Mario Blaser

Storytelling Globalization from the Chaco and Beyond

About the Series Map List Preface Introduction. Globalization and the Struggle for Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise Part One. Puruhle/Genealogies 1. Laissez-Faire Progress: Invisibilizing the Yrmo 2. State-Driven Development: Stabilizing Modernity 3. Sustainable Development: Modernity Unravels? Part Two. Porowo/Moralities 4. Enacting the Yrmo 5. Taming Differences Part Three. Azle/Translations 6. Translating Neoliberalism 7. A World in which Many Worlds (Are Forced to) Fit 8. Becoming the Yshiro Nation 9. Reality Check Conclusion: Eisheraho/Renewal

Ontological Conflicts and the Stories of Peoples in Spite of Europe

Ontological conflicts (conflicts involving different assumptions about “what exists”) are gaining unprecedented visibility because the hegemony of modern ontological assumptions is undergoing a crisis. Such crisis provides the context and rationale for political ontology, a “project” that, emerging from the convergence of indigenous studies, science and technology studies (STS), posthumanism, and political ecology, tackles ontological conflicts as a politicoconceptual (one word) problem. Why? First, because in order to even consider ontological conflicts as a possibility, one must question some of the most profoundly established assumptions in the social sciences, for instance, the assumptions that we are all modern and that the differences that exist are between cultural perspectives on one single reality “out there.” This rules out the possibility of multiple ontologies and what is properly an ontological conflict (i.e., a conflict between different realities). Second, because ontological conflicts pose the challenge of how to account for them without reiterating (and reenacting) the ontological assumption of a reality “out there” being described. To tackle this politicoconceptual problem, I discuss the notion of an all-encompassing modernity and its effects, present the political ontology project, and offer a story of the present moment where the project makes sense.

Ontology and indigeneity: on the political ontology of heterogeneous assemblages:

The first challenge faced by a project that seeks to bring concerns with ontology and indigeneity into a conversation is to sort out the various (and possibly divergent) projects that are being mobilized when the former term is used, not the least because what do we mean by ontology impinges upon how we can conceive indigeneity. In this article I play a counterpoint between two ‘ontological’ projects: one in geography, that foregrounds a reality conceived as an always-emergent assemblage of human and non-humans and troubles the politics that such assemblages imply. The other in ethnographic theory, that foregrounds that we are not only dealing with a shifting ontology, a (re)animated world, but also with multiple ontologies, a multiplicity of worlds animated in different ways. Thus, if the heterogeneity of always emerging assemblages troubles the political, the very heterogeneity of these heterogeneous assemblages troubles it even more. What kinds of politics and what kinds of knowledges does this troubling demand? I advance the notion of political ontology as a possible venue to explore this question.

Anthropology and STS: Generative interfaces, multiple locations

In this multi-authored essay, nine anthropologists working in different parts of the world take part in a conversation about the interfaces between anthropology and STS (science and technology studies). Through this conversation, multiple interfaces emerge that are heterogeneously composed according to the languages, places, and arguments from where they emerge. The authors explore these multiple interfaces as sites where encounters are also sites of difference—where complex groupings, practices, topics, and analytical grammars overlap, and also exceed each other, composing irregular links in a conversation that produces connections without producing closure.

From Progress to Risk: Development, Participation, and Post-Disciplinary Techniques of Control

Abstract The rationality that has made the adoption of participatory methodologies coherent for development is underlined. Post-development and reflexive development perspectives are compared and critically engaged. Changes in mainstream development discourses and practices, particularly their embracing of participation, point to the emergence of post-disciplinary technologies of control and the displacement of the notion of progress by that of risk. These technologies are highly ambivalent in that they simultaneously promote carefully bounded grassroots autonomy and generate conditions that subvert it.