History and the Duality of Power in Community‐based Forestry in Southeast Bolivia

This article discusses theories of power and economic articulation in the framework of a community‐based forestry project among the Chiquitano communities of southeastern Bolivia. The analysis focuses on the tensions that characterize indigenous development projects, and the problems that result from competing systems of control and power. Using Norman Whitten's concept of the duality in power, and Carol Smith's elaboration of historical economic analysis, the author examines the connections between historical, political and economic institutions and norms promoting redistribution of resources and goods in Chiquitano culture, and the unique Chiquitano response to the opportunities and challenges of international development. He contends that the distribution of development funds and resources in the form of small gifts and loans by Chiquitano leaders to neighbours and kin follows economic and political models established in Jesuit missions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The article also argues that patterns of resistance and adaptation in Chiquitano political leadership follow patterns established under rubber and ranching patrons in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.     

Whose politics and which science: beyond the colonial in liberal political theory

ABSTRACT

This article examines liberal political theory’s limits and possibilities in relation to indigenous self-determination. It shows that while the liberal tradition has provided theoretical rationale to the colonial project it is also equipped to rationalise a politics of substantive indigenous inclusion. The article introduces the recourses that exist within liberal theory for non-colonial interpretations of citizenship, democracy and sovereignty. It shows how these concepts may be interpreted to contribute to a liberal theory of indigeneity as a theory emphasising independent indigenous authority on the one hand and culturally contextualised and substantive participation in the politics of the state on the other.     

Australia's Indigenous Carbon Economy: A National Snapshot

Many Indigenous communities in Australia are well situated to provide greenhouse gas abatement and carbon sequestration benefits, but little is known about the factors affecting the capability of Australia's Indigenous organisations to participate in climate change mitigation strategies. This paper provides a ‘snapshot’ summary of certain aspects of Australia's Indigenous organisations' participation in carbon offset schemes. The snapshot provides insight into the degree to which Indigenous organisations are aware of carbon market opportunities in Australia, the level that these Indigenous organisations participate in or engage with carbon‐based economic enterprises, and the key pathways through which Indigenous carbon market opportunities are pursued. Analysis of data collected from a national survey conducted between 2011 and 2012 show that most obstacles to Indigenous participation in carbon offset schemes relate to land tenure arrangements; geographic and biophysical factors; low levels of requisite technical, human and financial resources; and appropriate recognition of Indigenous knowledge and cultural responsibilities. The snapshot also highlights the value of supporting regionally specific capacity‐building strategies to enable Indigenous people to participate in emerging carbon offset activities and the generation of associated ecosystem services. Cultural, socio‐economic or demographic factors that are also likely to influence the ability of many Indigenous communities to participate in carbon market opportunities are identified as important areas for further research.     

Madness and Mother Ireland in the fiction of Patrick McCabe

This article explores the relationship between madness and the figure of Mother Ireland in the work of the Irish novelist Patrick McCabe. It situates his work in relation to contemporary feminist responses to representations of Ireland as a woman, by identifying different versions of the Mother Ireland figure as a cause of psychosis in McCabe's writing. It argues that McCabe, in contrast to writers such as Eavan Boland and Edna O'Brien, finds an alternative and radical means of contesting this historically troublesome literary motif.     

The socionature that neo-extractivism can see: Practicing redistribution and compensation around large-scale mining in the Southern Ecuadorian Amazon

In this article I address the complex processes of transformation taking place due to industrial mineral extraction in the Ecuadorian Amazon through a focus on state and company led practices of redistribution, social investment and compensation. The analysis of three empirical examples related to the Mirador industrial mining project is viewed in relation to a more extensive assembling of a mining surface. I introduce the concept ‘surfacing’ to refer to discursive and material practices that state and corporate actors make use of to manage, facilitate and enact a redistributive economic policy, and at the same time produce value in and for the global capitalist market. A main argument is that these practices make certain socio-natural relations visible to the project of large-scale mining while obscuring affected peoples' ‘place-based life projects’. Restricted by neo-extractivist modes of recognition, of ‘seeing’ and ‘not-seeing’, indigenous Shuar, and mestizo livestock peasants, colonos, respond to mining intervention based on their differentiated engagements and trajectories with the Amazonian landscape and ecology. The paper is an intent to understand geosocial transformations and the differentiated practices of non-recognition while analyzing these responses.     

Knowledge production and border nationalism in northern Mexico

ABSTRACT. This article examines the transformations in the cultural sphere of Tijuana, one of Mexico's largest and fastest growing cities, in order to emphasise the border as a crucial site of nation‐building in northern Mexico. I propose that cultural and intellectual actors, through particular sites, are changing the way the city is positioned in relation to the national political space of Mexico. Two institutions are considered specifically, both of which are integral to the propagation of an array of representations of Tijuana. In looking to articulations of nationhood and practices of knowledge production, this article delineates how urban identities reclaim and reconfigure key aspects of national identity in a region heretofore unrecognised as central to the creation of a national imaginary.     

Provocative Readings in Intransigent Archives: Finding Aneityumese Women

Anticolonialists — my past self included — tend to read colonial texts with hostile but literal eyes, assuming that colonial intentions were realised and taking at face value colonisers' representations of their own centrality for indigenous people. In such discursive settings, indigenous — especially female — agency is likely to be elided or denied. I argue instead for a reading strategy that decentres colonial representations by identifying and decoding the traces of indigenous actions and presence which are sedimented in, and surreptitiously help shape, dominant texts. Decentred, such representations are susceptible to reverse colonisation: to appropriation and exploitation in writing historical narratives which can envisage indigenous agency and naturalisation of the alien and the novel in even the most repressive colonial arenas. I illustrate the principles and method via a narrative vignette which exemplifies, interrogates and exploits demeaning missionary tropes for indigenous women in mid-nineteenth century Aneityum, Vanuatu. The story evokes key issues in the politics of representation: the need to problematise assumptions that the discursively dominant are necessarily central in subaltern affairs; the need to dislodge the romanticism and ethnocentrism which bemoan the involvement of indigenous women in Christian domesticity, especially sewing, because it looks like submission to missionary hegemony.     

Está listo (Are you ready)? Gender,race and land registration in the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve

Geographers and political ecologists are paying increased attention to the ways in which conservation policies disrupt indigenous customary tenure arrangements. However, much less attention is given to the particular ways protected area management shapes natural resource access for indigenous women. With this in mind, this article examines how a recently proposed state land project in Honduras, Catastro y Regularización, requires that Miskito residents individuate collective family lands in the interests of ‘sustainable development’ and ‘biodiversity protection’. In the debates that followed the project's announcement, Miskito women feared that such measures would erase their customary access to family lands. As the state's project seeks to re-order Reserve land, intra-Miskito struggles intensified among villagers. Such struggles are not only gendered but are shaped by longstanding processes of racialization in Honduras and the Mosquitia region. Drawing upon ethnographic research, I argue that Miskito women's subjectivity and rights to customary family holdings are informed by their ability to make ‘patriarchal bargains’ with Miskito men inside the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve. Such findings suggest that scholars and policy makers continue to reflect on the ways global conservation and sustainable development practices may undermine indigenous customary tenure securities, whether intentionally or not.     

Seaborne Ethnography and the Natural History of Man*

This paper examines intellectual interchanges between European theorists in the science of man and sailors, naturalists and artists on scientific voyages in Oceania during the century after 1750. I argue that travellers' narratives and ethnographic representations were not mere reflexes of dominant metropolitan discourses, but were also personal productions generated in the tensions and ambiguities of cross-cultural encounters. I identify countersigns of indigenous agency embedded in such materials and evaluate their trajectory from the interactions which provoked them, through varied genres and media of voyagers' representations, to their contorted appropriation by European savants. My examples are drawn from British and French accounts of visits to New Holland and Van Diemen's Land between 1770 and 1802. In this paper, Aboriginal Australians, especially Tasmanians, serve as synecdoche for the indigenous inhabitants of Oceania generally, using the regional term in its extended early 19th-century sense which encompassed the present Indonesia and Australia along with Papua New Guinea, Aotearoa/New Zealand and the Pacific Islands.     

The Matter of Carbon: Understanding the Materiality of tCO2e in Carbon Offsets

Abstract: This paper examines the socio‐natural relations inherent in the commodification of carbon reductions as they are generated in energy‐based carbon offset project activities, and abstracted to wider market systems. The ability to commodify carbon reductions takes place through a socionatural–technical complex that is defined by the material nature of technology's interaction with the atmosphere, local social processes and the evolving governing systems of carbon markets. Carbon is not unproblematically commodified: some projects and technologies allow a more cooperative commodification than others. The examples of a hydroelectricity plant and an improved cookstove project in Honduras are used as empirical case studies to illustrate the difficulties and opportunities associated with the relational aspects of carbon commodification. Drawing upon select literatures from post‐structural thought to complement the principal lens of a more structural, materiality of nature analysis, the paper also outlines the reasons why carbon offset reform is needed if offsets are to more progressively engage debates about climate mitigation and North–South development.     

Gender and Colonial Space

The aim of this article is to highlight the gendered nature of colonial space. I aim to destabilise the assumption that imperial masculine idealised/desired space is the only spatial relation within colonial contexts, by focusing on the spatial relations of British and indigenous women at an idealised level and at the level of the 'contact zone'. Through an analysis of the complexity of different spatial relations within the colonial context, I hope both to bring to the fore different kinds of actors and actions from those generally considered within post-colonial theory, and also to make it possible to inflect the theoretical terminology developed within post-colonial theorising in a more materialist way.     

Revanchist Urbanism Heads South: The Regulation of Indigenous Beggars and Street Vendors in Ecuador

Abstract: Much of the discussion surrounding neoliberal urbanism has been empirically grounded in the North. This paper shifts the discussion south to focus on the regulation of indigenous street vendors and beggars in the Andean nation of Ecuador. Inspired by zero tolerance policies from the North, the cities of Quito and Guayaquil have recently initiated urban regeneration projects to cleanse the streets of informal workers, beggars, and street children. In this paper, I explore the particular and pernicious ways in which these neoliberal urban policies affect indigenous peoples in the urban informal sector. Grounded in the literature on space, race and ethnicity in the Andes, I argue that Ecuador's particular twist on revanchism is through its more transparent engagement with the project of blanqueamiento or “whitening”. I further argue that Ecuador's “refinement” of revanchist urban policies only works to displace already marginalised individuals and push them into more difficult circumstances.     

Prison and sacrament in the cult of saints: images of St Barbara in late medieval art

This article analyses the changing visual representation of St Barbara during the later middle ages. The article identifies a shift in St Barbara's iconography: whereas earlier medieval representations of the saint almost always show her with her prison tower, a number of fifteenth-century representations show the saint holding a chalice and host. The article traces how and why this shift occurred. In particular, the article explores the ways in which medieval thinking linking incarceration and liberation were integrated into new representations of St Barbara to stress her intercessionary, sacramental functions. Overall, the article argues that the visual transformation of St Barbara's prison tower into a liturgical vessel reveals how saints like Barbara were increasingly viewed as conduits to the inclusive sort of freedom that participation in Christianity's sacramental economy invited.     

‘So that we don't spoil them’: understanding children's everyday mobility through parents’ affective practices

ABSTRACT

Children's everyday mobility and freedom of movement have been closely linked to parental practices, or what has been referred to as parental ‘mobility permits’ or ‘mobility licences’. Most research tends to focus on parental restrictions, while this article explores the affective practices Swedish middle-class parents use in order to enhance their children's mobility, i.e. how emotions are perceived as enabling parents’ and children's spatial experiences and thus their feelings of safety and security; as well as how emotions are talked of as disabling or disrupting the potential for children's mobility. These affective practices are analysed in relation to the parents’ self-reflexive positioning on a continuum between ‘the helicopter parent’ and ‘the engaged and enabling parent’. The material for the article is comprised of 33 interviews with the children's parents, carried out within a larger ethnographic research project on children's everyday mobility in Sweden.     

Geographical knowledge and scientific survey in the construction of Italian Libya

Studies of colonialism and imperial cultures have increasingly recognized the roles of geographical knowledges in European efforts to construct the colonial world materially and imaginatively. Simultaneously, the discipline of geography has undergone a thorough self-critique of its part in the constitution of colonial space. This article discusses the imbrication of geographical knowledges and colonialism in Italy, and especially how the production and circulation of geographical knowledges about Libya worked hand in hand with its territorial occupation and control. In particular, the article discusses the expeditions directed and co-ordinated by the Italian Geographical Society that were despatched into the Saharan interior in the early 1930s to produce 'scientific' representations of the region. The article examines the roles of geographical sciences in the construction of Italian Libya, but particularly how this performance of 'colonial science' surveyed Libya's populations and contributed to their classification as 'primitive' and 'Other'. These conclusions supported Italian authority in the region, but also reinforced the development of a 'colonial consciousness' among Italians as African space and peoples were rendered legible by European epistemologies.     

Decolonizing cartography and ontological conflict: Counter-mapping in Colombia and “cartographies otherwise”

Discussions in decolonial literature have recently drawn on the concept of “ontological conflict” to reflect on the conflictual entanglements of diverse cosmologies. In Latin America (as elsewhere) these conflicts are frequently of a territorial nature, with indigenous and black communities making claims to communal land rights as indispensable part of their respective ways of being-in-the-world, which the post-colonial state has increasingly begun to acknowledge, often in the form of new political constitutions. In this article I examine the role of cartography in the resolution of such ontological conflicts; in particular a participatory mapping exercise in Colombia known as “social cartography,” which aims to challenge dominant cartographic representations and empowering local communities vis-à-vis the state. At the same time, I reflect on the limits of such an emancipatory vision and on the ways in which Colombia's version of counter-mapping has been coopted by dominant power. Inspired by the Modernity/Coloniality/Decoloniality framework, I contextualize this experience within other radical mapping exercises, or “cartographies otherwise,” in places such as Australia, Palestine and the Straits of Gibraltar, to finally suggest that the art of decolonizing cartography may be seen as a tool of Hardt & Negri's project of a multitude in resistance.     

Picturing the city: young people's representations of urban environments

Urban environments form the setting of everyday life for most Western young people. This article explores visual representations of cities made by young people in a range of environments within four countries. The findings inform a larger study on urban geographies within geography education. We analyse students' drawings of cities regarding physical characteristics, activities and issues. There are many commonalities between drawings from the four countries, the majority showing a ‘big, busy city’ representation with skylines, traffic and shopping areas. There are also distinctive characteristics for each set, for example Finnish students tended to emphasise environmental and social issues more than in the other countries. In relation to methodology, we conclude that drawings, supported by contextual information, are a useful source to understand young people's representations of cities. Further, this research supports thinking about how to merge young people's experiences and imaginaries with the teaching of urban geography.     

Intersections between philosophy and art: expressions of immanence in the seventeenth century — Spinoza and Vermeer*

ABSTRACT

Spinoza's philosophy of immanence represents a turning point that radically changed our conception of human agency and its relation to infinity. Hans Blumenberg rightly called the principle of immanence “a general hypothesis of the epoch”, a principle that applies to philosophy no less than to the sciences and arts in the seventeenth century. This article looks at Dutch paintings by drawing parallels between Spinoza's philosophy and Vermeer's work. Spinoza and Vermeer both deny a dualistic conception of the world and a hierarchical structure between inner and outer spheres. With the example of Vermeer's painting the Milkmaid, this article shows how an analysis of light and colour, time and space, reveal a vision of immanent infinity, with the human agent at its centre.     

Carbon Sequestration in Community Forests: Trade‐offs,Multiple Outcomes and Institutional Diversity in the Bolivian Amazon

Carbon sequestration in community forests presents a major challenge for the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) programme. This article uses a comparative analysis of the agricultural and forestry practices of indigenous peoples and settlers in the Bolivian Amazon to show how community‐level institutions regulate the trade‐offs between community livelihoods, forest species diversity, and carbon sequestration. The authors argue that REDD+ implementation in such areas runs the risk of: 1) reinforcing economic inequalities based on previous and potential land use impacts on ecosystems (baseline), depending on the socio‐cultural groups targeted; 2) increasing pressure on land used for food production, possibly reducing food security and redirecting labour towards scarce off‐farm income opportunities; 3) increasing dependence on external funding and carbon market fluctuations instead of local production strategies; and 4) further incentivising the privatization and commodification of land to avoid transaction costs associated with collective property rights. The article also advises against taking a strictly economic, market‐based approach to carbon sequestration, arguing that such an approach could endanger fragile socio‐ecological systems. REDD+ schemes should directly support existing efforts towards forest sustainability rather than simply compensating local land users for avoiding deforestation and forest degradation.