Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses disaster capitalism as the production of capitalist subjects “empowered” by the state and NGOs via initiation into the special knowledge and crafts of small enterprise.

Paper long abstract:

Disaster capitalism is typically defined as a systematic and opportunistic reconfiguration of economies and economic regulations in service of capitalist interests under the cover of environmental crisis (Gamburd 2013; Schuller 2008; Klein 2007). This paper offers another largely complementary variety of disaster capitalism—the production of capitalist subjects, new petit capitalists "empowered" by the state and NGOs via initiation into the special knowledge and crafts of small enterprise. This is at once an often well-intentioned strategy and one that reveals the limits of neoliberal imagination; the inability to envision recovery but through individualistic, entrepreneurial endeavors. In my ethnographic analysis of recovery from the 1999 and 2006 eruptions of Mt. Tungurahua in Ecuador, I present cases of state and nongovernmental organizations providing aid and recovery opportunities to affected highland peasants. These projects—subsidizing white onion production, small animal husbandry, tourism, and a farm-to-table program—are guided by well-meaning actors, though the projects suffer from poor planning. What these projects reveal, is that people can be moved to assume certain subjectivities by limited "inventories of possibility" (Marino and Lazrus 2015:342) and an internalization of dominant norms, truths, and structures (Boelens 2016). Even as the Andean subjects in these cases posture their culture and practices as moral, communitarian alternatives to capitalist greed, local economic strategies take on entrepreneurial characteristics that articulate with neoliberal ambitions of state and global institutions; peasant ambitions and desires are produced and invoked as if they were locally derived, while at the same time being co-constituted by dominant interests.