Forensics on Living Territory: From Land to Territory to Ecotone
Pluralizing the Anthropocene II
Pluralizing the Anthropocene II
The session will be in English
Events will take place online. All welcome but registration required
Raj PATEL (University of Texas)
Moderator: Gonçalo Santos (CIAS / Sci-Tech Asia / University of
Coimbra)
World-ecology is a young discipline, but its
perspective reaches into paleohistory. With such a very longue durée,
world-ecology is well placed to understand and decode the ways ‘land’ remains a
contested term. While classical Marxism is amply able to explain how enclosure
turns land from commons into a fungible commodity, it stumbles in attempting to
navigate the liberatory politics that might be found in understanding land as
territory and as ecotone. World-ecology offers a way of thinking about land, and
the web of life of which it is part, in ways that can resolve some of the
analytical tensions around territory and land, though at the cost of developing
new tensions around the political ecology of decolonization. This talk will
conclude with proposals for research directions around those tensions.
Related
Gonçalo D. SANTOS is an anthropologist and a leading international
scholar in the field of China studies. His research explores new approaches to
questions of modernity, subjectivity, and social, technological, and ecological
transformation in contemporary China. He is an assistant professor of
socio-cultural anthropology in the Department of Life Sciences and a Researcher
and Group Coordinator in the Research Center for Anthropology and Health (CIAS) at the
University of Coimbra. Prior to joining the University of Coimbra in 2020, he
held positions at the London School of Economics, the Max Planck Institute for
Social Anthropology, and the University of Hong Kong. He is the author of Chinese Village
Life Today (University of
Washington Press, 2021) and the co-editor of Transforming
Patriarchy (University of Washington Press, 2017). His research
has been published in leading scientific journals in the fields of
anthropology, science and technology studies, and Asian studies. He is a member
of the Research Group on
Culture and Society, Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues,
at Georgetown University, and is the founder and the director of Sci-Tech Asia, a transnational research
network that focuses on the relations between technoscience, politics, and
society in Asia and around the world. He is interested in comparative
approaches that draw on Chinese and Asian perspectives and histories to
challenge the hegemonic power of Euro-American epistemologies and narratives of
modernity.