• About Arturo • Brief Introduction • Research Interests • Written texts • Of Interest • Resume
Present Research
My current interests gravitate around the development of non-eurocentric approaches to thinking about the relation between globalization and difference: trying to understand local and regional articulations of difference in contexts of globalization. By non-eurocentric perspectives I mean ways of thinking about and constructing the world that do not readily, or completely, conform to the assumed cultural and epistemological privilege of the modern European experience. The need to think about the relation between globalization and difference in less structural ways has taken me from a relatively straightforward account of the cultural politics of social movements struggling against globalization and development to a focus on the politics of place as a new political imaginary and, more recently, to the study of networks, self-organization, and complexity as components of an alternative social theory. Networks and complexity, I believe, provide a basis for the development of a novel social theory (neither Marxist, liberal or poststructuralist, but based on what some now call a “flat ontology”), and the politics of place can provide the political grounding for such a theory in the age of imperial globality. A third main theoretical inspiration comes from the Latin American “Modernity/Coloniality/Decoloniality Research Program,” which precisely focuses on de-colonial thought projects beyond eurocentrism. This program aims at thinking with an unprecedented set of actors beyond the academy (largely linked to social movements) in order to create spaces for an other thought, or at least a thought that embodies de-colonial projects. This program has important implications for how we conceive of academic work; more than just an institution for “academic programs,” the academy becomes a space for furthering intellectual projects of decolonial thinking.
In my writing on the Colombia Pacific, I continue to examine the cultural and political struggles over the definition of, and control over, the region’s biodiverse resources, but now in terms of articulations of difference. I am trying to develop a framework for examining difference simultaneously in three domains: economy, ecology, and culture. In this way, I attempt to investigate ethnographically the political, ontological, and epistemological potential of practices of economic, ecological, and cultural difference. This reinterpretation, I believe, which constitutes the framework of a book to be completed in the Summer of 2006, has added much richness and newness to my work. At a time when the oppressive forces try to completely block any local and regional project of autonomy and difference –by brutally repressing it or colonizing the space/time of those who assert it, not infrequently with policies of ethnocide, as in the Colombian Pacific-- I see the work I do as a small contribution to those who are struggling to clear a path for spaces of difference –spaces, of course, where a measure of justice and cultural and ecological viability might be found.
Lastly, in terms of anthropology, I find myself at present been fundamentally interested in two developments: subaltern anthropologies and world anthropologies; and reformulations of anthropology as political practice –in connection with activist, partisan, militant, etc. approaches—such as those being developed largely by PhD students or recent PhDs working with social movements. These two emphases converge in our world anthropologies project, WAN.
My areas of work are of course interconnected and overlap with each other. Each has various sub-areas, as a point of departure and the North American academy as its main (although by far not exclusive) professional location; b) my long-standing and ongoing engagement and work in Colombia, particularly the Colombian Pacific, and with Latin American activists, intellectuals and scholars; c) my strong preference for collective work and my involvement with a number of collective projects.
Collective projects
The Social Movements Working Groups at Chapel Hill
http://www.unc.edu/smwg/The women and the politics of place (WPP) project which I coordinate with Wendy Harcourt of the Society for International Development (SID) in Rome
http://www.sidint.orgThe world anthropologies network (WAN) project
ram-wan.netThe Latin American modernity/coloniality/decoloniality research program which has an active site in the Chapel Hill/Durham (UNC-Duke) geographical area and is largely anchored in the Andean countries.
http://www.unc.edu/~restrepo/modernity-coloniality/
• About Arturo • Brief Introduction • Research Interests • Written texts • Of Interest • Resume •
----------------------------------------------------------------------- contact: aescobar[at]email.unc.edu ------------------------------------ 2006