Against Extractivism: Dialogues among Indigenous Women and the Politics of Life
This presentation draws upon decades of collaborative work with indigenous women throughout the hemisphere reflecting on the ways our anti-patriarchal and anti-colonial struggles engage the extractive assemblages and structures of feeling in the “sacrifice zones” in which we work. In confronting diverse extractive regimes, indigenous women create ways of knowing, feeling and acting on the world that articulate and cluster around two central contradictions of capitalism: social reproduction and the ecological (after Federicci, and Fraser). This has allowed them, in ways attuned to differently in each “sacrifice zone”, to bring care for human and more-than-human life under one lens, conceptually, affectively and practically.
I will focus especially on the circulation of connecting concepts such as “body-land-territory” (Cabnal) that have emerged from the anti-extractive and anti-racist work of indigenous women in Guatemala. By creating, re-working, adapting and transforming such connecting concepts and incorporating them into their diverse genealogies and experiences of affect-analysis-action, they enrich a politics of life. This politics links the ongoing construction of systemic alternatives to extractivism to the social reproduction and care of their communities and movements, in the process freeing political imagination for alliance making, solidarities and social transformation towards an environmentalized and indigenized feminist horizon.
Pamela Calla is a Bolivian anthropologist engaged with issues of gender, race, class, and state formation in Latin America. She is currently a Clinical Professor at the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS) at New York University and received the Dr. Martin Luther King Faculty Award in 2016-2017 at that same institution. She co-created and coordinates the CLACS Feminist Constellations Platform (2013-Present) and the Working Group on Racisms in Comparative Perspective (2010-Present). She co-founded the Observatory on Racism in Bolivia (2007-2017) and the Red de Accion e Investigacion Anti-Racista en las Americas, RAIAR (2010-2020) an initiative launched by the Universidad de la Cordillera (Bolivia) and the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies, University of Texas. As part of RAIAR, she participated in the collaborative research-action process and contributed to the book Black and Indigenous Resistance in the Americas. From Multiculturalism to Racist Backlash (Lexington Books, 2020) with the Chapter “The Difficulties of Connecting Anti-Extractivist and Anti-Racist Struggles in Contemporary Bolivia: The Weight of Patriarchy.'' She is co editor of Antropología del Estado: Dominación y prácticas contestatarias en América Latina (2007). She was an Associate Researcher of the "The State of the State in Bolivia", a project of the Informe sobre Desarrollo Humano, 2007, United Nations Development Project and co editor and author of Observando el Racismo: Racismo y Regionalismo en el Proceso Constituyente Boliviano, Agenda Defensorial No. 11 and 13, 2008. Defensor del Pueblo y Universidad de la Cordillera.