Daughter of the lake documentary

Discussion board

Reflect and write approximately 2 paragraphs about at least 3 of the following prompts. Respond to at least one other post.
READ:

De la Cadena, Marisol, “Uncommoning Nature. Stories from the Anthropo-Not-Seen” (24 pages)
Todd, Zoe. “Indigenizing the Anthropocene” in Davis and Turpin, Art in the Anthropocene (241-254) (13 pages) - YOU ALREADY DOWNLOADED THIS BOOK IN WEEK 2

PROMPT:

De la Cadena speaks of the “Anthropo-not-seen” as a double challenge that affects 1. environmental justice movements claims on the state to stop extractivism, 2. The possibility of alliances among Quechua water protectors and non-indigenous environmental movements. These challenges have to do with the different ways in which western and indigenous cultures perceive the relation and the “being” (ontology) of humans and what we, westerners, call “nature”. Can you express that difficulty in your own words and what is your opinion about this?
How does the documentary Daughter of the Lake “animate” the landscape? How are both the human and the non-human given agency in this film? How is “animation” and “agency” filmically represented?
Open-pit mining causes irreversible damage to the land. The excavations leave not only a “ruined land” as Rob Nixon might say, but no land at all. In the long run the effects of this destruction contribute to micro-climate changes. What are the challenges of scale and time that the filmmaker faces and how does he solve them? How impactful are these scenes for you?
How does Daughter of the Lake present the connection between racism, extractivism, and capitalism? Is this link represented convincingly, in your view?

Reflection paper # 2

Write approximately 4 paragraphs responding to the following prompts:

De la Cadena speaks of the “Anthropo-not-seen” as a double challenge that affects 1. environmental justice movements claims on the state to stop extractivism, 2. The possibility of alliances among Quechua water protectors and non-indigenous environmental movements. These challenges have to do with the different ways in which western and indigenous cultures perceive the relation and the “being” (ontology) of humans and what we, westerners, call “nature”. Summarize this difficulty in your own words and discuss De la Cadena’s concept of “not only” as a possible grounds for an environmental justice alliance and the future of life.
Compare in how far the films 500 Years and Daughter of the Lake invite viewers to reflect on the growing realization that the conceptual (western, scientific, epistemological) separation between human and non-human life may not only be partially responsible for ecological catastrophe but also linked to colonial racism, capitalism, and dispossession. Where do they fall short/what do they - in your opinion fail to address? Explain your opinion.
LINKS TO FILM:

daughter of the lake (part1):

https://drive.google.com/file/d/18N0xO9xm_n9hRS2AfXlow_4KEUmACkcs/view?usp=sharing

daughter of the lake (part 2):

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Vr8vTMxuNiP6_FamZeCzKwmdE6AQZpuR/view?usp=sharing

500 years:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ghmRpudLkgAdpENwKoWcJm5DvsuQs4De/view?usp=sharing

1. Uncommoning Nature

S t o ri e s f ro m t h e A n t h ro p o - N ot - S e e n

Marisol de la Cadena

A Preamble On June 5, 2009, at dawn, near the northern Amazonian town of Bagua, a violent confrontation took place between police forces and a large group of Peruvian citizens self- identified as belonging to the Awajun Wampis in- digenous group. This event, which resulted in more than thirty deaths, has marked the po liti cal imaginary, if with diff er ent emphases depending on one’s position to the left or the right on the national po liti cal spectrum. In general, the narrative that circulates in the media goes more or less as fol- lows: As part of a general strike, which started on April 9 (that same year) and was or ga nized by several Amazonian indigenous groups, the Awajun Wampis had taken control of a highway in northern Peru at a place called “La Curva del Diablo”— the Dev il’s Curve. They were protesting several de- crees with which the government had conceded their territory to corporate oil exploration without abiding by the ilo (International Labor Organ- ization) agreement 169. This international legislation, to which the Peruvian government officially adheres, requires signatory states to consult the opin- ion of the inhabitants of territories that corporations request for exploration and exploitation. Because they had not been consulted, the concession was illegal, the protestors said. The police’s objective was to break up the high- way blockade; through unknown circumstances (which are under investiga- tion), the confrontation got out of control. According to the official count, the clash— known as el Baguazo (in En glish, “the huge event in Bagua”)—

Harvey, P., Krohn-Hansen, C., & Nustad, K. G. (Eds.). (2019). Anthropos and the material. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from ucr on 2020-02-06 09:28:24.

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resulted in more than thirty deaths among the Awajun Wampis and police. Two weeks later, on June 19— under enormous pressure from heterogeneous groups and against the will of then president Alan García— the National Congress canceled the decrees that allowed the concession of indigenous territories to oil companies and transgressed the ilo Convention 169. At the same time, the local state ordered the arrest of some indigenous leaders; they faced charges of murder and sedition. Following a long trial, they were fi nally acquitted in September 2016.1

Among those arrested was Santiago Manuin Valera, the most public in- dividual among the Awanjun Wampis. The following quote is part of his testimony during the trial on April 10, 2014, five years after the event—at the time he faced life in prison: “The government is taking away our territory, the territory of the Awajun Wampis people, so that we become dependent on its [form of ] development. The government never asked: do you want to de- velop? They did not consult us. We responded, ‘Cancel the legislative decrees that affect our existence as a people.’ Instead of listening to our complaint, the government wanted to punish us— other peoples surrendered, we did not. The government ordered our forced eviction” (emphasis added).2 Two weeks after the trial, on April 26, he wrote:

We will never accept that the Government does what it wants with . . . the territory that our ancestors assigned us before the Peruvian state was formed. Peru and the whole world should know that this place of thirty thousand [square] kilo meters is ours and belongs to us; we will always defend it and will give our lives for it. [The Awajun Wampis] were defending our right, our identity, our culture, a development of our own, our forest, our rivers, our cosmos, and our territory.3 (emphasis added)

Manuin ended the statement by declaring his innocence. Why would it be a crime to defend the ancestral territory of the Awajun Wampis against a usurping state? The criminal trial against Manuin and others may be in- terpreted as a conflict over sovereignty, and depending on where we stand, we can support the Awajun Wampis people’s right to defend their territory or side with the state’s prerogative to decide about the national territory and the use of natu ral resources. Taken to the court, this would already be a challenging legal prob lem. However, I intend to argue that at the in- ception of the conflict is a disagreement that would not find resolution within the rule of law— even in its fairest version— for it exceeds its exist- ing domain.

Harvey, P., Krohn-Hansen, C., & Nustad, K. G. (Eds.). (2019). Anthropos and the material. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from ucr on 2020-02-06 09:28:24.

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Uncommoning Nature 37

Examining the confrontation, and writing in its aftermath, the anthro- pologist Shane Greene suggests “that there [was] more at stake than simply a defense of territory, a protest against cap i tal ist expansion, or a concern over the fate of the environment. What [was] also at stake is a distinct way of life” (2009, 58; emphasis added). Explaining the confrontation in the midst of the strike, Leni— a young Awajun Wampis leader with his face painted in red and black, a bandana around his head— spoke words that may illustrate Greene’s intimation:

We speak of our brothers who quench our thirst, who bathe us, those who protect our needs— this [ brother] is what we call the river. We do not use the river for our sewage; a brother cannot stab another brother. We do not stab our brothers. If the transnational corporations would care about our soil like we have cared for it for millennia, we would gladly give them room so that they could work here— but all they care about is their economic benefit, to fill their coffers with wealth. We do not understand why the government wants to raze our lives with those decrees.4

Taking Greene’s cue and listening to Leni’s words, I want to suggest that in the above statements, “territory” as referred to by Manuín may make ref- erence both to a piece of land under the jurisdiction of the Peruvian state and to an entity that emerges through the Awajun Wampis’ practices of life that may, for example, make people the relatives of rivers, as in Leni’s state- ment. And kinship between people and water and forest may transform ter- ritory into Awajun Wampis, as in a recent public declaration by their leaders in which they said, “Territory is the Awanjun Wampis.”5

This relation— where people and territory are together— exceeds the pos- sibilities of modern humans and modern nature as well as modern relations between them, without precluding any of them. Nevertheless, it complicates the conflict: rather than an abuse of power that can be unmade (with dif- ficulty, of course), the conflict becomes a misunderstanding that is impos- sible to solve without engaging in the terms that make territory other to the state’s ability to understand and therefore other to its recognition. Erupting publicly, the conflict poses a challenge intolerable to the state, and its re- sponse might be the eradication of its roots: the denial of the existence of the terms of the Awajun Wampis. Thus viewed, the conflict is ontological. I draw on Jacques Rancière and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro to conceptualize it as a confrontation housing a historical disagreement (Rancière’s term) about an equivocation (Viveiros de Castro’s term) over what territory is and what

Harvey, P., Krohn-Hansen, C., & Nustad, K. G. (Eds.). (2019). Anthropos and the material. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from ucr on 2020-02-06 09:28:24.

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kind of relations make it. Together these two concepts, disagreement and equivocation, may do work that each of them individually may not do; their joint analytic work may enable reflection about the complexity of the dispute expressed in Manuín’s statements. It may also expose a conflict located both within and beyond the domain of the rule of law.

Viveiros de Castro is a Brazilian anthropologist; “equivocation” is his concept to explain the mode of communication among Amerindian inhab- itants ( humans and not) in the Brazilian Amazon. Equivocation, he says, houses “the referential alterity between homonymic concepts” (Viveiros de Castro 2004, 5) with which the entities that populate Amerindian worlds communicate with—or translate to— each other. Crucial to the concept is, first, that these entities— which we would regard as humans or animals— consider themselves human and see their “ others” as animals; and, second, that what is results from the entities’ point of view, which in turn results from their bodies. The almost canonical example to illustrate equivocation is that of the differences between jaguar and human: what the former sees as beer, the latter sees as blood. The reason for the differences between their points of view resides in their diff er ent bodies; the difference is not con- ceptual, for both entities share the notions beer and blood. Therefore, com- munication, and even the preservation of one’s life, consists in “controlling” the equivocation (Viveiros de Castro 2004, 5) or understanding that while the concept (and therefore the understanding of the thing it refers to) may be shared, the thing itself may emerge as diff er ent if the concept is uttered by someone who is an other to the self in the interlocution. When equivocation is the mode of communication, concepts and things are only partially con- nected; the same word may refer to two diff er ent things depending on the world it is uttered from. In the case that concerns me here, territory may be both the piece of land that rests separate from the humans and the state that may have the right to it, and the entity that is with the Awajun Wampis— what territory is would depend on the world that is pronouncing the term, the relations that it emerges from.

Disagreement may have the appearance of an equivocation. Rancière, a phi los o pher of politics and aesthetics, conceptualizes disagreement as “the conflict between one who says white and another who also says white but does not understand the same thing by it.” Yet while equivocation assumes that all participants in the interlocution are speakers (and thus can name things that are conceptually the same and “objectively” diff er ent), the mis- understanding that provokes disagreement (à la Rancière) results from “a contention over what speaking means”; it is “a dispute over the object of

Harvey, P., Krohn-Hansen, C., & Nustad, K. G. (Eds.). (2019). Anthropos and the material. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from ucr on 2020-02-06 09:28:24.

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Uncommoning Nature 39

the discussion, and over the capacity of those who are making an object of it” (Rancière 1999, x, xi, xii). Moreover, as a po liti cal interruption to alter the conventional order and establish equality, disagreement is a dispute that confronts those who have (are granted) speech with those who do not have (are denied) speech—it is a dispute about the conventions that distribute capacities to define what is and how that is. Strug gles for civil rights in the Amer i cas would be an example of how disagreement established a new order of the perceptible. Thus, the difference between the two fellow con- cepts: equivocation is a misunderstanding in a relation among equals that are (i.e., ontologically) mutually other. The misunderstanding is an onto- logical relation; while the equivocation can be discerned (or controlled, to use Viveiros de Castro’s term), it is also an inevitable condition that cannot be changed. In contrast, disagreement pits socially unequal individuals in a dispute to be the same (or socially equivalent) and from such a position to name and define what the same should be; here the misunderstanding is po liti cal and reflects an epistemic dispute seeking to change how the estab- lished order is perceived. To put it differently, and perhaps more clearly in terms of the argument of this article, the misunderstanding in equivocation emerges when bodies that belong to diff er ent worlds use the same word to name entities that are not the same because they too, like the bodies that name them, belong to diff er ent worlds; disagreement results from misun- derstandings about the conditions for naming the same entities in a world that should be shared.

Impossible Politics, Silent War, and the “Anthropos- Not- Seen” Thinking through Rancière’s notion of disagreement, the “big event in Bagua” can be rendered as the eruption of politics: a historical event in which a subject emerges that disrupts the distribution of speech and the order it creates. In disagreement, this subject erupts in the established order (where he or she has no speech) to propose another distribution of the voices, ears, hands, and, ultimately, bodies that name what the French phi los o pher calls the perceptible. In the specific case of el Baguazo, the disagreement that the Awajun Wampis manifested would have interrupted the distribution of the speech that assigns the state sovereignty to decide about territory. Against it, the Awajun Wampis would have claimed their own sovereign voice. Under- stood as an extension of the country over which humans have the power of decision, the entity “territory” would have remained the same, and what and how it is would not be in dispute.

Harvey, P., Krohn-Hansen, C., & Nustad, K. G. (Eds.). (2019). Anthropos and the material. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from ucr on 2020-02-06 09:28:24.

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Conceptualized instead as a disagreement that houses an equivocation, the conflict can also be interpreted as a dispute around an entity— territory— that is not the same and cannot be the diff er ent things that it may emerge as in interlocutions between Awajun Wampis and the state. Thinking through territory as equivocation, Manuín’s statements— and the trial from which they emerge— would also reflect a disagreement, the nature of which is on- tological. Thus, the equivocation would also be a po liti cal dispute aggravated by the condition of its impossibility, for neither the state nor the law is able— let alone equipped—to recognize the equivocation or the po liti cal dispute around it. I am calling this condition the anthropo- not- seen. I conceptu- alize it as the world- making pro cess through which heterogeneous worlds that do not make themselves through practices that ontologically separate humans (or culture) from nonhumans (or nature)— nor necessarily conceive as such the diff er ent entities in their assemblages— both are obliged into that distinction (and thus willfully destroyed) and exceed it. The anthropo- not- seen would thus be both the will that requires the distinction (and destroys what ever disobeys the obligation) and the excesses to that will: the collec- tives that, like the Awajun Wampis, are composed of entities that are not only human or nonhuman because they are also with what (according to the obligation) they should not be: humans with nonhumans, and the other way around.

The Anthropocene makes scholarly reference to the era when humans have become a geological force capable of planetary destruction. The “anthropo- not- seen” makes obvious reference to the term, and the suffix is equally obviously intended as a pun on - cene. However, the not- seen may be decep- tive, for in using it, my intention is not to evoke the invisible of a vis i ble realm under which it exists bearing the duress of power. In fact, the not- seen does not mainly refer to a regime of visibility. Rather, it aims to make reference to what is within a historically formulated hegemonic condition of impossibility, and hence, included in the anthropo- not- seen are antagonistic partners and their antagonistic relationship. On one hand, the anthropo- not- seen comprises the practices and prac ti tion ers of the will that granted itself the power to eradicate all that disobeyed mandates to be “ human” as modernity (in its early and late versions) sanctioned. On the other hand, it includes the disobedient prac ti tion ers of collectives composed of entities recalcitrant to classification (and individuation) as either human or nonhu- man. Complexly, the anthropo- not- seen includes both the anthropos that embodies the self- granted will to make the world as he or she knows it, and the disobedient anthropos, the one that is inherently-with- others and thus not

Harvey, P., Krohn-Hansen, C., & Nustad, K. G. (Eds.). (2019). Anthropos and the material. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from ucr on 2020-02-06 09:28:24.

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Uncommoning Nature 41

only human. Both inhabit the not- seen, yet they do so in antagonism: in the case of the first anthropos, what is not- seen (as such) is its constitutive will to destruction, which in turn cancels the possibility of disobedient beings and therefore makes for their not- seen condition. As an or ga nized pro cess of destruction— sometimes through benevolently offered assimilation— the anthropo- not- seen included, and continues to include, a silent war waged against entities and world- making practices that ignore the separation of entities into nature and culture.6

Dating from the early sixteenth century in what became the Amer i cas, the war was initially loud and clear; fighting for their God, Christian clerics walked the Andes from Colombia to Argentina and Chile, “extirpating idol- atries,” a po liti cal practice that the friars conceived against “devil- induced worship.” Extirpation required dividing the participating entities into God- made nature (mountains, rivers, forests) and naturales, or incipient humans with a soul still to be saved. The invention of modern politics secularized the antagonism: the war against the recalcitrance to distinguish nature from humanity was silenced; yet it continued in the name of pro gress and against backwardness, the evil that replaced the devil. Making it not- seen, war prac- tices included forms of making live. Inferior humans became the object of benevolent and inevitable inclusion, enemies that did not even count as enemies: the war was waged through silent means. This last phrase paraphrases Michel Foucault’s inversion of Carl von Clausewitz’s classic aphorism (“War is a continuation of politics through other means”): “Politics is the continu- ation of war by other means” (2003, 15). Unpacking the phrase, he explains, first, that the relations of force through which modern power works were established in and through war at a given historical moment; and, second, that while politics “pacifies” “it certainly does not do so in order to . . . neu- tralize the disequilibrium revealed by the last battle of the war”; but, third, that instead “the role of po liti cal power is perpetually to use a sort of silent war to reinscribe that relationship of force, and to inscribe it in institutions, economic inequalities, language, and even the bodies of individuals” (15–16). I tweak Foucault a bit to indicate, first, that the signature of the war that es- tablished modern power was its colonial will to destroy—or assimilate, which amounts to destruction yet has hegemonic potential— that which was not in its image and likeness; second, that the “last battle” is always ongoing; and, fi nally, that rather than being waged through politics, modern war may be a mechanism against the demand for politics posed by those collectives against whom the war is waged. When these collectives pose such a demand— when the disagreement around equivocations becomes public, and collectives

Harvey, P., Krohn-Hansen, C., & Nustad, K. G. (Eds.). (2019). Anthropos and the material. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from ucr on 2020-02-06 09:28:24.

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press for recognition of that which the state cannot recognize— the silent war may translate into overt battle. The state would wage it in the name of the common good; disobedient collectives respond to defend their survival.

Extractivism or the End of the Silent War (and of the Not- Seen) Extractivism is a concept that circulates quite profusely in Latin Amer- i ca and that, quite literally, makes the Anthropocene materially pres ent as a human- geological force, while at the same time foregrounding its ar- ticulation through financial capital and in connection with infrastructural growth. This term is currently used in environmental circles in the region; critical contributors trace the start of extractivist practices back to Span- ish colonial mining (see Gudynas 2015; Bebbington 2015; Svampa 2015). The extraction of silver from the Cerro Rico de Potosí and Huancavelica (currently in Bolivia and Peru, respectively) is an infamous example of the death and destruction caused by the extraction of minerals for circulation in Iberian metropolitan markets. Guano, rubber, cotton, and sugar plantations and perforation for oil (mostly in coastal areas with access to small ports) followed in the late nineteenth century. Then, enabled by the construction of railways, the growth of ports in size and numbers, and the creation of a merchant naval industry, a great number of mines were opened throughout the twentieth century, attracting US and British capital. Throughout, these activities contributed to the general national income, to ecological “transfor- mation,” and to the death of populations ( needless to say, these were mostly indigenous and slaves of African origin).

Many features make extractivism a diff er ent venture compared to earlier (also extractive) practices. Some obvious ones are the corporate character of the practice; the worldwide ubiquity of the model and its interconnected- ness; the unpre ce dented rate of expansion of markets for minerals, oil, and energy; and the magnitude of new technologies that allow for quick and profitable extraction.

Former “tunnel mining”— the perforation of mountains following the vein of minerals— has been replaced by open pits that destroy mountains, creating crater- like formations that extend over hundreds of hectares and reach depths of more than a thousand meters.7 Multiple- well platforms have substantially increased the number of barrels and the speed of production, and relatively new technologies like inland and offshore fracking and the production of oil from tar sands are responsible for the unpre ce dented ter- ritorial expansion of oil extraction. The magnitude of the so- called environ-

Harvey, P., Krohn-Hansen, C., & Nustad, K. G. (Eds.). (2019). Anthropos and the material. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from ucr on 2020-02-06 09:28:24.

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Uncommoning Nature 43

mental impacts is also unpre ce dented. An example: between 2006 and 2011, Bolivia produced 5,600 tons of silver, which required the removal of more than 44 million tons of rocks (removing the rocks from where they were and then dumping them elsewhere is destructive). And while the tremendous amounts of water used in mining are not exactly destroyed, it becomes so full of contaminants that it is rendered useless for consumption by any living being. In the case of oil: fracking uses extraordinary amounts of water and releases large volumes of toxic and radioactive waste and dangerous air pol- lutants, and it thus affects bodies of all sorts in vast areas.8 Soybean and oil palm plantations (among others) join in the production of what Uruguayan biologist and politician Eduardo Gudynas has labeled “ecological amputa- tions” (2015, 25). The construction of infrastructure (necessary to market the resources) sponsored by central financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and new regional financial entities such as the Latin American Development Bank, enables the extraction to reach the remotest territories. All this propels what appears to be an unpre ce dentedly unstoppable and mighty removal of resources in these territories as they are also transformed into spaces for financial investment.

As im mense an ecological concern as it is, extractivism has become a central component of the economic strategies of all governments in the re- gion, left and right, without exception. Perhaps the only difference is that while the first, guided by a nationalist agenda, declare that they prefer to execute the extraction themselves, the latter have decidedly opened their ter- ritories to transnational corporations. Appropriation through Pollution is the subtitle Michel Serres (2011) gives to the little book in which he discusses the planetary ecological crisis we live with—to pollute is to possess; it is to exclude others from access to the resources that the polluter appropriates. And, of course, appropriation through pollution also kills those humans whom the destructive anthropos does not care to see— and therefore neither pollution nor deaths matter, for not infrequently (if implicitly), ecological am- putations are deemed necessary “geographies of sacrifice,” to adopt Valerie Kuletz’s (1998) phrase and adapt it to the ethos of extractivism. Accordingly, forms of life that continue to exist in the spaces from which resources can be extracted are disposable because those forms of life ought to have dis- appeared long ago. Moved by a well- funded race for pro gress and promoted by economic growth, the reach of the current destruction of indigenous worlds is historically unparalleled, and news about it is not exactly scarce; it takes no effort to learn about appalling incidents at any given time. Consider this commentary published on March 23, 2016, as I was writing this piece:

Harvey, P., Krohn-Hansen, C., & Nustad, K. G. (Eds.). (2019). Anthropos and the material. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from ucr on 2020-02-06 09:28:24.

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it narrates the slow death of an indigenous group recognized in Colombia as the Wayúu at the hands of an infamous coal mine.

Every thing has been taken away from them. They have stolen their land, their water, even their names. . . . And the spoliation continues. The draught that burns them with thirst is neither nature’s whim, nor a consequence of global warming: it is that the great coal com pany from El Cerrejón, built the dam El Cercado, which the state inaugu- rated with great publicity, and it sucked the water for the needs of the im mense mine. The mine grows, and as it does, it evicts the Wayúus into the desert in La Guajira. [Before the dam] El Cerrejón had already diverted for its own ends the course of several streams that fed the Río Ranchería, and now it insists on building a new riverbed, thus taking the whole river away in order to reach the im mense coal deposits that lie under the water.9

Denunciations like the above find a public beyond the indigenous peoples whose life is at stake, and among those more generally concerned with the distribution of ecological conflicts and human rights. Digging a mountain to open a mine, drilling into the subsoil to find oil, damming all pos si ble rivers, and razing trees to build transoceanic roads and railroads are tools for the transformation of territories into grounds for investment— but extractiv- ism’s hegemony is hard to achieve. Extractivism has met a relentless opposi- tion that articulates, if in complex and irregular ways, unexpected alliances across the heterogeneous demands of a vast array of collectives. Centrally, in all its diverse complexity, the alliance defies the mono poly of the state and corporations to make, inhabit, and define nature— and, at times, the chal- lenge it poses touches states’ nerves, producing the feeling that sovereignty over the territories they rule is challenged and that their hopes for economic growth (founded on extractivism) are jeopardized. So far, the reaction of national states (from the left and the right) has been to waver between ac- cepting and rejecting their opponents’ demands for negotiation. When re- jection happens, what I have been calling the “ silent war” moves onto an open battlefield—in the name of pro gress, as always. The confrontation in 2009 in La Curva del Diablo is an emblematic event of the end of the silent war: those who oppose the transformation of universal nature into resources oppose the possibility of the common good as the mission of the nation- state and are thus the state’s enemies, deserving jail at the very least.

The alliance against extractivism is complex. Po liti cally relevant, it has a capacity to attract public attention opposing the participation of the state in

Harvey, P., Krohn-Hansen, C., & Nustad, K. G. (Eds.). (2019). Anthropos and the material. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from ucr on 2020-02-06 09:28:24.

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