2001 Escobar - Culture Sits in Places
2001 Escobar - Culture Sits in Places
2001 Escobar - Culture Sits in Places
www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo
Abstract
The last few years have seen a resurgence of interest in the concept of place in anthropology,
geography, and political ecology. “Place” — or, more accurately, the defense of constructions
of place — has also become an important object of struggle in the strategies of social move-
ments. This paper is situated at the intersection of conversations in the disciplines about glo-
balization and place, on the one hand, and conversation in social movements about place and
political strategy, on the other. By arguing against a certain globalocentrism in the disciplines
that tends to effect an erasure of place, the paper suggests ways in which the defense of place
by social movements might be constituted as a rallying point for both theory construction and
political action. The paper proposes that place-based struggles might be seen as multi-scale,
network-oriented subaltern strategies of localization. The argument is illustrated with the case
of the social movement of black communities of the Pacific rainforest region of Colombia.
2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
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140 A. Escobar / Political Geography 20 (2001) 139–174
The question of “place” has been newly raised in recent years from a variety of
perspectives — from its relation to the basic understanding of being and knowing
to its fate under globalization and the extent to which it continues to be an aid or
a hindrance for thinking about culture and the economy. This questioning, of course,
is not coincidental; for some, placelessness has become the essential feature of the
modern condition, and a very acute and painful one in many cases, such as those
of exiles and refugees. Whether celebrated or decried, the sense of atopia seems to
have settled in. This seems to be as true of discussions in philosophy, where place
has been ignored by most thinkers (Casey 1993, 1997); theories of globalization,
that have effected a significant discursive erasure of place (Dirlik, 2000); or debates
in anthropology, which have seen a radical questioning of place and place making.
Yet the fact remains that place continues to be important in the lives of many people,
perhaps most, if we understand by place the experience of a particular location with
some measure of groundedness (however, unstable), sense of boundaries (however,
permeable), and connection to everyday life, even if its identity is constructed, tra-
versed by power, and never fixed. There is an “implacement” that counts for more
than we want to acknowledge, which makes one ponder if the idea of “getting back
into place” — to use Casey’s expression — or a defense of place as project — in
Dirlik’s case — are not so irrelevant after all2.
1
This paper is, in many ways, more personal than it is commonly the case; it has gone through many
turns and twists. The argument owes much to the work of, and dialogue with, historians Arif Dirlik and
Wendy Harcourt, whose support and interest I greatly appreciate. It was first presented at the biannual
meeting of the Society for Cultural Anthropology in San Francisco in May, 1997. Between 1997 and
1999, I presented the paper at a number of places and received rich feedback. The discussion was parti-
cularly useful at universities in Chicago, Chapel Hill, Bogotá, Copenhagen, Oxford (Geography), Barce-
lona, and Manchester. I should also mention discussions at the 1998 and 2000 Annual Meetings of the
American Association of Geographers (AAG), and at the workshop on “Producing Place(s)”, organized
by Scott Salmon at Miami University, Oxford, OH, 12–13 May 2000. I believe that the paper changed
significantly as a result, and I thank all of those whose insights made it richer. I also want to thank Terry
Evens for useful comments, and geographers Julie Graham, Erik Swyngedouw, Dianne Rocheleau, David
Slater, and Doreen Massey for their inspiring work and interest in the paper, as well as three anonymous
reviewers for the journal. Although this paper is written chiefly from an anthropological and ecological
perspective, and I am only a neophyte in the field of geography, I hope it contributes to the growing
dialogue between anthropology and geography, a dialogue that has seen active and lean periods since the
beginning of the century if not before, and which today promises to enrich both disciplines, for instance
around work being done at the intersection of environment and development, space and place, culture
and economy.
2
A refined outline of the concept of “place” is beyond the scope of this paper. See Casey (1993,
1997) for such an attempt within philosophy. I take place in an empirical and analytical sense — that is,
as a category of thought and as a constructed reality.
A. Escobar / Political Geography 20 (2001) 139–174 141
The disregard of place in Western theory and social science has been most point-
edly stated by phenomenologists. For philosopher Edward Casey, this disregard has
A. Escobar / Political Geography 20 (2001) 139–174 143
been endemic and long-standing. Since Plato, Western philosophy — often times
with the help of theology and physics — has enshrined space as the absolute, unlimi-
ted and universal, while banning place to the realm of the particular, the limited, the
local, and the bound. Seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophers, from
Descartes to Leibniz, assumed that places are only momentary subdivisions of a
universal and homogeneous space. For this to happen, space had to be dissociated
from the bodies that occupy it and from the particularities that these bodies lent to
the places they inhabit. Scientific knowledge welcomed this notion of the void, even
if a void with extension and structure that made possible the Cartesian project of a
mathesis universalis and the mathematization of nature (see also Foucault, 1973: 71–
77). Despite the hegemony of space, again following Casey, there has always been
an undercurrent of interest in, and theorizing of, place which has remained understud-
ied from this perspective and that extends from Aristotle to Irigaray, Bachelard,
Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari in our times and that includes, of course, Heid-
egger and Merleau-Ponty earlier in the century. This interest in place has spilled
over into disciplines such as architecture, archaeology, anthropology, geography, and
historical ecology. And although “this interest leaves place itself an unclarified
notion” (Casey, 1997: xii), its contours begin to be appreciated. Common to many
of these tendencies is an anti-essentialist notion of place, an interest in finding place
at work, place being constructed, imagined, and struggled over. One could say that
today there is an emerging philosophy and politics of place even if it still is clearly
under construction.
The disregard of place in the social and human sciences is the most puzzling since,
as Casey passionately argues, it is our inevitable immersion in place, and not the
absoluteness of space, that has ontological priority in the generation of life and the
real. It certainly does so in the accounts and practices of most cultures, echoed in
the phenomenological assertion that, given the primacy of embodied perception, we
always find ourselves in places. We are, in short, placelings. “To live is to live
locally, and to know is first of all is to know the places one is in” (Casey, 1996: 18).
Place is, of course, constituted by sedimented social structures and cultural practices.
Sensing and moving are not presocial; the lived body is the result of habitual cultural
and social processes. It is thus imperative that we “get back into place” (Casey,
1993) and reverse the long-standing disempowerment of place in both modern theory
and social life. This means recognizing that place, body, and environment integrate
with each other; that places gather things, thoughts, and memories in particular con-
figurations; and that place, more an event that a thing, is characterized by openness
rather than by a unitary self-identity. From an anthropological perspective, it is
important to highlight the emplacement of all cultural practices, which stems from
the fact that culture is carried into places by bodies — bodies are encultured and,
conversely, enact cultural practices. “Personal and cultural identity is bound up with
place; a topoanalysis is one exploring the creation of self-identity through place.
Geographical experience begins in places, reaches out to others through spaces, and
creates landscapes or regions for human existence” (Tilley, 1994: 15).
This also means that people are not only “local”; we are all indissolubly linked
to both local and extralocal places through what might be called networks — of
144 A. Escobar / Political Geography 20 (2001) 139–174
which the kula ring and internet networks would be contrasting variations in terms
of the ways in which they connect persons and places. Places concatenate with each
other to form regions, which suggests that porosity of boundaries is essential to place,
as it is to local constructions and exchange. Locality, in this way, becomes marked
by the interplay between position, place and region; by the porosity of boundaries;
and by the role of the lived body between enculturation and emplacement (Casey,
1996: 44), or between embodiment and enmindment, as Ingold (1999) put it in talk-
ing about the relation between person, organism and environment. Against this view
militate migration, wars, the new information and communications technologies
(NICTs), speed and, of course, the abstractions of space and much of Western
thought (Virilio 1997, 1999). Casey’s “region of places” is the opposite of Castells’
(1996) “space of flows” that is seen as characterizing today’s Network Society3.
I will argue that some social movements are taking the lead in this “getting back
into place” to which Casey summons us. Not only social movements, of course,
because there are multiple sources in this endeavor including, among others, feminist
body politics, phenomenological biology, new forms of dwelling in architecture,
alternative thinking on land and community, and the like. In commenting on the
economic prejudice against the small and the desecration of nature and rural com-
munities in the United States, Wendell Berry (1996), the poet farmer, for instance,
underscores ways of being rooted in the land; this leads him to envisage the historical
possibility of creating “the party of the local community”, that is, of local communi-
ties becoming more aware of themselves in their opposition to a postagricultural,
postnatural, and posthuman world that he sees as insidiously settling in. This party
has a double commitment: to the preservation of ecological diversity and integrity,
and to the renewal of local economies and communities. As we shall see, this double
goal of transforming ecology and economy can provide a powerful interface for the
renewal of place-based theory and practice.
Among the scholarly efforts, geography and archaeology have made strides in
recent years. After a period of initial interest on place in geography from various
perspectives (Relph, 1976; Tuan, 1977; Pred, 1984; Keith & Pile, 1993; see Entrikin,
3
Manuel Castells’ first volume on “The Information Age”, The Rise of the Network Society (1996),
a magisterial and essential book for understanding today’s economy and society, provides nevertheless
an example of the erasure of place Dirlik talks about. For Castell, the rise of a new technological paradigm
based on information, electronic and biological technologies is resulting in a network society in which
“the space of flows” overtakes the “space of places”, and where “no place exists by itself, since positions
are defined by flows…Places do not disappear but their logic and meaning become absorbed in the
network…structural meaning disappears subsumed in the logic of the metanetwork” (p. 412). In this new
situation, places may be switched off, leading to their decline and deterioration; people and labor are
fragmented in the space of places, as places get disconnected from each other (“elites are cosmopolitan,
people are local”, (p. 415). Global culture overpowers local cultures, and the resulting world is one of
pure Culture and no Nature, which amounts to the true beginning of History. While Castells seems to
maintain a certain nostalgia for places where face to face interaction and local actions count (such as the
Paris quarter of Belville who saw him come of age as a young intellectual), it is clear that for him the
new paradigm is here to stay. This is one of the many instances of the asymmetry in globalization
discourse that Dirlik is talking about.
A. Escobar / Political Geography 20 (2001) 139–174 145
1991 for a useful review) the discipline, at least economic geography, tended to
focus on the relation between political economy and space characteristic of late twen-
tieth century capitalism, broadly speaking. This prominent trend included analyses
of postfordism, uneven development and the urban question, and the articulation
between global capital and local culture specific to particular geographical locations
(see, among the most well known works, Harvey, 1989; Smith, 1996; Pred & Watts,
1992). Issues of globality and locality, modernity and postmodernity, capital, region,
and urban space saw a very fruitful theorization under a political economy approach
reinvigorated with considerations of culture, modernity, and novel forms of inquiry
into the dynamics of urban restructuring. The guiding concern in these analyses
continued to be the spatial shifts of capital specific to the growing global orders.
The geography of place has more recently reappeared within this important school
of economic and political geography through a variety of concerns. These include,
among others, a re-examination of the struggles around the reconfiguration of scale
by state, capital, and social movements in ways that challenge the pre-eminence of
the global (Swyngedouw, 1998); a renewed interest on “the production of place”
through a complex, and often contradictory, set of spatial dynamics of capital and
governance; attention to the impact of neo-liberal policies on the reconfiguration of
places and regions, such as inner cities or model urban development schemes and
local responses to them; and a keen theorization of scale and scalar politics
(Swyngedouw 1998, 2000; Peck, 2000). Beyond these trends, a number of geogra-
phers are finding themselves drawn back to place, and form a multiplicity of perspec-
tives, including psychoanalysis (Pile, 1996), the post-structuralism of Deleuze and
Guattari (Doel, 1999), and phenomenology and post-structuralist feminist geography,
to be discussed at some length below4. Needless to say, some of these tendencies
are in tension with each other, if not in outright conflict5.
A notable current in archaeology, mostly in Britain and growing out of the work
of Raymond Williams but influenced by phenomenology and feminism, is finding a
source of inspiration in theorizing landscapes in terms of people’s very different
4
If the scholarly programs at the annual meetings of the American Association of Geographers (AAG)
is any indication, the interest in place in geography skyrocketed recently. At the 1998 Boston Annual
Meeting, there were less than five organized sessions with “place” in the title. At the Pittsburgh 2000
meetings, on the contrary, the number at least doubled, and there were a number of papers on place in
other sessions (such as in the political ecology series). Of course, this does not mean either a substantive
treatment of the subject nor a unified perspective. On 12–13 May 2000 a working conference on “Produc-
ing Place(s): Economy, Governance and Resistance in the New Global Context” took place at Miami
University in Oxford, OH. This conference, which I attended, was convened by Scott Salmon and attended
by 16 people, mostly geographers. The meeting was devoted to developing new forms of political economy
analysis of economic and urban transformations from the perspective of scalar analyses centered on place.
5
For Doel (1999), for instance, speaking from the perspective of chaosophy and nomadology, many
of the phenomenological and feminist approaches to place (from Tuan and Entrekin to Massey) are prob-
lematic because of their “sedentary fixation” which, in his view, needs to be abandoned in geography.
Doel’s view is not necessarily inimical to the view of place as both event and location developed in this
paper. Enthralled by the “insatiable deterritorialization” preconized by a number of post-structralist writers,
however, Doel’s thought-provoking book, it seems to me, continues to privilege space and capital, even
if according to a postmodern processualism that differs from that of political economy.
146 A. Escobar / Political Geography 20 (2001) 139–174
Dawson, 1998: 4. This entails the loss of place as metaphor for culture. Moreover,
deterritorialization and “non-places” (Augé, 1995) become paradigmatic figures of
our times.
These critiques have been extremely productive. It was also usually assumed in
these anthropological critiques that places nevertheless continued to be important for
both ethnography and the producton of culture (Gupta & Ferguson, 1992). However,
it is possible to say that the concern with mobility and deterritorialization, while
necessary, has made many researchers lose sight of the continued importance of
place-based practices and modes of consciousness for the production of culture. They
have become more concerned with the space of political economy and geography,
understandably so given their focus on local effects of global power relations. There
has been, it would seem, a certain discursive excess in the critique of bounded notions
of culture that has made many researchers turn attention away from the fact that
next to the delocalizing effects of translocal forms of power there are also, even if
as a reaction to the latter, effects of boundary and ground making linked to places.
People continue to construct some sort of boundaries around their places, however,
permeable, and to be grounded in local socio-natural practices, no matter how chang-
ing and hybridized those grounds and practices might turn out to be. To capture the
place specificity of the production of place and culture thus becomes the other side
of the necessary reconceptualization of culture as deterritorialized and transnationally
produced. To paraphrase Basso (1996), culture sits in places (and in bodies and
biophysical ecologies, if your wish), even if it is by no means restricted to them.
The anthropology of place is the other, necessary side of the anthropology of non-
places and deterritorialized cultures. It is important to keep in mind the power of
place even in studies of placelessness (and vice versa). To make this assertion does
not mean that place is “the other” of space — place as pure and local and in oppo-
sition to a dominating and global space — since place is certainly connected to, and
to a significant extent produced by, spatial logics. It is to assert, on the contrary,
that place-based dynamics might be equally important for the production of space,
or at least they are in the view of some place-based social actors.
I also want to emphasize that to speak about place in this way does not mean that
place is fixed, permanent, unconstructed or unconnected. As Massey (1997) so
lucidly showed, a “global sense of place” that recognizes both global constructedness
and local specificity is neither an oxymoron nor needs to be reactionary. This is
because if the experience of movement and non-place has become fundamental for
modern identity and everyday life, the experience of place continues to be important
for many people worldwide. Place and non-place are more than contrastive
modalities. There are high cultural and political stakes in asserting one or the other.
It might indeed be true that places and cultures have always lived with, and accepted,
an inevitable hybridization. This does not make them necessarily less local, nor more
global, only differently so; the point is to find out how people, as Jonathan Friedman
put it, “practice the local in the global”, that is, of examining the practices through
which people construct places even as they participate in translocal networks (1997:
276). In other words, what I am also suggesting is that it might be possible to
approach the production of place and culture not only from the side of the global,
148 A. Escobar / Political Geography 20 (2001) 139–174
but of the local; not from the perspective of its abandonment but of its critical affir-
mation; not only according to the flight from places, whether voluntary or forced,
but of the attachment to them. This is what ecology allows you, indeed forces you,
to do, as we shall see. It is what some social movements are also demanding from
theoretical analysis. Even when social movements originate transnational networks,
these might be operational strategies for the defense of place. In some of these cases
one may speak, with geographer Sarah Radcliffe in referring to South American
indigenous networks, of “non-diasporic transnational identities” (1998; see also Rad-
cliffe, 1999 for a discussion of ambivalence in processes of recommunalization and
changing sense of nation and ethnic identity in Ecuador in the wake of unprecedented
indigenous mobilization). In this provocative term lies the possibility of linking
space, place, and identity in ways that are not accounted for either in conventional
models of identity that conflate place and identity nor in the newer ones that relate
identity to mobility and diaspora.
An awareness of the newly created invisibility of place in the most transnationally-
oriented literature is already surfacing in anthropology, particularly in those works
that most clearly engage with the work of phenomenologists and/or feminist geogra-
phers such as Doreen Massey (Moore, 1998; Raffles, 1999; Kirsch, 2000). Some
recent ethnographic orientations seem to take account of this fact, without disal-
lowing, but precisely building on, the notion of culture as deterritorialized. Some,
for instance, emphasize the dialectic of place and world, home and movement. How
do people construct narratives and practices of home in a world of movement
(Rapport & Dawson, 1998)? In these works, the sense of belonging and of movement
or displacement are relationally produced. This view of home is somewhat con-
ditioned by the concentration on Euro-American ethnographic cases, which entail an
historical intensification of disembededdness (the tearing apart of space away from
place that Giddens has identified as a paradigmatic feature of modernity, 1990); this
feature, according to these authors, would seem to push people to invest place and
home with personal agency to counter these tendencies.
More generally, places might be seen as self-consciously constructed by people
through active processes of work (Wade, 1999), narratives (Raffles, 1999; Berger,
1979), and movement (Harvey, 1999)6. In the environmental arena, people’s senses
6
Tim Ingold made the point that once we abandon the abstract notion of space, it is necessary and
sufficient to map the relation between place, environment, and movement for an adequate conceptualiz-
ation of place making (comment made in the discussion period after my talk at Manchester, 16 May
1999). In Pig Earth, John Berger (1979) gave a wonderful description of the role of narrative in place
making. In discussing his relation as a writer to the place he was writing about, he argued that “what
distinguishes the life of a village is that it is also a living portrait of itself: a communal portrait, in that
everybody is portrayed and everybody portrays…And one must remember that the making of this continu-
ous communal portrait is not a vanity or a passtime: it is an organic part of the life of the village. Should
it cease, the village would disintegrate” (p. 9, 11). And he adds, referring to himself: “The stranger’s
contribution is small, but it is to something essential” (p. 11). So with the fieldworker. (It should be
pointed out, however, that place-based narratives are seldom self-contained; on the contrary, they are
usually linked to, and in conversation with, larger narratives past and present, as shown by Gudeman and
Rivera (1990) in their analysis of peasant economic narratives in the Colombian Andes.)
A. Escobar / Political Geography 20 (2001) 139–174 149
of place have been shown to change with the deterioration of local landscapes follow-
ing the environmental impact of activities such as mining (Kirsch, 2000 for an
example from Papua New Guinea; Kuletz, 1998 for the impact of uranium mining
and nuclear waste disposal on Native American places and senses of place in the
Western regions of the United States). This trend, still barely visible, self-consciously
broaches the exciting and difficult task of bringing together phenomenology and
political economy (see also the forthcoming volume by Campbell & Milton, 2000,
with contributions at this intersection that take Ingold’s work as a point of departure).
The crucial importance of this trend for the defense of place as project should become
increasingly appreciated. The point in these works is not only to show how long-
term habitation and commitment to place are unsettled by larger political economies,
but how local groups develop “strategic countermeasure[s] to the deterritorialized
space” represented by those forces (Kuletz, 1998: 239). A related, but different angle
is taken by Pramod Parajuli, who has developed a substantial and promising concep-
tualization of place-based grassroots forms of governance based on ecological eth-
nicities and a simultaneous revitalization of ecology and democracy, and very much
in opposition to destructive trans-local forces (Parajuli 1996, 1997).
Other recent attempts focus on the field of relations that become significant to
people of a given social group as they mobilize through different world regions
(Olwig & Hastrup, 1997). By examining cultural sites that are identified with parti-
cular places and yet accommodate the global conditions of people’s lives, these
authors convey a textured sense of both local and non-local processes at work in
the production of place and culture. Caribbean people form the island of Nevis, for
instance, “sustain a home” through processes of both deterritorialization and attach-
ment to place that brings together Nevisians from the island with those that have
migrated to New Haven, Leeds, or the Virgin Islands in the shared maintenance of
the family land and house back on the island. These networks of relations, however
transnationalized, evidence the existence of cultural sites of certain sustenance and
permanence (Olwig, 1997). While this approach, of course, has clear precedents in
anthropological theory, particularly in earlier works on networks and migration, they
have achieved great theoretical coherence in terms of encompassing the manifold
and contradictory spheres of life in which people are involved today, including the
dialectic of dwelling and traveling, localizing and globalizing (see also Clifford,
1992).
Related approaches highlight the efforts by social groups to construct boundaries
around them, and the creative ways in which people might use external or global
conditions for further attempts at defensive localization. Belonging, these authors
find, is often expressed in terms of attachment to locality; however, this does not
mean that these expressions are drawn out of context. Indeed, the interesting question
is how people mobilize politically notions of attachment and belonging for the con-
struction of individual and collective identities, including the conflict that this local
mobilization might entail with broader political and economic interests (Lovell,
1999). Needless to say, it is necessary to acknowledge the social importance of the
senses of attachment and belonging of the powerful, and their intensification at parti-
cular historical conjunctures. In these cases, boundary making around places is also
150 A. Escobar / Political Geography 20 (2001) 139–174
localities — which is to say, the perception and experience of place — [are] few
and far between” (Feld & Basso, 1996: 16). The aim of these ethnographers is to
underscore the cultural processes through which places are rendered meaningful by
looking at local knowledge, localized expressions, language, poetics and perform-
ance. How do people encounter places, perceive them, and endow them with signifi-
cance? Appealing to phenomenological and hermeneutic positions in their accounts
of perception, meaning and experience, these anthropologists discuss with great
lucidity senses of place, emplacement, and meaningful modes of dwelling. Quite a
different project, that linguists and linguistic anthropologists approach from the
related perspective of the relation between language, naming, and place (see for
instance Samuels, 1999; Gnerre, 1998).
A final trend linked to the investigation of place is found in ecological anthro-
pology, and concerns the study of local knowledge and local models of nature7.
Generally speaking, political ecologists and ecological anthropologists have
reopened, with increasing decisiveness and eloquence, the project of demonstrating
that many rural communities in the Third World “construct” nature in strikingly
different ways from prevalent modern forms; they signify — and, thus, use — their
natural environments in very particular ways. Ethnographic studies in Third World
settings unveil a significantly different set of practices for thinking about, relating
to, constructing and experiencing the biological and the natural. This project was
formulated some time ago (Strathern, 1980) and has achieved a remarkable level of
sophistication in recent years (e.g. Descola & Pálsson, 1996). There is, of course,
no unified view on just what characterizes local models of nature. Perhaps the most
well-established notion today is that many local models do not rely on a nature-
society dichotomy. In addition, and unlike modern constructions with their strict
separation between biophysical, human and supernatural worlds, it is commonly
appreciated that local models in non-Western contexts are seen as often predicated
on links of continuity between the three spheres. This continuity might nevertheless
be experienced as problematic and uncertain; it is culturally established through sym-
bols, rituals and practices and is embedded in particular social relations which also
differ from the modern, capitalist type. In this way, living, non-living, and often
times supernatural beings are not seen as constituting distinct and separate
domains — certainly not two opposed spheres of nature and culture — and social
relations are seen as encompassing more than humans. In general terms, it could be
said that local models of nature constitute ensembles of meanings-uses that, while
existing in larger contexts of power, can neither be reduced to modern constructions
nor accounted for without some reference to local culture and grounds and boundary
effects. Cultural models and knowledge are based on historical, linguistic, and cul-
tural processes that, while never isolated from broader histories, nevertheless retain
certain place specificity. In addition, many of the mechanisms and practices at play
7
See Ingold (1992, 1993) and the volumes by MacCormack and Strathern (1980), Gudeman and Rivera
(1990), Hobart (1993), Milton (1993, 1996), Restrepo and del Valle (1996) and Descola (1994); and
Descola and Pálsson (1996). This last volume is devoted to examining cultural models of nature and to
debunking the nature/culture dichotomy.
152 A. Escobar / Political Geography 20 (2001) 139–174
global forces, following a political economy approach; and the “senses” or, more
generally cultural construction of place — how places are endowed with meaning
and the constitution of identities, subjectivities, difference and antagonism, following
phenomenological, interpretivist, and constructivist paradigms. The advantages of
cross-fertilizing these two currents should be apparent by now, with the concomitant
blurring of boundaries between geography and anthropology, political economy and
post-structuralist tendencies and epistemologies. Finally, the continued vitality of
place for social practice is attested by phenomenologists, for whom body and place
are ineluctably the bases for human existence; by ecological anthropologists, in their
discussion of place-based models of nature; and by a number of struggles and social
movements that, to a greater or lesser extent, take place and place-based modes of
consciousness as both the point of departure and goal of their political strategies.
8
The notion of “postdevelopment” has become a heuristic for re-learning to see and reassess the reality
of communities in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Is it possible to lessen the dominance of development
representations when we approach this reality? Postdevelopment is a way to signal this possibility, an
attempt to carve out a clearing for thinking other thoughts, seeing other things, writing in other languages
(Crush, 1995; Escobar, 1995; Rahnema and Bawtree, 1997).
154 A. Escobar / Political Geography 20 (2001) 139–174
ives, the recent barter and solidarity economies in various parts of the world, etc.)
are thus seen as opposite, subordinate, or complementary to capitalism, never as
sources of a significant economic difference. Their critique applies to most theories
of globalization and even of postdevelopment, to the extent that the latter situate
capitalism “at the center of development narratives, thus tending to devalue or mar-
ginalize possibilities of noncapitalist development” (Gibson-Graham, 1996: 41). By
criticizing capitalocentrism, these authors seek to liberate our ability for seeing non-
capitalisms and building alternative economic imaginaries9.
This reinterpretation challenges the inevitability of capitalist “penetration” that is
assumed in much of the literature on globalization:
In the globalization script…only capitalism has the ability to spread and invade.
Capitalism is presented as inherently spatial and as naturally stronger than the
forms of noncapitalist economy (traditional economies, “Third World” economies,
socialist economies, communal experiments) because of its presumed capacity to
universalize the market for capitalist commodities…Globalization according to
this script involves the violation and eventual death of “other” noncapitalist forms
of economy…All forms of noncapitalism become damaged, violated, fallen, sub-
ordinated to capitalism…How can we challenge the similar representation of glo-
balization as capable of “taking” the life from noncapitalist sites, particularly the
“Third World”? (Gibson-Graham, 1996: 125, 130)
From this perspective, not everything that emerges from globalization can be said
to conform to the capitalist script; in fact, globalization and development might pro-
pitiate a variety of economic development paths; these could be theorized in terms
of postdevelopment in such a way that “the naturalness of capitalist identity as the
template of all economic identity can be called into question” (Gibson-Graham, 1996:
146). They could also be conceived of, as Mayfair Yang does in her farsighted
application of Gibson-Graham to the changing and multiple Chinese economies, in
terms of the hybridity of economies; what she means by this is that many of today’s
economic formations in China are composed of both capitalist and a whole array of
non-capitalist forms. With this reinterpretation, Yang challenges us to entertain the
idea that “indigenous economies do not always get ploughed under with the entrance
of capitalism, but may even experience renewal and pose a challenge to the spread
9
The argument is more complex than presented here, and entails a redefinition of class on anti-essen-
tialist grounds that builds on Althusser’s work and on the post-structuralist Marxism of Resnick and Wolff
(1987). Briefly, at issue is a reinterpretation of capitalist practices as overdetermined and the liberation
of the economic discursive field from capital as a single overarching principle of determination. Coupled
with a transformed definition of class that focuses on the processes of producing, appropriating and
distributing surplus labor, this reinterpretation yields a view of the economy as constituted by a diversity
of class processes — capitalist and non-capitalist — thus making visible a variety of noncapitalist practices
by women wage earners, peasants, household, communal and self-help organizations, cooperatives, sub-
sistence economies, etc.
A. Escobar / Political Geography 20 (2001) 139–174 155
10
The most important were those of Taussig (1980), Scott (1985), Ong (1987) and Comaroff and
Comaroff (1991). Fox and Starn (1997) moved beyond everyday forms of resistance to consider those
forms of mobilization and protest that take place “between resistance and revolution”. For a review of
some of this literature, see Escobar (1995), Chap. 4.
156 A. Escobar / Political Geography 20 (2001) 139–174
women, minorities, the poor and, one might add, local cultures11. Some feminist
geographers have attempted to correct this asymmetry by arguing that place can also
lead to articulations across space, for instance through networks of various kinds
(Chernaik, 1996); this leaves unresolved, however, the relation between place and
location, as well as the question of boundaries.
More fundamental perhaps in Dirlik’s analysis are the consequences of the neglect
of place for current categories of social analysis such as class, gender, and race (and
we should add the environment here), which make such categories susceptible of
becoming instruments of hegemony. To the extent that they are significantly sundered
from place in discourses of globalization and deterritoralization, contemporary
notions of culture do not manage to escape this predicament, for they tend to assume
the existence of a global power structure in which the local occupies a necessarily
subordinate position. Under these conditions, is it possible to launch a defense of
place in which place and the local do not derive their meaning only from their
juxtaposition to the global? A first step in resisting the marginalization of place,
continuing with Dirlik’s exposition, is provided by Lefebvre’s notion of place as a
form of lived and grounded space and the reappropriation of which must be part of
any radical political agenda against capitalism and spaceless and timeless globaliz-
ation. Politics, in other words, is also located in place, not only in the supra-levels
of capital and space. Place, one might add, is the location of a multiplicity of forms
of cultural politics, that is, of the cultural-becoming-political, as it has become evi-
dent with rainforest and other ecological social movements12.
Dirlik suggests that “glocal” could be a first approximation for moving towards
giving equal attention to the localization of the global and the globalization of the
local. The term “glocal” was initially coined in the late 1980s in association with
processes of capitalist restructuring (Swyngedouw personal communication, 1998);
this term is gaining some currency for moving away from binary divisions between
the local and the global (see below). But the concrete forms in which the two-way
traffic between globalization and localization takes place, let alone its equalization,
is not easily conceptualized. Even the local of social movements against capital and
11
This is very clearly the case in environmental discourses, for instance, of biodiversity conservation,
where women and indigenous people are credited with having the knowledge of “saving nature”. Massey
(1994) already denounced the feminization of place and the local in theories of space. For a good example
of the assymetry Dirlik talks about, see the quotes from Castells’ book above (footnote No. 3).
12
Lefebvre’s distinction has been taken up recently by Soja as a way to move beyond the binarism of
much social theory and to reinfuse politics with considerations of place. Building upon the work of
Lefebvre and of feminist and postcolonial theorists, Soja suggests a notion of Thirdspace that transcends
the binarism of the first space (material space) of positivist science (geography, planning, etc.) and the
second space (the conceived space of theory and design) of interpretive theories. Thirdspace involves
both the material and the symbolic; it is closest to “space as directly lived, with all its intractability
intact…the space of ‘inhabitants’ and ‘users’” (Soja, 1996: 67). Soja’s “trialectic” of lived, perceived and
conceived spaces — while provisional — may be seen as providing the grounds for a strategic political
choice in defense of place and lived space. Would it be possible to think about first, second and third
“natures” in a similar way (first nature as biophysical reality, second nature as that of theorists, managers
and symbolic constructions, and third nature as that which is lived by people in everyday life)?
A. Escobar / Political Geography 20 (2001) 139–174 157
modern natures is globalized in some ways, for instance, to the extent that social
movements borrow metropolitan discourses of identity and the environment (Brosius,
1997). Conversely, many forms of the local are offered for global consumption, from
kinship to crafts, music, and ecotourism. The point here would be to distinguish
those forms of globalization of the local that could become effective political forces
in the defense of place and place-based identities, as well as those forms of localiz-
ation of the global that locals might be able to use to their own advantage. As Virilio
put it, “I love the local when it enables you to see the global, and I love the local
when you can see it from the global” (Virilio, 1999: 112).
To construct place as a project, to turn place-based imaginaries into a radical
critique of power, and to align social theory with a critique of power by place requires
that we venture into other terrains. This proposal resonates with, and moves a step
beyond, Jane Jacobs’ idea that “by attending to the local, by taking the local seri-
ously, it is possible to see how the grand ideas of empire become unstable techno-
logies of power with reach across time and space” (1996: 158). To be sure, “place”
and “local knowledge” are no panaceas that will solve the world’s problems. Local
knowledge is not pure or free of domination; places might have their own forms of
oppression and even terror; they are historical and connected to the wider world
through relations of power, and in many ways determined by them. The defense of
local knowledge proposed here is both political and epistemological, arising out of
the commitment to an anti-essentialist discourse of difference. Against those who
think that the defense of place and local knowledge is undeniably romantic, one
could say, with Jacobs (1996: 161) that “it is a form of imperial nostalgia, a desire
for the ‘untouched Native’, which presumes that such encounters [between local and
global] only ever mark yet another phase of imperialism”. It will be necessary, how-
ever, to expand the inquiry into place to consider broader questions, such as the
relation of places to regional and transnational economies; place and social relations;
place and identity; place, boundaries and border crossings; place and alternative mod-
ernities; and the impact of digital technology, particularly the internet, on places.
What changes do occur in particular places as a result of globalization? Conversely,
what new ways of thinking about the world emerge from places as a result of such
an encounter? How do we understand the relations between biophysical, cultural,
and economic dimensions of places?
The notion of cultural models of nature and non-capitalist practices does not do
away with the need to rethink capitalism and globalization; this is a vexing question.
It does point to the weaknesses of capitalocentrism, however: the fact that what
Marxism and other progressive frameworks have been called upon to transform is
this impossibly large monster that cannot be changed, a Capitalism that is immune
to radical reconceptualization and the position of which seems to get further
entrenched in the very act of critique. But is it possible to see it otherwise? “What
if we theorize capitalism not as something large and embracing but as something
partial, as one social constituent among many?…What if capitalism were a set of
different practices scattered over the landscape that are (for convenience and in
violation of difference) often seen as the same? If categories like subjectivity and
society can undergo a radical rethinking, producing a crisis of individual and social
158 A. Escobar / Political Geography 20 (2001) 139–174
The Pacific region of Colombia is a vast rainforest area about 900 km long and
50–180 km wide, stretching from Panama and Ecuador, and between the westernmost
chain of the Andes and the Pacific Ocean. It is known as one of the “hot spots” of
biological diversity in the world. Afro-Colombians, descendants from slaves brought
beginning in the sixteenth century to mine gold, make up for about 90% of the
population, with indigenous peoples from various ethnic groups accounting for about
5% of the region’s population of close to a million. About 60% of the population
still live in rural settlements along the numerous rivers that, in the southern part,
flow from the Andes towards the ocean. Although the region has never been com-
pletely isolated, two factors have brought watershed changes to it in recent years:
the radical neo-liberal opening of the country to the world economy adopted by the
government after 1990; and the granting of collective territorial and cultural rights
to the black communities in 1993 (the so-called Ley 70 or Law 70), following the
implementation of a new national constitution in 1991. It was in the context of this
conjuncture that the three changes with which this account is concerned need to be
situated. First, the increased pace of capitalist extractivist activities, such as the rapid
expansion of African palm plantations and industrial shrimp cultivation in the south-
13
This is an extremely succinct presentation of the both the region in question and the movement. It
is intended to give the reader a sense of the importance of culture, place, and territory for this movement.
The concept of “territory” itself is very new, dating from the mid 1980s, and so is the ethnicization of
black identities. The defense of territories and ethnic identities have only become political projects in the
1990s. For more background on the region see Whitten (1986), Escobar and Pedrosa (1996), Restrepo
and del Valle (1996) and Camacho and Restrepo (1999). The social movement of black communities is
analyzed in Grueso, Rosero and Escobar (1998), and the movement’s political ecology framework in
Escobar (1998). Finally, the book I am currently writing on these issues has a chapter on place from
which the brief remarks included here are adapted. The book is based on eight years of research, including
over 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork starting with a year-long period in 1993.
160 A. Escobar / Political Geography 20 (2001) 139–174
ern part of the region. Second, the growing concern with the destruction of biological
diversity, leading to the implementation of an innovative project for its conservation,
with the region’s social movements as one of the project’s main interlocutors. Third,
the rise of important ethnic movements, particularly the social movement of black
communities.
How can the production of this peculiar “rainforest” region be analyzed in terms
of place? Generally speaking, the “Pacı́fico biogeográfico”, as the region is known,
is constructed through processes involving the human, biophysical non-human, and
machinic worlds operating at many scales, from the microbiological to the trans-
national. These processes can schematically be seen as follows:
Since the early 1990s, the biodiversity network has become an important element
in the struggle over the Colombian Pacific as place and territory.
In a very schematic fashion, these processes can be further divided into two overall
strategies. These strategies, let it be emphasized, and not bounded and discrete, but
overlapping and in many ways co-produced:
as traditional gold mining or women’s shell collecting in the mangrove areas. Each
of these corridors is marked by particular patterns of mobility, social relations
(gender, kindred, ethnicity), use of the environment, and links to other corridors;
each involves a particular use and management strategy of the territory.
The region-territory is a category of inter-ethnic relations that points toward the
construction of alternative life and society models. It entails an attempt to explain
biological diversity from the endogenous perspective of the eco-cultural logic of the
Pacific. More concretely, the territory is seen as the space of effective appropriation
of the ecosystem, that is, as those spaces used to satisfy community needs and for
social and cultural development; it is multidimensional space for the creation and
recreation of the ecological, economic, and cultural practices of the communities.
For a given river community, this appropriation has longitudinal and transversal
dimensions, sometimes encompassing several river basins. Thus defined, the territory
cuts across several landscape units; more importantly, it embodies a community’s
life project. The region-territory, on the contrary, is conceived of as a political con-
struction for the defense of the territories and their sustainability. In this way, the
region-territory is a strategy of sustainability and viceversa: sustainability is a strat-
egy for the construction and defense of the region-territory. The region-territory can
thus be said to articulate the life project of the communities with the political project
of the social movement. The struggle for territory is thus a cultural struggle for
autonomy and self-determination. This explains why for many people of the Pacific
the loss of territory would amount to a return to slavery or, worse perhaps, to becom-
ing “common citizens”.
The issue of territory is considered by PCN activists as a challenge to developing
local economies and forms of governability that can support its effective defense.
The strengthening and transformation of traditional production systems and local
markets and economies; the need to press on with the collective titling process;
and working towards organizational strengthening and the development of forms of
territorial governability are all important components of an overall strategy centered
on the region. Finally, it is clear that communities themselves increasingly have a
sense of the loss of territory at present and what it might take to defend it. Those
in river communities are prone to point at the “loss of traditional values and identity”
as the most immediate source of loss of territory. Other factors seem to converge
on this variable; loss of traditional production practices, irrational exploitation of
resources, state development policies oriented by purely external criteria, increase
pace of industrial extraction, and the existence of totally inappropriate and alienating
educational models for the young people are cited as the most common factors asso-
ciated with the loss of values and territory. In more substantial discussions with
community leaders and social movement activists, a series of other factors linked to
the loss of territory start to emerge, such as: the spread of plantations and specializa-
tion of productive activities; changes in production systems; internal conflicts in the
communities; the cultural impact of national media, education and culture; out
migration and the arrival of people foreign to the region espousing the ethics of
capitalism and extractivism; and of course inadequate development policies, the neo-
liberal opening to world markets, and the demands of the global economy.
A. Escobar / Political Geography 20 (2001) 139–174 163
What are the prospects for defense of place projects such as that of the Colombian
Pacific? It is important to tackle this question in a general way before concluding.
For Dirlik, the survival of place-based cultures will be insured when the globalization
of the local compensates for the localization of the global — that is, when symmetry
between the local and the global is reintroduced in social and conceptual terms and,
we need to add, when economic and ecological difference are similarly rendered
into centers of analysis and strategies for action. In the last instance, however, the
14
I base this preliminary analysis of networks on my knowledge of, and engagement with, several
networks, including the social movement of black communities and its transnational activities; the
UNESCO-sponsored project, “Women on the Net” (Harcourt, 1999b), an international network devoted
to the study and promotion of the use of NICTs by women’s groups world-wide; and the International
Group for Grassroots Initiatives (IGGRI), a coalition of social movements against globalization. I have
also followed from a distance the activities of the Geneva-based People’s Global Action Against Free
Trade (PGA), which has been instrumental in a number of mobilizations against the World Trade Organi-
zation has been since May, 1998. Two dissertations in progress at the University of Massachusetts at
Amherst, by Chaia Heller and Mary King, also advance a network ethnography, the first in the context
of French peasant mobilization against transgenic agriculture (see Escobar & Heller, 1999), the second
focused on the activities of a small number of radical NGOs in the area of genetic resources and biodivers-
ity conservation. The last chapter of a book I am currently writing, based on several years of fieldwork
in the Colombian Pacific, will be devoted to the theory and ethnography of networks.
164 A. Escobar / Political Geography 20 (2001) 139–174
This would imagine the spatial as the sphere of the juxtaposition, or co-exist-
ence, of distinct narratives, as the product of power-filled social relations; it would
be a view of space which tries to emphasize both its social construction and its
necessarily power-filled nature. Within this context, “places” may be imagined as
particular articulations of these social relations, including local relations “within”
the place and those many connections which stretch way beyond it. And all of
these embedded in complex, layered histories. This is place as open, porous,
hybrid – this is place as meeting place (again, the importance of recognising in
the “spatial” the juxtaposition of different narratives). This is a notion of place
where specificity (local uniqueness, a sense of place) derives not from some
mythical internal roots nor from a history of relative isolation — not to be dis-
rupted by globalisation — but precisely from the absolute particularity of the
mixture of influences found together there (1999: 18; see also Massey, 1994).
very same dialectic that geographers talk about. Massey’s emphasis on narratives
and specificity opens the way for geographers to be more attuned to the cultural
dimension of space. Space is not culturally neutral, as it is often assumed. The
relationship between space, the natural and the cultural needs to be spelled out more
clearly in spatial narratives that tend to take it for granted. The production of space
through processes and narratives of capital and development, for instance, is quite
different from the space struggled for by social movements (e.g. the “region-territory
of ethnic groups” of the Colombian Pacific).
Morever, although this idea can only be mentioned in passing here, social move-
ments-led networks and glocalilties contribute to produce different kinds of space.
For the spaces created by capital not only abstract from place but tend to enforce
the regularized spaces of modernity; they are driven by mechanisms of de- and re-
territorialization that can only take into account what is specific to place up to a
certain point. To put it simply, capital operates at the local level but cannot have a
sense of place — certainly not at least in the phenomenological sense. To be sure,
capital needs to articulate with local conditions, yet this is not the same as saying
that capital is place-based, at least not in the way in which place-based struggles
are, or rarely so. This idea resonates with Doreen Massey’s suggestion that in con-
ceiving of space as always a product of interrelations, that is, as a genuinely existing
multiplicity, one must have to acknowledge that “the South” or the cultures of much
of Asia, Africa and Latin America “might have their own story to tell”; this implies,
in turn, that “what is required for the constitution of the spatial is a degree of mutual
autonomy, a genuine plurality…An understanding of spatiality, in other words,
entails the recognition that there is one more story going on in the world and that
these stories have, at least, a relative autonomy” (Massey, 1998: 3; see also Slater,
1998). Again, it is important to highlight the cultural source of this difference and
autonomy. Massey is absolutely right in pointing at what she calls “the spatialisation
of the story of modernity” as a key problem in the conceptualization of globaliz-
ation — that is, the fact that what is described as globalization is the universalization
of a particular way of imagining cultures and societies as having a particular relation
to (national) space. Globalization, in other words, starts with the spurious assumption
of spaces already divided-up into parcels (the nation-states), and of places which are
already separate, bounded, and subordinate. In delinking the story of globalization
from that of modernity, Massey wants to open up the imaginary of globalization to
an alterity of space-place forms; it is a way of multiplying the geographical speaking
positions for a truly spatialized globalization. I suggest that thinking in terms of
glocalities that qualitatively reorganize and recreate space is a way of doing so. For
this possibility to become fully visible, however, one has to move to the terrain of
culture. The cultural politics of social movements suggests ways for reconnecting
space and place in ways that do not yield the standardized narratives of capital
and modernity.
These discussions of place already hint at the question of the politics of the defense
of place. Theoretically, it is important to learn to see place-based cultural, ecological,
and economic practices as important sources of alternative visions and strategies for
reconstructing local and regional worlds, no matter how produced by “the global”
166 A. Escobar / Political Geography 20 (2001) 139–174
they might also be. Socially, it is necessary to think about the conditions that might
make the defense of place — or, more precisely, of particular constructions of place
and the reorganization of place this might entail —- a realizable project. As I men-
tioned, in their triple localizing strategy, some rainforest social movements engage
in what geographers call “the politics of scale”; they jump from one scale to another
in their political mobilization. The results occur at various scales, from the local
territories to the construction of regional socionatural worlds, such as the Pacific as
a “region-territory of ethnic groups”. Alternative ecological public spheres might
be opened up in this way against the imperial ecologies of nature and identity of
capitalist modernity.
It is true that capital and globalization achieve dramatic scaling effects. They con-
trol places through the control of space. As geographers point out (Swyngedouw
1997, 1998), we are witnessing an important geographic re-scaling by capital which
shifts power primarily to the global level and global forms of governance (for
example, NAFTA, the EU, GATT, and WTO). Most times these maneuvers are
undemocratic and disempowering; they are fueled by discourses of free trade, devel-
opment, and the unrestricted work of markets. However, social movements and pro-
gressive NGOs often times also create networks that achieve supra-place effects that
are not negligible. The various networks of indigenous peoples of the Americas are
already well known in this regard, but there are transnational networks emerging
around a host of issues world wide. The anti-WTO demonstrations in Seattle in
November, 1999 are a case in point. They were actually the result of networks of
organizations in ascension since at least the anti-GATT protests in India in the early
1990s. These networks propitiate the reorganization of space from below and some
measure of symmetry between the local and the global. They can be seen as creating
“glocalities”, that is, cultural and spatial configurations that connect places with each
other to create regional spaces and regional worlds. Glocality means that everything
is local and global, to be sure, but not global and local in the same way (Dirlik,
2000). In other words, not only capital but place-based struggles reorganize space
through networks, and they do so according to different parameters and concerns.
This is also to suggest that the politics of place has to be found at the intersection
of the scaling effects of networks, on the one hand, and emergent identities, such
as the black and indigenous identities of the Colombian Pacific, on the other. Social
movements and local communities are not just trapped in places, awaiting for the
liberating hand of capital, technology or development to join the networks of trans-
national flows of commodities, images, and the like. In constructing networks and
glocalities of their own, even if of course in their engagement with dominant net-
works, social movements might contribute to democratize social relations, contest
visions of nature (such as in biodiversity debates), challenge current technoscientific
hype (and in the case of transgenic agriculture and genetically modified organisms,
GMOs), and even suggest that economies can be organized differently from current
neo-liberal dogmas (as in the resurgence of barter and local-currency economies and
the continued survival of non-capitalist practices). Social movements suggest that
“the gestalt of space” (Swyngedouw, 1997) needs to be approached not only from
the perspective of capital’s spatialization but from the side of the production of space
A. Escobar / Political Geography 20 (2001) 139–174 167
by place-based networks. It is also vital that researchers recognize both the social
production and the cultural construction of space; the scaling-up of networks has
cultural effects that are often missed in conceptions of space and networks, including
those that have been most enlightening and influential (Harvey, 1989 for space; Lat-
our, 1993 for networks; Castells, 1996 for both).
A politics of difference based on place-based practices and networks is greatly
aided today by the creative use of NICTs. Information and networking have been
shown to be of vital importance to the political strategies of a number of cultural
rights movements, including the Zapatista and the Maya culturalist movement
(Nelson, 1996), women’s movements (Harcourt, 1999b), and other ethnic, environ-
mental, and indigenous movements (Ribeiro, 1998; Escobar, 1999b). It might seem
paradoxical at first to use NICTs, known for their de-localizing effects at the service
of capital and global media, for a defense of place-based practices. But the fact is
that people rooted in local cultures are finding ways to have a stake in national and
global society precisely as they engage with the conditions of transnatioanalism in
defense of local cultures and ecologies (Arizpe, 1999). This is so because these
networks are the location of emergent local actors and the source of promising cul-
tural practices and possibilities. They are most effective when they rely on an ongo-
ing tacking back and forth between cyberpolitics and place politics — that is,
between political activism in the internet and other network-mediated spaces and
activism in the physical location in which the networkers sit and live. Because of
their historical attachment to places and the cultural and ecological difference they
embody, women, environmentalists, and ethnic social movements in some parts of
world are particularly suited to this task of weaving the virtual and the real, and
culture, gender, environment and development into an innovative cultural–political
practice (Ribeiro, 1998; Rocheleau, Thomas-Slate & Wangari, 1996; Harcourt,
1999b; Escobar, 1999b).
The radical lessons of a politics of place do not stop there, and there is a final
aspect I would like to mention before concluding. A place-based politics might
enable scholars and activists to think about the conditions for what philosophers
Spinosa, Flores and Dreyfus (1997) have called “the retrieval of history-making
skills”. Working out of a reformed phenomenology, these authors attempt to bring
back a contextualized and situated notion of human practice in contrast to the desitu-
ated and detached view of people and things fostered by Cartesianism and modern
science. To be sure, this attempt takes place fully as a critical project of modernity;
however, it can be reinterpreted to illuminate certain unsuspected aspects of the
politics of place. While the philosophers acknowledge the historical trend towards
uprooted and flexible selves and communities fostered by NICTs, they believe that
history-making skills linked to an attachment to place and stable identities have not
disappeared and may be creatively recuperated. Why? Because, in their argument,
we live at our best when engaged in acts of history making, meaning by this the
ability to engage in the ontological act of disclosing new ways of being, of trans-
forming the ways in which we understand and deal with ourselves and with things.
Places can be thought of as “disclosive spaces”, defined as “any organized set of
practices for dealing with oneself, other people, and things that produces a relatively
168 A. Escobar / Political Geography 20 (2001) 139–174
self-contained web of meanings” (p. 17). While most activity going on in places can
be categorized as daily coping or customary disclosing, there is always the possibility
of historical disclosing; this might happen, for instance, when activists identify and
hold on to a disharmony in ways that transform the background practices of under-
standing or the disclosive space in which people live. This life of skilful disclosing,
which makes the world look genuinely different, is only possible through a life of
intense engagement with a place.
This is in direct opposition to the conventional notion of the public sphere that
operates through detached understanding of problems and that results in abstract
solutions. Democracy, in these philosophers’ views, requires the rootedness in parti-
cularly problems and places (the immersion in the background practices of a col-
lectivity with the risk taking that speaking out of this background entails); only in
this way can meaningful public spheres be created, and only under these circum-
stances can the kind of interpretive speaking through which particular practices and
identities might appear as worthy of attention to a mixed community be exercised.
Interpretive speaking, in other words, belongs with/in places. Place-based activists,
intellectuals, and common citizens (“reticent citizens”, pp. 94–115) do not act as
detached contributors to public debate (as in the talk show model of the public
sphere) but are able to articulate the concerns of their constituencies in such a way
that the relevant background practices are changed. Social movements also fulfill
this role at various scales through the networks they create; their actions emerge from
the concrete experience of their subworld; at their best, they respect the difference of
other subworlds with which they network and interact, even as they cross-appropriate
practices of those subworlds. In the process, not infrequently the background prac-
tices of all the subworlds involved are transformed 15. Surely, a new model of politics
and of the public sphere is needed if we are to take seriously the challenge of non-
historical living these authors see as becoming pervasive. Some argue that this new
model of politics can already be observed in networks of place-based struggles, such
as certain women’s networks (Harcourt, 1999a) or in grass-roots forms of governance
linked to ecological ethnicities (Parajuli, 1997).
In sum, social movements and many progressive NGOs and scholars are finding
it increasingly necessary to posit a defense of place and place-based practices against
the economic and cultural avalanche of recent decades. Most times, this project does
not take the form of an intransigent defense of “tradition” but rather of a creative
engagement with modernity and transnationalism, often times aided by NICTs (see
also Arce & Long, 2000). These social actors do not seek so much inclusion into
the global network society but its reconfiguration in such a way that their visions
of the world may find minimum conditions for their existence. Despite tensions and
conflicts, they create networks and glocalities with a more decidedly plural character:
15
They give the example of Chico Mendes, who cross-appropriated practices from the Brazilian
indigenous movement and the international environmental movement to craft a practice (extractive
reserves) that could not have been generated solely out of their own concerns and experience (1996: 113–
114). The notion of cross-appropriation provides interesting elements for thinking about social move-
ment networks.
A. Escobar / Political Geography 20 (2001) 139–174 169
glocalities in which many cultural politics and political cultures can coexist, giving
new meaning to democracy. Popular glocalities might be able to establish structures
of power that do not impose homogeneous conceptions of the good on all of its
participants. Here we might find a new hope for a reasonable pluralism. The fact
that a growing number of people and groups demand the right to their own cultures,
ecologies, and economies as part of our modern social world can no longer be
denied, nor can it these demands be easily accommodated into any universalist liberal
or neo-liberal doctrine. It is no longer the case, as neoliberal globalizers would have
it, that one can only contest dispossession and argue for equality from the perspective
of inclusion into the dominant culture and economy. In fact, the opposite is becoming
the case: the position of difference and autonomy is becoming valid, if not more,
for this contestation (see Gledhill 1997, 1999 for the exemplary case of the Zapatista
in this regard; Escobar, 1999c for a general argument). Appeals to the moral sens-
ibility of the powerful ceased to be effective, if they ever were. It is time to try out
other strategies, like the power strategies of groups connected in networks, in order
to negotiate contrasting conceptions of the good and the value of different forms of
life and to re-state the long-standing predicament of difference-in-equality. It is time
for thinking more openly about the potential healing effects of a politically
enriched alterity.
Conclusion
It might seem paradoxical to assert that the identities that can been as emerging
in the cultural–environmental domain today might simultaneously be attached to
place and most open to what remains unimagined and unthought in biological, cul-
tural, and economic terms. These identities engage in more complex types of mixing
and dialectics than in the most recent past. The dynamic of place, networks, and
power at play today in many ambits suggests that this is the case. Subaltern strategies
of localization still need still to be seen in terms of place; places are surely connected
and constructed yet those constructions entail boundaries, grounds, selective connec-
tion, interaction, and positioning, and in some cases a renewal of history-making
skills. Connectivity, interactivity an positionality are the correlative characteristics
of the attachment to place (Escobar, 1999b,c), and they derive greatly from the modes
of operation of the networks that are becoming central to the strategies of localization
advanced by social movements (and, of course, by capital in different ways). Net-
works can be seen as apparatuses for the production of discourses and practices that
connect nodes in a discontinuous space; networks are not necessarily hierarchical but
can in some cases be described as self-organizing, non-linear and non-hierarchical
meshworks, as some theorists of complexity think of them at present (De Landa,
1997). They create flows that link sites which, operating more like fractal structures
than fixed architectures, enable diverse couplings (structural, strategic, conjunctural)
with other sites and networks. This is why I say that the meaning of the politics of
place can be found at the intersection of the scaling effects of networks and the
strategies of the emergent identities. As Rocheleau put it eloquently, this calls for
170 A. Escobar / Political Geography 20 (2001) 139–174
effectivity of the local in all of its multiplicity and contradictions? What role will
various social actors — including technologies old and new — have to play in order
to create the networks on which manifold forms of the local can rely in their encoun-
ter with the multiple manifestations of the global? Some of these questions will have
to be given serious consideration in our efforts to give shape to the imagination of
alternatives to the current order of things.
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