Beyond Territories of Resistance

LIMITS TO DECOLONIZATION neo-extractivist regimes like Bolivia. That binary needs Coulthard, G. S. 2014. Red Skin, White Masks: challenging, if for no other reason than to complicate Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minne- its need to constitute an outside that glosses over a apolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. set of typically Marxist questions regarding living labor and the rural/urban, frontier/core binaries used Fabricant, N. 2012. Mobilizing Bolivia’s Displaced: to understand it (Gago and Mezzadra 2017). Under- Indigenous Politics & the Struggle Over Land. Chapel played in the book, these questions of capital emerge Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. as one of the more forceful limits to decolonization. Fanon, F. 2004. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated In one of the earliest formulations of decoloniza- by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press. Original tion, Franz Fanon (2004) argued that decolonization edition, 1963. required the production of nothing less than a new, Gago, V., and Mezzadra, S. 2017. A Critique of the planetary humanity. Put differently, decolonization Extractive Operations of Capital: Toward an Expanded was at least as militantly anti-capitalist as it was anti- Concept of Extractivism. Rethinking Marxism 29(4): colonial as echoed by Fanon’s Bolivian contemporary, 574-591. Fausto Reinaga (Reinaga, 2010; see also Coulthard 2014). On those terms, both Itika Guasu and the Gustafson, B. 2009. New Languages of the State: MAS fall short. The former does so for reasons Indigenous Resurgence and the Politics of Knowledge in discussed above, while the latter comes across as Bolivia (Narrating Native Histories). Durham: Duke constrained by its origins in the coca growers’ union. University Press. The specificity of that history – cooperative organized Hindery, D. 2013. From Enron to Evo: Pipeline (export-oriented) commodity production on politics, global environmentalism, and Indigenous rights ‘national’ lands with a clear set of social commitments in Bolivia. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press. to producers – appear magnified at the national level with the MAS’s approach to extractivism. As the text Postero, N. 2017. The Indigenous State: Race, politics, suggests, that specificity imposes its own set of limits and performance in plurinational Bolivia. Oakland, to decolonization in part because they give themselves CA: University of California Press. over to reproducing a potent inside/outside division of politics that underwrites the logic of recognition Reinaga, F. 2010. La revolución india. La Paz, Bolivia: and extractivism that dominate in Bolivia. The text Ediciones Partido Indio de Bolivia. Original edition, provides ample evidence that would suggest a far 1970. more variegated set of relations, partially overwritten by formal recognition and controversially activated by the negotiations between Itika Guasu and Repsol. The final chapter of this book suggests much richer engagement with these ideas that feels cut short by the Beyond Territories of Resistance studied ethnographic focus. Perhaps those questions Penelope Anthias will become book two? If so, readers should be eager Department of Geography to read the next installment. Durham University Department of Food and Agricultural Resources References University of Copenhagen Bryan, J., and Wood, D. 2015. Weaponizing Maps: I would like to thank the reviewers for their Indigenous Peoples and Counterinsurgency in the incisive and thought-provoking comments. This Americas. New York: The Guilford Press. symposium offers a valuable opportunity to reflect on the place of my book, Limits to Decolonization, within a broader set of scholarly discussions – on postcolo- 66 Human Geography  PENELOPE ANTHIAS nialism, Indigenous mapping, and neo-extractivism For many Guaraní people, territory is central to this – in which my critics have played important roles. In project. Territory here is understood as the locus of addition to the two reviews published here (by Cheryl a collective struggle for freedom, a site for nurturing McEwan and Joe Bryan), I will address points raised and defending other kinds of relations following a by Tom Perreault, who participated in the recent century of racialized dispossession. Yet, my research author-meets-critics session at the AAG, and whose also sought to answer questions expressed by my review appears in the Summer 2019 issue of the AAG Guaraní interlocutors about why their territorial Review of Books (Perreault 2019). I will structure my claim had produced such ambivalent results; to give response around three core questions that are raised voice to the disillusionment felt by many Indigenous by the reviewers. These can be summarized briefly people in the Bolivian lowlands two decades after as: territory and decolonization, transformation and the creation of Native Community Lands and one endurance, and the specter of capital. decade after the election of an Indigenous president. Here, it is significant that my research took place in 1. What is the role of territory in Indigenous decolo- the aftermath of the ‘territorial turn’, unlike much of nial struggles? the literature on Indigenous counter-mapping. It also coincided with the expectations, then the disappoint- As Cheryl McEwan notes, repatriation of land ments, of Bolivia’s ‘process of change’. In many ways, is seen by many decolonial theorists as the root to this has been a time of frustrated hopes for Indigenous “‘unsettling’ settler colonialism”. In her reading, peoples of the Bolivian Chaco. Limits to Decolonization complicates this argument by revealing the challenges involved in the land repa- In some ways my research anticipated this. My triation process and the cleavages that can open up decision to focus on an Indigenous territorial claim between cultural recognition and resource control. that overlies Bolivia’s biggest gas field was informed How, she asks, might such cleavages be bridged to by my skepticism about multicultural forms of rec- enable progressive, decolonial politics and material ognition – as well as about the promise of state-led distribution? Joe Bryan identifies an ambivalence that decolonization via extractivism. By interrogating the runs through Limits to Decolonization – what he calls limits faced by Indigenous territorial claims, I hoped a “productive dissonance” – regarding the possibilities to understand something about the contours of the and limits of territory as a site of decolonial struggle. colonial present. In writing the book, I have sought to On the one hand, the book insists on the radical make visible the conditions of coloniality and capital- content of the Guaraní territorial claim and privileges ism that constrain Indigenous struggles for territory, territory as an empirical focus. On the other hand, it but without losing sight of the decolonial content of is the limits of this territorial strategy – explored in the such claims. erasures of the mapping process, the racialized politics Of course, it could be argued that a “politics of of land titling, the state’s prioritization of capitalist recognition” will never produce decolonial outcomes resource claims – that repeatedly come to the fore. I (Coulthard 2014; see Fraser 2018 for an alternative read in these comments a keen appreciation of what viewpoint). Certainly, other scholars have gone further is at stake in the book, but also, perhaps, a frustration than me in suggesting what decolonization beyond that it does not offer clearer answers about what a recognition politics might look like (Coulthard 2014; decolonial politics of territory should look like. Simpson 2015). My book’s focus on territorial recog- I suspect that the dissonance Bryan identifies is nition reflects a paradox at the heart of Indigenous linked both to my positionality and to the timing of politics in the Bolivian lowlands: claims to territory my research. The book emerged from my attempt to directed at the state remain a central axis of Indig- understand – from my own limited vantage point and enous struggle even as the ambivalent outcomes of based on a decade of engagement with Guaraní people such claims are starkly evident. This paradox continues of the Chaco – what is at stake in decolonization. under the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) government, where Indigenous Originary Peasant Ter- Volume 12, Number 3 2019 67 LIMITS TO DECOLONIZATION ritories (the new term for Indigenous territories under from somewhere else – from a historical memory, ways the 2009 Constitution) are now encountering many of being, and conceptions of living well that are not of the same obstacles as Native Community Lands. At legible to the state. stake here is a stubborn persistence of the politics of recognition in the face of its recurring limits. McEwan’s commentary suggests that this Other locus of enunciation could have been more strongly How should we respond to this? While I agree articulated in the book. While the ethnographic with McEwan that Limits to Decolonization compli- sections do offer glimpses of a Guaraní life-world built cates the question of land repatriation, it should not around norms of reciprocity and more-than-human be read as an argument for abandoning territory as a relations, readers will not go away from this book with a site of Indigenous decolonial politics. For peoples like deep understanding of Guaraní epistemology (arakua) the Guaraní – who have faced a recent history of ter- and ways of being (ñande reko). The question is: ritorial dispossession and face acute problems of land should they have done? I am not sure. Those working access – it is difficult to imagine what a decolonial in the field of political ontology have demonstrated struggle without territory would look like. What the the political stakes of making visible Indigenous book does challenge is the idea that legal-cartographic ontologies and their radical challenge to Western recognition offers an easy solution to such claims. humanism. However, this was not my project. I also Of course, I am not the first to highlight the limits remain skeptical that rendering Indigenous ontologies of mapping and land titling for Indigenous peoples legible to a Western audience will contribute towards (Wainwright and Bryan 2009). Where this book’s the thriving of Indigenous life-worlds – or that non- originality perhaps lies is in its detailed and multi- Indigenous scholars are best positioned to narrate such sited account of the processes through which territory worlds. In doing so, we risk not only “speaking for the becomes severed from decolonial agendas and trans- subaltern” (Spivak 1988), but also obscuring our own formed into an empty signifier of recognition. This locations within the resource assemblages that threaten is not reducible to a single ‘modern’ or ‘neoliberal’ Indigenous futures. That is, I worry that Indigenous logic; rather, it requires careful empirical attention to ontologies, if treated uncritically, could become a new the specific contexts and variegated terrains in which liberal horizon (Povinelli 2018) that detracts attention territory is produced – from activist counter-mapping from the violence of the colonial present. It is to this (Chapter 2), to state bureaucracy (Chapter 3), to colonial present that Limits to Decolonization turns its everyday land politics (Chapter 4), to hydrocarbon attention. negotiations (Chapter 5 and 6). As Bryan observes, the book’s ambivalence 2. What endures in the wake of propertization and regarding the radical possibilities of territory reflects a extractivism? second ambivalence, concerning how territory is con- A second question posed by the reviewers is the ceptualized – as a political technology, as an outcome extent to which Indigenous understandings of land and of struggle (in a Lefebvrian sense), or as a site of radical territory have been fundamentally and permanently ontological difference. At different moments, each of transformed by engagement with state land titling and these conceptualizations comes to the fore. This refusal hydrocarbon development. The book points to aspects to fix territory as a concept may be unsatisfying to some of transformation and endurance, which play out in readers. Yet, it also, I hope, conveys something about contradictory ways across different scales of Guaraní how territory acts as a site of equivocation (Viveiros life. At the level of Indigenous organizational politics, de Castro 2004) between decolonial projects and the it is perhaps the transformations that stand out, from logics of the state, capital, and multiculturalism. While leaders’ entanglement with the bureaucratic proce- the territory’s legal-cartographic production is located dures of land titling to their reimagining of the Native firmly within the terrain of recognition politics (where Community Land claim as a site for capturing and it is permeated and challenged by broader processes of distributing hydrocarbon rents. In contrast, in rural territorialization), Guaraní claims to territory emanate 68 Human Geography  PENELOPE ANTHIAS communities, the fabric of everyday life continues to at the end of my fieldwork. My decision to include be governed by relations of reciprocity and resource this material was for two reasons. First, I perceived sharing, by the seasonal rhythms of fishing, sowing, that hydrocarbon citizenship was of significance migration and wage labor. beyond Itika Guasu – something my recent research in the Chaco has borne out. And second, I realized This distinction requires qualification. As Chapter that the Guaraní’s frustrated struggle for territory, 6 argues, the Guaraní leadership’s vision of gas-funded detailed in the preceding chapters of the book, was key territorial autonomy was partly an effort to recapture to understanding these dynamics. Here my argument the political content of territory, which was central resonates with Nancy Postero’s (2007) book, Now We to earlier processes of Indigenous organizing but had Are Citizens, which revealed how Indigenous peoples’ been evacuated from the state land titling process. encounters with the limits of multicultural recogni- Despite the growing distance between Guaraní orga- tion shaped demands for a new national distribution nizational politics and community life, leaders are also of political power and resource wealth under the MAS members of rural communities and express concerns government. about the lasting consequences of hydrocarbon development for Guaraní ways of being and relations Perhaps even more consequential in the long with land. Meanwhile, even in the most remote term will be the ecological effects of extraction in communities, everyday life is not immune from the the Chaco, something Limits to Decolonization only effects of propertization and extractivism. Chapter 4 touches on – in part, because my community-level documents how the fragmentary effects of land titling ethnography was at some distance from gas wells. have exacerbated processes of territorial enclosure, Independent research is urgently needed to investigate threatening an established moral economy of resource these impacts — environmental impact studies are sharing. This is not just a result of propertization, currently funded by oil companies — and to explore however, but reflects broader social-ecological changes how Indigenous communities are making sense of and — from climate change to the distribution of barbed responding to them. The same is true of the effects wire through gas-funded state cash transfer programs. of climate change, which periodically surface in my In this context, the question is perhaps less whether ethnography but which remained largely beyond the Guaraní understandings of land have been fundamen- scope of the book’s analysis. tally altered by propertization (I would argue they have not), than how Guaraní communities will adapt Ultimately, the question of ‘what endures’ amidst to a broader set of socio-ecological transformations in these transformations is partly a matter of perspective. the Chaco. Against the yardstick of multicultural conceptions of indigeneity — in which Indigenous peoples are asso- As the reviewers note, a central aspect of this ciated with timeless cultural traditions – much may question relates to the long-term political and eco- indeed be changing. However, my experiences living logical effects of extractivism. Chapter 6 charts the among the Guaraní revealed how transformation can articulation of a new vision of gas-funded territorial itself be a form of endurance — from older men’s autonomy among the territory’s leadership following memories of labor migration to Argentina, to one a financial agreement with Repsol, and its challenge young woman’s decision to relocate to a nearby town by a rival leadership that promised to incorporate to cook for hydrocarbon workers in order to feed her the territory in state forms of gas rents distribution. family, to Indigenous bureaucrats who are seeking As Perreault (2019, 165) notes, “understandings direct state gas rents to rural communities struggling of territory and collective belonging are framed in to cope with worsening drought conditions and relation to, and according to the terms of, gas extrac- declining fish supplies. Despite the book’s emphasis on tion” — something I explore through the concept of ‘limits’, I hope readers will come away with a sense of hydrocarbon citizenship. As all three reviewers observe, the many ways in which Guaraní people are managing the lasting effects of hydrocarbon citizenship remain to endure in the face of these challenging conditions. to be seen. This is partly because these events occurred Volume 12, Number 3 2019 69 LIMITS TO DECOLONIZATION 3. Are the limits to decolonization ultimately a the Chaco, natural gas extraction is just the latest in a question of capital? series of historical collusions, legitimized through law, between the Bolivian state, foreign capital, and non- A final point raised by the reviewers relates to the Indigenous settlers. Understanding how capital places persistent role of capital in shaping both the limits limits on decolonial struggles requires attention not to decolonization and the contours of Indigenous only to the ongoing processes of primitive accumula- struggle in Bolivia. Bryan notes that Indigenous terri- tion that sustain global capitalism (Luxemburg 1951; torial recognition represents an “essential component Coulthard 2014), but also to the situated alignments of extractivism”: in the very process of gaining state of race, property and sovereignty through which such recognition of their land rights, Indigenous peoples processes unfold. are forced to renounce sovereignty over the subsoil. On the other hand — or in response to this Faustian This is why the book begins with a detailed bargain — it is increasingly through negotiations over account of the origins and evolution of the Guaraní extraction that Guaraní leaders in Itika Guasu have land struggle, turning to the dynamics of hydrocarbon sought to assert their territorial sovereignty. As Bryan extraction only in the final two chapters. Without this rightly observes, this resonates with a notion that is context, the significance of the ‘friendship agreement’ gaining traction among Indigenous rights advocates with Repsol would be difficult to grasp. It is important in other parts of the world: namely, that “corporations to state here that the book is not an endorsement of are better disposed to recognition of Indigenous rights negotiations with oil companies as a route to Indig- than states still compromised by structural racism.” enous empowerment. As Chapter 6 makes clear, the The rise of authoritarian populism may well intensify outcomes of such agreements for communities are this trend. In fact, this is not only a trend among ambivalent to say the least. What the book does shed Indigenous rights advocates (see Anaya 2014), but light on is why such agreements may seem appealing also an effect of transnational companies’ evolving to Indigenous leaderships engaged in long and frus- approaches to corporate social responsibility and the trating struggles for recognition with recalcitrant management of risk. As the ambiguous role of the states — struggles in which capital has proved itself to legal advocacy NGO Equipo Nizkor in Itika Guasu be a defining influence on state power. demonstrates, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish where the “oil complex” (Watts 2005) ends and the As Bryan and Perreault both note, the appearance NGO-activist complex begins. of these dynamics in Bolivia challenges the apparent contrast between neoliberal, market-led governments While I accept Bryan’s point that this broader and supposedly progressive, neo-extractivist regimes. landscape of oil governmentality could have been In both cases, it is capital that ultimately appears to more fully elaborated in the book, I do not agree that shape the content and outcomes of territorial struggle. it underplays the role of capital. In my mind, Limits A similar point is made by Maristella Svampa (2015), to Decolonization is precisely about the ways in which who writes of a pervasive “commodities consensus” hydrocarbon capitalism both constrains and redefines in Latin America. What Svampa and others have Indigenous decolonial struggles. However, rather than been less willing to acknowledge are the ways in beginning from the traditional Marxian question of which Indigenous peoples — in both neoliberal and how capital remakes territory and social relations, the neo-extractivist states — are becoming implicated book takes an alternative starting point: the struggle in extractivism, in ways that go beyond ‘resistance’. of 36 communities to reclaim territory after a century Critical scholarship has been slow to confront the of racialized dispossession. In doing so, it seeks to tell fact that Indigenous peoples who live in extractive a different kind of story about capital; one that reveals landscapes rarely have the power to stop extraction how the dynamics of capitalist resource frontiers are from happening, leaving questions of employment, shaped by deeper (post)colonial struggles over race, environmental monitoring and benefits-sharing as the property, and recognition (Perreault 2019). Seen only possible issues for negotiation. In this context, from the perspective of Indigenous communities of more research is required to understand the ways in 70 Human Geography  PENELOPE ANTHIAS which extraction — through rents-sharing, corporate ries in resistance” (Zibechi 2012), there are challenges social responsibility initiatives, labor relations, and to sustaining a pluriverse on a gas field. On a more environmental impacts – produces new dynamics personal level, witnessing the limits of possibility of social and class differentiation within Indigenous faced by Indigenous peoples in the Chaco has pushed groups. In this sense, Bryan is right that there is much me towards confronting extractivism within my own that Limits to Decolonization leaves unexplored. Nev- society, including through participation in the Extinc- ertheless, I would contend that, compared to much tion Rebellion movement. recent literature on Indigenous territories, capital plays quite a visible role in the book — both in ter- While Limits to Decolonization does not address ritorial politics and in everyday life. these issues explicitly, it can be read as a challenge to redemptive narratives, a call to make visible (as Where I do feel the book could have been more Indigenous scholars often do) the constraints of the explicit is in articulating the political stakes of docu- colonial-capitalist present, and the creative ways menting how capital imposes limits on decolonial Indigenous peoples struggle for self-determination “in struggles. I have sensed in some responses a frustration the teeth of Empire” (Simpson 2014). Rather than that Limits to Decolonization does not offer a horizon viewing sites like the Chaco as less interesting because of hope, a clear way out of the capitalist present. What they appear mired in the dynamics of extractivism, is the point in radical scholarship if not to demonstrate I believe there is much to be learned by thinking that ‘another world is possible’? Since completing the from such places and their Indigenous inhabitants book, I have gained a clearer sense of the challenge about global capitalism and the ongoing challenge of it poses to much critical Latin Americanist scholar- decolonization. ship. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of neoliberalism, Latin America has been seen by many on the left as the site for political alterna- References tives — whether in the guise of leftist governments Anaya, J. 2014. Report of the Special Rapporteur on or in the place-based struggles of Indigenous peoples. the Rights of Indigenous peoples, James Anaya, on the While this is arguably being challenged by the rise of Situation of Indigenous peoples’ rights in Peru with repressive regimes on both the left and the populist Regard to Extractive Industries. UN Human Rights right, the search for political alternatives continues to Council. permeate much Latin Americanist scholarship. Coulthard, G. S. 2014. Red Skin, White Masks: Writing this book has led me to question this Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minne- tendency to look elsewhere — often to the most apolis: University of Minnesota Press. marginalized peoples — for alternatives to global- ized hydrocarbon capitalism. This is not a call for Fraser, J. A. 2018. Amazonian struggles for recogni- individualized responsibility and ‘carbon guilt’, but tion. Transactions of the Institute of British Geography rather a questioning of this propensity of Western 43: 718– 732. scholars to look to Indigenous peoples as the source of Li, T. M., 2014. Land’s End: Capitalist Relations on an radical (anti-capitalist) political change while failing Indigenous Frontier. Durham: Duke University Press. to acknowledge our own privileged locations within the resource assemblages we study. One effect is a Luxemburg, R. 1951. The Accumulation of Capital (tr. tendency to focus on emblematic cases of resistance Agnes Schwarzchild), London: Routledge and Kegan rather than routine forms of capitalist dispossession Paul. (Li 2014). In the most extreme cases, it produces a kind of strategic essentialism, in which efforts to Perreault, T. 2019. 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