Review: <em>Territories of Difference: Place, Movements, Life, Redes</em> by Arturo Escobar

Abstract

Territories of Difference: Place, Movements, Life, Redes by Arturo Escobar. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. 456 pp. ISBN 978-0- This work investigates forms of alterity, difference, and heterogeneity that emerge through the dynamics of postcolonial development and modernization along the Pacific coast of Colombia. Escobar’s work looks specifically at the Process of Black Communities (Proceso de Comunidades Negras, PCN), a political organization that represents the larger community of Afro-Colombians who had been geographically, politically, and economically isolated until the 1990s. With the advent of efforts to integrate these communities into the mainstream Colombian and global economy, Escobar documents the ways in which PCN attempted to transform this integration process in their own terms. Escobar’s ethnographic account of PCN’s efforts elegantly traces the continuity between the activists’ practices of economic and cultural self-determination and the larger theoretical discourse of alterity, difference, and heterogeneity. This continuity between practice and theory provides a sense of globalization and economic integration as an epistemological encounter in which the Afro- Colombian communities’ ways of knowing and acting in the world are wholly threatened. Escobar’s work is thus largely motivated by identifying possibilities for exit out of this epistemological encounter; that is, possibilities for exit out of a modernization and rampant capitalism that leaves little room for alternate forms of being. On the whole, his work provides an ambivalent response to this overarching question; nevertheless, this is an important work for scholars interested in understanding the epistemological and power dynamics within the global political economy of environmental activism and conservation. By looking specifically through the prisms of place, capital, nature, development, identity, and networks, Escobar analyzes the various forms of alterity, difference, and heterogeneity that occur through the work of biodiversity conservation among the PCN activists. For example, traditional Western accounts construct the concept of place as a territorial configuration. Escobar demonstrates instead how concepts of place for the Afro-Colombian activists are inclusive of notions of history, culture, environment, and social life. This distinction, he argues, is one of the epistemological fault lines around which the political debates of place and environment form. Through his inquiry of alterity, difference, and heterogentity through the additional tropes of capital, nature, and development, Escobar makes several broad arguments. First, Escobar argues that capital and forms of economic organization should been seen as fundamentally heterogeneous and diverse in order to prevent the universalizing tendencies in economic frameworks. Second, he asserts that Western models of science are based on culturally specific