Strategies for oppression

 During a lecture on January 15, 1975, Michel Foucault (2014) mentioned two different types of exercise of power: that of leprosy—a system based
on exclusion— and that of plague, based on inclusion ; were practices of marginalization, rejection, expulsion (Omar)
 Unlike leprosy, in the plague-control model, there is no intention to exclude the sick, but rather to include them, with certain coordinates of control
 capitalist system that tends to generate exclusion and marginalization is different from a model that does not exclude, prohibit, marginalize, and
repress, but on the contrary includes, incorporates, intervenes, and transforms individualities in accordance with its own project of political and
epistemic organization (Omar)
o What they tried to do with the San Andrés Agreements; what the PRI did with Chamula and other communities; what AMLO is trying to do
with his nice Instagram pictures with indigenous communities, while his workers prepare more militarization plans
o It is a population that is included in the margins of the system.
o that power is much more efficient when it includes rather than excludes. When power is imperceptible, when instead of feeling the
oppression of direct violence, the so-called “excluded” believe that they are part of the forces of development.
o Here power is less expensive, more efficient, and long lasting. If we assume that capitalism is mostly an insatiable machine that engulfs the
population to make it a part of its inner workings and that the function of development is to include by standardizing, to create uniformity,
and to insert the populations subserviently to the US version of the Western project
o Like the project of agricultural modernization (see knowledge/epistemologies)

Time/temporality (progress)
 Omar (11, 12; 98-; 104;113;121
 territories where healthy foods and nonfood items are produced, in tune with nature’s cycles, using grassroots knowledge, and where young people and other family
members choose to live in the countryside (Rosset, 2016
 Tsing
o 21,23; 131-132

Knowledge/epistemologies
 Omar
o The nature/culture separation that underlies agronomic and zootechnic practices, coupled with the dichotomous discursiveness of rural development, can
only be assimilated when living in a world dominated by these dichotomous meanings in a practical and permanent way, such as when one perceives them
from uniform plantations of palm, soya, sugar cane, or grassland.
 o It is impossible to think of knowing, doing, and being, independently of the contexts in which people find themselves. What people perceive of their world,
and what they call it, will depend on how they engage with the environment surrounding them.

 Time, development and progress: Omar (13-14; 25)

o Modernization of agriculture
 Omar (51-
 Importance of alternative epistemologies in social movements: Omar (14;94; 131)
 Colonization of epistemologies and ontologies
o Omar (42; 46-47;51;53 122;).
o Tsing (colonization and its rhythms, scalability, uniformity, informed the progress that characterizes modernity, also in academia,39)
 Colonization of bodies
o Omar (46-47

 Hybrid ontologies
o Omar (43;126
o Related to time, non-linear, but cyclical: Omar (104;111;123;129
o Possibility of tech: Omar (104-106;111-116)
 Technique vs technology (112;125)
 Context dependant (113
o THE MAYA FOREST GARDEN
 Academia
o Omar(88; 130); “science-poetics” (130)
 Dominant epistemology/ontology
o Omar (94; 104;112-114;117-120;130)
o Metaphysics (22-26)
o logic both divorces peasants from nature and separates them from each other, individualizing them, fracturing their community networks,
depriving them of the autonomy they maintained with their territories, and introducing them into the ontology of commercial competition
(Omar)
 o In terms of the rural producers of the Global South, first their traditional wisdom was destroyed by inserting them into the Green Revolution
and its technologies. Once their ability to shape and maintain their livelihoods according to the ecological and cultural conditions of their
inhabited place was dispossessed (Omar)
 Alternatives
o Omar (121- from 126 more focused on epistemologies and ontologies; last chapter specially)
 Important things for the end of storytelling; story as well does not end, does not follow the linear process that progress follows in
western epistemologies and ontologies
 Connection with land
o Omar (82-
o valorization of capital rests on, first, a rupture that decouples a certain affective relationship that ties rural producers to one another and
also ties them to the land; this is followed by a reorganization of their behavior, emotions, desires, and feelings in a metaphysical imaginary
of production and consumption
o there is no deterritorialization that is not influenced by the affective flows and the emotional regulation of the subjects
o The symbol of Mother Earth that emerges with agriculture clearly expresses humans’ feelings when they acknowledge their relationship to
the earth. The religious experience also becomes much more concrete: It blends intimately with the seed, the earth, and the rain. It merges
more completely with life.
o As humans we conceive of ourselves tied to concrete places, understand ourselves as belonging to a place-territory that produces affections,
feelings, sensations.
o It is an affective and affecting relationship, in which both the agricultural producer transforms the ecosystem and the producer is
transformed by the land on which he/she toils.
o communal forms of habitation affected the ecosystemic order with their common knowledge, while also being affected by the creation of
inhabitable habitats. Bodies-plots, bodies-knowledge, social-bodies. In other words, relational ontologies in which the “being” of many
people of the global South cannot be conceived as independent of their territory and the immanent communal structure of how they
practice their lives (Escobar, 2015).
o Dominant
 Bodies separate one from another and become independent “I’s.” It is precisely here where dissociation occurs and where the
power of development passes through
 Economic rationality
  We began, however, from the fact that we cannot exist without a body and thus the absurdity of fragmentations between heart and
mind, disjunctions between emotions, feelings, and affections, and what we abstractly call “reason” (León, 2011)
 A fundamental fracture in the “linkages to the place” and the “place as a homeland” has occurred, and de-territorialized linkages
have been created, emotional links to other aspects provided by the market. In the final analysis, as Foucault suggested, the
effectiveness of power rests not in coercion, but rather in the logic of common sense regarding the content and values that subjects
adopt from the world.
 If, through the creation of agriculture, a powerful ontological transformation had occurred, with the territorial growth of capitalism,
another ontological transformation happened, i.e., the affective de-linkage of the place and the reorganization toward an emotional
attachment that is de-linked from the original belonging to the land and human sociability. Foucault (2002) gave this process the
name biopolitics: a technology tasked with regulating life, of actively “fabricating” populations such that their entire lives are at the
service of capital
 Omar uses the term “affective deterritorialization”

 Language/discourse; part of political ecology

o Omar
 role of language in the configuration of “worlds.”
 We need to highlight the effects of language on the perception of reality
 We humans have this resource to express one of many possible realities.
 As Wittgenstein noted (1988), we are predisposed to think, perceive, and even to feel in a particular way, according to inherited
imaginaries by belonging to a specific language community
 Language is a mediator between the world in which we live and share with others in society and ourselves
 we use to creatively project “worlds.”
 Mediate between our body and the environment to observe it in a particular way and to make realities “arise” that we bring as
firsthand experiences of the world
 by saying, things get done”—as Austin noted
  Also nature, in this particular way of constructing reality; how in the language of development nature takes the form of an object
and a commodity and how our relationships with each other are expressed as transactions; business language to describe nature
and natural resources
 Creates dichotomies between culture and nature and express the dominance of humans over nature
 Rather, these verbal conventions are incarnated and become permanent dispositions (Bourdieu), once communities find these
metaphorical statements congruent with their own experience
 apprehending is not about taking a view “about” the world, as if it were “out there” and we had to para chute into a reality that
precedes us (Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1997). Apprehending, on the contrary, means getting involved, dwelling, forming a vision
“of what is inside” (Ingold, 2000)
 We live in a world with others, so our way of being and inhabiting surface according to a history of relationships between the human
body, language, and a lived environment
 Reproduction of linguistic regime and a system of truths; in the dominant, it depends on agroextractivism to maintain its hegemony

Agroecology

 Importance for alternative epistemologies in relation to progress: Omar (15, 32;89-90;109-111); ontologies: Omar (93;110-111; 131)
 Fake, “new phase of Green Revolution”: Omar (31
o Agroecology has also been the subject of co-optation by the institutions that govern agriculture around the world, which highlights the
growing interest in not wasting the traditional knowledge built over millennia by farming communities (Omar)
 True vs fake
o Related to autonomy: Omar (92,93
 Reformist vs revolutionary
o Omar (32
 Collective experiments (44;113-114
 Resistance
o
o Omar (75- 84 very important.. continues;131)
 post-development
o Omar (86-; 114
  Autonomy
o Omar (89)
 Milpa
o Omar (121
 Traditional knowledge
o Tsing (182-183

Human and non-human/antrhopocentrism

 Omar (20,94)
 Omar (97;117;119
 Concept of “other agricultures” (inspired by other world): Omar (97)
 Autopoiesis: Omar (104; 107)
 Multispecies
o Tsing (22,23; 155-157;168

Ideas  practices (political ecology)

 Omar (18;129)

Capitalization/neoliberalization of nature (and society); dominant epistemologies and ontologies

 Omar (19-23; 127)

o Also nature, in this particular way of constructing reality; how in the language of development nature takes the form of an object and a
commodity and how our relationships with each other are expressed as transactions.
 Colonial times
o Omar (21,42)
 Hacienda
o Omar (22)
 Subsidies
o Omar (27)
  Land dispossession
o Omar (35-
o Resistance
 Omar (42
o Omar (78
 Agricultural activity is based on land, i.e., a scarce natural asset with different qualities of fertility and location. This characteristic means individual
capitalists monopolize the best land, while less commercial land, more barren and difficult to access, is left to small farmers. (Omar)

Environmental Impacts of Capitalization of agriculture

 Omar: 78- ;102;108-110;118-119

o Wallerstein (119)


Subjectification

 Omar (87;90; 127, 129)

 Related to autopoiesis? : Omar (104;114

Create, more than anti

 Omar (90)

Not taking state power

 Omar (91-92; 132)

Autonomy

 Omar (104

To use in the graph of cycle vs institutions

  In spite of the drive to bring all social relations into global value added circuits, the other side of the equation consists of struggles, resistance, and
hidden power strategies that are outside capital’s field of vision (Omar)
 when power loses its sophistication and its prosaic and violent nature is exposed, it produces an antagonistic effect by mobilizing resistance

Co-development, collaboration; evolution theory

 Tsing (142