Paper short abstract:

While industrial capitalism was stalked by its characteristic monsters – vampires, zombies, and ghosts of dead labour – what might we learn from the monsters dwelling in a financialised ecumene? This paper offers a bestiary of Guaraní monsters that appear in Paraguay's financial/agribusiness biome.

Paper long abstract:

While industrial capitalism was stalked by its characteristic monsters – vampires, zombies, and the ghosts of dead labour – what might we learn from the monsters dwelling in a financialised ecumene? And further, from the monsterbiomes specifically devastated by financial instruments, arrangements, and ways of apprehending the world? In this paper, I offer a bestiary of Guaraní monsters that appear in the Paraguayan countryside amidst the rise of commercial export agriculture, growth of crops such as sesame and chia that depend on a complex economic life support system to survive in a hostile environment, and arrival weather insurance written onto drought conditions. This is the financialised biome in which farmers encounter the monstrous offspring of Taú and Kerana such as the Jasy Jatere and the trickster Pombero and live to tell the tale. Following Frederick Luis Aldama’s (2023) usage of “ethnohorror” to describe the narrative conventions of Paraguayan sesameros as they recount their meetings with these creatures, I suggest that their appearances offer strategic pauses in the speculative imagination and narrative dominated by finance (Komporozos-Athanasiou 2022). The narrative pause arising from ethnohorror – that is, collective experience of the peoples (ethno) devastated by the traumas (horror) of environmental devastation and capitalist rapacity – creates an alternative speculative imagination, with alternative tempus oriented towards the deep past rather than the financial temporality of pressing the future into the present for profit.

Komporozos-Athanasiou, Aris

2022 Speculative Communities: Living with Uncertainty in a Financialized World. University of Chicago Press.