Locality, Hegemony and WAC: A Reply to Iacono

Abstract

I appreciate Iacono’s dedication in critiquing my paper on WAC. He has highlighted several points that deserve some clarification. It is always surprising to see oneself through someone else’s eyes. Rather than revisiting one by one the different points he passes through, I would like instead to focus on the points of this discussion that are most fertile for accomplishing my own aim when writing the original paper, that is, discussing the actual and potential roles of WAC in the contemporary world (characterised by terms such as ‘globalised’, ‘network-society’, ‘post-colonial’, ‘post-capitalist’, ‘empire’). With that aim in mind, some pieces of (political) theory were introduced in my paper, not because I identify myself monolithically with those bodies of theory, but because I felt that some inspiration could be obtained from them – and communicated – in order to move from commonsensical understandings (sometimes referred to as ‘ethics’) into a theoretically informed political discussion. After all, the aim of my paper was and still is, to produce an informed and open discussion on WAC’s politics. And Iacono’s comment is particularly timely for getting into that sort of open discussion. At this point in time, after repeated calls for an open and informed discussion on WAC politics regarding relationships with multinationals, and after almost two years since the onset of WAC negotiations with the Rio Tinto Group (RTZ), WAC officers have proposed a members-only discussion on ‘engagement’ on the WAC website. Thus, I want to express my sincere gratitude to both the Present Pasts editorial board and to Iacono, for this open conversation. The main focus of Iacono’s comments is about the place of locality within theory. For him, classifying me as post-colonial and consequently reading my text through Callinicos’ reading of post-colonial theory, I essentialise the locality, in some way mystifying the local as a pristine and ideal place of resistance. My understanding of the local is, however, not essentialist but relational. I see the local as an antagonist force in relation to power (or ‘empire’ to return to Hardt & Negri, if the reader can avoid assuming that from this word that I subscribe to everything that these authors say). And it is within this antagonism that I prefer to place several different issues normally considered to pertain to discrete fields: archaeology, archaeological heritage, multinationals, large-scale mining, transnational organizations, WAC, and several other global discourses (such as that on ‘global ethics’ referred to in the title of the panel in which my paper was originally read, as well as those advanced by Iacono in his comments - ‘historic reconstruction’, ‘education’ and ‘social criticism’). In order to bring these phenomena into the antagonistic field between localities (or territories) and power (or empire) I thought that Hardt & Negri’s category of empire was useful as a description. I am not necessarily implying that power is incorporeal. After the panel discussion already referred to, several senior WAC people travelled to a particular place within the