorded an active role in the construction of different realities through relations (DeLanda 2006) associations (Callon 1986 Latour 1993 2005) enactments (Law 2004 Mol 2002) or performance (Abram and Lien 2011) This approach considers reality as constructed not of essences but of relations of man-ifold (also non-human) lsquoactantsrsquo (Latour) or lsquocomponentsrsquo (DeLanda) that form lsquonetworksrsquo lsquocollectivesrsquo (Latour) or lsquoassemblagesrsquo (DeLanda) This research program seems to have gained momentum during the last 10 to 15 years espe-cially in Europe and particularly in the UK However I think this ontological turn has not manifested itself in good ethnographies While I consider Molrsquos (2002) The Body Multiple to be particularly successful despite some obvious limitations (politics role of larger-scale dynamics) many studies that claim to work in this direction end up making conventional analyses of human narratives (eg Lavau 2011 Swyngedouw 1999) Materiality is conspicuously absent from their inves-tigations despite claims to the contrary4 So how well does Escobar manage to produce a neorealist or new materialist ethnography

With regard to the culture-nature issue Escobar states that ldquothis chapter [on place] is concerned with what could be termed the making of a socionatural


worldrdquo (29) and that ldquothere are no separate biological and social worlds nature and culturerdquo (309) He also writes about the ldquonature-culture regimerdquo (111 138 154) However this non-representationalist thinking is not pursued when he discusses knowledge of nature in the ldquonaturerdquo chapter Here he rather articulates the conventional social constructivist view that ldquonature is culturally constructedrdquo (112) He briefly outlines a ldquoLocal Model of Naturerdquo which ldquomay be seen as constituting a complex grammar of the environmentrdquo forming ldquoa cultural coderdquo and concludes that ldquothe environment is a cultural and symbolic constructionrdquo (115) In my view his outline of this local model of nature based in large part on ethnographic work by other scholars tends toward describ-ing one coherent homogeneous model or cosmology and does not allow for variations multiplicity tensions material agency and so on This is the ethno-science take on local knowledge (see Berlin et al 1973 Conklin 1962) that has been criticized for equating knowledge too much with linguistic categories and ignoring situated practice (Ellen 1993) Escobar has added to this linguistic understanding of local knowledge a pitch of romanticismmdashthe ldquoecological ethicrdquo (118) of the black groups forming the backbone of a ldquodecolonial view on naturerdquo (154) Put differently his basic assumptions about the local model of nature are clearly based on an understanding of culture and knowledge as being organized along linguistic principles

Thus Escobar seems to expound a classical version of social constructivism (not easily situated within either of the positions on lsquonature epistemologiesrsquo that he discusses in the same chapter) The stance that he takes here contrasts starkly with two positions that he elaborates and draws on later in the book (1) a Varela-inspired perspective on embodied cognition and ldquoembodiment and emplacementrdquo (7) and (2) a DeLanda-inspired promotion of assemblagenet-workmeshwork theory Both Varelarsquos cognitive-phenomenological approach and DeLandarsquos relational ontology typically define themselves in opposition to language-based theories of knowledge We can see this if we go to these sources themselves Varela (1999 17) states that ldquocognition consists not of representa-tions but of embodied actionrdquo According to Varela it is through situated embod-ied action within an environment that knowledge about that environment is gained not as Escobar puts it through a ldquocomplex grammar of the environmentrdquo (115) And DeLanda (2006 3) asserts that social entities should be ldquotreated as assemblages constructed through very historical processes hellip in which language plays an important but not constitutive rolerdquo More radically he holds that ldquo[l]anguage should be moved away from the core of the matterrdquo (ibid 16)

Escobar concludes the ldquonaturerdquo chapter by claiming that the political ecolo-gies of social movements ldquoarticulate uniquely questions of diversity difference and interculturalitymdashwith nature as central agentrdquo (155) However he provides no evidence to substantiate his claim about the agency of nature The descrip-tion we have had of materiality thus far in the book is a fairly old-fashioned account of the geological and biological history of the Paciacutefico Biogeograacutefico (33ndash42) which Escobar from what I will consider an antindashanti-realist position defends as necessary to explain how ldquo[p]laces are thus [results of] coproduc-tions between people and the environmentrdquo (42) However the description on


the preceding pages gives little substance to such a purported co-production but rather reverts to lsquopurersquo nature Analytically therefore nature and culture remain separate and purified

Thus Escobarrsquos descriptions of a local model of nature and of the biological and geological environment are not congruent with the lsquonew materialismrsquo that he argues to be part of He makes a more direct attempt (based in large part on his 1998 article ldquoWhose Knowledge Whose Naturerdquo) to put these new materi-alist and network theories into play in his analysis of the social movement and the biodiversity discourse This is initially more promising Following DeLanda (2002 2006) he outlines in the ldquonetworkrdquo chapter a lsquoflat ontologyrsquo perspective on networks self-organization meshworks systems theory and so on This is a dense and complex chaptermdashinteresting but also frustrating Space prevents me from tracing all of its threads but a focus here on how hierarchy and materiality are portrayed will illustrate some of my concerns

Escobarrsquos analysis of biodiversity networks (or assemblages) goes along these lines ldquoIf the first set of sites produces a dominant view that could be said to be globalocentricmdashan assemblage from the perspective of science capital and rational actionmdashthe second creates lsquothird world national perspectivesrsquordquo (282) In addition to these two assemblages he also identifies ldquobiodemocracyrdquo advanced by ldquoprogressive NGOsrdquo (282) and social movements that empha-size cultural and political autonomy (282ndash283) We can already see here how difficult it is to stick to a consistent definition of assemblages Are assem-blages constituted of sites perspectives actors or something else altogether Overall in this chapter concepts such as lsquonetworksrsquo lsquoviewsrsquo lsquoassemblagersquo lsquoperspectiversquo lsquointerrelated sitesrsquo lsquopositionrsquo lsquodiscoursersquo and lsquodiscursive forma-tionrsquo slide into each other and are used interchangeably However whatever concept Escobar uses the new materialist agenda disappears the networks he describes are purely social networks He also mobilizes Latourrsquos (1996)5 actor-network theory (ANT) (270) which is even more explicit than DeLandarsquos views about the important role of non-human actants in the construction of networks When Escobar discusses the ldquoceaseless negotiation between subal-tern and dominant actor-networksrdquo (284) he allows no role for the material in the story His description of networks descends to a very conventional social network analysis While the description of associations between human and non-human actors is central to the practice of ANT Escobar limits network theory to be about chains between human actors only He thus fails to make a new materialist monist analysis that would disturb conventional understand-ings of lsquonature versus societyrsquo When challenged in a book review symposium on the issue of why he has not better accounted for ldquohow lsquonon-humans actively contribute to constitute worldsrsquordquo he brushes this away saying ldquoI believe that this absence characterizes most accounts of socio-natural worlds even those frameworks specifically developed to deal with the non-human such as actor-network theoriesrdquo (Routledge et al 2012 150) I might agree that some accounts (see above) that claim to draw on or articulate ANT perspectives are less than successful but I find this a shallow explanation for the incoherence between on the one hand Escobarrsquos programmatic statements about socio-nature and on


the other hand his very conventional accounts about lsquothe social constructionrsquo of nature and about social networks

The novelty that Escobar more explicitly tries to bring into his analysis of social networks is an understanding of social movements as self-organizing meshworks which he contrasts with the hierarchical structures of state and capi-talism ldquoWhat takes place is an encounter between self-organizing ecosystems and people from below on the one hand hellip and hierarchical organizations of various sorts (eg capital and the state) on the otherrdquo (62) In the ldquobiodiversity networkrdquo (283) ldquosubaltern assemblagesrdquo are ldquobased on a design principle of interoperability among heterogenous organizations hellip which allows for intercon-nection of autonomous components decentralization resilience and autonomyrdquo (284) The degree to which assemblages networks or organizationsmdashwhatever you call themmdashare organized vertically (or rhizomatically) or hierarchically (or tree-structured) and the way in which self-organizing social movements can develop into more hierarchical social organizations are indeed important issues explored by Escobar I think that relational ontology especially of the ANT vein has shown little willingness to explore and compare the character of different networks Its proponents have been busy trying to identify all the threads that make up a network but perhaps they have ignored the the networkrsquos overall structure whether the threads amount to an ordered carpet or a yellow pullover or if they are more messy like threads floating around the floor of a tailor Does Escobar do a better job at describing how the threads come together to create networks with unique properties What I think he does is to assume that peo-plersquos real interests hopes and lives are constrained by the always hierarchical heavy black cloak of capitalism And he does this without following the threads or the relations without exploring the network that makes up capitalism

Escobar seems to take it for granted that DeLandarsquos social ontology assumes that lsquodistributed networksrsquo are not found in capitalism However it is precisely a core concern of DeLanda (2006) to show that markets and capitalism can take various forms also within modern Western capitalism Comparing Silicon Valley to Boston industrial systems DeLanda concludes that the first has a distributed character while the second is hierarchical (ibid 79ndash82) Economic anthropol-ogy has also demonstrated the wide variety in forms of the organization of markets (Polanyi 1957)

The second problem relating to Escobarrsquos operationalization of theory is that some important concepts and assumptions are left undefined and unexplored While Escobar deconstructs and explores alternatives to for example mod-ernization and development other important concepts that he widely invokes as powerful outside forces such as capitalism neo-liberal globalization and imperial globality are left undefined and unexplored Imperial globality is espe-cially called on to explain violence in the Colombian Pacific ldquo[L]ocal war is in part a surrogate for global interestsrdquo (20) He does not clearly define or provide references for the concept but he does mention that ldquoimperial globality is also about the defense of white privilege worldwide hellip the defense of a Eurocentric way of liferdquo (20) Again I do not find the claim well-substantiated Instead I am left with the impression that many of Escobarrsquos assumptions about the


larger dynamics and forces affecting the Colombian Pacific are related to his undeclared but clearly strongly held ideological position

Commenting on Corsonrsquos (2010) identification of alliances between business and conservation in USAID Laura Rival (2011 17) argues that ldquoCorsonrsquos sim-plistic anti-neoliberal approach does not allow her to go beyond the surface of rhetorical pronouncements or to engage the complex contexts in which rhetoric get transformed into activities and processes on-the-groundrdquo I think very much the same goes for the way that Escobar identifies the presence of neo-liberaliza-tion capitalism and imperial globality in the Colombian Pacific he claims the presence and effects of these (undefined) forces or dynamics without describing the causal relationships to processes that he has observed

Rivalrsquos critique echoes previous criticisms of political ecology for assuming too much about structures and their causal effects (Latour 2004 Vayda and Walters 1999) In formulating a list of precepts for a reformed political ecology Latour (2004 21) claims that a strength of political ecology as he envisions it is that ldquo[i]t does not know what does or does not constitute a system It does not know what is connected to whatrdquo Latour would then be likely to say lsquoI do not know what capitalism isrsquo I find both Escobarrsquos and Latourrsquos positions to be problematicmdashEscobar assuming in advance what capitalism as a system is and Latour not willing to assume anything at all about it Promising work in this field is being done by for example Igoe and Brockington (2007) who attempt to ward off definitions and uses based on popular and ideologically impreg-nated understandings of core concepts They make an explicit effort to define what for example lsquoneo-liberalismrsquo and lsquoterritorializationrsquo are and are not and how they can be identified in ethnographic material Escobarrsquos approach is rather to draw on popular and ideologically informed concepts and to refrain from giving them a precise definition

Furthermore Escobarrsquos use of analytical concepts is often not stable6 His application of concepts that he does define often slips gradually back to some conventional understandingmdashbe it of lsquonetworksrsquo (as social networks) of lsquonature-culturersquo or of lsquolocal knowledgersquo (as linguistically based) By invoking such lsquoinnovativersquo concepts he gives to a conventional analysis a veneer of innovation boldness and creativity Finally distinct yet similar concepts are used inter-changeably as mentioned above for networks and also with regard to lsquocapitalrsquo lsquoneoliberal capitalrsquo lsquopostmodern capitalrsquo and lsquoconservationist capitalrsquo What if any is the difference between these forms of capital Since the lsquonewrsquo concepts that Escobar employs slide back to conventional understandings and since other core concepts remain undefined the book is best described as a neo-Marxist political economy tempered by some meshwork analysis of a social movement confronting a homogeneously exploitative capitalism and a monolithic state

ldquoScholarly Dexterity and Breadthrdquo

Escobar explicitly identifies political ecology as one of the important schol-arly contexts for his book (21ndash22) and he cites some of the major overviews


and collections produced in this field However I think that he could have contributed better to advancement in this area if he had positioned his work more explicitly in opposition to Latour (2004) or Vayda and Walters (1999) Furthermore there exist works whose agendas are very similar to Escobarrsquos that have received much attention and he surely must be aware of them I am here thinking particularly of Anna Tsingrsquos Friction (2005) Like Territories it addresses nature-culture environmentalism capitalism social movements the nature of knowledge biodiversity and the nature of globalization and it explores avenues offor hope But it would be unfair to criticize only Escobar To build your own project (career) it may sometimes seem wiser to ignore than to relate to comparable projects Indeed in Friction Tsing fails to relate explic-itly to works upon which she bases her elaborations or that address the same agendas for example Latour on lsquonature-culturersquo or Debord ([1967] 1994) about lsquoworld-makingrsquo7 Would not anthropology and political ecology progress much more advantageously if major contributions like these could relate explicitly to each other Is ignorance of similar comparable projects good scientific practice

But then after all Escobar may not consider his work to be science He maintains that what is called for to address todayrsquos crises is not science but rather ldquodifferent forms of existencerdquo as promoted especially by social move-ments (311) and here supposedly brought out by Escobarrsquos collaborative effort with them He maintains that ldquo[m]ore than the validation of theories the goal of collaborative projects comes to be seen as contributing to the goals of par-ticular social and political movementsrdquo (307) But if this book is not a work of science what criteria shall we then use to assess it If it is lsquoaction anthropol-ogyrsquo why does Escobar not relate to the literature about this Do we think that it is acceptable to retreat from established criteria for evaluating academic knowledge when the project is the outcome of dialogue between scholarly texts and activist knowledge I think that there are at least two reasons not to renege on such criteria for assessing this book as an academic text First there is good reason to argue that cooperation with activists ismdashin principlemdashno different from anthropological projects that cooperate with other kinds of informants After all do we not increasingly consider ethnography generally as projects of cooperation and collaboration with informants Second Territories of Differ-ence is a highly academic text it is clearly intended for an academic readership not for activists Thus should not academic standards apply Graeberrsquos book Direct Action (2009) is probably a better ethnographic account of activist-ethnographer collaboration and it also retains the dialogical intention in its written output since it is crafted in a style accessible also to activists

Conclusions

In an exchange about the future of anthropological engagement with environ-mentalism Escobar once commented that environmental movements ldquocan be seen as elaborating an entire political ecologyrdquo further he asked ldquoDo we have a role to play in this intellectual and political projectrdquo (comment by Escobar


in Brosius 1999 292) I think Territories was intended to be his affirmative answer to that Escobar tries especially to show that anthropology has a role to play in elaborating theory in cooperation with social movements In pursu-ing this objective Escobarrsquos project might have grown too ambitious Territo-ries would have been a much stronger book of political ecology if it had been limited to an ethnographically based description of PCN and a discussion of social movements identity and development Yet even without the excessive discussions of complexity theory and epistemology the weak chapters about ldquoplacerdquo ldquocapitalrdquo and ldquonaturerdquo and the too long and overlapping discussions about the emergence of the biodiversity discourse (139ndash145 and 278ndash282) there would have remained major issues relating to reflexivity and politics the role of ethnography application of theory and dialogue with comparable anthropological projects

It is perhaps ironic that while Escobar himself stressesmdashcelebrates evenmdashbottom-up or self-organizing processes meshworks in place of hierarchy his own approach to ethnography is highly hierarchical Escobar has not designed his project in such a way that his ideological political and theoretical positions risk being rubbed against evidence By allowing PCN knowledge the same epis-temological status as expert knowledge the project does initially seem to offer the potential for an exciting dialogue between theory activist knowledge and ethnographic evidence However as there appears to be no tension between PCN perspectives and Escobarrsquos own position this potential dissolves One is left pondering what this project would have looked like if there was notmdashapparentlymdashsuch a high degree of congruence between its academic and social movement perspectives

I do accept that learning from knowledge produced by social movements is one way that we can work but I do not think that there is only one way to practice good political ecology or only one kind of role that anthropologists can legitimately take in the study of environmental social movements Further I believe that what counts as good political ecology can be demonstrated only through its practice the writing of monographs such as Territories being one such practice Thus what has this review of Territories taught me about politi-cal ecology If anything I think that it has brought out the major challenges facing the political ecology of environmental social movements Since there is no scope for elaborating widely on these challenges here I have below pro-vided references to works that take these discussions further

If we can say that the agenda of political ecology is to try to understand at one and the same time environmental and distributional issues current approaches to each of these seem to pull the field in opposite directions the study of the environmentmaterial toward relational ontology and method-ological individualism the study of power toward neo-Marxism or post-struc-turalist discourse studies While there have been many calls for reinvigorating the study of ecology (Vayda and Walters 1999 Walker 2005) the biophysical dimensions (Escobar 1999) and the material (Biersack 2006) in political ecol-ogy it seems to be particularly fashionable to turn to some version of ANT to reclaim the material However the material agency thinking that comes with


ANTrelational ontology sits uneasily with the largely structural approach of much political ecology that is often drawn on to understand the role of states and capitalism in environmental struggles (see Fine 2005 Gareau 2005 Rudy 2005 Taylor 2011) I think this uneasy mix is responsible for much of the tensions and imprecise operationalization of theories in works of political ecology Are there good alternatives to the dichotomous positions on issues such as capitalism represented by vulgarpopular Marxism (to some extent represented by Territories) and the anti-structuralist approach of ANT (Latour 2004) I think that sensible alternative approaches are being elaborated by scholars focusing on neo-liberalcapitalist conservation (eg Brockington and Duffy 2010 Igoe and Brockington 2007 Rival 2011) although they are not tak-ing account of the material There are also promising theoretical studies (see Castree 2002 Kirsch and Mitchell 2004 Tsing 2010) and empirical studies (eg Mitchell 2002) that attempt to bridge the gap between structurepowerhistory and material agency

Another major issue concerns how to engage with and represent social movements and activist knowledge This involves challenges pertaining to the danger of disclosing resistance ideology and strategies and the question as to whether there is a distinction between intervention and analysis Brosius (1999) for instance claims that the production of anthropological knowledge as discourse helps to reframe the world and therefore intervenes in the world Above I also discussed the tension between engagement and analysis and the related question of what criteria to use to select whichmdashif anymdashknowledge produced by social movements should be adopted as anthropological analysis Other scholars have been concerned with how political ecology can inform policies and the extent to which it should (Walker 2006)

As acknowledged by Escobar (24) anthropologists are latecomers to the theorizing of social movements Activist anthropology like Escobarrsquos seems to place high hopes on the transformative potential of social movements While embracing this hope we should realize that the concept lsquosocial movementsrsquo and the images related to it can also be problematic For instance where does one draw the line between environmental social movements and green NGOs In pursuing such questions there is potential for dialogue with studies of and engagement in social movements in WesternNorthern societies (eg Graeber 2009 Katsiaficas 2006)

Questions of identity and authenticity are almost always part of the agenda of environmental social movements Studies of situations where authenticity is at stake entail a major dilemma should our analyses expose through critical eth-nography the politics of authentication or will that risk hurting the cause of the mobilization (Brosius 1999) Perhaps there are constructive ways to collaborate in which the politics of authenticity can be seen as a creative dialectic between romanticized identitiesknowledges and a deconstruction of those same lsquoessen-tializedrsquo identities (Tsing 1999)

Centrally at stake in most environmental struggles are notions and experi-ences of place and landscape Anthropology more than any other discipline has made valuable contributions to our understanding of this Yet the way in


which the materiality of landscape and the politics of landscape are connected remains unexplored As becomes apparent in Territories of Difference an analy-sis of the politics of landscape becomes very thin when it is not supported by a detailed ethnography informed by the experience of the landscape While the human ecology of the 1960s and 1970s was unable to engage many of the agendas mentioned above and in Territories one thing that this literature should remind us about is the continued importance of detailed ethnography

We certainly have got work to do

Staringle Knudsen is a Professor of Anthropology and Head of the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen For over 20 years he has researched Turkish Black Sea fisheries covering issues such as knowledge technology science consumption state policies poverty and common pool resources Between 2004 and 2013 he was involved in interdisciplinary EU-funded work related to the management of European seas More recent research interests have included biodiversity and introduced species in the Black Sea and beyond the energy sector in Turkey with a particular focus on environmen-tal protest and international energy companiesrsquo handling of corporate social responsibility and assessment of how and to what extent neo-liberalization in Turkey impacts on natural environments

Notes

1 For a critical assessment of Escobarrsquos previous articulations on lsquopost-developmentrsquo see Olivier de Sardan (2005)

2 Proceso de Comunidades Negras (Process of Black Communities) is described by Escobar as a ldquonetwork of ethnoterritorial organizationsrdquo (10) working in the Colom-bian Pacific region

3 While Escobar explicitly draws on Varelarsquos phenomenology (234) he fails to pro-vide a reference However judging by the terminology presented and the fact that it is listed in the bibliography the work being preferred to is likely Varela (1999)

4 For my own effort in this direction see Knudsen (2014b) 5 In the back matter Escobar provides a reference for a 1997 article by Latour titled

ldquoThe Trouble with Actor-Network Theoryrdquo The source is a URL (httpwwwensmpfrfflatourpoparticlespoparticlep067html) that is no longer accessible The work in question is probably largely the same as Latourrsquos (1996) article ldquoOn Actor-Net-work Theoryrdquo

6 I am indebted to Mads Solberg for having pointed this out 7 For Tsingrsquos failure to acknowledge Debordrsquos work see Igoe (2010 378) Escobar also

writes about ldquothe process of world makingrdquo (129) without providing any reference


References

Abram Simone and Marianne E Lien 2011 ldquoPerforming Nature at Worldrsquos Endrdquo Ethnos 76 no 1 3ndash18

Berlin Brent Dennis E Breedlove and Peter H Raven 1973 ldquoGeneral Principles of Classification and Nomenclature in Folk Biologyrdquo American Anthropologist (ns) 75 no 1 214ndash242

Biersack Aletta 2006 ldquoReimagining Political Ecology CulturePowerHistoryNaturerdquo Pp 3ndash40 in Reimagining Political Ecology ed Aletta Biersack and James B Green-berg Durham NC Duke University Press

Brockington Dan and Rosaleen Duffy 2010 ldquoCapitalism and Conservation The Production and Reproduction of Biodiversity Conservationrdquo Antipode 42 no 3 469ndash484

Brosius J Peter 1999 ldquoAnalyses and Interventions Anthropological Engagements with Environmentalismrdquo Current Anthropology 40 no 3 277ndash310

Castree Noel 2002 ldquoFalse Antitheses Marxism Nature and Actor-Networksrdquo Antipode 34 no 1 111ndash146

Callon Michel 1986 ldquoSome Elements of a Sociology of Translation Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St Brieux Bayrdquo Pp 196ndash229 in Power Action and Belief A New Sociology of Knowledge ed John Law London Routledge amp Kegan Paul

Conklin Harold C 1962 ldquoLexicographical Treatment of Folk Taxonomiesrdquo Interna-tional Journal of American Linguistics 28 no 2 119ndash141

Cooper Jasper 2010 ldquoTerritories of Difference Place Movements Life by Arturo Escobarrdquo International Social Science Journal 60 no 197ndash198 497ndash508

Corson Catherine 2010 ldquoShifting Environmental Governance in a Neoliberal World US AID for Conservationrdquo Antipode 42 no 3 576ndash602

Debord Guy [1967] 1994 The Society of the Spectacle Trans Donald Nicholson-Smith New York Zone Books

DeLanda Manuel 2002 Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy New York Continuum

DeLanda Manuel 2006 A New Philosophy of Society Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity London Continuum

Ellen Roy 1993 The Cultural Relations of Classification An Analysis of Nuaulu Ani-mal Categories from Central Seram Cambridge Cambridge University Press

Escobar Arturo 1998 ldquoWhose Knowledge Whose Nature Biodiversity Conservation and the Political Ecology of Social Movementsrdquo Journal of Political Ecology 5 no 1 53ndash82

Escobar Arturo 1999 ldquoAfter Nature Steps to an Antiessentialist Political Ecologyrdquo Current Anthropology 40 no 1 1ndash30

Farnham Timothy J 2007 Saving Naturersquos Legacy Origins of the Idea of Biological Diversity New Haven CT Yale University Press

Fine Ben 2005 ldquoFrom Actor-Network Theory to Political Economyrdquo Capitalism Nature Socialism 16 no 4 91ndash108

Flora Cornelia B 2011 ldquoArturo Escobar Territories of Difference Place Movements Liferdquo Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 24 no 2 199ndash201

Friedman Jonathan 1995 ldquoComment on Scheper-Hughes The Primacy of the Ethical Propositions for a Militant Anthropologyrdquo Current Anthropology 36 no 3 421ndash423 in a special section titled ldquoObjectivity and Militancy A Debaterdquo

Gareau Brian J 2005 ldquoWe Have Never Been Human Agential Nature ANT and Marx-ist Political Ecologyrdquo Capitalism Nature Socialism 16 no 4 127ndash140


Graeber David 2009 Direct Action An Ethnography Oakland CA AK PressHale Charles R 2009 ldquoArturo Escobar Territories of Difference Place Movements Life

lsquoRedesrsquordquo Journal of Latin American Studies 41 no 4 826ndash829Hamel Pierre 2010 ldquoTerritories of Difference Place Movements Life Redes by

Arturo Escobarrdquo American Journal of Sociology 115 no 5 1604ndash1606Hames Raymond 2007 ldquoThe Ecologically Noble Savage Debaterdquo Annual Review of

Anthropology 36 177ndash190Harris Marvin 1995 ldquoComment on Scheper-Hughes The Primacy of the Ethical

Propositions for a Militant Anthropologyrdquo Current Anthropology 36 no 3 423ndash424 in a special section titled ldquoObjectivity and Militancy A Debaterdquo

Henare Amiria Martin Holbraad and Sari Wastell eds 2007 Thinking Through Things Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically London Routledge

Igoe Jim 2010 ldquoThe Spectacle of Nature in the Global Economy of Appearances Anthropological Engagements with the Spectacular Mediations of Transnational Conservationrdquo Critique of Anthropology 30 no 4 375ndash397

Igoe Jim and Dan Brockington 2007 ldquoNeoliberal Conservation A Brief Introductionrdquo Conservation amp Society 5 no 4 432ndash449

Juris Jeffrey S 2011 ldquoTerritories of Difference Place Movement Life Redes by Arturo Escobarrdquo American Anthropologist 113 no 1 171ndash172

Katsiaficas George 2006 The Subversion of Politics European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life Oakland CA AK Press

Kirsch Scott and Don Mitchell 2004 ldquoThe Nature of Things Dead Labor Nonhuman Actors and the Persistence of Marxismrdquo Antipode 36 no 4 687ndash705

Knudsen Staringle 2014a ldquoEnvironmental Activism above Politics How Contests over Energy Projects in Turkey Are Intertwined with Identity Politicsrdquo Invited talk at University of Arizona Tucson 31 March

Knudsen Staringle 2014b ldquoMultiple Sea Snails The Uncertain Becoming of an Alien Spe-ciesrdquo Anthropological Quarterly 87 no 1 59ndash92

Latour Bruno 1993 We Have Never Been Modern Trans Catherine Porter New York Harvester Wheatsheaf

Latour Bruno 1996 ldquoOn Actor-Network Theory A Few Clarificationsrdquo Soziale Welt 47 no 4 369ndash381

Latour Bruno 2004 Politics of Nature How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy Trans Catherine Porter Cambridge MA Harvard University Press

Latour Bruno 2005 Reassembling the Social An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory Oxford Oxford University Press

Lavau Stephanie 2011 ldquoThe Natures of Belonging Performing an Authentic Austra-lian Riverrdquo Ethnos 76 no 1 41ndash64

Law John 2004 After Method Mess in Social Science Research London RoutledgeMitchell Timothy 2002 ldquoCan the Mosquito Speakrdquo Pp 19ndash53 in Rule of Experts

Egypt Techno-Politics Modernity Berkeley University of California PressMol Annemarie 2002 The Body Multiple Ontology in Medical Practice Durham NC

Duke University PressOlivier de Sardan Jean-Pierre 2005 Anthropology and Development Understanding

Contemporary Social Change Trans Antoinette T Alou London Zed BooksPieterse Jan N 2000 ldquoAfter Post-developmentrdquo Third World Quarterly 21 no 2 175ndash191Polanyi Karl 1957 The Great Transformation Boston Beacon PressRamphele Mamphela 1996 ldquoHow Ethical Are the Ethics of This Militant Anthropolo-

gistrdquo Social Dynamics 22 no 1 1ndash4


Rival Laura M 2011 ldquoAnthropological Encounters with Economic Development and Biodiversity Conservationrdquo Working Paper No 186 Queen Elizabeth House Series University of Oxford

Robins Steven 1996 ldquoOn the Call for a Militant Anthropology The Complexity of lsquoDoing the Right Thingrsquordquo Current Anthropology 37 no 2 341ndash343

Routledge Paul Jaunita Sundberg Marcus Power and Arturo Escobar 2012 ldquoBook Review Symposium Arturo Escobar (2008) Territories of Difference Place Move-ments Life Redesrdquo Progress in Human Geography 36 no 1 143ndash151

Rudy Alan P 2005 ldquoOn ANT and Relational Materialismsrdquo Capitalism Nature Social-ism 16 no 4 109ndash125

Scheper-Hughes Nancy 1995 ldquoThe Primacy of the Ethical Propositions for a Militant Anthropologyrdquo Current Anthropology 36 no 3 409ndash420

Swyngedouw Erik 1999 ldquoModernity and Hybridity Nature Regeneracionismo and the Production of the Spanish Waterscape 1890ndash1930rdquo Annals of the Association of American Geographers 89 no 3 443ndash465

Taylor Peter J 2011 ldquoAgency Structuredness and the Production of Knowledge within Intersecting Processesrdquo Pp 81ndash98 in Knowing Nature Conversations at the Intersec-tion of Political Ecology and Science Studies ed Mara J Goldman Paul Nadasdy and Matthew D Turner Chicago University of Chicago Press

Tsing Anna L 1999 ldquoBecoming a Tribal Elder and Other Green Development Fanta-siesrdquo Pp 157ndash200 in Transforming the Indonesian Uplands Marginality Power and Production ed Tania M Li Amsterdam Harwood Academic Publishers

Tsing Anna L 2005 Friction An Ethnography of Global Connection Princeton NJ Princeton University Press

Tsing Anna L 2010 ldquoWorlding the Matsutake Diaspora Or Can Actor-Network The-ory Experiment with Holismrdquo Pp 47ndash66 in Experiments in Holism ed Ton Otto and Nils Bubandt Chichester Blackwell

Varela Francisco J 1999 Ethical Know-How Action Wisdom and Cognition Stanford CA Stanford University Press First published in Italian in 1992

Vayda Andrew P and Bradley B Walters 1999 ldquoAgainst Political Ecologyrdquo Human Ecology 27 no 1 167ndash179

Walker Peter A 2005 ldquoPolitical Ecology Where Is the Ecologyrdquo Progress in Human Geography 29 no 1 73ndash82

Walker Peter A 2006 ldquoPolitical Ecology Where Is the Policyrdquo Progress in Human Geography 30 no 3 382ndash395

Escobarrsquos rEsPonsE

Arturo Escobar

Thanks first of all to Professor Knudsen for his review of Territories of Differ-ence it denotes a thorough and thoughtful engagement with the work Thanks also to the journalrsquos co-editor Bjoslashrn Enge Bertelsen for his kind invitation to write this response Let us hope this engagement is useful to readers of Social Analysis as both the critique and my reply reflect open-ended and contested issues in the nature of social analysis as I shall hope to demonstrate It is often the case that in substantial critiques of a given work such as Knudsenrsquos review there is more to the disagreements than meets the eye Paraphrasing Viveiros de Castro we might speak of lsquouncontrolled equivocationsrsquo in these cases in the sense that while both author and critic disagree on many issues the grounds on which they disagree are not the same and thus the disagree-ments are not solely about what seems readily apparent I will not be able to address all of the aspects covered in the review (particularly Knudsenrsquos com-mentary on neo-materialist and network approaches which would require a treatment of its own) but will attempt to answer those which are most central

It seems to me that Knudsenrsquos criticisms could be arranged into three over-lapping categories that converge in his argument about my ldquolack of distancerdquo1 The first concerns critiques that refer to the place of ethnography in anthropo-logical research in general and in Territories of Difference in particular Many of these criticisms would seem valid to many perhaps most scholars and I also find many of them pertinent and useful The second category involves critiques stemming from epistemological and ontological assumptions regard-ing the nature of lsquotheoryrsquo and the role of lsquoreflexivityrsquo The third relates to dif-ferences in our respective views of the relation between theory the academy and politics (related but not reducible to the second set of criticisms) These three categories parallel those highlighted by Knudsen throughout the text most clearly in his opening statement I should make it clear from the outset however that especially for the last two categories there is no easy resolution to the debates In fact as I shall argue at these levels we are dealing with con-trasting epistemological and ontological assumptions about knowledge and the world with no absolute right or wrong position In a way we would need to lsquoagree to disagreersquo This in my view would go a long way toward explaining many aspects of Knudsenrsquos reading Agreeing to disagree in this sense would

98 | Arturo Escobar

be a method to control the equivocation that is a means to reveal the onto-epistemic grounds of our practices of conceptualization I would hope that my comments contribute to eliciting a commitment on our part to discuss the grounds of the disagreement and respond accordinglymdashto engage in a different politics of reading across positions

Ethnographic Writing versus Ethnographic Fieldwork or the Question of lsquoEvidencersquo

Let me paraphrase at the outset Knudsenrsquos main criticisms particularly those concerning ethnography Although perhaps an oversimplification my para-phrase is purposeful in the sense of helping me bring to the foremdashand partially disentangle and repositionmdashthe various levels of Knudsenrsquos commentary

Your ethnographic evidence is thin which leads to unsubstantiated claims and gross generalizations The line between ethnographic evidence and analysis is blurred and as such the work is a poor example of political ecology and social science research

You do not differentiate sufficiently between your views and those of the social movement with which you work Readers cannot make out which is which and as such your book is not a good model for scholarship You take stands that privilege PCN interpretations without submitting them to critical scrutiny (ie as one position among many)

A third closely related claim concerns my role in relation to PCN

You fail to reflect on your role vis-agrave-vis the social movement This lack of distance between researcher and researched can only lead to idealist and romantic stances on the side of the movement Your position is thus politically compromised Con-sequently the work is not a good model for scholarship on social movements

Let me begin with the claims about ethnography and ldquogeneral issues con-cerning anthropological writingrdquo In Knudsenrsquos view the bookrsquos ethnographic information ldquois already highly interpreted and generalized to the point of often-times obscuring when Escobar moves from ethnographic lsquofactrsquo to analysisrdquo The ldquoconcrete evidencerdquo provided is sparse Knudsen asserts that overall the book is ldquonot driven by ethnography but by theoryrdquo One of the main examples given to prove this point is my presentation of the social movement concepts of lsquoterri-toryrsquo and of the Pacific as a lsquoregion-territoryrsquo of ethnic groups (145ndash153 see also 52ndash62) This example makes clear to me a first distinction that goes some way toward explaining what is going on In my view there is a difference between ethnographic writing on the one hand (primarily based on the subjectsrsquo own voices or with substantial sections paraphrasing those voices) and writing based on ethnographic research but not primarily couched in the subjectsrsquo voices I refer to this distinction briefly (25) stating that the book follows the

Escobarrsquos Response | 99

latter rather than the former model The section in question is precisely a con-densed statement of substantial ethnographic research over several years on the production of the said concepts by the movement and of the movementrsquos distil-lation of that knowledge linking together autonomy territory life projects and region-territory (eg 148 fig 6) That being said Knudsen is right in that the reader would have been better served by a more detailed account of the activ-istsrsquo discussions leading to their conceptualization Generally speaking I concur with Knudsen that well-textured ethnographic writing (ie constructed largely through peoplersquos own voices) constitutes better anthropological writing in most senses But we should not forget that this is largely a professional convention a point to which I will return below2

Knudsen is also right in commenting critically on the theory-driven character of much contemporary anthropological writing This in my mind is an effect of the ascendancy of post-structuralism in post-Writing Culture Anglo-Ameri-can anthropology (and of the latterrsquos influence on many world anthropologies) and one that needs to be questioned I always try to make our PhD students aware of this feature and encourage them to write more ethnographically and not just to engage in theory-driven anthropological writing based on ethno-graphic research While this might mean that I am lsquoguilty as chargedrsquo Terri-tories of Difference introduces two correctives to this trend first it highlights activist knowledge production second it encourages us to be mindful of which kinds of theory we use going beyond the established Euro-American canons (following the analysis of the coloniality of knowledge discussed in the chap-ter on development) I should add thirdly that I do not believe that claims to ethnography and ldquoconcrete evidencerdquo are a good solution to the quandaries created by post-structuralism (more on this below)

Another major problem identified by Knudsen regarding the ethnographic basis of the book is the lack of first-hand ethnography on place making and the fact that I rely on othersrsquo ethnographies of place and nature (eg in the long sec-tion on the local models of nature 113ndash120) In this case I would also say that he is rightmdashup to a point As I believe I made clear it was not the bookrsquos inten-tion to provide such ethnography (as stated on 315n18 the book is not about the lsquoblack culturesrsquo of the Pacific) Relying on the available and excellent stud-ies by others (eg by Restrepo Losonczy and Ulloa) seemed to me a perfectly reasonable choice To provide my own account of the local meanings of nature and place-making practices was well beyond the scope of the book Indeed it would have been an altogether different project within ecological anthropology (one in which again Restrepo Losonczy and Ulloa have engaged admirably)

Finally still on the issue of ethnography I tend to agree with Knudsen that ldquoTerritories would have been a much stronger book of political ecology if it had been limited to an ethnographically based description of PCN and a discussion of social movements identity and developmentrdquo This is an issue that younger scholars in particular would likely do well to consider in other words what kinds of books do we want to write I have the hunch that this decision is rarely made on purely scholarly grounds or on pragmatic considerations alone such as the potential reception of the work At issue I suspect at least in many cases

100 | Arturo Escobar

are also deeply personal reasons and concernsmdashquestions of lsquoaffectrsquo as some theorists might be inclined to put it today and considerations of politics that overflow the academy Throughout his review Knudsen identifies what he considers lsquogood modelsrsquo for scholarship in political ecology and social move-ment studies I am sure that these are all excellent books yet given the above I prefer to believe that exemplars of onersquos scholarly practice do not conform to a unique or even widely shared set of scholarly criteria and concerns3

On Critical Distance and the Relation between Theory and Politics

These are the areas that I think can be characterized as lsquouncontrolled equiv-ocationrsquo To put it succinctly at least a great deal of the disagreement can be accounted for by contrasting ontological and epistemological assumptions about knowledge and the realmdashwhat in olden days readers might have called lsquoparadigmatic differencesrsquo My explanation will have to be brief but I hope to convey the sense of what I am talking about I start with a clue provided by Knudsenrsquos reliance on Olivier de Sardanrsquos criticism of the deconstruction of development and proposals for post-development in which I was involved along with others in the 1990s According to Olivier de Sardan this approach ldquois not based on unbiased empirical enquiryrdquo Knudsen goes on to quote from Pietersersquos well-known critique of my work on post-development as being ldquobased on confused examples with more rhetoric than logicrdquo Elsewhere I have responded to the multiple critiques of post-development as involving indeed paradigmatic differencesmdashthat is as stemming from dissimilar social theory frameworks whether liberal Marxist or post-structuralist (Escobar 2007) This is not the place to recast these debates however in what follows I attempt to bring these differences to light in a somewhat different manner taking a cue particularly from the alleged lack of ldquocritical distancerdquo on which Knudsen bases much of his critique of Territories4 I will do so by distinguish-ing between three models of scholarship critical distance distanced interiority and embodied reflexivity (or embedded criticality)

Critical distance This is the most common position in academia in general and in social movement studies It is epistemologically realist (although not positivist in those works belonging to critical traditions including many post-constructivist approaches) and ontologically dualist It assumes the existence of a discrete ethnographer and discrete subjects There is a real lsquoout therersquo at some level independent of the researcher the truth of which we can approxi-mate In this model ethnography is constituted by empirical research or lsquoevi-dencersquo plus logical argumentation (interpretation and analysis) The critical distance model follows the conventions of ethnographic neo-realism I call it lsquoneorsquo because with so-called postmodern anthropology reflexivity often became a higher form of realism Much of the scholarship written following this model is compelling and valuable yet it functions within a lsquonormal sci-encersquo mode in the Kuhnian sense It is the dominant perspective in the so-called leading journals in the English language


Distanced interiority I found this concept in my colleague Peter Redfieldrsquos recent work on the anthropology of humanitarianism where he reports on its use by Didier Fassin one of the leading authorities in this field Not having read Fassinrsquos work I can only mention a couple of features gleaned from Red-fieldrsquos (2013 166ndash167) account (see also Bornstein and Redfield 2010 31ndash32) It entails a sort of liminal critique or engaged critical realism that arises in situations in which the anthropologist shares deeply the subjectsrsquo concerns (the work of Doctors Without Borders in Fassinrsquos and Redfieldrsquos cases) but would also be willing to conduct uncomfortable critiques when necessary These critiques are seen as anchored in sound empirical research and complex theoretical analysis that avoid easy binary distinctions (eg between lsquovic-timsrsquo and lsquothe statersquo) Likened to a sort of teacutemoignage (witnessing) I believe distanced interiority constitutes a hopeful model for the scholarship of global conditions at present

Embodied reflexivity (or embedded criticality) This is an oxymoronic con-cept at first sight since lsquoembeddednessrsquo implies precisely a lack of distanc-ing In this version the lsquoindividual researcherrsquo cannot be fully independent of the object of study moreover there is no real lsquoout therersquo that could serve as an anchoring point for the kind of strong distancing envisioned by the first model of scholarship The epistemology of this model is neo-realist and most importantly the ontology is not dualist In a deep relational conception life is interrelation and interdependency through and through and by implication nothing pre-exists the relations that constitute it In other words there are no discrete entities independent selves or pre-constituted or self-standing objects at all You can see how this conception complicates lsquodistancingrsquo What enables the knowledge that we (academics) can recognize as such is the fact that besides our inevitable embeddedness in the world (lsquothrownnessrsquo in phenom-enologistsrsquo lingo) there is also always a distancing of sorts whether for histori-cal reasons (we all live partially in modern societies for which distancing and abstraction are a sine qua non) or for cognitive reasons (we are both Cartesiandetached and embeddedrelational beings)5 But this sort of embodied reflexiv-ity implies a different distancing from the dualist detachment entailed in the critical distance approach6

My classification is very tentative as the three models often overlap in each researcherrsquos practice yet all three are valid in their own way Nonetheless I want to emphasize a few points that explain at least partly Knudsenrsquos critique about my lack of distance and reflexivity vis-agrave-vis PCN First to paraphrase Law (2004) there is no lsquoout therersquo out there that is not enacted through particular practices (including method) Critical distance is made possible by historically intensified practices including ethnography and the use of logocentric language Foxrsquos (1991 8ndash9) contention that anthropologyrsquos fixation on ethnography as the method of anthropology par excellence (even in postmodern anthropology) shelters an ldquoartisan imagerdquo of the anthropologist hiding the fact that we are also produced ldquounder lsquofactory conditionsrsquordquo remains valid to this day in my view We need to see critical distance as an artifact of our practices7 Second if we adopt a relational view (embedded criticality) the relation to our subjects changes


significantly The idea of a social movement as an object of study disappears entirely Issues such as the ldquoidealization of activistsrdquo ldquokeep[ing] a distancerdquo taking ldquoa stand that privileges some interpretations over othersrdquo and the ldquoten-dency to romanticizerdquo the movement all take on a different meaning given that the relation between theory politics and the real changes form (Osterweil 2013)

Let me offer the following counter-narrative in lieu of a full explanation To the charge of romanticism leveled against those who speak about the need for alternatives to development I often say that the true romantics are the world bankers IMFers and developers of all kinds who still insist after six decades of failure that yet one more round of lsquodevelopmentrsquo no matter how qualified will bring about significant improvements Now I would add that a lsquoroman-ticrsquo is she who believes that our knowledge can be assessed on the basis of how disconnected we can be from our subjects who holds that lsquodistancingrsquo ensures more adequate knowledge who operates within a naturalized view of knowledge in which politics can take the form of lsquonot taking sidesrsquo truth corre-sponds to empirical evidence and the real exists independently of our actions In contrast those who place as much trust in popular or activist knowledge as in academic knowledge or who seek to validate their knowledge in relation to the subjectsrsquo knowledge more than any academic canon could be seen as more politically realistic A politics of the possible in any case should be as valid as a politics of the objectivist real (Gibson-Graham 2006)

Does this make science impossible It does if by lsquosciencersquo we understand only what conforms to the realist model of critical distance But it does not if we are willing to question the onto-epistemic arrangement by which only certain humans can speak authoritatively about the world Allowing othersmdashhumans and non-humansmdashto participate in both knowledge and politics signif-icantly unsettles this modernist arrangement (Blaser 2010 de la Cadena 2010)

I am aware that the above is not a completely adequate response to Knud-senrsquos review My hope is that by proceeding in this way we might at least agree to disagree in the sense of recognizing a multiplicity of methods that instead of enacting an academic lsquoone-worldrsquo ontology (Law 2011) might help to foster a pluriverse

Arturo Escobar is Kenan Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Uni-versity of North Carolina Chapel Hill His main interests are political ecology design the anthropology of development social movements and science and technology Over the past 20 years he has worked closely with several Afro-Colombian organizations in the Colombian Pacific in particular the Process of Black Communities (PCN) His most well-known book is Encountering Devel-opment The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (1995 2nd ed 2011) His most recent book in English is Territories of Difference Place Movements Life Redes (2008 2010 for the Spanish edition)


Notes

1 Unless otherwise specified double quotation marks are used to indicate text from the draft of Knudsenrsquos review provided to me by the journal

2 As in most reviews there is bit of selective reading as well For instance Knudsen expresses dismay at my saying that ldquoscientific definitions of biodiversity emphasize the various levels of destructionmdashgenetic species and ecosystemsrdquo (his emphasis from pages 139ndash140 of the book) he goes on to provide the ldquostandard scientific definition of biodiversityrdquo I agree that ldquodefinitionsrdquo was not the right choice of word I should have said ldquodiscoursesrdquo (scientific discourses of biodiversity do indeed lament the loss of diversity at these three levels) However to suggest that I do not know the standard scientific definition of the term amounts to very selective reading There are ample sections in the book where scientific debates on biodiver-sity are reproduced and analyzed (after more than 20 years of studying the subject writing about it in English and Spanish and having substantial scientific training myself it would be safe to assume that I know what scientists are talking about)

3 For instance among books that I have read recently I find Ogden (2011) Blaser (2010) and Dove et al (2011) to be good exemplars for work in political ecology But even these are very different from each other What might be a strength in one of them (say theory or ethnography or narrative style or design or politi-cal engagement) is not necessarily so in the others In terms of neo-materialist and ANT-type ethnographies I generally agree with Knudsen that the promise of neo-materialist approaches has not crystallized in novel ethnographic treatments Again here I find a situation in which the emerging theoretical approaches have solved some problems in social theory but have created others (I deal with the apo-rias of network approaches in Escobar [2008] specifically in terms of unresolved issues concerning agency connectivity historicity and contextuality) Some recent ethnographic treatments such as John Law and Marianne Lienrsquos (2012) work in progress on industrial salmon fishing in Norway are taking strides to bring together theoretical insights and empirical research Through a detailed and careful ethnog-raphy these authors deal more effectively than most with fundamental questions of the ontological turn What kinds of worlds are enacted through what kinds of practices What is the role of scientific and technological practices in generating multiple ways of lsquodoing naturersquo and creating lsquorealsrsquo How do we think politically about strategies for multiple reals within the experience of modernity itself

4 To summarize my response to the critics of post-development suggested that the liberalsrsquo critique was based on a defense of the Real (lsquopost-development advocates do not understand how reality actually works they are fixated on languagersquo) the Marxistsrsquo critique was based on a defense of the People (lsquoyou do not understand peoplersquos real needs and struggles which are material and not discursiversquo) and the post-structuralistsrsquo critique was based paradoxically on a defense of Truth or better science (lsquoyou Escobar et al do not understand how the development discourse works it is not homogeneous as you depict it but heterogeneous localized and contested etcrsquo) See Escobar (2007) for a lengthy response Some of these issues are also at play in Knudsenrsquos review

5 I find inspiration for the term lsquoembodied reflexivityrsquo in the work of Francisco Varela Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch who speak of embodied mindful and open-ended reflection Their work is based on both cognitive science and Tibetan Bud-dhism See Varela (1999) and Varela et al (1991)

6 This model exists in contemporary scholarship in many forms for instance Har-awayrsquos notion of lsquosituated knowledgersquo or anthropologist Xochitl Leyvarsquos method of


lsquoco-laborrsquo in Chiapas which constitutes a radicalization of participatory research approaches along relational lines Marisol de la Cadena (forthcoming) develops a notion of co-labor that acknowledges relationality See also Osterweil (2013) for a relational framework on ontological and epistemic politics

7 The consequences of academic practices (including those from critical scholarship) are being discussed in novel ways as in those works emphasizing epistemic decolo-nization in Latin America as well as in attempts focused on decolonizing method-ologies such as Smithrsquos (1999)

References

Blaser Mario 2010 Storytelling Globalization from the Chaco and Beyond Durham NC Duke University Press

Bornstein Erika and Peter Redfield eds 2010 Forces of Compassion Humanitarianism between Ethics and Politics Santa Fe NM School of American Research Press

de la Cadena Marisol 2010 ldquoIndigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes Conceptual Reflections Beyond lsquoPoliticsrsquordquo Cultural Anthropology 25 no 2 334ndash370

de la Cadena Marisol Forthcoming When Worlds Meet Making Excess Fit in the Andes Durham NC Duke University Press

Dove Michael R Percy E Sajise and Amity A Doolittle eds 2011 Beyond the Sacred For-est Complicating Conservation in Southeast Asia Durham NC Duke University Press

Escobar Arturo 2007 ldquolsquoPost-developmentrsquo as Concept and Social Practicerdquo Pp 18ndash32 in Exploring Post-development Theory and Practice Problems and Perspectives ed Aram Ziai London Zed Books

Escobar Arturo 2008 ldquoDevelopment Transmodernities and the Politics of Theoryrdquo Focaal 52 127ndash135

Fox Richard G 1991 ldquoIntroduction Working in the Presentrdquo Pp 1ndash16 in Recapturing Anthropology Working in the Present ed Richard G Fox Santa Fe NM School of American Research Press

Gibson-Graham J K 2006 A Postcapitalist Politics Minneapolis University of Min-nesota Press

Law John 2004 After Method Mess in Social Science Research London RoutledgeLaw John 2011 ldquoWhatrsquos Wrong with a One-World Worldrdquo Paper presented at the

Center for the Humanities Wesleyan University 19 September httpwwwhetero-geneitiesnetpublicationsLaw2011WhatsWrongWithAOneWorldWorldpdf

Law John and Marianne Lien 2012 ldquoDenaturalizing Naturerdquo Paper presented at the Sawyer seminar ldquoIndigenous Cosmopolitics Dialogues about the Reconstitution of Worldsrdquo University of California Davis 21 October

Ogden Laura A 2011 Swamplife People Gators and Mangroves Entangled in the Ever-glades Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press

Osterweil Michal 2013 ldquoRethinking Public Anthropology through Epistemic Politics and Theoretical Practicerdquo Cultural Anthropology 28 no 4 598ndash620

Redfield Peter 2013 Life in Crisis The Ethical Journey of Doctors Without Borders Berkeley University of California Press

Smith Linda T 1999 Decolonizing Methodologies Research and Indigenous Peoples London Zed Books

Varela Francisco J 1999 Ethical Know-How Action Wisdom and Cognition Stanford CA Stanford University Press

Varela Francisco J Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch 1991 The Embodied Mind Cognitive Science and Human Experience Cambridge MA MIT Press

rEPly to Escobar

Staringle Knudsen

In a short rebuttal like this it is difficult to respond fully to the profound considerations Escobar has undertaken in his response I am glad he acknowl-edges the value and relevance of several of my comments Moreover I appre-ciate his effort to seek to uncover deeper differences in assumptionsmdashin epistemologies and ontologiesmdashthat underlie our different stances Escobar suggests that ldquowe would need to lsquoagree to disagreersquordquo Actually I do not find it difficult simply to agree to many of the points he makes in his response on the challenges involved in theory-driven approaches on the relational character of fieldwork and of the world on the importance of acknowledg-ing the lsquofactory conditionsrsquo of anthropological knowledge production and so forth Yet I think there is some distance between the position he outlines in his response and the way that his project is articulated in the book I will try briefly to explain why

In his response Escobar primarily relates to my section titled ldquoInnovative Method to the Study of Social Movementsrdquo The most striking tension between Territories and Escobarrsquos response here relates to social movements as an object of study In his response he argues that ldquoif we adopt a relational view hellip [t]he idea of a social movement as an object of study disappears entirelyrdquo However in three of five endorsements on the back cover and in claims in Ter-ritories itself (24 258 259 311) the book is precisely presented as being such a study of a social movement and as contributing to social movements theory Now I am aware that Escobarrsquos ldquopoint of departure for working with activists is the political position of the movement not academic interestsrdquo (24) If so then I think that his take on social movements in the book is ambiguous as he tries to contribute to social movements theory but only from within a social movement stance Moreover is a researcherrsquos choice of a social movement with the lsquorightrsquo political position straightforward In a review article Edelman (2001 310) argues that anthropologists who work with social movements with which they share political sensibilities tend to take positions that ldquopotentially mask vital movement dynamics and may even limit researchersrsquo political usefulness for activistsrdquo Edelman furthermore asks ldquo[H]ow are we to understand move-ments about which we do not feel intensely protective hellip or which we may in fact not like at allrdquo (ibid 311)


I do not believe in a science that does not take sides I was in Istanbul during the demonstrations in June 2013 and I explicitly took a side in the conflict lsquoNot taking sidesrsquo is of course a fictitious position But I do not think that this is a question of either-or One can be involved but still try to take a step back and consider what is happening from a perspective not framed by the activistsrsquo own discourse Why are some Turkish activists whose position I feel sympathetic toward inspired by Harvey Agamben and Chomsky and what are the implica-tions of that There was an amazing mood of hope and excitement in Gezi Park in Istanbul during its occupation but the place was also extremely heteroge-neous with the activistsrsquo resistance toward the AK Party and its authoritative leader Erdogan being the only commonality among those there Why would it be legitimate to choose the perspective of only one of these protest groups for elaborating a lsquoTurkish insiderrsquo perspective on social movements and knowledge

Again I do not criticize Territories for taking sides but rather for not discuss-ing the justification for the choices made and the implications of the approach taken I do not claim as he alleges to in his third paraphrasing of my criticisms that his position is ldquopolitically compromisedrdquo I think it is analytically compro-mised Not because of the particular choice but because the reasons and impli-cations of the choice are not discussed For example it may be that in the Latin American context the academics-politics-social movements configuration takes on a special character This configuration might be very different elsewhere The issue of which social movement to work with may seem more acute and rela-tions between academics and activists may also be more tense

Latourrsquos and Lawrsquos politics are very different from Escobarrsquos Escobar starts from an explicit political stance and selects collaborators on the basis of that stance The politics of ANTrelational ontology is in some senses more radical in that it ideally starts out lsquonaiversquo and unpositioned claiming not to listen to the great narratives and theories about science modernity development and so forth with their associated dichotomies (this approach also comes with some challenges which I do not have space to discuss here) So the method of relational ontology has political implications and Escobar has in his book tried to harness the force of this approach However I think it ultimately fails since Escobarrsquos position is already political structured around some core dichotomies and embedded in theories that make great claims about the way the world is arranged

It is thus paradoxical that Escobar draws on Latour and Law to argue for relational approaches a flat ontology a methodological plurality and an epis-temological multiplicity It is precisely to counter and deconstruct gross gen-eralizations about capitalism state and science for examplemdashwhich I think abound in Territoriesmdashthat they have developed their approach I think Lawrsquos intent has been to call for acknowledgment of the fact that the world we study is messy and not easily captured by preconceived theories Thus we need to experiment with method and work on our epistemology to craft better accounts of the messy multiple world But I do not think that Lawrsquos position lends sup-port to saying that we should accept a multiplicity of incommensurable methods with different standards I think we should continue the conversation across the

Reply to Escobar | 107

board about what is good method and what is good ethnography And I do read Territories as an attempt to contribute to a conversation about method in anthro-pology it makes claims about how to study social movements development and so forth The claim Escobar makes in his response is for ldquowriting based on ethnographic researchrdquo (rather than ldquoethnographic writingrdquo) I think this choice has resulted in restricting rather than multiplying interpretation in closing the door to the messiness of the worldmdashto plurality ambiguity flux tension

Escobar claims that ldquoembodied reflexivityrdquo the model of scholarship that he seems to prefer is based on an ontology that is not dualist However as I indicated in my review I find that much of the analysis in the book is based on dualist ontologymdashnatureculture hierarchynetwork activistssocial movementscapitalismstate even goodevil Some of his analyses especially those leaning on Marxist perspectives may even tend toward objectivist real-ism and one-world ontology And his politics is at times a politics of the objec-tivist real (it is objectively true that capitalism and imperial globality are evil forces disrupting the livelihoods of people in the Colombian Pacific)

My review was written in the belief that we do sharemdashor in Escobarrsquos par-lance can have a conversation aboutmdashmethod and epistemology I am a bit weary of accepting a thinking that holds that there are differentpluralmultiple and mutually incompatible epistemologies in anthropology and that different standards apply to each of them Although there are different anthropological methods although ethnography and method are not coherent objects they still hang together somehow They are related and that is why we are able to prac-tice and teach anthropology and anthropological method I think we canmdashand shouldmdashhave ambition to do more than ldquoagree to disagreerdquo Our anthropologi-cal projects are not totally disconnected But we disagree on how we can create authority in anthropological texts I find it difficult to let analytical validity rest on the lsquorightrsquo political position And I am not convinced that ldquowriting based on ethnographic researchrdquo is a sound ideal Although Escobar claims that his book is ldquoan effort by the academy to be closer to the drummingrdquo (25) I cannot hear the drumming

References

Edelman Marc 2001 ldquoSocial Movements Changing Paradigms and Forms of Politicsrdquo Annual Review of Anthropology 30 285ndash317


we should perhaps not consider it an exemplary work in terms of theoretical sophistication and ethnographic detail

The book obviously makes some very significant contributions and pushes some important agendas especially concerning the work of social movements in Colombia and the ways in which anthropology can engage with activism Territories is also a courageous attempt at integrating very different strands of thinking and an astonishing variety of thematic issues The first chapters in the book outline the context and ground for the work of social movements whose activities are more directly described and analyzed in the second half In addition to an introduction and conclusion the book has six chapters each with one word titles Chapter 1 titled ldquoplacerdquo is about place making and region making (partly as an antidote to much recent focus on lsquomovementrsquo and lsquoflowrsquo) The next chapter ldquocapitalrdquo draws on new Marxist theory to explore the workings of capital on the Colombian Pacific In the third chapter ldquonaturerdquo Escobar counterpoises ldquoplace-based ecological practicesrdquo to the ldquocoloniality of nature in modernityrdquo (8) He takes this dichotomous thinking further in the next chapter ldquodevelopmentrdquo where he argues that seen against a backdrop of development projects generated from the outside alternative development initiatives linked to social movements can be analyzed as ldquoacts of counterwork by locals hellip producing alternative modernitiesrdquo (10) Chapter 5 ldquoidentityrdquo sur-veys the ldquoknowledge about identities produced by the social movementsrdquo (11) while the last substantive chapter ldquonetworksrdquo focuses on how different social networks may have different characteristics In particular Escobar considers that most modern organizations are hierarchical and centralized while the social movements he has worked with can better be seen as ldquoself-organizing meshworksrdquo (34) Biodiversity is a recurring thematic throughout the book There is no separate theory chapter Instead longer theory discussions are interspersed with ethnography with major sections on economy (in ldquocapitalrdquo) epistemological positions (in ldquonaturerdquo) modernity and development theories (in ldquodevelopmentrdquo) and flat ontology (in ldquonetworksrdquo)

Reading and reflecting on Territories motivated me to ponder some general issues concerning anthropological writing knowledge production and the question of how anthropological knowledge can advance (if not lsquoprogressrsquo) and mature My discussion of this in the context of Escobarrsquos book is about what place we make for ethnography in our texts about reflexivity concern-ing the ethnographerrsquos role in lsquodialogicalrsquo or lsquoactivistrsquo projects like this about the use and interpretation of theory and about what criteria we should use to assess the quality of ethnographies of political ecology This is thus not another conventional review and I will not be discussing in detail all of the bookrsquos contributions Territories first caught my attention because I am myself currently working on biodiversity and social movements and was interested in finding exemplary texts on political ecology Since Escobar explicitly pres-ents Territories as a contribution to political ecology (6 21ndash22) I have read and assessed it as a work on political ecology For a review of the bookrsquos contribution to the issues of development and modernization I will refer the reader to Cooper (2010)1


























































Conclusions

















Notes









References






























































Arturo Escobar



98 | Arturo Escobar






























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rEPly to Escobar

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Conclusions

















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References






























































Arturo Escobar



98 | Arturo Escobar






























Notes










References



















rEPly to Escobar

Staringle Knudsen












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Notes









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Arturo Escobar



98 | Arturo Escobar






























Notes










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rEPly to Escobar

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Arturo Escobar



98 | Arturo Escobar






























Notes










References



















rEPly to Escobar

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References










































Arturo Escobar



98 | Arturo Escobar






























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rEPly to Escobar

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98 | Arturo Escobar






























Notes










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rEPly to Escobar

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Notes










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is escobar’s territories of difference good political ecology? on anthropological engagements with...

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