Mario Blaser

AVAILABLE  AT:
http://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=738DEE9979AE76FF1D5FFDC45C5B261D

For more than fifteen years, Mario Blaser has been involved with the Yshiro people of the Paraguayan Chaco as they have sought to maintain their world in the face of conservation and development programs promoted by the state and various nongovernmental organizations. In this ethnography of the encounter between modernizing visions of development, the place-based “life projects” of the Yshiro, and the agendas of scholars and activists, Blaser argues for an understanding of the political mobilization of the Yshiro and other indigenous peoples as part of a struggle to make the global age hospitable to a “pluriverse” containing multiple worlds or realities. As he explains, most knowledge about the Yshiro produced by non-indigenous “experts” has been based on modern Cartesian dualisms separating subject and object, mind and body, and nature and culture. Such thinking differs profoundly from the relational ontology enacted by the Yshiro and other indigenous peoples. Attentive to people’s unique experiences of place and self, the Yshiro reject universal knowledge claims, unlike Western modernity, which assumes the existence of a universal reality and refuses the existence of other ontologies or realities. In Storytelling Globalization from the Chaco and Beyond, Blaser engages in storytelling as a knowledge practice grounded in a relational ontology and attuned to the ongoing struggle for a pluriversal globality.

Authored as a result of a remarkable collaboration between indigenous people's own leaders, other social activists and scholars from a wide range of disciplines, this volume explores what is happening today to indigenous peoples as they are enmeshed, almost inevitably, in the remorseless expansion of the modern economy and development, at the behest of the pressures of the market-place and government. It is particularly timely, given the rise in criticism of free market capitalism generally, as well as of development. The volume seeks to capture the complex, power-laden, often contradictory features of indigenous agency and relationships. It shows how peoples do not just resist or react to the pressures of market and state, but also initiate and sustain "life projects" of their own which embody local history and incorporate plans to improve their social and economic ways of living.

he passage of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007 focused attention on the ways in which Indigenous peoples are adapting to the pressures of globalization and development. This volume extends the discussion by presenting case studies from around the world that explore how Indigenous peoples are engaging with and challenging globalization and Western views of autonomy. Taken together, these insightful studies reveal that concepts such as globalization and autonomy neither encapsulate nor explain Indigenous peoples’ experiences.

More than one and less thanmany, has become a refrain to depict the notion of multiplicity. Borrowed from Mariyln Strathern, Annemarie Mol mobilized the refrain to succinctly capture the complex result of a series of operations that make a variety of practices hold together
as a singular thing. In this article, I seek to explore some
consequences of the proposition that multiplicity can be figured in, at least, two different ways: as diffraction, where the operations of singularization explored by Mol are more easily carried out, and as divergence, where singularization is not necessarily an option. The exploration is part of a larger project to rework the notion of cosmopolitics first proposed by Isabelle Stengers and later taken by
Bruno Latour. Elsewhere I have argued that their conception of cosmopolitics as a project oriented towards the composition of a common world is predominantly informed by the figuration of multiplicity as diffraction, and thus it very much resembles a process of singularization writ large. In this context, foregrounding multiplicity as divergence opens a path to probe the limits of this
conception of cosmopolitics, inquire into the different ways in which multiplicity holds together, and envision alternative forms of cosmopolitics. I organize my exploration around two entities caribou and atîku that, so to speak, occupy the same space at the same time
in terms of bodily presence, albeit dominant common sense would have it that atîku and caribou are two words for the same entity.

This article introduces the term uncommons as a
conceptual response to questions that emerged in the context of conflicts around the scale and scope of diverse ‘‘commons’’ that are under threat by extractivism. It introduces the articles for this special issue, which were the result of an invitation to think with the concept of uncommons for a variety of situations.
It is concluded that these articles provide a strong
grounding to think of uncommons as constitutive of the commons, and that ‘‘uncommoning’’ might be crucial for giving shape to solid commons.

Dans cet article, le terme « incommun » est pre´sente´
comme une re´ponse conceptuelle a` des questions souleve´es dans un contexte de conflits entourant l’e´chelle et l’e´tendue de plusieurs « communs » menace´s par l’extractivisme. Il pre´sente les articles de ce nume´ro spe´cial, soumis en re´ponse a` l’invitation a` re´fle´chir sur le concept des « incommuns » dans des situations varie´es. Il conclut que ces articles constituent un fort ancrage sugge´rant que les incommuns sont constitutifs des communs et que le « faire incommun » pourrait eˆtre crucial
dans la constitution de communs solides.

"The concept of cosmopolitics developed by Isabelle Stengers and Bruno Latour keeps open the question of who and what might compose the common world. In this way, cosmopolitics offers a way to avoid the pitfalls of reasonable politics, a politics that, defining in advance that the differences at stake in a disagreement are between perspectives on a single reality, makes it possible to sideline some concerns by deeming them unrealistic and, therefore, unreasonable or irrelevant. Figuring the common world as its possible result, rather than as a starting point, cosmopolitics disrupts the quick recourse to ruling out concerns on the basis of their ostensible lack of reality. And yet, questions remain as to who and what can participate in the composition of the common world. Exploring these questions through ethnographical materials on a conflict around caribou in Labrador, I argue that a cosmopolitics oriented to the common world has important limitations and that another orientation might be possible as well. [ontological politics; cosmopolitics; alterity; science and tech- nology studies; political ontology; Innu; caribou]"