Abstract
How do Indigenous and peasant political paradigms interact? This essay examines the relationship between Indigenous-ontopolitical critiques of development and peasant-oriented demands for alternative development in the Guatemalan defense of territory (DT), an Indigenous-led alliance against extractive development. Drawing on politically-engaged ethnographic and historical fieldwork, I argue that theories that counterpose indigenous ecological values of reciprocity and human-nature relationality to “development” oversimplify Indigenous responses to the multi-dimensional nature of colonization. I describe how Indigenous cosmological critiques coexist with demands for food sovereignty, agrarian struggles, integral development, and even progressive (redistributive) extraction in territorial defense movements. I suggest that the ascendance of post-development critiques in the DT crowds out heterogeneous demands for anticolonial development, limiting the movement’s potential to present a compelling alternative for marginalized communities. I point to a convergence between some kinds of Indigenous ontopolitics and counterinsurgency efforts to repress radical developmentalism and propose holding critiques of and demands for development in creative tension to strengthen counterhegemonic struggles.
Published Version
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