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Territories of Difference: Place, Movements, Life, Redes

by Arturo Escobar

Article  in  Latin American Politics and Society · January 2010

DOI: 10.2307/40660508

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180 LATIN AMERICAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY 52: 1

fited from a deeper discussion of the epidemic’s course, to provide a con-

text for the political debates described. How did the various manifestations
of the epidemic in different regions shape perceptions of the virus and
those it infected? For example, the early history of the epidemic played out
largely in the urban core of Brazil’s Southeast, the center of Brazil’s politi-
cal and economic establishment. This shaped the government’s response
to the epidemic in a way that a rural epidemic in Brazil’s Northeast would
not have. Similarly, a greater description of the gay movement and of the
social lives of HIV-positive people might have enriched the discussion of
NGOs. Still, Nunn’s focus is on the high-level politics surrounding
HIV/AIDS treatment, and in this area her work excels.
In some respects, the central question of the HIV pandemic in Latin
America is why HIV’s prevalence has not generally reached levels com-
parable to those of some states in southern Africa and Asia, despite
social inequalities, patriarchal structures, drug usage, and homophobia.
Nunn’s work implicitly suggests that one reason may be the region’s
democratization. Throughout the region, HIV appeared at the same time
that military governments were collapsing. In Brazil, the social move-
ments and political pressures that underpinned the nation’s successful
program to address HIV/AIDS clearly would not have been effective
under an authoritarian regime. For example, the media pressure that
compelled Brazil’s minister of health to purchase drugs for HIV in 1996
would not have worked during military rule.
This raises the question of whether democratization itself can be a
variable that fosters successful public health interventions against HIV.
Of course, there are counterexamples, such as Cuba, an authoritarian
state that implemented an effective program to control HIV, and South
Africa, where a newly democratic government fell under the sway of
AIDS denialists, with tragic results. Nunn’s work, however, shows how
political struggles in a democratic system can challenge received eco-
nomic wisdom and lead to an effective and innovative HIV/AIDS pro-
gram. With its impressive research and clear argument, Nunn’s work will
represent a key resource for people interested in how Brazil fought the
greatest pandemic of our time.
Shawn Smallman
Portland State University

Arturo Escobar, Territories of Difference: Place, Movements, Life, Redes.

Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. Maps, tables, figures, bibli-
ography, index, 456 pp.; hardcover $89.95, paperback $24.95.

In his latest book, Arturo Escobar weaves together an extraordinary

array of knowledge and experience to produce a synthetic work that
will be a model for long-term interdisciplinary collaborative research for
 BOOK REVIEWS 181

years to come. Based on his many years of research with local residents,
academics, organizations, and activists in the Pacífico biogeográfico in
Colombia, he critically evaluates disciplinary bodies of knowledge in
relation to the local knowledge of the region’s residents.
The setting of the research in the Colombian Pacific is important for
three reasons. Beginning in the 1980s, the region became the center of
an intensive strategy of development for Colombia. The region also has
significant biodiversity and an active, if small, social movement of black
communities, the Process of Black Communities (PCN). This combina-
tion of factors makes the region an especially appropriate entry point to
examine many of the most pressing issues in today’s highly globalized,
neoliberal world.
In one sense, the book is “an ethnography of the practices, strate-
gies, and visions of this particular group of activists, including their own
knowledge production” (x). But it is also a collective work involving the
activists and residents of the Pacific and the various intellectual and
scholarly groups with whom Escobar participated in formulating several
of the frameworks of the book. These groups share the view that knowl-
edge production itself is inherently problematic, a perspective that par-
allels in many ways that of the PCN, and thus forms a link in terms of
process and perspective that blurs the boundary between the academic
and the activist.
Chapter 1 delves into the complexities of place, both in the partic-
ular case of the Pacific region and more generally in arguing for a
renewed emphasis on “the continued vitality of place in the creation of
culture, nature, and economy” and against the priority given to space as
the dynamic referent in discussions of globalization. After discussing the
historical, economic, and geographical forces that have formed the
Pacific region, Escobar examines the area in terms of the concepts of
territory and region-territory produced during the 1990s by resident
black and indigenous organizations. In the course of theorizing territory
in terms of the concept of worldview (cosmovisión) developed by the
social movement of the local communities, an important connection is
made between culture, politics, and policy. Because the region-territory
concept involves the defense of resources against their appropriation by
others, along with alternative ways of organizing social and economic
life, it is “both a conceptual innovation and a political project, what
could be called a subaltern strategy of localization” (59). This politics of
place is important because of the centrality of concrete places in the
livelihoods of so many subaltern and less powerful groups in the world,
and thus the material basis for resistance they provide against the “pol-
itics of empire”: “Places always fail to be fully capitalist [and modern, in
the Eurocentric sense], and herein lie[s] their potential to become some-
thing other” (Gibson-Graham, quoted in Escobar, 67).
182 LATIN AMERICAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY 52: 1

The second chapter is on capital, again both in the specific forms it

has taken in the Pacific region—African palm oil plantations and shrimp
farms—and as a general concept in economics and development. With
regard to the latter, Escobar reviews various schools of thought on cap-
ital, nature, the economy, and the contradictions in and among them.
Drawing on the concepts of “diverse economies” and “the retrieval of
history-making skills,” Escobar explores the possiblity of noncapitalist
economic practices that emphasize livelihood and community economy
rather than capital accumulation. Thus the struggles over the forms of
production in the Pacific are not just economic struggles over ecologi-
cal resources but also “struggles for culturally specific alternative para-
digms of production, development and sustainability. This is the main
lesson derived from an antiessentialist political ecology and view of the
diverse economy” (104–5).
In chapter 3, “Nature,” Escobar continues the dialectic between the
particular and the general, the ethnographic and the abstract. Given the
peculiar place that nature occupies in the worldview of Western moder-
nity—as something that has been controlled and thus pushed into the
background of everyday life—he appropriately begins this chapter with
folktales and cultural practices that illustrate local conceptions and
models of nature in the Pacific. This provides the context for elucidat-
ing the concept of the coloniality of nature (120–21), which is a central
ideological foundation for the modern worldview of nature, and the
many varieties of essentialist and constructivist epistemologies of nature
that derive from it. His discussion of these is impressive in its scope and
thought-provoking in its synthesis and analysis of these formulations of
nature, which include contributions from biology and ecology along
with philosophy and the social sciences.
Before tacking back to the very detailed ethnography of traditional
production systems in the Pacific region, Escobar makes an important
epistemological observation on the paradoxical limitations of modern
knowledge and the sciences.

The modern exploitation of nature constituted a definitive inter-

vention in the evolution of the ontological orders of nature and cul-
ture, hybridizing the real in ineluctable ways; each science . . . was
supposed to take charge of a given differentiated aspect of the
hybrid entity, but these sciences are unable to offer a view of that
reality that matches its complexity . . . that is, given their focus on
a particular object of knowledge, the sciences cannot know this
complexity.” (130)

In relating sustainability and biodiversity to conceptions of nature and

back to territory, culture, social movements, and politics, Escobar con-
cludes that “a decolonial view of nature and the environment calls for
 BOOK REVIEWS 183

seeing the interrelatedness of ecological, economic, and cultural

processes that come to produce what humans call nature. This implies
the ability of constructing difference as the basis for both a critique of
dominant nature-culture regimes and a guiding tool for efforts at recon-
structing socionatural worlds” (154–55).
In the fourth chapter, Escobar critiques the dominant view of devel-
opment as a project and a way of thinking that are possible only in the
context of globalization and modernity and that assert that there is no
“outside” to modernity. This critique has been developed by the moder-
nity/coloniality/decoloniality (MCD) group of Latin American thinkers,
who posit that modernity cannot be understood separately from “the
coloniality of power that accompanied it and that entailed the margin-
alization of the cultures and knowledge of subaltern groups” (162).
Given this legacy, it is necessary for social movements and those who
work with or study them to keep in tension three political projects and
ongoing processes in relation to development: alternative development,
alternative modernities, and alternatives to modernity (162).
The basic insight the MCD framework contributes to the discussion
of development is that there is an outside or “exteriority” to the global
system, and that this position, “from the colonial difference,” can be
used to critique the system and offer alternatives to it—political, social,
economic, cultural, ethical, and even epistemological. This exteriority is
not literally outside the system, but exists in a particular relation to it in
the form of difference from the view of the hegemonic discourse of the
system. It is “Other as oppressed, as woman, as racially marked, as
excluded, as poor, as nature” and thus “the Other becomes the source
of an ethical discourse vis-à-vis a hegemonic totality” that challenges the
system (169). Epistemologically, it is important because it provides a
way of thinking about modernity from outside of its limitations, because
the Other has been excluded from modernity (or at least its benefits). It
thus provides an alternative that is important and even necessary, pre-
cisely because of the limitations modernity imposes on itself, which
include being unsustainable in its current form.
A potential way out of these limitations, especially for Others but at
least implicitly for modernity itself, is through the concept of counter-
work developed by Arce and Long. “What the notion of counterwork
adds to the ethnography of modernity is the idea of an ongoing,
endogenously generated task performed on incoming messages, ele-
ments, information, etc. that transforms what one thinks of as the
modern and the traditional” (174). Ultimately, the goal is to transform
modernity itself, as through “a weakening of the strong structures of
modernity—universality, unity, totality, scientific and instrumental
rationality, etc.” (196). But as Escobar notes, alternatives to modernity
are really an expression of a political and utopian desire more than a
184 LATIN AMERICAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY 52: 1

description of a concrete reality. Nevertheless, they are important in

imagining and working toward a different and better world, especially
by those who suffer most from the current one, a situation that produces
their “perspective of the colonial difference” (196).
Chapter 5 deals with identity, a topic of importance because of the
dramatic changes in the identities constructed and practiced by mem-
bers of the black communities in the Pacific and the parallel growth of
theorizing about identity in a variety of disciplines since the 1980s. Esco-
bar follows Grossberg in advocating “a logic of otherness, productivity,
and spatiality” in opposition to the framing of identity as relations of dif-
ference (208). This logic of otherness has two advantages. First, it allows
for analyzing the idea of identity-as-difference itself, as produced by
modern power. Second, although they see identity and difference as
being produced by power, theories of otherness do not relegate them
simply to those effects. Instead, these theories conceptualize otherness
as something positive, as well as something exterior to the dominant
Euro-Andean order of the region.
The PCN has operated from a notion of otherness in its black iden-
tity, but has formulated it in and through a set of guiding “political-orga-
nizational principles that, in the activists’ view, encompassed the prac-
tice, life-world, and desires of the black communities,” revolving around
“identity, territory, autonomy, and development” (223). The experience
and practice of this for people in the movement can be illuminated
through the phenomenological perspective, which conceptualizes being
and practice as embodied, contextualized acts of making history, con-
sisting of “the ontological act of disclosing new ways of being, of trans-
forming the ways in which [humans] understand and deal with them-
selves and the world” (235). “Identities are thus the result of
engagement with cultural worlds; they arise not out of detached delib-
eration but out of ‘involved experimentation’” (235).
In the sixth and final chapter, “Networks,” Escobar explores theo-
rizing about networks in some depth, because of what he sees them
offering to a more complex understanding of human experience in the
world. He also, in an important way, relates networks as an organiza-
tional element of social movements to the more abstract and episte-
mological aspects of network theory and “flat ontologies”; which is to
say that politics and theory are linked to epistemology and ontology
once again. Escobar draws particularly on the work of Manuel de
Landa, who, following Deleuze and Guattari, theorizes two general
types of networks: “hierarchies and self-organizing meshworks” (274).
The implications of the emergent properties of self-organizing mesh-
works are thought-provoking, though in this chapter they turn more
toward the sociology of knowledge than to their relation to the PCN or
other concrete social movements. The risks of network politics also
 BOOK REVIEWS 185

become clear, because information networks and communication tech-

nologies, such as the Internet, “are also part of the infrastructure of
imperial globality” (276).
Nevertheless, on a deeper level that links research and social action
back to epistemology and ontology, Escobar argues that “flat ontolo-
gies” and “flat alternatives” view the processes of localization “as the
actualization of a particular connective process, out of a field of virtual-
ity” (290). In so doing, “these recent frameworks . . . provide an alter-
native to much established statecentric, capitalocentric, and globalocen-
tric thinking” and thus offer a wide range of possibilities for political
action, utopian though they may be. Appropriately, Escobar ends with
the work of Maturana and Varela, whose “enactive view of cognition
starts with the radically different phenomenological position of the con-
tinuity between mind and body, the body and the world,” as expressed
in the phrase “all doing is knowing and all knowing is doing” (293).
Inevitably, some readers will be dissatisfied with this book. Some
might find Escobar’s treatment of certain theoretical perspectives or con-
cepts too brief or oversimplified. There may be some merit to this crit-
icism, but his synthesis of so many conceptual fields and theoretical per-
spectives means that it would have been impossible to treat all of them
adequately for specialists in each field. A related criticism might be that
his approach is too broad, synthetic, and interdisciplinary. While per-
haps more a methodological question than a substantive one, it is
understandable, given how often and how deeply he crosses discipli-
nary lines and conceptual boundaries.
Other readers will specifically oppose the substance of Escobar’s
arguments. In particular, his use of ideas from postmodernist thinkers
like Deleuze and Vattimo and his application of network theory and
complexity theory to the social, the biological, the ecological, and the
cognitive may turn some readers off, because they may be unfamiliar
with or may oppose these perspectives. But given the interconnected-
ness of these realities ethnographically—as shown by the worldview
and practices of Afro-Colombians in the Pacific—and methodologically
and politically for Escobar and his research partners from elsewhere, his
syntheses of these approaches are attempts to understand the multiple
levels of reality that we all occupy and that we try to understand and
change as scholars and practitioners. They therefore need serious
thought, precisely because they stretch more conventional approaches
to reality in the social and natural sciences.
There is no question that this book is challenging on several levels.
But the reader does not have to be a postmodernist to benefit from
reading it. Even if one disagrees with the theoretical and political per-
spectives it advocates, or is unfamiliar with all the fields it addresses,
there is much to learn from this very important, thought-provoking
 186 LATIN AMERICAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY 52: 1

work, especially for those interested in social movements, political

economy, culture, and development.
Christopher L. Chiappari
Saint Olaf College

Marion Kaplan, Dominican Haven: The Jewish Refugee Settlement in

Sosúa, 1940–1945. New York: Museum of Jewish Heritage, 2008.
Tables, map, figures, bibliography, chronology, index, 255 pp.;
paperback $19.95.
Allen Wells, Tropical Zion: General Trujillo, FDR, and the Jews of Sosúa.
Durham: Duke University Press, 2009. Tables, map, figures, bibliog-
raphy, 447 pp.; hardcover $99.95, paperback $27.95.

Much of the literature on Jews in Latin America has focused on their

sojourns in the countryside, even though only a minority settled in these
areas and most did so temporarily. Studies of these agricultural experi-
ments nevertheless provide critical insights into the region and its
Jewish inhabitants. This is the case for Jewish immigration to Sosúa, in
the Dominican Republic, as these two books admirably demonstrate.
The authors agree on the main lines of the story. It begins with the
Evian Conference of 1938, the purpose of which was to find countries
willing to accept Jewish refugees. Only the Dominican Republic
responded favorably. The Dominican Republic Settlement Association
(DORSA), established by Agro-Joint, a division of the American Jewish
Joint Distribution Committee, took charge of the ensuing colonization
project. Leading this effort were lawyer James Rosenberg and agrono-
mist Joseph Rosen, who had previously directed the Agro-Joint’s Jewish
agricultural program in the Soviet Union.
Approximately 750 refugees passed through Sosúa, and another 76
were born there. Thanks to the other visas it issued, however, the
Dominican Republic may have saved as many as 3,000 to 4,000 Jews.
Those who reached Sosúa were mostly urban Central European men
with backgrounds in business or the skilled trades, who were recruited
outside German-occupied territories. A final contingent who had spent
the war in Shanghai arrived in 1947.
DORSA and the immigrants faced many problems. The site lacked
water, the soil was poor, and malaria was endemic. Too old or unwill-
ing to work in the fields or adapt, some refugees undermined the colo-
nization effort. So, too, did divisions among the rest, as well as dis-
agreements with DORSA officials. The scarcity of women disheartened
single men and jeopardized the vitality of homesteads, communal serv-
ices, and volunteer activities. The most crucial dilemma was that only a
tiny fraction of the immigrants the country was willing to accept actu-
ally arrived. Despite these difficulties, the creation of dairy and meat

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