Alberto Arce

Global Development: Markets and Wellbeing

The relationship among global development, markets, and well-being is an important theoretical and methodological association to address and analyze theoretical ways of ‘value framing and talking’ among experts, institutions, and people. These relations may take the forms of interfaces, dislocations, and disjunctions, which are expressed under the notion of ‘new materialities’, encompassing the encounter of social and biological sciences. Main social concerns still are civic manifestations, knowledge encounters, and policy dilemmas present on contemporary global modernities. This interrelatedness of concepts, ethnography studies, and imagined spaces represents a cosmopolitan configuration that focus on the reflexivity of development studies and direct us to critically reconsider dualistic ways of thinking about the world. Today actors involve themselves arduous laboring of becoming engaged in development processes through social action to organize and materialize their meaning, values, and new subjectivities, as an expectation of becoming ‘new’ social actors. This orientation reaches the core of the anthropology of development endeavor.

Storytelling Globalization from the Chaco and Beyond (review)

Blaser generates a powerful and sophisticated narrative oriented toward critical engagement with the notion of modernity as he understands it: the dominant trajectory that has divided and ordered the world. He holds this to have created a tapestry composed of objects and subjects, which the author argues we should not take as the “reality out there” or a single “regime of truth.” This is a much-visited theoretical position advanced by advocates of postcolonial and poststructural theoretical orientations; what is stimulating and innovative here is the attempt by Blaser to move beyond existing notions of multiple modernities. Critical reflexivity is the tone and mood of this storytelling ethnography. With a sensitivity to the political nature of the politics of representation, the author passionately argues for a dialogue of knowledge in order to make visible the “anomalies” experienced by Yshiro-Ebitoso communities in Paraguay since 1986, and the political consequences from development interventions beyond the Chaco.