survival strategies for global times

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SURVIVAL STRATEGIES FOR GLOBAL TIMESSusie O'Brien aa McMaster University , CanadaPublished online: 25 Jun 2008.

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S U R V I VA L S T R AT E G I E S F O R G L O B A L

T I M E S

The Dese r t Wa l k fo r B i od i v e r s i t y , Hea l t h and He r i t age

Susie O’BrienMcMaster University, Canada

................Focusing on the 2000 Desert Walk for Biodiversity, Health and Heritage, this

paper considers possibilities for countering the temporal logic of economic

globalization with a different understanding of time shaped by the politics of

environmentalism and anti-colonial resistance.

In 2000, a group of about twenty people, mainly Seri and Tohono O’odham

Indians, took part in a 12-day, 230-mile walk from El Desemboque, Mexico, to

Tucson, Arizona. During the journey, organized in part to draw attention to the

growing problem of diabetes in their communities, the walkers ate only food

indigenous to the desert, while educating themselves about the complex

intersections of desert ecology, human health and culture. This essay reads the

Desert Walk as an intervention in a struggle for sovereignty over time � a means

of ordering human experience which is currently defined, according to the

prevailing currents of neoliberalism, by a tension between the narrative of

history, along with its animating ideology of progress, and the non-linear

temporality of post-industrial society that has been called, variously, ‘post-

modern’, ‘chronoscopic’ and ‘Corporate’ time. The Desert Walk challenges this

dominant temporal mode, I argue, not by transcending or resolving its contra-

dictions but rather by self-consciously harnessing them in order to recognize how

......................................................................................interventions Vol. 9(1) 83�98 (ISSN 1369-801X print/1469-929X online)

Copyright # 2007 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/13698010601173833

ecology

globalization

postcolonial

slow

time

desert walk

biodiversity

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time is embedded in other practices and processes. Nourished by a particular

culture and environment, the time of the Desert Walk is also crucially mobile and

progressive, granting its participants a stake in the promotion of a habitable

global future.

................

In March 2000, a group of about twenty people set off on a trek from El

Desemboque, Mexico, to Tucson, Arizona. Along the way, the walkers,

mostly Seri Indians from northern Mexico and Tohono O’odham from

southern Arizona, ate only food indigenous to the desert, both what they

could forage and what was given to them by people in the communities they

passed through. The 230-mile, 12-day trek, called the Desert Walk for

Biodiversity, Health and Heritage, had a number of goals, primary among

which was to draw attention to the growing problem of diabetes among

natives in the south-west. In this essay I want to draw out some of its many

implications as they relate to globalization. By ‘globalization’ I mean a

number of different things: first, I use the term in its most commonly

understood sense to refer to the rapid extension and intensification of

capitalism that have occurred over the last few decades. As Misao Miyoshi

(2004) and others have noted, these processes have had mostly disastrous

results, including an acceleration of the destruction of the environment and a

growing gap between rich and poor. In the wake of NAFTA (North

American Free Trade Agreement), the indigenous communities of northern

Mexico and the American south-west are all too familiar with these

problems. The Desert Walk represents one modest effort to address them.

Rather than an act of protest it is an effort to negotiate globalization from

the ground (literally as well as figuratively) up.

As an initiative that combined elements of cultural renewal, ecological

consciousness-raising and anti-colonial activism � all of which organizers

saw as essential to the goal of promoting community health � the Desert

Walk highlighted the networks of influence, or what John Tomlinson (1999)

calls ‘complex connectivity’, that characterize globalization. While the

realms of experience traditionally understood under the rubrics of ‘ecology’,

‘culture’ and ‘politics’ have always been intimately connected, the speed and

technological voracity of global changes in the last few decades have made

the connections ever tighter. Accordingly, the task of understanding those

changes and their consequences increasingly demands interdisciplinary

analytic frameworks. The Desert Walk is a particularly clear example of

an event whose significance can best be understood through a conjunction of

postcolonial and ecocritical analysis. Beginning with Alfred W. Crosby’s

Ecological Imperialism in 1986, the two critical approaches together have

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yielded valuable insights into postcolonial nature and culture, particularly in

relation to the effects of colonialism and globalization on space and place.

This essay attempts to extend those insights to an understanding of how

globalization shapes our experience of time. Specifically, it looks at the

Desert Walk as one arena in a struggle for sovereignty over global time.

As various critics have shown, the spatial effects of globalization are

complex and contradictory (see, for example, Dirlik 2001; Harvey 1989;

Massey 1994). Although there is some truth to the standard critique of

globalization � that it completes the colonial process of converting local

places into abstract space � the bleak scenario of a planet encircled by

endless identical strip malls hasn’t exactly materialized. As critics such as

Arif Dirlik point out, in addition to producing greater uniformity,

globalization also produces the intensification of some local differences,

through the expansion of consumer and tourist markets. While these

counter-movements seem mostly to support the consolidation of corporate

power, the conjunction of globalization and localization can also offer

occasions for resistance � through the creation of transnational alliances

between indigenous groups, for example (see, for example, Khasnabish

2004; Solnit 2004). The temporal politics of globalization is no less complex.

In some respects, we are still dominated by the imaginary time scheme of

colonialism which harnessed the world into a progressive vision of history.

Despite confident proclamations of its demise (see especially Fukuyama

1992), history continues to animate global time, in tension and sometimes in

collusion with the non-linear temporality of post-industrial society that has

been called, variously, ‘postmodern,’ ‘chronoscopic’ and ‘Corporate’ time

(see Nowotny 1994; Hassan 2003; Giroux 2003). Global time, then, is not

uniform but comprised of different temporal schemes whose tensions

establish a framework for the ideology and practices of neo-liberalism.

The Desert Walk challenges this dominant temporal mode, I argue, by self-

consciously harnessing its contradictions. In effect, it counters the time of

economic globalization with an alternate model of global time, shaped by

the temporalities of ecology and anti-colonial resistance.

G l o ba l t i m e : h i s t o r y g o e s co r p o r a t e

An article by James Surowiecki that appeared on the financial page of the

New Yorker in April 2004 provides a vivid snapshot of exactly what it is the

walk resists. Called ‘Punctuality pays’, the article describes a movement in

Ecuador that set out to reform Ecuadorians’ notoriously relaxed attitudes

towards time. Designed to combat a culture gripped by a ‘vicious cycle of

manana, manana ’, the Campana Contra la Impuntualidad worked on a

number of different fronts. Part of the campaign involved the distribution of

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posters through cities and villages in Ecuador entreating citizens: ‘Inject

yourself each morning with a dose of responsibility, respect, and discipline!’

(One has to imagine this slogan packs more of a punch in its original

Spanish.) The posters were a lead-up to a giant rally held in Quito on

1 October 2003, during which, at precisely 11:59 Ecuador Standard Time,

Olympic gold medal runner Jefferson Perez invited members of the crowd to

synchronize their watches. This largely symbolic gesture was followed by

more serious ongoing measures, such as the commitment by many

companies to bar late workers from meetings.

The punctuality campaign was no frivolous exercise in a country said to be

losing up to 3.4 per cent of its GDP or 2.5 billion dollars a year due to

chronic lateness. The nation was essentially failing in its task of performing

in a global economy whose ‘fundamental challenge’, Surowiecki suggests, is

to ‘coordinate the actions of millions of independent people so that goods

may be produced and services delivered as efficiently as possible’ (2004: 31).

We can gain useful perspective on the meaning of the campaign by looking

more closely at Surowiecki’s unequivocally enthusiastic take on it. In its tone

and argument, his piece neatly expresses the dominant ideology of global

time, and in particular its contradictions. Those contradictions are between

historical time and what for the purposes of my argument I’ll call, following

Henry Giroux, Corporate Time (see Giroux 2003).

The phrase is a metaphor, borrowed (without permission we can safely

assume) from the Oracle Corporation’s executive software that now goes by

the name of Calendar. The program allows companies to synchronize the

activities of employees by granting selective access to each employee’s

schedule. This allows an executive assistant, for example, to set up a meeting

between an employee and her boss, by looking for a free space in the

employee’s schedule and slotting the meeting in. The diligent employee will

consult her calendar throughout the day to see her changing slate of

activities. The appeal from an employer’s perspective is obvious: Calendar

facilitates the flexible organization of employees to fit the demands of a

rapidly changing work environment. From an employee’s perspective the

impact of Calendar is a bit less appealing: it allows a degree of managerial

intervention into the hours (and time, in many workplaces, is measured not

in hours but in 15-minute increments) of one’s workday that is no less

intrusive for being virtually invisible. In its capacity to control workers’

movements, Calendar recalls the Autocrat, the less subtly named nineteenth-

century clock designed, so its manufacturer claimed, to ‘[give] military

precision, and teach practicality, promptness and precision wherever

adopted’ (cited in Levine 1997: 67) and to ‘offer supervisors a means for

extending their disciplinary reach beyond their vision’ (Levine 1997: 68).

Corporate Time (the old name has the virtue of being more resonant and

creepy-sounding than Calendar) offers a useful metaphor for a broader social

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experience of time, driven by the imperative of economic productivity.

Infinitely flexible in its organizational capacity, theoretically democratic in

its application � Corporate Time can be adapted to allow everyone, from the

lowly factory worker to the CEO, access to everyone else’s schedule � it is

generally deployed hierarchically, allowing those at the top to dispose of the

time of those at the bottom with a few keystrokes. (In fact, factory workers

are unlikely to have any direct involvement with Corporate Time; their days

are still likely to be run according to nineteenth-century methods of temporal

discipline like punch-clocks. However, the schedules of factories are largely

dictated by corporate offices somewhere; hence the overarching power of

Corporate Time.) A feature of Corporate Time that is perhaps even more

disturbing is its capacity to penetrate employees’ privacy. The ‘daytimer’ or

daily journal, a mnemonic device that once symbolized an individual’s

freedom to pencil in appointments or musings or rants more or less at will,

has been usurped by an invisible overseer which now has the power to

inscribe itself at ever deeper levels of consciousness.

So, as a metaphor for a global temporal orientation, Corporate Time has

the following features: first, it operates according to the imperative of

economic productivity such that the market becomes, as Giroux puts it, a

‘‘‘master design for all affairs’’, profit-making becomes the defining measure

of responsibility, and consumption is the privileged site for determining

value between the self and the larger social order’ (James Rule, cited in

Giroux 2003: para. 19); second, it exercises a managerial function,

combining maximum flexibility at the top of the economic ladder with

minimum personal control at the bottom; and third, it insinuates itself into

the consciousness of its mostly involuntary subscribers on a minute-by-

minute level far more subtly than the Autocrat or its fictional counterpart,

the huge mechanical clock featured in Charlie Chaplin’s spoof of the

industrial workplace, Modern Times .

The connection to the nineteenth century is not lost in Surowiecki’s article,

which cites E. P. Thompson’s observation of how ‘the rise of the factory in

Great Britain profoundly altered people’s notion of time’, while conspicu-

ously leaving out Thompson’s critique of the ways in which factory owners

coerced (and, in many cases, failed to coerce) workers to comply with the

new regime (see Thompson 1967). Surowiecki acknowledges the likelihood

of some cultural resistance, but observes reassuringly that ‘in Western

Europe and the United States, people once had to learn to become punctual

too’ (2004: 31). Like the once-tardy workers who, by adhering to the

programme of Corporate Time, learned to arrive early at meetings,

Surowiecki allows that ‘maybe someday Ecuador will be welcomed into

the community of punctual nations’ (ibid.).

The prediction is interesting not just in its hectoring tone which, like the

posters urging Ecuadorians to inject themselves with a dose of responsibility,


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has an oddly Victorian ring to it. Equally interesting is the anachronistic idea

of progress that inspires it, rooted in the temporal framework of history.

Linear and lumbering, history makes an odd bedfellow to the sexier, more

fluid model of Corporate Time. Of course there is a sense in which the

persistence of historical time isn’t striking at all, any more than is the fact

that, in the age of computer time, some workplaces still rely on punch-

clocks. To risk straining a metaphor, it seems fair to say that, just as the post-

industrial service economy still needs physical labour (someone has to pick

the coffee beans to make the lattes that fuel the stockbrokers), the ephemeral

fibres of Corporate Time still need a strong ideology of growth and progress

to justify all the long hours at the office.

But history lacks the strength it once had, when it lent ideological

authority to the grand projects of colonization and industrialization. That

authority came from two sources. First, history’s universalizing code � its

empty homogeneous character, to borrow Walter Benjamin’s phrase �allowed it to corral vast areas of the world into the European civilizing

mission. In his book Provincializing Europe , Dipesh Chakrabarty describes

the process whereby history, a way of thinking about time that emerged in

conjunction with Western modernity, simultaneously incorporates non-

Western cultures and disenfranchises them by defining them as belated

inclusions in the global narrative of progress. Their inclusion came, he notes,

at the cost of all those temporal elements that cannot comfortably be

accommodated by the secular codes of history. This includes ‘practices in

which gods, spirits, or the supernatural have agency in the world’, which are

always assumed to be explained by particular contexts before being

translated into the universal language of history (Chakrabarty 2000: 72,

76). Thus, history works to assimilate diverse cultures and spiritual

traditions into a homogeneous code at the same time as it naturalizes

uneven economic development according to a linear narrative of civilization.

Its success in doing this, however, depended on its ability to temper its

teleological heavy-handedness with the promise of progress. In both its

Marxist and capitalist incarnations, history promised to set us free. That

promise fuelled, among other things, a sense of commitment to future

generations and, on a more practical level, an ideal of democratic education

committed to the goal of enhancing citizens’ potential for self-government. It

gave us a stake in the future, and a sense of responsibility to successive

generations.

As an idea that inspired some of the best and the worst projects of the last

few centuries, history is losing its power to make sense of our post-industrial

global society. Dominated by the abstract commodities of money and

information, the economy moves at a rate that can’t be measured in

traditional units of linear time. Moreover, technological developments are

proceeding at a rate that outpaces the ability of science to predict their

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consequences, widening what Thomas Homer-Dixon has called the ‘in-

genuity gap’ (2001: 1�3). Accordingly, our ability to imagine time as an all-

encompassing singular narrative slowly unfolding itself into a collective

future is eroding, fragmenting into an ever-shifting network of short-term

conditions: Corporate Time. Only, Corporate Time lacks the grand vision of

historical time. While it might facilitate a greater number of meetings, it does

not foster a sense of global solidarity; and while it provides a supple

framework to enable the spectacular production of wealth in the corporate

sector, it offers no provision to close the widening gap between rich and

poor. Neither does it provide any remedy to the problem of a deteriorating

environment: in a context where only short-term calculations make sense, it

becomes increasingly hard to imagine, and so guard against, the likelihood

that a technology or programme might harm future generations. This points

to the biggest limitation of Corporate Time, which is its incapacity to

imagine the future.

In short, Corporate Time supplies the software that keeps us going but

lacks the content that gives us a reason to do so. And so history lingers as a

heavy, slightly awkward figure, keeping everyone in line � like the ageing

former leader of a Communist state whose presence lends ideological

credibility to a post-ideological regime committed to the sacrilege of the

free market. Shorn of its sense of promise, however, history retains only its

menacing authoritarian flavour that offers brute back-up to the smooth-

talking cyber-commander of Corporate Time. Together, Corporate Time

and history keep the economy rolling, in part by fostering a prevailing mood

of crisis: the bizarre ‘if we don’t keep shopping the terrorists will have won’

rallying cry is just the most recent version of a long-running campaign to

threaten and cajole us to stay on the true path of civilization and progress.

The consequences of falling behind or refusing to comply with the dominant

economic paradigm are far graver for those in developing nations who have

the least access to the path of salvation through shopping.

The boost in crisis talk post-September 11 masks Corporate Time’s long

operation as a form of social control that encourages people literally to keep

in time. The push for the standardization of time in the nineteenth century

was justified in part by arguments that it would make it easier to mobilize

troop movements in the event of a national emergency (Kern 1983: 12).

Those who resisted standard time noted its capacity to, as one critic put it,

‘[go] beyond the public pursuits of men and [enter] into their private lives as

part of themselves’ (Levine 1997: 73). Then as now, the rhetoric of enhanced

security sought to enlist people’s cooperation in surrendering their autonomy

to the temporal dictates of corporate power. Moreover, as the example of the

Ecuadorian campaign illustrates, the nation state continues to do the bidding

of that corporate power in its administration of the discipline of postcolonial

economic development. GDP remains the quantitative marker that lets


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citizens know how their nation is ‘keeping up’ with the rest of the world. In

addition to its obvious limitations as a measure of national well-being (wars,

health crises and crime are all good for the bottom line), the GDP, like the

system of time that helps ensure its continual growth, harnesses diverse

regions and cultural groups into a single ‘empty and homogeneous’ national

economic programme based on a global standard.

Of course, just as there are pockets of resistance against the dominant

economic model, it is also possible to find rebels against the dominant system

of time. These include fundamentalists who challenge the unholy alliance of

history and Corporate Time by appealing to a more eternal order. On the

other side are counter-cultural critics who call for resistance against the

imperative for speed in the form of various Slow movements. There is a huge

difference between these two types of temporal rebels � both merit more

detailed consideration than I am able to give them here. What they have in

common, though, is their attempt to transcend the contradictions of global

time by a return to some purer temporal order, whether this is defined by the

authority of sacred tradition or by an idea of a natural environment in which

everyone marches (or lounges) to the rhythm of their own clock (see Honore

2004, for example). In fact, neither fundamentalists nor counter-culturalists

escape the contradictions of global time: fundamentalists adhere to the

dogma of history without its commitment to human development, while the

bucolic pleasures advocated by many proponents of Slow movements are

only available via the consumerist rationality of Corporate Time. I would

argue that what limits these movements is not their failure to escape or to

resolve the contradictions of global time, but rather the belief each promotes

that resolution is possible and desirable. One of the problems with history,

Chakrabarty notes, is the way it blunts our recognition that ‘the contem-

porary is actually plural, so radically plural that it is not possible for any

particular aspect or element to claim to represent the whole in any way (even

as a possible future)’ (2000: 88). This failure is compounded in Corporate

Time, which, while it may acknowledge the existence of different temporal

perspectives in the recognition that culture matters � ‘more’, as Surowiecki

admits ruefully, ‘than many bondholders wish it did’ � insists that it is ‘not

immutable’ but, like currencies, infinitely flexible to the demands of the

uber-culture of the market (2004: 31).

But if we admit with Chakrabarty that the contemporary is radically

plural we are still left with the problem of the future. In other words, if we

ditch entirely the idea of history, than where do we find the incentive for

collective hope? The Desert Walk offers one incentive not just in the sense of

what it accomplished for its twenty or so participants, but in a broader

metaphorical way. (Thinking metaphorically has its own temporal logic that

merits more serious study.) In brief, the Desert Walk offers a way past what

Jerome Binde in his essay ‘The ethics of the future’ calls ‘the tyranny of

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emergency’ which prevents us from recognizing ‘the emergency of the long

term’ � the dire consequences for human health and prosperity and the

environment of the continuation of current practices (Binde 2000: 56). The

Desert Walk responds to this emergency � not, significantly, by escaping the

contradictions of global time, but rather by engaging temporal disjunction

more fully, in order to recognize how time is embedded in other practices

and processes. Nourished by a particular culture and environment, the time

of the Desert Walk is also crucially mobile and progressive, granting its

participants a stake in the promotion of a habitable global future. Finally,

the walk fulfils an educational purpose that extends beyond its mandate to

raise awareness about diabetes in Native American communities. It also

offers a model of knowledge production that resists the creeping surrender of

public education to Corporate Time.

T he D e s e r t Wa l k a n d p u b l i c t i m e

50% of adults in the O’odham community suffer from Type 2 diabetes � the

highest rate of any ethnic group in the world. (Mansfield 2001: para. 5)

The Desert Walk challenges the dominant model of time most obviously in

its rejection of global fast-food culture in favour of the rhythms of local

ecology. During the walk, participants replaced their regular diet of

packaged, processed and imported food with desert fare like prickly pear,

boiled venison, tepary bean burritos and mesquite tortillas. Scientific studies

have credited these foods, with their slow glucose-release properties and high

fibre, for the near-absence of diabetes in south-western native communities

until about fifty years ago. But their benefits cannot be measured solely in

terms of biochemistry. As ethnobotanist Gary Nabhan points out:

If the native foods are worth eating only for their value in reducing blood sugar and

cholesterol levels, we might as well just extract their soluble, fiber-making genes

and insert them into some easy-to-grow, easy-to-prepare nutraceutical packaged

food. But they are also good for the land and good for our souls. (2002: 303)

The walk’s emphasis on food is inseparable from its connection to the

broader aim of restoring cultural traditions * traditions that are enmeshed

with food and the land. Just as the nutritional properties of the desert food

can’t be abstracted from the broader ecological and cultural context, cultural

traditions lose their force in the absence of the ways of life they traditionally

supported. Although songs and dances like the traditional rain ceremony had

persisted in the O’odham community, they were meaningless in the absence

of the crops for which they were performed. The walk was a chance to revive


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the culture through a re-engagement with the land that nurtured it. In

‘coming home to eat’, as the title of Nabhan’s book puts it, the walkers chose

consciously to recognize how their eating practices are embedded in

extensive ecological and cultural networks � the networks that fast food

encourages us to disavours. To frame the walk’s significance in temporal

terms, it did more than simply replace fast food with slow. It also challenged

the presentism of global time through its conscious evocation of an alien

time � the time of the Seri and O’odham ancestors in which past, present and

future co-mingle, and the mundane and the spiritual are firmly intertwined.

What is particularly interesting about the walk’s disruption of global time

is that it doesn’t wholly abandon it; rather, it subversively incorporates it.

Nowhere is this gesture more explicit than in the odd communion ceremony

the walkers celebrated as they crossed the US�Mexican border: in a parody

of a traditional bread-breaking ritual, they took hundreds of loaves of

Wonder Bread and Pan Bimbo and stomped them to dust. These breads,

Nabhan observes,

were the perfect manifestations of the vacuous nutritional promises of the

industrialized food that had sold our health down the river . . .They had popped

up and spread across the Americas in the thirties, replacing ashcakes, stottycakes,

and johnnycakes, baguettes, biscuits, and bagels, focaccias, puglieses, and pitas,

hand-shaped tortillas and dark, seedy harvest loaves of all shapes and sizes with a

phantom of one standard size, machine knifed into equally thick slices. A white

bread for white America, which sooner or later became so symbolic of the

dominant culture that Mexican restaurants would see Americans sit down at their

tables, and remove all corn and wheat tortillas, replacing them with a dozen slices

of Bimbo. (ibid.: 298)

Part of the effectiveness of the parodic communion lies in its violent removal

of the white bread from its banal secular context and, by making it part of a

spiritual ritual, its transformation into metaphor rich with the host of

cultural resonances, histories of conquest and memories of other tastes that

its soft pale texture works to conceal.

The symbolic value of the bread-stomping scene is complicated for me and

perhaps most readers, who have not, I suspect, recently encountered a slice

of Wonder Bread. The lost breads of the Americas, the tortillas, fresh

focaccias and harvest loaves, have all reappeared, at premium prices, in

health food stores and most major supermarkets. Few who shop at those

places will be able to relate to the experience of a Seri homemaker who went

to the local grocery store in search of something nutritious for her family and

found that ‘the shelves were stocked with sugary Zucaritas breakfast cereal,

Instant Lunch noodle soup, and giant plastic bottles of Coca-Cola [while

outside] a 5-year-old chewed a marshmallow candy’ (ibid.: 292). The issue

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here is not so much the persistence of the fast-food mass culture represented

by Wonder Bread but the unevenness of its distribution. While slow food

exists, its availability is still mostly restricted to the wealthy consumers who

live in places far away � in geography and in knowledge � from the

consequences of the industrialized food system on which the poor are

increasingly are forced to subsist:

After living successfully in the Sonoran Desert for thousands of years, the O’odham

now have the lowest per capita income of all U.S. reservations ($3,113) (Mansfield

2001: para. 9).

In asserting control over what and how they eat, the desert walkers share the

spirit of a growing slow-food counter-culture that celebrates the ecological

benefits of simple food, locally grown. But while the walk afforded its

participants a temporary immersion in a way of life outside the cultural and

economic mainstream, the lives they returned to are firmly embedded within

that mainstream. For the Seri and the O’odham � as for many if not most

indigenous people in the world today � escaping consumer culture to live off

the land is not an option. It is a cruel irony that, just as they and other

economically marginalized minorities are the groups least likely to be able to

buy the foods that sustained their ancestors, they are also the most

vulnerable to the shifting currents of the global economy. Statistical

indicators like the GDP and development indexes may be crude and even

inaccurate measures of social well-being, but they have undeniable sig-

nificance as markers of relative power in the world. Thus, we should view

the Desert Walk not simply as a bid to opt out of modernity and all its

dubious advantages; it also constitutes a demand on behalf of its indigenous

participants to be included, but on their own terms. Put another way, the

walk represents a movement out of what Jeremy Rifkin calls a ‘temporal

ghetto’, a symbolic place whose inhabitants, ‘confined in a narrow temporal

band, unable to anticipate and plan for their own future, are powerless to

affect their political fate’ (1987: 165).

To understand the significance of the walk as an assertion of political

agency, it is necessary to attend more closely to the act of walking itself, and

specifically to the meaning of collective walking. While gathering food from

the desert speaks to a temporal politics defined by the rhythms of the

physical environment as they are mediated by culture and biology, walking

links this conception to a different mode of time. Connected to the time of

history, this mode is linear and more distinctively modern, just as the

practice of walking for its own sake is largely a product of the modern world

(Solnit 2000: 14). Whatever else the walk was for its participants, it was an

exercise in hope, a physical and symbolic movement forward. By engaging

with the modern temporal perspective of the future, while simultaneously


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honouring the ecological time of their ancestors, the walkers not only

symbolically challenged the prevailing assumption of a single temporal

mode, insisting on the vitality of alternate temporal orders concealed within

the dominant; they also signalled through the strength of their steps their

refusal to be left behind in the economic, political and social worlds created

by that dominant order.

The Desert Walk engages with a long tradition of collective walks

characterized, as Rebecca Solnit suggests in Wanderlust: A History of

Walking , by a complex conjunction of ‘the iconography of the pilgrimage

with that of the military march and the labor strike and demonstration’

(ibid.: 58). On the one hand, The Desert Walk is a form of pilgrimage, a

‘walking prayer’, as one participant puts it, that is premised on the

assumption that the spiritual is not removed from the world, but takes on

bodily and geographical form (Nabhan 2002: 290). Though pilgrimages

have their place in virtually all religions, they have a particular resonance for

indigenous groups like the O’odham and Seri whose ancestral beliefs are

what religious historian Philip P. Arnold (1999) terms ‘locative’ � grounded

in place, in contrast to the ‘utopian’ world view of Christianity and other

major religions. (Utopian, of course, means ‘no place’, allowing � almost

demanding � the kind of infinitely expansionist impulse that, Arnold argues,

helped to fuel European colonialism.)

For the O’odham and Seri, the walk over the sacred territory of their

ancestors is a form of spiritual affirmation that is also intensely political. In

its claim for collective sovereignty over land that has undergone successive

stages of privatization and colonization, the Desert Walk also recalls a longer

history of mobile protest that includes nineteenth-century British socialist

rambling clubs, Gandhi’s 200-mile-long Salt March and, more recently, the

anti-globalization demonstrations in Seattle, Washington DC and Quebec

City. Whether urban or rural, these walks challenge the prevailing view of

territory as property. Walking, Solnit notes,

focuses not on the boundary lines of ownership that break the land into pieces but

on the paths that function as a kind of circulatory system connecting the whole

organism. [It] is, in this way, the antithesis of owning. It postulates a mobile,

empty-handed, shareable experience of the land. Nomads have often been

disturbing to nationalism because their roving blurs and perforates the boundaries

that define nations; walking does the same thing on the smaller scale of private

property. (2000: 162)

To walk across a state boundary, as the Desert Walkers did, is to regain, at

least symbolically, the bodily and territorial wholeness that was lost with the

massive transfer of land from Mexico to the US that culminated in the 1853

Gadsden Purchase. The walk acquired an extra, unanticipated political

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resonance as a group of Mexicans took advantage of the distraction afforded

by the hikers to sneak past customs into the US � a cheering reminder of the

multiple possibilities of global mobility (Nabhan 2002: 297).

In their low-tech efforts to facilitate globalization on their own terms, the

walkers and their furtive fellow travellers did more than reclaim colonized

space; they also challenged traditional notions of progress. To walk in most

parts of the developed world is to commit an anachronistic offence against

the dominant car culture and the ideology of progress it represents. Among

its other meanings, the Desert Walk’s goal of bearing witness was made

possible only by the speed at which the journey was undertaken. Walking is

both peripatetic and forward-moving. It demands unmediated engagement

with a physical world whose rhythms still confound the dictates of

civilization. At the same time, it asserts human agency, linking the steps of

the walkers in a collective act of self-determination. Keeping those contra-

dictions in mind, we can explore the temporal significance of the walk as an

educational or pedagogical exercise.

The Tohono O’odham have the highest school drop-out rate of all Native

American tribes; fewer than half of the adults have completed high school.

(Mansfield 2001: para. 9)

Walking, as Solnit notes, is an activity particularly conducive to thinking. It

‘strikes a delicate balance between working and idling, being and doing. It is

a bodily labour that produces nothing but thoughts, experiences, arrivals’

(Solnit 2002: 5). The idea of a temporal order that privileges thought is

central to what Giroux calls ‘public time’, an endangered value in a US

education system that is increasingly in thrall to the structures of Corporate

Time (2003: paras 16�18). Corporate Time eliminates the possibility for

deliberation, consideration, contemplation and critique, not simply because

such activities are considered to be a waste of time, but also because they

have the potential to illuminate the failure of neoliberalism to create the

conditions for social justice, and to strengthen the capacity to imagine

democratic alternatives to the current world order. Public time, by contrast,

slows time down, not as a simple refusal of technological change or a rejection of

all calls for efficiency but as an attempt to create the institutional and ideological

conditions that promote long-term analyses, historical reflection, and deliberations

over what our collective actions might mean for shaping the future. (ibid.: para. 17)

Public time, as it is embodied particularly in public institutions of learning, is

a key part of the modern project of educating citizens to participate in

democracy.

Another critical temporal element in that project is its orientation towards

the future. Implicit in this orientation is the sense that civic responsibility


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involves in large measure responsibility towards future generations. The

dismantling of the public infrastructure, including the school system, has

proceeded in tandem with a discounting of the future in favour of a focus on

the present. Giroux suggests that the goal of education today should be the

cultivation of what he calls ‘educated hope’ (ibid.: paras. 30�7), or what

Pierre Bourdieu calls ‘realist utopianism’ (cited in ibid.: para. 29; see also

Binde 2000: 64). Such a project enlists a two-pronged attack on prevailing

temporal politics in its insistence on an obligation to the future, symbolized if

not actually embodied in today’s children, and on a commitment to securing

that future through education conceived in the framework of public time.

Public time rejects the economic urgency of Corporate Time in favour of a

reflective engagement with the emergency of the long term.

The way public time and the kindred concepts of ‘educated hope’ and

‘realist utopianism’ engage with history and progress resonates with the

approach often taken in postcolonial theory. That is to say they approach it

in the sense Gayatri Spivak has termed ‘catachresis’ (1993: 277). While the

temporal logic of history functions invisibly in the dominant version of

global time, as the mostly hidden ally of Corporate Time, public time makes

history central, as the name of a temporal model, a vestige of whose utopian

promise we still need, even as we reject its universalist ideology of global

progress. But the idea of public time must be pushed further if it is to

recognize what Chakrabarty calls the ‘plurality’ of the contemporary, or

what Nestor Garcıa Canclini has identified in another context as the

‘unresolved conflicts’ of modernity (Chakrabarty 2000: 88; Canclini 1995:

11). In order to realize its democratic potential, public time needs to

incorporate multiple and conflicting rhythms, including not simply tradi-

tional or indigenous versus modern times but also the time of biology that

extends from the human to the non-human world.

The Desert Walk engages that idea of public time in its advancement of a

form of knowledge production that is practical, interdisciplinary and

collaborative. Informed by collective memory, it is oriented towards the

sustenance of future generations. First, without letting the beleaguered

public school system off the hook, the walk shows the possibilities of

grassroots education. Beyond its broad educational mandate, one goal of the

walk was to raise money for summer internships for O’odham, Yoemem

(Yaqui) and Seri at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, where they would

learn skills relating to diabetes prevention, native plant propagation and

sustainable harvesting of wild plants which they could take back to their

communities (Nabhan 2000: 29). For native youth who have not been well-

served by the public school system in the US, the walk offered a

complementary model of learning.

This model is collaborative and interdisciplinary in the broadest sense. The

medical science that revealed the links between desert plants, blood

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cholesterol and diabetes is a critical element in the production of a

developing understanding that also draws crucially on the expertise of

ethnobotanists studying heritage plants of the south-west and their uses, as

well as the cultural, spiritual and ecological knowledge of native elders.

Understood this way, the educational possibilities represented by the walk

help to explain the decision of 27-year-old Tony Johnson, one of the students

on the walk, to give up his studies at Harvard to go back and study under the

leadership of elder Danny Lopez. Rather than a rejection of modern,

progressive education in favour of a focus on the past, such a move expresses

a belief in the possibility of an education that creates crucial links between

past, present and future which current public institutions are not capable of

making. A critical part of that education is an idea of heritage, not just in the

sense of tradition but in an expanded sense: one whose function, Binde

suggests, quoting Remond-Gouilloud, is

not so much to transmit and to perpetuate objects and values as to create an

impulse for transmission, to establish a dynamic sense of solidarity between

generations, that is to say, to give a meaning to the perpetuation of the human

species, a reason to live. (cited in Binde 2000: 59)

To conclude, the Desert Walk resembles a lot of collective interventions in

globalization in its mobilization of a group of citizens in defence of

ecological health and postcolonial autonomy. Beyond its demonstration

that these concerns are crucially connected, the walk demonstrates their

predication on time. The walk challenges the authority of global time, not

just by resisting its imperative of speed but by determinedly invoking public

time: a temporal structure composed by the unassimilable energies of culture

and environment, memory and hope. In the face of what often feels like a

fatally successful global Campana Contra la Impuntualidad, it represents a

subversive belief in manana � the future.

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survival strategies for global times

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