Territories of Difference

Arturo Escobar is the Kenan Distinguished Teaching Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the author of Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World, winner of the Best Book Award from the New England Council of Latin American Studies, and MAs AllA del Tercer Mundo: GlobalizaciOn y Diferencia. He is a co-editor of World Anthropologies: Disciplinary Transformations within Systems of Power; Women and the Politics of Place; The World Social Forum: Challenging Empires; and Cultures of Politics/Politics of Cultures: Revisioning Latin American Social Movements.

About the Series vii Preface ix Acknolwedgments xiii Introduction 1 1. Place 27 2. Capital 69 3. Nature 111 4. Development 156 5. Identity 200 6. Networks 254 Conclusion 299 Notes 313 References Cited 381 Index 417

"A wonderful, massive tour de force by one of today's leading anthropologists. Arturo Escobar links his ethnography to a series of larger pressing debates about globalization and development, biology and nature, and social movements and network theory. The result is a book of astonishing virtuosity, range, and insight. It is nothing less than a model for the dense, interdisciplinary, polyglot theoretical analysis needed to understand experience anywhere in the world today." Orin Starn, author of Ishi's Brain: In Search of America's Last "Wild" Indian and co-editor of The Peru Reader: History, Culture, Politics "Arturo Escobar's eloquent, engaged, and extremely well-informed narrative of the Afro-Colombian movements in their struggles to defend their territories and ways of life is, to my mind, the best book on social movements to have appeared in years. It combines the minutely traced complexity of the struggles and their evolving contexts with much broader issues that appeal to and impact all of us, such as biodiversity, alternatives to development, sustainability of life on earth, and social and cognitive justice. We-- academics, students, activists of social movements--cannot but be powerfully interpellated by this landmark book, and can only honor it by reading it attentively."--Boaventura de Sousa Santos, editor of Another Knowledge Is Possible: Beyond Northern Epistemologies "This book invites us all into alternative projects of world making. Never losing sight of the forces pushing back at us or the colonizing power of Western thinking, Arturo Escobar marshals an extraordinary array of intellectual resources and social networks to galvanize hopeful action. He grounds his honest yet truly inspiring vision in the place-based knowledge and global activism of his longstanding collaborators, the resilient and resourceful Afro-Colombian activists of the Pacific region."--J. K. Gibson-Graham, authors of A Postcapitalist Politics "The product of a lifetime's work on the pitfalls of development, Arturo Escobar's new book is an engaging and engaged effort to bring together knowledge from Western academia and from Afro-Colombian activists. Through his own blend of discursive theory, he makes academia listen, in the words of one of his local interlocutors, to the 'drumming' of a place subjected to capital but resistant to it, brightly illuminating at once the geopolitics of knowledge and of modern empires."--Fernando Coronil, author of The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela "Arturo Escobar links his ethnography to a series of larger pressing debates about globalization and development, biology and nature, and social movements and network theory. The result is nothing less than a model for the dense, interdisciplinary, polyglot theoretical analysis needed to understand experience anywhere in the world today."--Orin Starn, author of Ishi's Brain: In Search of America's Last "Wild" Indian "Territories of Difference confronts the theoretical and empirical complexities of capitalism, identities, and political struggle. This book will quickly become required reading for everyone interested in contemporary forms of globalization and the social movements organized against them."--Lawrence Grossberg, Morris Davis Distinguished Professor of Communication Studies and Cultural Studies, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill