Book review symposium - SAGE Journals

Book review symposium

Sarah A. Radcliffe, Dilemmas of Difference: Indigenous Women and Postcolonial Development Theory. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015, 400pp.: 978-0-822-37502-9, £23.99 (pbk), £86.00 (hbk).

Commentary I: Difference and transformation: Dilemmas in interpreting development in Ecuador Much of Sarah Radcliffe’s intellectual career has been dedicated to seeking to understand subaltern and marginalized voices and ways of living in Andean America. Whether her focus has been on people migrating, high Andean communities’ ways of marking the boundaries of their territories, domestic workers in Lima, women’s organizations, indigenous activists or, as in this book, indigenous women, the concern has been the same: to understand other ways of knowing, and to find adequate ways of representing, and theorizing, these modes of knowing. Throughout, her work has also been infused with skeptical and critical approaches to development, modernity and dominant social institutions – in large measure because these exclude, distort or simply fail to understand (or do not want to understand) the voices on which Sarah’s work is concentrated. While I do not doubt that Sarah will write more books after this one, to my mind Dilemmas of Difference marks something of a culmination of this body of work. It is the most consistently and incisively theorized of her contributions, and draws on empirical work conducted not only for this project but also, it seems, for at least one of the prior ones. It is

Progress in Human Geography 1–10 ª The Author(s) 2017 Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0309132517691629 journals.sagepub.com/home/phg

probably also the most dialogical of all her contributions – in the sense that, while Sarah is the formal author of the book, she is quite clear in saying that the thinking that underlies the book reflects both long-standing conversations as well as more recent discussions with indigenous women (indı´genas) in both the highlands and coastal lowlands of Ecuador. Sarah is clear in recognizing that in this project these women are much more than informants: they are also coproducers of the knowledge and the ideas brought together in the book. There is no doubt that many people will love this book and will view it as a very important contribution to critical development studies and post-colonial theory and practice in Geography; and then a few others will be critical of its theory and its prioritization of particular voices. In my comments here, I am not interested in getting into critiques and prefer instead to reflect on several of the many things that Sarah’s book has made me think about. I group these reflections into the following categories: reflections on Ecuador; reflections on voices; reflections on development; and reflections on ways of working. I will take each in turn. Much of the material in this book comes from a region of Ecuador that I used to know well. I lived for 14 months or so in Chimborazo in the late 1980s and returned regularly over the following decade. Since 2000 or so I have been able to return just two or three times, and only briefly, so much will have changed. Still, the Guamote or Colta that I knew in the 1980s were not that many decades out of hacienda control, were a zone of contention between growing evangelical churches and struggling Catholic priests, and were home to numerous

2

development projects – many of them small scale and non-governmental, some government-led and slightly more extensive. Without a shadow of a doubt that world of development intervention engaged above all with men: most of the project workers were men, and most of the leaders and farmers they talked to were men. But at the same time, gender identities and women’s sense of rights and obligations were transforming. A wonderful, sadly unpublished, PhD by Rebecca Tolen based on the community of Pulucate caught some of these transformations. Both Becky and I had the intuition that these changes had something to do with the theology and authority structures of the evangelicalisms taking root in the region – though Becky’s work was far more nuanced and in-depth than mine in being able to explore this intuition ethnographically. Of course there were many other influences at work too, and my point is not to adjudicate among them. Rather I simply make the comment that this region had been on a slow-burn but very grassroots-based transformation since before land reform, and this transformation has had much to do with the relationships between an emerging labor-reserve economy, religious change, the sustained modernizing effects of a plethora of development organizations, and diverse and changing identities – in much the same way at a local level as David Lehmann had begun to plot out so suggestively for Latin America as a whole (Lehmann, 1990). Ideas of citizenship had been in constant and significant change for quite some time. Sarah’s work catches a recent, and remarkable, slice of these processes. One of the many wonderful things about this book is its foregrounding of indı´genas’ voices. These voices speak of differences that have not been attended to (or badly attended to) by development initiatives, and at the same time offer critiques of development policy, development projects, Ecuadorian society and everyday colonial and patriarchal relationships, among others. While, Sarah does not try to aggregate these voices into a single ‘indı´gena’ critique of

Progress in Human Geography

development and imagination of possible future worlds, almost inevitably what emerges from the pages is a nuanced sense of indigenous women’s views. What is less clear is how these views might vary by other dimensions of their identities. This is an observation, not a criticism, because it would not be easy to capture yet more differences in what is an already nuanced piece of work. Still, I think it is worth recognizing that these views and voices might differ among evangelical, Catholic and other religious positions, by generation, or by other differences. While some of these differences are themselves products of settler colonialism, in particular those relating to faith, they remain seriously held faiths and beliefs of indigenous women and may have implications for views on development, sexuality and so forth. Another ‘dilemma of difference’, then, is that not all difference can ever be captured in a particular text, though they may have implications for some of the arguments and messages conveyed. Third, this book lays down profound challenges to the idea and practice of development. One way in which it does so is through the very helpful lens of ‘dilemmas of difference’. Sarah illuminates the very many differences that development interventions often fail: gender differences, differences in ontology, differences in how histories are understood and remembered, differences in ways of knowing, differences saturated with asymmetries of power. While multiple axes of difference characterize social life, development interventions simplify, focus and make themselves intentionally deaf and blind, whether this reflects the pragmatic goal of ‘just getting something done’ or the deliberate intent to impose a particular notion of improvement and of social order. As Sarah shows, even those projects that seek to be participatory often do a poor job of really engaging with the implications of difference – including profound differences in ability or comfort in participating in particular ways and particular


venues. In general, the message is that as a consequence of this bluntness, development not only fails people, especially indı´genas, it also fails on its own terms much of the time. While the book does not lay out clear alternative ways of understanding or practicing development, it does have a lot to say that is relevant. For me, the implication is that there is no ideal ‘alternative’ available, nor will there ever be; that all interventions will fail to deal with many dimensions of differences; and that for that reason development theory and practice ought always to be done with considerable humility and reflexivity. However, and building on the prior paragraph, a further implication of the narrative is also that a number of interventions in the region have, intentionally or not, also contributed to changing and progressive notions of citizenship and rights as well as to new ideas of how the Ecuadorian state might be organized. There is, for me at least, also a story of unintended consequences running beneath the argument, and not all these consequences are efarious. A final observation: Sarah’s book reflects a way of working that demands great respect. She has returned over and again to the provinces of Chimborazo and Santo Domingo and spent many days, hours and weeks talking with indı´genas in an effort to understand their arguments, their interpretations and their positions. At the same time, one senses, she has really grappled with how to represent these arguments, both in their own terms and in relation to theory – so that they can be understood through that theory, and also so that the theory can be understood in new ways through these voices. For me, at least, what the indı´genas quoted in this book have to say has challenged my thinking about critical development, development practice and post-colonial theory. My intuition is that other readers will be equally challenged by this superb book. Tony Bebbington Clark University, USA

3

Reference Lehmann AD (1990) Democracy and Development in Latin America: Economics, Politics and Religion in the Postwar Period. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Commentary II: New postcolonial insights on gender, indigeneity, and development, and refractions to environment and health issues Postcolonialism is at once a vigorous knowledge network, a wide-ranging coalescence of theoretical analysis, a powerful critique of policy, and a practical toolkit used to dissemble and connect ideas and concepts. For the past few decades it has been extensively and productively engaged in rethinking ideas of nature and culture and applying these insights to environment and health issues. The postcolonial perspective on nature and culture has framed understandings of the powerful dynamics of gender, race, and ethnicity that permeate policy and management in these other fields. This perspective has offered major insight into the asymmetrical power relations of persistent social groups (women, indigenous people, Afro-descendants, urban and rural poor) and the entwining of their politically and policymediated relation to resource access and certain spaces. In the case of environmental issues, for example, these spaces have included the territories designated as parks, nature reserves, and protected areas. Sarah Radcliffe’s excellent new book, Dilemmas of Difference: Indigenous Women and Postcolonial Development Theory, provides a tour de force of human geography and interdisciplinary postcolonial studies of gender, indigeneity, and development. Radcliffe’s book succeeds wonderfully in its goal to understand the genealogy of development’s treatment of social heterogeneity and exclusion/inclusion apprehended through individual bodies (p. 29). To do so Radcliffe crafts the sustained,

4

extensive engagement of postcolonial gender, race, culture, and development theory with grounded ethnographic field study. Dilemmas of Difference is focused on two geographic areas of Ecuador, Chimborazo province in the Andes and the rural surroundings of Santo Domingo in the Pacific Coast foothills. It engages the political discourses and lived experience of the indigenous rural women of two ethnic groups, Kichwa (Chimborazo) and Tsaćhila (Santo Domingo), in the contexts of their multi-scale networks and organizations. Poverty, abuse, violence, and discrimination, as well as exceptional social organization, are defining of many of their experiences. Radcliffe’s book builds directly upon and advances the vibrant area of work of a major cadre of leading authors and thinkers such as Marisol de la Cadena, Mary Weismantel, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Arturo Escobar, Emily Yeh, Tania Li, Susan Paulson, and numerous others. Dilemmas of Difference offers an impressive suite of major new contributions to human geography and interdisciplinary postcolonial studies of gender, culture, and development. It also suggests important parallels to studies of environment and health issues that are the focus of my brief comment. Those of us seeking to understand the growing global array of policies on these other issues must seek to engage fully the intellectual discussions, debates, and advances in human geography, anthropology, sociology, political science, and other fields that also traverse vibrant interdisciplinary domains. (Of course environment and health issues tend, to varying extents, to contain elements requiring certain ways of knowing, such as the environmental and biological sciences, that are related yet distinct from the social sciences, thus cross-reading must be carefully situated and suitably constrained.) One parallel stemming from Radcliffe’s new book is the sustained focus on the suite of development policies, political regimes, and governance approaches that are also common to many environment and health issues. Neoliberal


multiculturalism, rights-based governance, postdevelopment, decolonization, and policies for decentralization, social participation, ethnodevelopment, antipoverty initiatives, and gender-anddevelopment (GAD), as well as others, are exegetically examined. Yet these postcolonial policies, whether their application is to development and/or to environmental and health issues, offer partial, imperfect, and often re-enabling connections to the kinds of social and power relations, symbols and representations, and politics that are rooted in the colonial past. Postcolonial environmental studies have revealed the fault lines of the colonial categories of social heterogeneity. For example, social exclusion is frequently a functional counterpart to fortress conservation and the new wave of often authoritarian land use planning and territorial zoning. The second parallel to be noted stems from Radcliffe’s sustained critique of the ways in which development is ‘impelled to take social difference into account’ and how development in itself is taken as an ‘unalloyed good’ (p. 125). Yet of course development is a deeply political and contested process. Employing postcolonial intersectionality analysis, Dilemmas of Difference generates cogent analysis of the need for development ‘to decide where and with whom to work’, leading to the often problematic focus of policy on ‘single dimensions of social difference’ (p. 3). Later in the book Radcliffe describes the development policy associated with neoliberal multiculturalism and citizenship rights as focused on ‘at-risk populations’ and its categorization of ‘indigenous women’ (p. 157) that more generally reflects the ‘problematization of non-modern subjects’ (p. 185). Radcliffe’s characterizations of sociospatial heterogeneity and development resonate with insights suggesting potential intersections with environment and health issues. In one example from the latter field, the enduring institutional use of demographic and geographic categorization is being combined with technical innovation (e.g. molecular bioscience), thus offering


suggestive similarities. In another case, humanenvironment and nature-society studies have elucidated the fragmentation and exclusion of certain geographic spaces relative to others in conservation and land use policy and management. In western South America, for example, the geographic differentiation of mountain land use (e.g. valley versus upland spaces) and the under-representation of desert environments in conservation policies both reflect the influence of the colonial present. Predictably one particular strength of Dilemmas of Difference, and the focus of this final refraction onto postcolonial environment and health policy, is the book’s treatment of the decolonization policies of sumak kawsay or ‘Living Well’. Elucidated by Radcliffe, the latter Ecuadorian Kichwa term is preferred among the warmikuna, the Andean indigenous women, who reject the widespread use of the Spanish buen vivir. To indigenous Andean women, the term sumak kawsay and the national policies of decolonization have brought development closer to their reality than previously. Meanwhile the Tsaćhila of Santo Domingo, whose ethnicity is distinct from the Kichwa indigenous majority, do not find much meaning in these terms and the related policies. In the initial presentation of her findings Radcliffe adeptly weaves key points about the recent and ongoing decolonization policies including persistent colonial distinctions (p. 21), influences of rights-based agendas (p. 22), and gendering (p. 35). The book’s introduction also foreshadows the importance of ‘discerning motley alternatives’ (p. 36), building upon Cusicanqui’s formulation of emergent modern Andean hybridities that are defined in part by prevalent livelihood practices such as migration. This idea of hybrid social relations and identities is needed to move beyond the category of ‘indigenous women’, scare-quoted as Radcliffe notes (p. 156), owing to its fraught legacy and ongoing imaginary visa`-vis dominant institutions and one-dimensional narratives (e.g. Third World women as victims, p. 149).

5

The food preferences and health practices embedded in the everyday and embodied practices of the indigenous women are an integral part of sumak kawsay (pp. 257–90). These vibrant ethnic expressions contribute to the suggestion of potential motley alternatives. Rationales for the motley alternatives emerge from the experience of hybrid livelihoods. Widespread migration and dynamic socioeconomic and environmental changes contour the often interspersed spaces of the indigenous and nonindigenous worlds. Biopolitics in the food and health dimensions of decolonization policies and political alternatives in Ecuador offer the potential for illuminating insights across closely related spans of geographic space and historical time. These dimensions have become similarly integral in the national policies and movements of vivir bien in Bolivia and Peru, and in the indigenous precepts expressed linguistically and culturally as sumaq qamanã and allin kawsay. Per Radcliffe’s resplendent tracing, the current decolonization policies on environment, food, and health issues must be framed in arcs of understanding that span the colonial past and the colonial present. Karl S. Zimmerer Pennsylvania State University, USA

Commentary III: Decolonizing critique? In an unrelated scholarly book published around the same time as Sarah Radcliffe’s Dilemmas of Difference, the literary critic Rita Felski traces out what she terms ‘the limits of critique’ (2015). Felski’s ‘critique of critique’ focuses on literary analysis. As the key term denotes, however, literary critique is not a million miles from the work of social scientists, who, like their humanities colleagues, also see themselves to be engaged in the unceasing, rigorous, and sophisticated labour of questioning. For even the most stalwart conservative, critique is the

6

attitude of questioning and the sine qua non of scholarship. Critique marks the boundaries of seriousness. It grammars our responsibility. It holds thought to account. It is ‘the only conceivable thing’ (Felski, 2012). Only, some people are critical; others are not. We need to learn to become critical; or, so we tell ourselves. Teaching others how to dissect the processes through which knowledge claims and their associated truths are established makes up the work of higher education; it’s the privilege of the critical theorist, the scientist, and the analyst (Horkheimer, 1985). Disabusing and disenchanting unexamined beliefs lends critique its reflexive legitimacy. The Kantian imperative to be self-reflexive precludes even our own possibility (the hubris!) of ever being fully complicit with the forces stacked against us, whether they be nature’s, governments, or gods. Hence the anxiety that pervades academic life. Socrates chose death rather than renounce his acidic responsibility to himself and others. But, what happens when we need to recognize that conditions of epistemological doubt, analytic enquiry, and scepticism are also operative in others who have not learned to articulate their selfreflexivity in the terms assumed by Socratic traditions of reflective agency and action? What happens, further, when we recognize that what counts as the responsibility of critique is also guilty of implementing structures that reproduce abandonment and domination? This is one of the key questions that lies at the heart of Radcliffe’s dense and challenging book, a book that co-theorizes with indı´gena to decolonize development’s privileging of the West’s subject-centred thinking. Radcliffe concludes her book with the following summation: ‘critique is not uniquely the privilege of a subject centred in the West . . . . [I]ndigenous women are . . . theorising participants in a wider conversation about how to understand, conceptualise, and practically reconfigure politics’ (p. 290). When one asks, as Radcliffe’s research exhaustively does in her developmental contexts of Andean Kichwa and


coastal Tsaćhila communities, what is an indigenous woman, one learns that the assumed forms collective politics and development take are woefully inadequate to addressing the social heterogeneities and ontological intersections that shape indigenous lives. Development and political accountability are not matters of access; they are problems of ‘knowledge production’ (p. 289). Development agendas, Radcliffe and her indı´gena co-theorists argue, systematically, even wilfully, colonize through ‘direct marginalization and epistemic violence’ (p. 117). Operational conceptions like ‘woman, rurality, raceethnicity and citizenship’ (p. 289) are simply scant and false categories that require retheorizing. Radcliffe’s simple point is that indı´genas’ insights and debates stand on their own as critical contributions to this re-theorizing which takes as its goal ‘the rehumanization and morethan-humanization of life-worlds’ (p. 282). Indı´gena reflexivity, doubt, enquiry, and questioning is ‘critique’ (p. 290). Our job is to see it as such and so decolonize our assumptions, expectations, thought, and action. But, while Radcliffe’s argument lays down a profound challenge to development agendas, more importantly, it also defies the dominant critical grammars that question those agendas. While decolonizing development is her prime focus throughout the book, what she and her co-theorists’ also invoke is the need to take up the forms of ‘marginalisation and epistemic violence’ effected by Amer-European critique. Being critical is not enough if we don’t recognize that the ontological grammars of critique also mobilize boundaries, exclusions, expectations of situatedness, and effects that shape what counts as valid questioning or suspicion. One of the things I find exciting about the implications of Radcliffe’s arguments is the need to decolonize our accepted understanding of critique in ways that do not preclude the positive commitment to intersectional and inter-ontological agencies. In other words, can we be critical and interact with – not ‘believe’ – mountain spirits


(Apus) and an earth mother (Pachamama)? Indı´genas certainly do. And it does not prevent them from questioning hierarchies, inequities, or the many assemblages that constitute how they understand themselves. What is significant in this recognition is the need to see critique as more than negative. Indeed, the onus of critique become one of composing precisely the opposite of what it is often taken to do: ‘the formulation of the negative in relation to its object’ (Koch, 2002: 531). Critique must, instead, also be a commitment to the formulation of positive statements. As Radcliffe and her co-theorists ask us recognize, thought is a compositional effort or action that commits us in certain ways with the pluriversal lives of others. ‘Commit’, from the Latin, committere, to join and entrust in a putting forth, or sending out, as against ‘critique’, from the Greek krinein, which means to separate and decide in judgement. The ontological emphasis of committing lies less in doubt, than in the necessary, compositional pluralities that enact and entrust, indeed, that constitute the ability to doubt. The decolonial option becomes here more than being reflexively postcolonial. Critique is not simply about subjects becoming reflexive about themselves, but about sensing thought as implicate within the wider ecologies and relations which make it possible: Pachamama, Apus, their extended more-than-human lifeworlds. Whereas subjectivity, in the modernist genealogy, separates a reified, self-aware subject from the constituent materialities of which we are necessarily a part, this is the epistemic narrative Radcliffe asks us to resist. Framing a postcolonial politics of modern inclusion through operations of critique that themselves have not been decolonized will only result in more misunderstanding and more broken promises. Politics must become, then, not a field limited by questions of representation, recognition, state, or legitimacy, but an ‘intra-active’ orientation, a form of life, operating through the

7

semiotic relations of every assemblage (Bergen, 2010: 34). Doubt sometimes struggles to open us in embodied generosity whether in action and idea; unreconstructed critique can’t open us to radical material or relational agency because it operates with the logic that ‘behind any idea of nature, we will find only human agency’ (Sharp, 2011: 56). Indigenas’ critique, instead, asks us to re-naturalize our approaches by committing ourselves to the many grounds and stories that compose us. The semiotic relation is reversed. ‘Signs don’t come from the mind. Rather it is the other way around. What we call mind, or self, is a product of semiosis’ (Kohn, 2013: 34). Worlds, in other words, geo-graph with us. Attending the indigenas’ call returns political critique to more than epistemological negotiation and analytical enquiry. For to be alive is to undergo a history of constitutive affections and transformations in response to encounters with other earth-beings, human and nonhuman (Sharp, 2011: 8). To pretend otherwise, that is, to denaturalize politics without recognizing how we, all of us, are composed and committed by pre-linguistic relations forecloses the critical possibility of other worlds, and their many inhabitants, speaking. Mark Jackson University of Bristol, UK References Bergen V (2010) Politics as the orientation of every assemblage. New Formations 68: 34–41. Felski R (2012) Critique and the hermeneutics of suspicion. M/C Journal 15(1). Available at: http://journal. media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/ view/431 (accessed 17 November 2016). Felski R (2015) The Limits of Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Horkheimer M (1985) Traditional and critical theory. In: Horkheimer M, Critical Theory: Selected Essays. New York: Continuum, 188–243. Koch R (2002) The critical gesture in philosophy. In: Latour B and Weibel P (eds) Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 524–36.

8 Kohn E (2013) How Forests Think: Towards an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Berkeley: University of California Press. Radcliffe S (2015) Dilemmas of Difference: Indigenous Women and the Limits of Postcolonial Development Policy. Durham: Duke University Press. Sharp H (2011) Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Strathern M (1988) The Gender of the Gift. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Author’s response: Situating difference, boundary work and de-colonial perspectives Thank you for three generous, thoughtful and engaged responses to the book, as well as to the PIHG editors for facilitating them. Here I respond to three linking threads: postcolonialdecolonial theory and where to situate difference; boundary work and decolonial scholarship; and, briefly, the politics of alternatives. First, theorizing and situated difference. My work seeks to work in the direction of decolonization, namely ‘a long-term process involving the bureaucratic, cultural, linguistic and psychological divesting of colonial power’ (Tuhiwai Smith, 2010: 33; also Escobar, 2007). In the context of colonial-modernity, the patterns of exclusion affecting indigenous women are associated with – and replicated within – policy interventions in environment and health as colonial thinking and practice endure across liberal institutions (Stoler, 2016). Geographers and others write about colonial-modern apprehensions of matter – the stuff of indigeneity, tropical nature or femininity – and the misunderstandings, impetus to control, and categorical ordering that subordinate forms of difference (Harding, 2008). Yet the dynamic I found among Kichwa women was a decolonial agency, divesting themselves of mainstream understandings of development to re-tune thinking about gender, exclusion and containment. Bebbington highlights how the book foregrounds indı´genas’ voices. Diversifying the


viewpoints in a text (and generating compromised authorization practices) is well established in Geography. Yet what I sought to emphasize, as Jackson notes, are indigenous women’s theoretical inputs into the coproduction of knowledge. As well as quoting Tsa´ chila and Kichwa women, the book engages with Latin American intellectuals who are – self-consciously – indigenous women (Lugones, Rivera Cusicanqui, Choque, among others). Their ‘voices’ are written, circulated in journals, and engage with publics inside/outside indigenous movements, policy circuits and northern academia (also Gargallo, 2012; Millań, 2014). Indı´genas’ words then are not mere content or data, but engagements in producing knowledge otherwise. The Comaroffs argue that such theory is grounded, linked to lived praxis and ‘immanent to life itself’ (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2012b). While inspired by Southern theory, geography has yet to engage as much as it might in understanding the situations, routes and consequences of lived praxis/theorizing from the South, and its containment by quotidian always-violent expressions of epistemic power (Rivera Cusicanqui et al., 2016). Jackson calls for us to ‘decolonise our accepted understanding of critique in ways that do not preclude the positive commitment to intersectional and inter-ontological agencies’, in part by re-naturalizing our approach. The modest comparison between Chimborazo and Santo Domingo revealed quite how unpredictable and intrinsically spatial these agencies are. From my substantive-conceptual standpoint, Jackson’s proposal risks erasing a key spatial dimension, namely that the Andean political ontological critique was not Tsaćhila women’s politics. Moreover, Kichwa women did not necessarily rank the hybrid entangled politics of Pachamama as primary or fundamental to their critique. While after 2008 Pachamama’s valence in the public sphere was amplified, Kichwa women continued to struggle for institutional change, policy


improvements and forms of interaction across socio-epistemic differences that had nothing to do with Pachamama formally or informally. So in order to theorize from the South, it seems imperative not to interpret human/other-thanhuman interrelations as universally present or as always politically useful, but rather engage with them as they arise in specific historicalgeographical conjunctures as partiallyconnected ontological political engagements. Caution here arises not merely in the countertopographies of political agency, but additionally in relation to the vernacularized and situated patterns of re-working life (molecular science, food sovereignty practices, REDDþ etc.) (Medina et al., 2014; Harding, 2016; Radcliffe, 2016). Second, boundary work and decolonial scholarship. Two aspects are relevant here: the spatial vocabularies through which to decolonize geographical knowledge production; and, secondly, the nature of area studies. Zimmerer rightly highlights how colonial-modern power is exerted by fragmenting and excluding certain places-environments and populations. Dilemmas of Difference’s concept of internal colonies pays attention to the deeply routinized ways that class, race-ethnic hierarchies and gender continuously reproduce uneven development and naturalize socio-spatial exclusion. Jackson and Zimmerer, in markedly different ways, cite the intrinsic co-production of nature-environment and colonial-modern power. While Jackson focuses on the ontological distinctiveness of (Kichwa) indigenous women’s politics around Pachamama, Zimmerer draws on his Andean scholarship to highlight the hybrid, contested and multifaceted epistemologies, politics and knowledges that circulate in the region. Dilemmas of Difference sought to situate indigenous bodies and places firmly within colonialmodern institutions, landscapes and governmentality, relations whose connections to other-than-human agents (such as Pachamama) have been deliberately severed, suppressed and denied. In other words, I sought to resituate

9

geographies of indigeneity as much as a coproduction with colonial-modern power as with nature (also Radcliffe, 2015b, 2016). In relation to area studies, Bebbington records an Andean colonial present, the ‘relationships between an emerging labor-reserve economy, religious change, the sustained modernizing effects of a plethora of development organizations, and diverse and changing identities’. These dynamics are, of course, not unique to the Andean countries as the transformations of political economy and translocal influences on development and citizenship comprise a complex field of North-South, South-South and South-North learning and knowledge production (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2012a, 2012b; Roy, 2016; Ho et al., 2016). In doing grounded theory on development, then, a tension exists between ethnographic depth, self-reflective positioning on knowledge production, and managing to ‘think about the issues on a world, not just a [metropolitan] regional, scale’ (Connell, 2015: 53). While my ethnographic comparisons were ethnicregional, the contextualization and interpretation reflected decolonial parameters for comparative thinking coming from the ‘third wave of area studies’ (Ho et al., 2016) and theorizing from the South (Connell, 2007; Harding, 2008; Comaroff and Comaroff, 2012a). Third, the politics of alternatives. Reviewers note the hybrid agendas associated with Buen Vivir. Bebbington rightly highlights the risks of expecting a complete transformation under this distinctive interpretation of socialenvironmental sustainability, citing the sheer complexity of tackling intersectional inequalities. However, Ecuador does highlight the dynamics between social movements, social justice demands, and national settlements that find echo in other ‘pink tide’ states, and transformations around the world (Radcliffe, 2015a), suggesting the need for a continuously comparative frame. Undoubtedly daily experience reflects numerous dimensions of social

10

difference, yet postcolonial development continuously polices the interlocking of raceethnicity, gender, place and class. So while Buen Vivir seeks to tackle social injustice and the Sustainable Development Goals to Leave No-one Behind, these specific ‘silos’ of social difference persist in shaping top-down, institutionalized and epistemically-endorsed policy. Unless we seek to understand the power relations that endorse particular interpretations of social difference and fail to listen to those excluded from dominant narratives, development will remain mired in inequality. Sarah A. Radcliffe University of Cambridge, UK References Comaroff J and Comaroff J (2012a) Theory from the South: Or, How Euro-America Is Evolving toward Africa. Boulder, CO: Paradigm. Comaroff J and Comaroff J (2012b) Theory from the South: A rejoinder. Cultural Anthropology. Available at: https://culanth.org/fieldsights/273-theoryfrom-the-south-a-rejoinder (accessed 25 February 2012). Connell R (2007) Southern Theory: The Global Dynamics of Knowledge in Social Science. Cambridge: Polity. Connell R (2015) Meeting at the edge of fear: Theory on a world scale. Feminist Theory 16(1): 49–66. Escobar A (2007) Worlds and knowledges otherwise: The Latin American modernity/coloniality research programme. Cultural Studies 21(2–3): 179–210. Gargallo CF (2012) Feminismos desde Abya Yala. Bogota´: Desde Abajo.

Progress in Human Geography Harding S (2008) Sciences from Below: Feminisms, Postcolonialities and Modernities. Durham: Duke University Press. Harding S (2016) Latin American social studies of scientific knowledge: Alliances and tensions. Science, Technology and Human Values 41(6): 1063–87. Ho E, Sidaway JD, Rigg J and Woon CY (2016) Area studies and geography: Trajectories and manifesto. Society and Space 34(5): 777–90. Medina E, Marques IC and Holmes C (eds) (2014) Beyond Imported Magic: Essays on Science, Technology and Society in Latin America. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Millań M (ed.) (2014) Ma´s alla´ del feminismo: caminos para andar. Mexico City: Red de Feminismos Descoloniales. Radcliffe SA (2015a) Development alternatives. In: Arsel M and Dasgupta A (eds) Critical Development Studies. Development and Change 46(4): 855–74. Radcliffe SA (2015b) Geography and indigeneity I: Indigeneity, coloniality and knowledge. Progress in Human Geography. DOI 10.1177/0309132515612952. Radcliffe SA (2016) The difference indigeneity makes: Socio-natures, knowledges and contested policy. In: Raftopoulos M and Coletta M (eds) Provincializing Nature: Approaches to the Politics of the Environment in Latin America. London: ILAS Books, 161–85. Rivera Cusicanqui S, Domingues JM, Escobar A and Leff E (2016) Debate sobre el colonialismo intelectual y los dilemas de la teorıá social latinoamericana. Cuestiones de Sociologıá 14: e009. Roy A (2016) When is Asia? Professional Geographer 68(2): 313–21. Stoler AL (2016) Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times. Durham: Duke University Press. Tuhiwai Smith L (2010) Decolonizing Methodologies. London: Zed Books.