Paper short abstract:

This essay analyses the ethnic dynamic at the cross roads of ethnicity and class implicit in the anti-systemic protests against the neoliberal agenda, and the possibilities and limits of the ethnic agenda Sumaj Qamaña Sumaj Qamana under the Morales government in Bolivia.

Paper long abstract:

Andean core culture, which is founded on communal property rights, organization of production based on reciprocity and mutual help, forms of redistribution, decision-making strategies based on rotational management and administration of common-pool resources, is oriented to the common good and therefore incompatible with the logic of capitalism. Fighting for their ancestral rights, Andean peasants are inherently anti-systemic. At the discursive level "Indianness" became the cultural reference not only for peasants, but also for the urban poor, becoming the powerful motor of the anti-neolibeal protests. The worldview of Sumaj Qamaña (living well) based on ancestral Andean principles is presented as an alternative to the western concept of development. Morales included diverse ethnicities officially in nationhood. He has redistributed income through conditional cash-transfer programs as part of his government's social policy in the fight against poverty and exclusion. However, in spite of the resonance of Sumaj Qamaña, once in power, the Morales administration did not propose any specific programs based on Sumaj Qamaña. The Andean sacralisation of Mother Nature has not been translated into a modern ecological program of development. I want to discuss the possibilities and limits of the alternative agenda Sumaj Qamaña in the context of current correlation of social forces in Bolivia, within the constraints imposed by the world oconomy.

Paper short abstract:

Based on the notions of "equivocation" (Viveiros de Castro, 2004) and "tacit agreement" (Almeida, 2003), I intend to show the encounters and disencounters between conceptual languages and motivations of indigenous and non-indigenous people involved in a pisciculture project in the upper Rio Negro.

Paper long abstract:

The objective of this paper is to reflect upon sustainable development and food safety initiatives among the indigenous peoples in an Upper Rio Negro indigenous land, located in the municipality of São Gabriel da Cachoeira - AM (Brazil). The focus is on the pisciculture project executed with the Baniwa that inhabit the riverside and the tributaries of the Içana River. This project was implemented by the Federation of Indigenous Organizations of the Rio Negro (FOIRN) and supported by an ONG called the Socio-Environmental Institute (ISA). Among the Baniwa, the project's main base is the Baniwa and Coripaco Indigenous School Pamáali, where the indigenous pisciculture technicians and students participate in trainings, workshops and classes on topics such as sustainability, environmental management and biodiversity, and learn the techniques of artificial reproduction of fish in laboratory. The intention is to capture the points of view of different actors involved with the project, in order to show how indigenous technicians, leaders of associations and non-indigenous technical advisors understand and negotiate the importance and the motivations of the projects, besides the definitions of the beings associated with them - like the fish and the environment - and the interactions between indigenous and scientific knowledge. As we sought to evidence, for the indigenous people involved with the project, more than the production of fish and the resolution of an environmental problem, the interest in the projects was associated with the expansion of relations and the incorporation and control of alien knowledges.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how development projects in Belize’s southern Toledo district are bound up in territorial debates over land and other environmental resources at local, national and international scales, involving contestations of rights, identities and livelihoods.

Paper long abstract:

Belize's southernmost district of Toledo is widely referred to as the 'forgotten district', owing in part to its high measured levels of poverty, and its geographical distance from the national centres of economic and political power. The majority of Toledo's population comprises Mopan or Q'eqchi' Maya people, many of whom live in rural villages between the newly-paved Southern Highway and the contested border with Guatemala. The district is also home to Mestizo, Garífuna, South Asian, Creole, Mennonite and Chinese people, among other groups. While numerous rural development projects in the district have been planned and implemented - some with explicit aims to engage with notions of 'community' - it is widely felt that these have for the most part failed to live up to expectations.

Drawing on ethnographic research in southern Belize, this paper reflects on how contemporary projects - involving electricity provision, forest management, and road construction - shape and are shaped by ongoing debates about Maya land rights, indigenous identity, the meanings and practices of 'community', and the international territorial dispute with Guatemala. Understanding these processes involves addressing not only the anticipated costs and benefits of project outcomes, but also the complex relationships bound up with their negotiation - not least for people living in areas expected to be most proximally affected. The supposedly marginal 'forgotten district' emerges as central to deliberations over the potential environmental and political futures of the region.

Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses a dispute over a planned road within the Isiboro Secure National Park and Indigenous Territory (TIPNIS), Bolivia. It explores the articulations of indigenous identity being voiced in the struggle and their power in relation to changing development and environmental priorities.

Paper long abstract:

This paper uses a case-study approach, analysing a current dispute over plans to build a highway through the Isiboro Secure National Park and Indigenous Territory (TIPNIS) in Bolivia. It focuses on the opposition movement challenging the road and the state, using 8 months of recent fieldwork data to analyse articulations of indigenous identity and its changing power in relation to shifting development and environment priorities.

Using theories of indigeneity, conservation and capitalism, it examines interactions between the oppositional movement, the state and development non-government organisations (NGOs) and argues that the conflicting ways that indigenous identity is being (re)positioned in the struggle is changing its discursive and political power. It argues that indigeneity is being (re)constructed within state policy, diminishing the ability of rural Amazonian communities to control the rate and pace of development in their locality.

Paper short abstract:

Mining activity in Cerro de Pasco, Peru has marked the Andean landscape with contamination and ruins. This study explores the role that industrialisation has had in historically articulating insecurity as affect. It also aims to emphasise the role that affect has in provoking local political action.

Paper long abstract:

In a town located at 4,330 m.a.m.s.l. in the Peruvian Andes, urban destruction provoked by mining activity has become the everyday reality. The mining enterprise has gained industrial proportions since the beginning of 20th century when the North-American Copper corporation purchased the small-scale, local mines.

In the last 50 years, tunnel mining has been supplemented with open-pit exploitation in the middle of the urbanization. The open-pit expansion has been done at the expense of gradual forced displacement and the destruction of some of the oldest historical neighbourhoods in Cerro de Pasco.

Despite being aware of the negative effects of mining activity, few locals engage in political resistance: most remain indifferent or prefer to abandon the place. The mining company's development decisions, from which most locals are excluded, have shaped the urban landscape into one of ruins and contamination.

Nevertheless, for some locals, the personal trauma of displacement becomes a source of political activism. This paper aims to explore the role that the charged affect felt during the experience of forced displacement has in forging local political identities (Thrift 2007).

The paper also focuses on the historical articulation of the affect of insecurity as a result of the transformations in urban space and infrastructure across the political-historical context. These urban transformations reciprocally affect the ways locals have engaged or dis-engaged with their surroundings and the political governance.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how state run development programs affecting Mapuche people in southern Chile reinforce a model of agricultural entrepreneurship, which is turn actively reconfigured by recipients in terms consistent with their anxieties concerning social and environmental crisis.

Paper long abstract:

For the last two decades, a vast number of state run development initiatives, including extension programs and credit schemes, have been applied to Mapuche population in Chile to promote new forms of agricultural entrepreneurship among landowners. The expectations of these programs sharply contrast with the historic issue of land scarcity caused by land grabbing. Drawing on ethnographic research in South-Central Chile, this paper will show how the "entrepreneurial subject" promoted by development programs is not simply rejected on the ground of incommensurability of indigenous and non-indigenous moral economies, but are rather contextualized within existing concerns over social and environmental crisis. The socio-ecological crisis affecting Mapuche communities centers on the decline of the value of respect (respeto- yewen) towards humans and non-humans, which is epitomised by concerns over water loss and deforestation. Central to these anxieties is the conundrum of the need to exploit the environment in ways incompatible with customary values and thus conducive to cultural loss in order to avoid migration to urban centres and thus preserve the link with one's locality (tuwün) as crucial form of identity and self-determination in Mapuche society. In this sense, acculturation often looks as a lesser evil in order to remain Mapuche. By focusing on the implementation of state run agricultural development, this paper ultimately aims to illustrate the blurred relation between neoliberal and Mapuche subjectivities as well as their cosmological underpinnings.