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.     

What exactly do REDD+ projects produce? A materialist analysis of carbon offset production from a REDD+ project in Cambodia

This article attempts to re-ground analyses of carbon markets by examining the material relations of production of a REDD + project in Cambodia. It focuses on how surplus value is extracted from labour at various points in the production chain of Verified Carbon Units (VCUs). Using extensive field work conducted over three years on a REDD + project in northern Cambodia I argue that VCUs are neither actual avoided units of deforestation and emissions, nor mere imagined or socially constructed commodities. Rather VCUs are packages of technical and affective claims attached to particular REDD + projects which are created through material labour processes. Only by examining the use-values that are created through these labour processes can demand for VCUs be properly understood. This article will start by giving a background to the Oddar Meanchey REDD + project (OMREDD + project). It will then examine the writing of the project document and examine the verification process and consider how these formed critical parts of the commodity production process. After that it will examine how the project collapsed on the ground and yet VCUs were still sold in the market. Finally the article will consider how the claims of the OMREDD + project were challenged by critical work and how future interventions against REDD + projects can successfully undermine the claims of REDD + projects and the extraction of surplus value.     

Historic and symbolic violence in the Romani Fuenteovejuna by TNT-El Vacie: Gender,ethnicity, and interculturalism

Abstract

I address here the performance of Lope de Vega’s Fuenteovejuna undertaken by TNT-El Vacie, giving particular consideration to the ways in which Antonio Álamo’s adaptation, Pepa Gamboa’s direction, and the staging of El Vacie, a company composed exclusively of Roma women, constitute a site of resistance as well as a performance of gender, identity, and place. From this vantage point, I wrestle with issues of agency, dialogism, and intercultural communication to make sense of ontological as well as hermeneutic aspects of the performance text: deletions and additions; orality and authority; meta-theatricality and self-reflexivity; acting and becoming. In addition, I bring to bear the fact that the name of the company, El Vacie, bears witness to the impoverished settlement or shantytown where the women reside, which stands within a mere two hundred yards of the theater where the play is performed. The name of the company signals the identification of the actresses with the marginal space in which they live, enriches the text, and further complicates their reading of Fuenteovejuna by adding levels of referentiality and indexicality that redefine boundaries as well as processes of exclusion and inclusion. While this is not the first collaboration between TNT and El Vacie—it was preceded by the successful and award-winning 2009 staging of La Casa de Bernarda Alba—I consider this performance a particularly important contribution to the construction of a historicized cultural politics of identity that makes the Romani community visible by positioning the women of El Vacie center stage as participants, creators, and interpreters of the national cultural patrimony. Through this cultural intervention, certain spaces and markers of the Roma community acquire visibility as they get inserted into a national historical discourse from which they previously had been historically excluded.     

THE CONCEPT OF TRANSPARENCY,ITS HISTORY,AND THE THEORY OF BEGRIFFSGESCHICHTE

In this review essay, I examine the theoretical assumptions required in order to reconstruct an understanding of another historical period. Stefanos Geroulanos has produced a masterful history of mid‐twentieth‐century French thought, and he argues for a significant difference between that period and our own based on the values and ideas associated with the concept of transparency. The book is innovative in both its method and interpretation of the period of 1945–1984. However, despite the suggestive theoretical framework announced at its start, Geroulanos prefers to explore the theoretical content of conceptual history more than to explain how one might go about identifying, understanding, and translating the concepts of a different epoch. In order to contribute to what is already a successful project, I endeavor to extend some of Geroulanos's theoretical sketches through a comparison with Reinhart Koselleck's theory of Begriffsgechichte. Despite some muted criticism of Koselleck from Geroulanos, I argue that the projects share similar commitments, although Geroulanos needs to develop his theoretical premises at greater length, both for a full comparison and in order to complete the critical project that Transparency appears to be undertaking.     

Femininity,mobility and family fears: Indian international student migration and transnational parental control

In this paper, I explore the migration of Indian-trained nurses enrolled in a post-graduate critical/geriatric care programme at a Canadian public college. Calling upon recent literature on gender, modernity and mobility in India, I examine the extent to which skilled transnational migration is shaped by gender relations established in India. While feminized international migration suggests increased autonomy of female migrants, this research highlights two important dimensions of such migration. The first is that family migration strategies are major determinants of the occupational choice and migration processes that daughters engage in, and the second is that the moral subjectivity of daughters is maintained through transnational methods of care and control.     

The Archaeological Heritage of Iraq in Historical Perspective

Abstract

In this paper I argue that members of the public are simultaneously attracted to and alienated by the uncannyin archaeology. I examine the role of popular culture representations of archaeology in these conflicting but connected processes, and strategies for overcoming them. By exploring Freud's notion of the unheimlich, or uncanny, in relation to archaeology and autopsies, I argue that it is mediated by popular culture, which alienates the public from the actual uncanny practices. By considering the relationship between archaeologists and the public as a discourse between actors and their audience, I examine ways in which this alienation can be overcome. My aim is to offer a better understanding of the complex ways in which people engage with archaeology.     

Experimental Consensus: Negotiating with the Irrigating State in the South of Laos

Abstract

It is common to view Laos as a political culture prone to “consensus”, yet it is also true that policy is constantly changing there, often radically. If everyone is always “in consensus”, what can explain this change? I suggest that the answer is found in the particular kind of consensus at play: it is informed by a wider “experimentarian” ethic evident in rural Laos, where ideas (including the latest policies) are put to the test through practical implementation. The results of these experiments are used to validate policy change and reversal. This allows rural residents a degree of manoeuvrability in their engagements with the state that is striking given the “authoritarian” status of the current regime. It can explain and is used to justify, for instance, the oft-observed gap between policy and actual practice. This room for manoeuvre comes at the price of “playing the game”, at least for a while, of the latest policy fad, sometimes with disastrous consequences for rural livelihoods. I use the example of an irrigation project that was implemented in the south of Laos from 1999–2002 to examine “experimental consensus” at work as policy was received, engaged and eventually relinquished.     

A “Scented Declaration of Progress”: Globalisation,Afropolitan Imagineering and Familiar Orientations

Branded as “Africa's first luxury perfume”, the Scent of Africa perfume is a “scented declaration of progress”. Particularly fascinating is the commercial advertisement for the perfume, which I argue to be an “Afropolitan Imagineering” project that is intended to signal Africa's rise and its new association with global cosmopolitanism. At first glance, the Scent of Africa perfume advertisement seems to point to the ways in which Imagineering projects can reproduce colonial discourses about Africanness. However, in this article, I suggest that we complicate the advertisement and examine its subversive potential to decentre whiteness and celebrate Africanness while writing Africa into the world. Despite this subversion, I conclude that African worlding practices should disinherit the familiarity of Eurocentric geographic determinism that is embedded in Afropolitan Imagineering and instead become informed by afro‐futuristic imaginings and disidentification politics.     

Toxic Encounters,Settler Logics of Elimination,and the Future of a Continent

This paper engages the relationship between toxic geographies and settler colonialism. By bringing to light larger structures and histories that underpin the settler colonial project, I examine a series of toxic encounters and consider the racialised hegemonic narratives that enable the production toxicity. Among these is a methylmercury contamination in Northern Ontario, just upstream from Grassy Narrows First Nation, and a cluster of toxic conversations that bled through social media in the wake of the murder of Colten Boushie, a 22‐year‐old Cree man in Saskatchewan, Canada. I argue that examining the normative ideologies, settler narratives, and socio‐political structures that are involved in the production of toxicity provides valuable insight into the diffuse and relational colonial logics that define the lives that are privileged as the standard, and those that fall outside the regulatory category of the Human, and as a result, are subject to elimination.     

The Corporeal Empire: Physical Education and Politicising Children's Bodies in Late Colonial Bengal

This article deploys children's bodies as an analytical lens to examine the political significance of knowledge production and childhood in British colonial projects in late colonial India. Scholars have theorised the ‘body as method’ of history to argue that bodies are imbued with meanings, become stakes in power struggles and are sites of knowledge and power. I examine this theme by investigating a key locus of knowledge production for children – the colonial school and its curriculum, specifically physical education. To underline the multi‐stranded processes and loci of colonial knowledge production, I examine nationalist pedagogies of two Bengali children's magazines (Amaar Desh and Mouchak) as a form of informal schooling. I argue that the colonial state's engagement with physical education in schools stemmed from anxieties to both discipline native children's bodies, and to discourage students’ ‘seditious’ political activism. Second, I demonstrate that for Bengali educated elites, children embodied a political space for contestation and undertaking their projects of re‐masculinising the youth. These nation‐building projects placed a premium on masculinity, influenced boy cultures to imitate adult male cultures, and inscribed gender roles on the bodies of Bengali boys and girls. By doing so, these colonial encounters restructured and redefined childhood in crucial ways.     

Remembrance of Things Passed: Memory,Body and the Politics of Feasting in New Ireland,Papua New Guinea1

This paper explores the connection between body and memory for the people of the Lelet Plateau of central New Ireland. Through an examination of the processes by which memories of mortuary feasts are created and circulated, I draw attention to the embodied nature of memory as a central facet in the politics of feasting. The approach taken here differs from other prevailing approaches to the body and memory in its exploration of the ways in which memories are created through and within the body, rather than seeing the body, or things representing the body, as signs that are utilised for remembering. In particular, I examine the forms of sorcery which target the participants' bodies, making them experience diarrhoea as a mnemonic process. It is through this that a significant memory of the feast is created, one which stands out notably from numerous other memories, and is the means by which remembrance of the event is transformed into fame for the host.     

Attending to grape vines: perceptual practices,planty agencies and multiple temporalities in Australian viticulture

This article considers the agency of crop plants within sociocultural processes by examining how grape vines influence seasonal labour patterns in Australian viticulture and wine production. Drawing on ethnographic research within a large Australian wine company, I examine how vineyard managers and winemakers coordinate the timing of the grape harvest with the ripening of grapes. I argue that by making the harvest's approach perceptible to humans, chemical and sensory tests of grape ripeness precipitate seasonal changes in viticultural work—rendering grape vines active participants in patterning social time. Practices of attention to ripening grapes thus render the social agency of grape vines perceptible. I analyse these time-reckoning practices as a ‘learning to be affected’, in which human viticulturists actively strive through multiple sensory practices to become attuned to plants' activities. However, attending to the multiple practices used to reckon the ‘right’ time to harvest grapes also emphasises that these ways of enacting the times and agencies of crop plants may interfere or conflict with one another. Highlighting the emotional stresses and tensions between viticultural workers that this may generate, I suggest that agricultural time is both more conflicted and more suffused with power relations than theoretical accounts have typically indicated.     

Environmental governance and private actors: enrolling insurers in international maritime regulation

Government programmes have always relied on the enrolment of intermediate actors, both public and private, in the regulatory process. An increasing recognition that the form of implementation is as important as the passing of new legislation means that these actors are increasingly the focus, rather than just the means to an end, of regulatory programmes. This is particularly the case in international maritime environmental regulation. In this paper I examine how the enrolment of private actors takes place, both discursively and through the use of incentives and sanctions. I focus in particular on the use of liability and compulsory insurance and examine the conditions necessary for an environmental insurance market to function. I then take one set of private actors—Protection and Indemnity (P&I) Clubs which insure shipowners' third party liabilities—and look how international government institutions create (dis)incentives and discourses that encourage the P&I Clubs to act in favour of regulatory goals. The contingent nature of regulation means there is an increasing feedback in which P&I Clubs are allowed to contribute to the framing of specific government programmes in the name of practical implementation, but this must be balanced against the risk of allowing private interests to determine ultimate policy objectives.     

Playing with Infrastructure like a Carishina: Feminist Cycling in an Era of Democratic Politics

This article discusses transit infrastructure as a site of radical possibility and limitation in an age of participatory democracy across Latin America. I focus on multiple spaces of participation in Quito, Ecuador to elucidate how citizenship and infrastructure are co‐produced through gendered processes. I first analyse city space of Quito from a gendered and infrastructural lens to consider how urban environments are dictated by violence and insecurity. Then, against this backdrop, I explore the spatial strategies of the feminist bicycle collective, Carishina en Bici, which translates from Quechua to “bad housewives that cycle”. Here, I draw on the concept of “deep play” to reveal how public practices in Quito question the equitable impacts of local democratic experimentation. To examine Carishinas’ spatial practices, I focus on an urban alleycat race, the Carishina Race, to show how strategic practices of solidarity reinsert feminist possibilities in urban space.     

Crisis,Continuity and Change: Neoliberalism,the Left and the Future of Capitalism

Abstract: This essay's point of departure is the coincident economic and environmental “crises” of our time. I locate both in the dynamics of capital accumulation on a world‐scale, drawing on the ideas of Marx, Karl Polanyi and James O’Connor. I ask whether the recent profusion of “crisis talk” in the public domain presents an opportunity for progressive new ideas to take hold now that “neoliberalism” has seemingly been de‐legitimated. My answer is that a “post‐neoliberal” future is probably a long way off. I make my case in two stages and at two geographical scales. First, I examine the British social formation as currently constituted and explain why even a leading neoliberal state is failing to reform its ways. Second, I then scale‐up from the domestic level to international affairs. I examine cross‐border emissions trading—arguably the policy tool for mitigating the very real prospects of significant climate change this century. The overall conclusion is this: even though the “first” and “second” contradictions of capital have manifested themselves together and at a global level, there are currently few prospects for systemic reform (never mind revolution) led by a new, twenty‐first century “red‐green” Left.     

The study of collector variability in the transition to sedentary food producers in northern Colombia

Human adaptation to the tropics by populations of collectors has been a longtanding issue of debate, especially with regard to the role that collectors may have played in pathways toward sedentism and food production. In this essay, I examine significant differences in strategies developed for estuarine environments versus the inland environments of the transitional savannas of northern Colombia to analyze how these two adaptations articulate with the processes which led toward sedentism and food production in neotropical northern Colombia. Contrary to the received wisdom, I argue that the exploitation of rich estuarine environments is not necessarily a prelude to food production; seed exploitation early in the sixth millennium B.P. in the northern Colombian transitional savanna zone provides a second and arguably more probable model.     

Geological controls on regional transmissivity anisotropy

A variety of data indicate that the Carbonate aquifer in southern Manitoba is a heterogeneous and anisotropic aquifer wherein groundwater flow follows preferred flow path networks. Specific capacity tests show that aquifer transmissivity can vary by up to four orders of magnitude within 1 km. Geostatistical analysis reveals a strong anisotropy in the transmissivity field, with better spatial continuity in NE–SW and NW–SE directions, coincident with the dominant orientations of fractures observed in bedrock exposures. However, discrepancies between the orientation of highest fracture density and best transmissivity continuity suggest that either additional geological factors control the preferred flow network or there is a biased representation of the fracture pattern because all direct fracture observations came from the northern part of the study area. In an effort to investigate whether the geographically biased fracture data set represents the fracture pattern for the whole region, Landsat images and digital elevation maps were processed to extract linear features that may indicate subsurface fracture zones in areas where bedrock is covered by glacial sediments. The results suggest a consistent fracture pattern throughout the study area, indicating that the two observed fracture groups might have gone through different processes in terms of permeability development. Alteration by mineral cementation and dissolution along fracture surfaces may have preferentially improved the fracture permeability in one orientation, while reducing it in the other. The in situ stress field is also believed to play a major role in the preferred regional flow network. This paper discusses the evidence for the preferred flow path network and possible geological factors controlling aquifer anisotropy in this region.