Geographical Dictionary Entries

27 Aug. - Syllabus/Intro, Geographical Dictionary Entries ● Latin America: ○ Everything South of the US Border ○ An uncritical approach: this region is bounded, everyone and place in this region is the same, it is not diverse ○ We want to see Latin America as a region that has developed culturally and geographically overtime ● Why is attention to the region’s Latin heritage problematic? ○ Denotes Colonialism ○ Using post-colonialism is problematic also because colonialism is not over ○ Latin America groups everything together ● Relatedly, why is it problematic to analyze as a coherent unit? ○ Assumes that states do not have their own independent personalities ○ Reductionist way to justify US intervention in Latin America ○ “America’s backyard” as a similar statement that justifies US intervention ● What are some potential pitfalls of studying Latin America from a US context? ○ Using the US as a benchmark for other state’s development ■ Benchmark, what religion, schools, and government looks like is very different ■ The US can group Latin America as one large group and ignore its diversity and differences between the states ○ Imperialist viewpoints ■ Undermining the lives and achievements of those people in those countries ■ The US took over the government, or saved the day, this undermines the achievements and people in that state 2 Sept. - Introduction to Course Themes ● Nature: ○ Human conceptualizations of nature are always social and political ○ It is a problematic but common understanding or worldview that humans and nature are separate; this has political consequences ○ We will: ■ Strive to avoid the pitfalls of viewing humans and nature as entirely distinct and they myth that humans always conquer nature; ■ Challenge the idea of a human-nature separation, and consider the political work it does and we will investigate how people in LAC are challenging this idea ○ Three “currents” in geographic scholarship with nature: ■ 1.) Showing that the idea that nature is a pristine space outside society is an historical fallacy; this actively erases native peoples from the story of natural resources and the environment in the Americas ■ 2.) Paying close attention to the relationships between people and nature/or resources in their everyday lives ■ 3.) Exploring the role of the body in human-environment research (although we explore this one less in this course) ● Environmental Justice: ○ “The right of everyone to enjoy and benefit from a safe and healthy environment, regardless of race, class, gender, or ethnicity … a social movement that takes social justice and environmental politics as fundamentally inseparable” (pg.201) ○ Three major components of Environmental Justice: ■ 1.) We will give attention to people’s unequal exposure to environmental hazards, ■ 2.) We will consider unevenness of control over and access to resources, ■ 3.) We will learn about how people in Latin America are engaging in political struggles for environmental justice as a result of the first two ● Political Economy: ○ We cannot study the politics of resources without considering the political economic forms that dictate resource extraction, production, trade, and governance ○ We will consider how capitalism, it’s neoliberal form, and attempts at postneoliberal economic ideology and policies in Latin America influence resource politics ● Post-Colonialism: ○ “ … concerned with the diverse, uneven and contested impact of colonialism and colonized peoples” (pg.561) ○ Engaging with post-colonialism means critically engaging with the effects of colonialism and its impacts on knowledge production 2 Sept. - Nature as a Social Construction ● Why is our geographic imaginary for wilderness tied to high-alpine forests? ○ In the US, from our history and knowledge, our idea of wilderness is very specific and tends to be of pine trees and mountains ○ When the US first sectioned off land for national parks and reserves, no resources were at the locations ■ Deserts came next ○ The government does not want to set aside and preserve areas that have use: farming, cutting, mining, oil, etc. ● Nature as a Social Construction ○ To understand nature as a social construction, is to understand that nature is a product of social processes, beliefs, ideologies, history, and actions. This is a fundamentally political stance. Why? ■ We tend to see people as having conquered the Earth, saying anything less acknowledges that we ultimately are not in control of it (i.e. climate change, COVID) ■ We would have to acknowledge our past with nature, and bring all of the bad into the light to fully comprehend our impact on the enviro. ■ When we here the word resource, we determine that it can be used for something, we don’t simply just allow it to remain as it is ○ Two main ways to view nature as a social construction: ■ 1.) How we “know” nature: ● Our ideas and beliefs about nature are constructed through representations we encounter in our society, culture, media, education etc. (we cannot escape ourselves and ‘know’ some original intrinsic value of nature) ● Our ideas about nature become accepted and taken for granted through the ways we communicate and make meaning. Social context matters, politics matter. ■ 2.) How we engage with and remake nature: ● Societies always interact with (non-human) nature; we also physically reconstitution nature ● Actual manipulation and use of nature by humans, in concert with biophysical processes, made/makes “the environment” ○ One could argue now that there is nothing on Earth that has not been touched or impacted by humans in the environment ■ We are fundamentally now a part of nature, our consumption of air and water ○ Taking a constructivist perspective entails: ■ Emphasizing the centrality of concepts, ideologies, and social practices, of our understanding and making of the world ■ To say that a claim or concept that seems “natural” actually is socially constructed is to ask the questions that Robbins does (pg.123): ● 1.) Is this claim or concept natural, inevitable, timeless, and universal? ● 2.) If not, at what point was it invented? Under what conditions? ● 3.) What are the social, political or environmental effects of believing that this claim or concept is true, natural, or inevitable? ● 4.) Would we be better off doing away with the concept altogether, or rethinking it in a fundamental way? ○ “Such a set of questions can be applied to a great many things, with implications for how we think about problems of the relationships between nature and society.” 2 Sept. - “Pristine Myths” and “Noble Savages” ● Geographic imaginaries of the Americas after 1492 ○ Geographic imaginaries: our perceptions or ‘imaginaries’ (social constructions) of particular places (i.e. the Amazon) ● The “Pristine Myth” ○ Two key ideas: ■ 1.) untouched, pristine nature with, ■ 2.) low populations of relatively “benign” and “passive” natives ○ Early explorers (Europeans) either described the Amazon as either the “Green Hell” or the “Garden of Eden”; these notions still persist today ○ This imaginary/myth comes from romantic constructions of 19th century writers and artists, and from what colonists found in the 18th century AFTER indigenous populations had already declined (diseases, scattering, etc.) ■ Further discussions about its impacts and ramifications today ■ Even if you are aware of this myth, we still see it being pictured in images, tourist marketing, Disney movies, etc. ○ Related to the Pristine Myth is the myth/construction/imaginary of the “noble savage” ● The “Noble Savage” ○ Indigenous people are seen as “part of nature” ○ As grouped in with nature as though in the background to a pristine environment ■ Ideas constructed by Europeans, the people were the background to the “Garden of Eden” ○ Hecht & Cockburn 2011, pg.36: ■ “The portrayal of native peoples as … creatures of the forest has served several functions. It has permitted a view of them as children, incapable of wise decisions or the exercise of adult responsibilities … to perceive native peoples as stone-age remnants who lie in the same relationship to nature as a tapir or a deer has made it easy to claim that these peoples’ contribution to modern societies amounts to little … the view of natives has also been used to justify the theft of their land.” ● Challenging the ‘Pristine Myth’ and ‘Noble Savage’ Imaginaries ○ New research shows that prior to European colonization large thriving civilizations intentionally managed (cities, agriculture) the landscape ■ Many more thousands, even millions resided in the Americas than previously thought ■ Evidence of man-made soils that show advanced civilizations were creating agriculture for massive groups of people ■ Planting of trees in specific places ■ The use of fire for clearing and agriculture ■ Evidence of dams, agricultural fields, irrigation systems ○ How did colonizers not see this? ■ Western perspectives, if it does not fit their expectations of what a society, religion, and technology should look like, it doesn’t exist ■ Eurocentric ideas of nature/wilderness make it difficult to view and to understand the Amazon differently 3 Sept. - Imaging/Constructing Latin America & Human-Environment Relations ● Nature as a social construction: ○ “... in most common speech and thinking, nature is understood as that state, condition, or quality that is before, separate form, or outside of society, human history, and volition.” (Robbins, Hintz, Moore 2014, pg.122) ● Co-Production and materiality: ○ The idea that humans and non-humans impact on, produce, and alter one another ○ Acknowledges the non-human material world and its influence on humans ○ A solution to constructivist approaches that might devolve into nihilism ● Breakout Groups: ○ 1.) How would you define the “Pristine Myth” of the Americas, and how does it relate to the “Noble Savage”? Why is this a key example of the social construction of nature? How did Europeans not see this evidence? ■ Two main ideas of the Pristine Myth: ● 1.) untouched, pristine nature with, ● 2.) low populations of relatively “benign” and “passive” natives ○ How this relates to the Noble Savage ■ We assume that people are living as only the background to nature’s innocence and do not interact with their environment ● European’s assume it does not happen because they cannot see it ○ With agriculture, they are living off the land and their impacts are not visible to what the Europeans assumed they would see in the environment (fields) ● Europe’s religion impacts how they view the world ○ 2.) What evidence is marshalled against this myth in the Deneven article? How does Deneven contradict the ‘Pristine Myth’ and the ‘Noble Savage’ imaginaires or constructions? ■ Group 4: Wildlife (pgs.424-425) ● Deneven debunks the “Noble Savage”, because the indigenous populations that reside in this land know how to use where they are and preserve it ○ Example of Central Mexico, Europeans assume that they overkill/overuse natural areas ○ “They eat any living thing” ■ They appear to be savages from the perspectives of others ● Noble Savage: Deneven debunks this myth by acknowledging that the indigenous people understandcycles the and currents of nature and understand how to hunt, harvest, and preserve the land and that they have the experience and knowledge of that environment to be stewards of the land. ○ They had no problem sustaining themselves (film, that everyone appeared to be well fed) ● Pristine Myth: Denevan then discredits the pristine myth because he portrays the land as a home for the indigenous people, not as a place for resources. They live with the environment, not alongside it. This debunks the ‘Pristine Myth’ because nature is not untouched and has been used and shaped by indigenous populations for sometime. ○ There is also evidence of some areas being overhunted, again showing that they lived in the environments and that the nature wasn't pristine 10 Sept. - Imagining/Constructing L.A.C. and Human Environment Relations ● Situated within peasant studies and indigenous studies: ○ Subdisciplines that give agency to native people and peasants (smallholder family farmers engaging in subsistence production and growing cash crops) ○ Gives agency and respect to local knowledges/relationships to nature/environmental practice ● Attention to livelihood practices: ○ Generally, the means of securing the necessities of life ○ Recognizes that people have their own logics and pressures and ways of meeting household needs through livelihood practices that are not always obvious to an outsider 16 Sept. - Identification & Nature ● Identification: ○ The process of categorizing people on the basis of constructed social differences ○ Race, gender, ethnicity, and other categories of ‘social difference’ as socially constructed/imbued with different meanings in different times and places ○ Focus here: ■ The role of constructions of nature and human-environment relations in the racialization and gendering of individuals and groups (or in the meaning given to particular gender and race categories) in Latin America ● Sudberg article: ○ Dominant visions of nature and human-environment relations articulate with and inform racial hierarchies in Latin America ○ “... racial categories come into being and achieve fixity in relation to hegemonic visions of appropriate resource use and, in turn, how natural resource management practices come to be racialized.” (p.572) ○ Proper or improper (good and bad) land and resources uses and production systems were fundamental to the racialization and demarcation of some groups as inferior to others ○ Environmental justice-orientated research in Latin America needs to acknowledge the role of human-environment relations in the organization, justification, and reconfiguration of environmental injustices ● Anderson reading: ○ Anderson looks to the “building blocks” of European worldviews: ■ Argues that the idea of what it means to be human is rooted in the achievements of Western humanity’s control over nature ○ Human ‘development’/achievement/’civilization’ is relative to (a particular definition of) human control over nature, creating a civilized/savage dichotomy ○ Dominate (western) notions of what is it to be human formed out of ethnocentric ideas about human groups’ relative ‘distance’ from nature (animals) that in fact preceded ○ Do you think these ideas still matter to understanding contemporary notions of social difference or ‘otherness’? Or do you think society has moved on? ● Gender and nature ○ Women, and particularly rural women, in Latin America are often framed as “closer to nature” than men ○ Ideas about ‘appropriate’ uses of resources articulate with and inform gender identities, relations, and hierarchies ■ Gender roles and norms in particular places/cultures dictate people’s relationships to resources and thus livelihood possibilities ○ People’s differential access to resources often impacts men and women unevenly ○ Power relations as a product of gender-related identities, stereotypes, and discriminatory imaginaries and practices manifest in human-environment relations and resources access ○ Women are disproportionately affected by ecological change in many parts of rural LAC ○ Gender is an important variable shaped by and shaping resource access, control, and ecological change in intersection with caste, class, ethnicity, culture, and race ● Concluding statements: ○ Self-identification in relation to natural resources/nature also a tactic in rectifying environmental injustices 24 Sept. - Climate Change and COVID (Contemporary Issues) ● Key themes: ○ Uneven effects of COVID-19 ○ Climate change ● Climate Change: ○ Warner reading: ■ When we talk about climate change (Warner can argue) that it is a red herring because of a blanket statement that this climate is changing, which is easy to disregard, and by doing this blame can be displaced by corporations ■ Existing issues with gender/ethnic policies and such only aggravate climate change ○ Small groups (3): ■ What are some examples of people’s particular (intersectional) vulnerabilities to climate change that are highlighted in the Lustgarten NYT magazine article, and what are the human-environment relations that make those people/groups particularly vulnerable? ● Agricultural populations are vulnerable to climate change ○ Socio-Economically, those in this group who are more vulnerable to climate change are often those in poverty ○ Jorge in Guatemala, with El Niño ■ Which will become more severe as time passes ■ Why is ‘transformation’ or ‘emancipation’ necessary for overcoming climate change-induced challenges in Latin America according to Warner et al.? ● Transformation is sedimented across identities and intersections, which invokes rural transformation with climate change in Latin America (pg. 17) ● When progress with Climate change is made, there are a lot deeper issues within LAC societies ○ IN order to climate change to truly end, deeper issues need to be addressed as well, ultimately they caused CC ■ Empowering people will give individuals more political/economic power to counter climate change themselves Sept. 29 - Political Economy & Uneven Development ● Why look at political economy in a class on resource/environmental politics? ○ A major feature of capitalism is the extraction of ‘surplus value’ from nature and people ○ Social and cultural relationships are inextricable from economic interactions from economic interactions amongst people and between people and non-human objects/systems ○ Exogenous, unsustainable extractive regimes result in environmental and social stresses ○ Production for the global market leads to contradictions and dependencies which impact peoples and environments ● (Broadly defined) Political Economy: ○ Generally, political economy is an approach to understanding the global economy that takes into account the political factors, material processes, and social relations needed to maintain the capitalist mode ○ “A political economy approach to understanding the environment and society argues that, at base, it is the structure of the economy and the set of power-laden relationships … that produce both the environment in which we live and out perceptions of it (Robbin, Hintz, Moor pg.100) ● Political economic approach to understanding capitalism (or the capitalist mode of production) (also from Marx but has moved beyond this) basic tenets: ○ Under capitalism, some people (workers) sell their labor power to other people (capitalists). Capitalists are people that own the means of production (factories, equipment, property) and conditions of production (the raw materials). Workers are also the consumers of the products they and other workers make. The social relationships between capitalists and workers are considered the relations of production. ○ The earning accumulated by selling the finished commodities, minus the cost of labor power and the cost of materials needed in the production process is the surplus value ○ Surplus value is accumulated by capitalists, and reinvested into further production ○ Capitalism requires constant accumulation of capital, and constant circulation of capital through the system, competition is key ○ Oceraccumulation happens when wealth is concentrated into fewer and fewer hands, causing economic slowdown ○ If goods and capital dont move quickly enough throughout they system (which is bound to happen) crisis of overproduction of underconsumption ensues ○ Competition drives down surplus value over time, so capitalists must find new ways to extract surplus value from the production process this could be: ■ Get innovative with production techniques ■ Accelerate buying and selling (put more products into the economy, to find new markets) ■ Extract more value from labor ■ Extract more value from the environment ● Not necessarily exploiting it, but fracking or digging deeper ● What is primitive accumulations? ○ Act of dispossessing resource users and erasing customary resource management institutions through the use of statist-capitalists property rights regimes. This has been an ongoing trend in LAC since colonialism, achieved in different ways. ● What are the first and second internal “contradictions of capitalism” ○ Robbins et. al. reading”: ○ 1st → tendency for capitalism to undermine its own (socio)economic conditions; overaccumulation crisis, overproduction of commodities, reduction in wages, etc; predicted to eventually lead workers to fight back and usher in a new economic model ○ 2nd → Tendency for capitalism to undermine its own environmental conditions; degradation of resources/nature and worker health; predicted to eventually lead environmentalists and workers to fight back and usher in a new economic model ● Capitalism and Uneven Development ○ Crises happen all the time → an expression of the internal contradictions of capitalism ○ One solution for capitalism? What geographers (David Harvey) call a “spatial fix”: ■ The tendency of capitalism to temporarily solve its inevitable periodic crises by establishing new markets, new resources, and the new sites of production in other places (Robbins pg.120) ■ Development is always uneven (costs and benefits of capitalism are uneven socially and geographically) because of the contradictions and their solutions and the spatial fix (pg.110) ● Nature and Capitalism ○ Commodities are produced through combining natural resources and labor ○ To maintain surplus value extraction and the accumulation of capital, value must be exploited from either labor or nature or both ○ Humans rely on natural resources for social reproduction: ■ To meet the basic needs for survival and good health, and thus be able to keep working (this relates back to the second contradiction); but also about how people live, the things that make a life worth living, etc. ○ The structure of the economy and the power-laden relationships surrounding it are key to how the environment is used/produced, and how we humans understand the environment and our relationship to it ● Colonialism and its role in uneven development in LAC ○ Consider the following in conjunction with theAlimonda (2015) reading: ■ Why does attention to colonial patterns (“coloniality” past and present) of social and environmental relations matter for understanding: ● (a) contemporary global power structures (uneven development) ● (b) contemporary nature-society issues in LAC ● Colonialism and uneven development in LAC: ○ “The whole process was a pumping of blood from one set of veins to another: the development of the development of some, the underdevelopment of others” (Galeano 1971, pg.83) Sept. 29 → Neoliberal Political Economy ● Neoliberalism: ○ A ‘mode of regulation’ in the current ‘era’ of capitalism ○ Beginning in the 1970s capitalism entered an ‘era’ of neoliberalism ■ A new orthodoxy especially in the US and UK (Raegen and Thatcher) in the 1980s ■ That went on to profoundly influence international development approaches ● Chile in the 1970s and worsens in the 1980s ○ An ideological and political project: ■ Neobliberla economic theories inform neoliberal policies, reforms, and approaches to the state economy society relationship ● A worldview that is cemented in policies ■ Therefore, neoliberalism is also an environmental project that is radically reconfiguring societal relationships to nature ○ Is characterized by: ■ Most extremely/overgeneralized “state rollbacks and market triumphalism” ● Reducing the roll of the state, letting the economy go wild ■ Idea that the market will regulate itself; the market is better suited than the state to allocate goods and services ■ “Roll back” of state intervention in the economy, the idea that the state should not interfere in the economy ● But this is a contradiction because the government is used to protect private property ans ensure the commodification of good ans services to help capitalism ■ We can’t imagine what a government would look like without government regulation, because that does not exist ■ State is restored: increasingly privatized, cuts to state spending, ‘re-scaling’ of governance (responsibilities given to local governs, international institutions enjoy greater power with less oversight ■ Roll back of state spending on social wellbeing programs and services ■ Self regulation and responsibility expected (of firms and the economy rather than regulation by the states (example: corporate social responsibility) ■ International investments are encouraged, economy is open to free trade ■ Increasing application of economic logis into everyday life (people should be self regulating and responsible) ○ Neoliberal Environmental Governance: (as an environmental project) ■ Privatization of land and resources (primitive accumulation/accumulation by dispossession) ■ Commodification of nature (for the purposes of selling it and saving it) (i.e. carbon credits) ■ Rollbacks in state interventions to protect the environment ■ Rescaling of environmental governance (examples: international bodies demanding particular environment and market-related policies abroad) the opening up of global trade resulting in intensified resource use ■ Incorporation of environmentalism into neoliberal ventures ● “Green washing” a company shows their environmentally “friendly” to donate funds, but in reality they are not conscious ■ New environmental social movements: ● Unjust social relations around resource access leading to resistance to neoliberal environmental governance ● And diverse concerns that challenge neoliberalism’s attempts to sever regulations governing the environment ● Neoliberalism in LAC: ○ Debt crisis → imposition of neoliberalism ■ Loans from IMF, WBO, etc. ■ STRUCTURAL ADJUSTMENT POLICIES ● Cuts on social spending, education ● Open boards, limit environmental protections ○ Neoliberalism as solution to “underdevelopment” ○ Imposed by governments and international institutions ○ Lasting effects in LAC (Alimonda article) ■ (Market Justice (Kaup)) 8 October → Bolivia ● This week’s course themes: ○ ‘New Left’/pink tide/'post-neoliberalism' in LAC, Extraction & capitalist social relations in LAC, The 'supercycle', (Neo)extractivism, Modernity, neoliberalism, & indigeneity, The NPE/’shock therapy’ and the emergence of Neoliberalism in Bolivia, Uneven social effects of neoliberalism, Accumulation by dispossession (and mobilizing against it), Imperialism, LPP/decentralization of the state, Mobilizing against neoliberalism, Spaces of marginalization & role of cocaleros, Exploitation & marginalization, Water and Gas ‘Wars, Bolivia as ‘padlocked’ by neoliberalism, Post-neoliberalism/counter-neoliberalism ● Imperialism: ○ The extension of the state authority over the political and economic life other territories; Pressures can be economic, political, military, cultural; often begins with a state’s desire to exploit the resources of another place ● Corporate Imperialism: ○ The extension of corporate authority over the political and economic life of other territories; pressures can be economic, political, and cultural ● Overarching question: How did neoliberal ideology and policy manifest specifically in Bolivia? - - The US “wouldn’t answer the phone” and the IMF; Bolivia knew that they couldn’t rely on foreign powers Working with Jeffery Sacks, Bolivia sought out Western help to improve their economy that led into neoliberalism - The American campaign managers for Morales’ opponent NPE was a domestic influence that worked against indigenous communities - “Shock therapy sessions”