{"id":1231,"date":"2017-11-29T11:07:45","date_gmt":"2017-11-29T11:07:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/processing.matteringpress.org\/?page_id=1231"},"modified":"2018-06-27T17:16:38","modified_gmt":"2018-06-27T16:16:38","slug":"27-extractivism-refusals-and-the-unearthing-of-failure","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/processing.matteringpress.org\/ethnographiccase\/27-extractivism-refusals-and-the-unearthing-of-failure\/","title":{"rendered":"27. Extractivism, Refusals, and the Unearthing of Failure"},"content":{"rendered":"

Welcome. Plea<\/i>se read the\u00a0instructions<\/a>\u00a0for reviewing before commenting.\u00a0We ask contributors to be generous when thinking along with our pieces and to keep in mind that the final chapters are intended to be short essays.\u00a0Visit matteringpress.org<\/a> for more information on its other books. Readers might\u00a0also want to have a look at this resource<\/a> created by one of the book’s editors, Emily Yates-Doerr, which catalogues key Open Access anthropology publications.\u00a0<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

By\u00a0Teresa Velasquez<\/em><\/p>\n

Is ethnographic research analogous to a gold mine project, an extractive industry that makes a social and material landscape knowable, and hence governable? Is knowledge construction a veil for narrative extraction, where knowledge is a commodity to be reassembled for productive gain? I ask these questions as a way to tease out the tensions experienced between me and my collaborators that occurred during field research.<\/p>\n

In July 2013, I returned to the Southern Ecuadorian Andes to conduct research return: the sharing of findings with participants to seek their critical feedback. Having conducted fieldwork between 2008 and 2010 among anti-mining activists, my impressions were messy: scientific studies of water pollution sparked a local movement against a proposed Canadian-backed gold mine, but gender and racial\/ethnic differences divided the movement in antagonistic ways.<\/p>\n

After having agreed to participate in my earlier fieldwork, Rosita\u2014one of my closest collaborators\u2014refused to participate in the research return workshop. In this essay, I take the case of Rosita\u2019s refusal as a multi-layered feminist practice. In focusing on an act of refusal, I show how my failure to conduct research return among a group of women anti-mining activists is a story of the political conditions that entangle ethnographic research with processes of extraction, i.e. extractivism.<\/p>\n

In 2013, I visited some of my closest informants\u2014Do\u00f1a Patricia, her two daughters and their neighbor Rosita\u2014all of whom form a women\u2019s anti-mining group, to seek their participation in a research return workshop. Do\u00f1a Patricia\u2019s home is a modest two-room house nestled in a flat valley surrounded by rolling hills. The zigzag fences created a patchwork of green and brown grassy pastures, demarcating those farms that had irrigation and those that did not. This was an area dominated by dairy farmers\u2014some rich, some poor\u2014who supplied milk to regional and national producers. The women in the group had come together against a proposed gold mine project located upland in their watershed.<\/p>\n\"\"<\/span>In the Azuay province of Ecuador, Andean peasant farmland relies upon the Irquis River feed by upland streams where gold mining has been proposed. All photos by author unless otherwise indicated.<\/small><\/span>\n\"\"<\/span>Where the Irquis river runs through the parishes of Victoria del Portete and Tarqui, large land owners including the hacienda pictured here have predominant access to irrigation water.<\/small><\/span>\n

They shared the same political goal, but were a socially heterogeneous group that varied in ethnic ancestry, access to markets, education, and age. Although not all women were mothers, the organization used the language of \u201cmotherhood,\u201d cast in biological and environmental terms, to oppose the proposed gold mine: they defended \u201cMother Earth\u201d and sometimes represented themselves as \u201cmadres\u201d who worried about the mine\u2019s impacts on children. Do\u00f1a Patricia and the others quickly and enthusiastically agreed to participate in a research return workshop, which I referred to as\u00a0devoluci\u00f3n.\u00a0<\/em>The root word of devoluci\u00f3n\u00a0<\/em>is \u201cdevolver,\u201d an adjective that means to give back or return something to its original place. It comprises a little-written about aspect of activist research methods that values collaborative knowledge production (see Hale 2001).<\/p>\n

Several days after our initial agreement was reached, Do\u00f1a Patricia\u2019s daughter Ceci phoned to tell me that Rosita, relying on her authority as president of the women\u2019s organization, had called off the meeting. According to Ceci, Rosita believed that the women in the group would have to stand up and provide some sort of testimony that I would document and take away with me to the USA. I called Rosita to talk through and clarify what I was hoping to achieve. After all, I had done extensive interviews with Rosita and thought that if I could just explain\u00a0devoluci\u00f3n<\/em>\u00a0in local terms of accountability (rendir cuentas<\/em>) she would understand and, ultimately, want to know how I had incorporated their interviews into my study. My goal with\u00a0devoluci\u00f3n<\/em>\u00a0was to seek the women\u2019s validation of my research results with the hopes that it could be used in ways to support their political agenda. But Rosita refused.<\/p>\n

I was struck by the image that Rosita conjured of the\u00a0devoluci\u00f3n<\/em>. She had evoked a public performance in which the information would circulate beyond her control. While most anthropologists would consider presenting one\u2019s research to the community in their native language an ethical act, I suspect that for Rosita the opposite was true. I wondered if Rosita feared the circulation of information within her community. Did she worry that certain information considered private would be made public, or perhaps that she would lose control over the political narrative about the women\u2019s group?<\/p>\n

Rosita knew that I had been a doctoral student whose writing would be read by a largely English-speaking audience. During my initial fieldwork, she invited me to her home and maize patch many times and granted me two formal interviews. Her refusal to participate in return research belied the collaborative relationship I thought we had developed. Rosita never fully explained her refusal to hold a women\u2019s\u00a0devoluci\u00f3n\u00a0<\/em>workshop. Instead, she translated her concerns with the workshop into an idiom of extractivism\u2014a term with negative implications that we both understood.<\/p>\n

Rosita\u2019s evocation of extractivism reveals the awkward relationship between collaborators and anthropologists. While some scholars suggest that ethnographic research and the political agendas of activism may be mutually constructive, in my experiences such mutuality was complicated by the political conditions under which both set of actors labor.<\/p>\n

For instance, my initial research plan in 2008 did not exclusively focus on anti-mining activists, but then everyone wanted to know which side I was on. Some people silently eyed me with suspicion; others were more vocal and demanded to know my intentions. In an effort to earn trust, I let my political views guide my research. I aligned my research with the defense of watersheds from mineral extraction hoping to use my research to support the rights of farmers who could be displaced by an industrial gold mine upstream.<\/p>\n

As I learned in practice, the decision to politically support farmers did not take into account that anti-mining groups were internally fragmented and had competing political agendas. The movement\u2019s heterogeneity enabled connections with research that, in their partiality, maintained differences among our agendas. At times, my enactment of ethnographic knowledge enabled a connection with the women\u2019s group and other times, their activist embodiment of refusal underscored the differences between the women\u2019s political agenda and my practice of anthropological research.<\/p>\n

At the start of my fieldwork in 2008, the women\u2019s group allowed me to volunteer with them. I co-organized an international women\u2019s anti-mining conference and several popular education workshops on a variety of topics related to environment, health, and human rights. Through these events, I documented the process through which, as one woman put it, the diverse group of women learned \u201chow to speak.\u201d Learning how to speak enabled them to craft their own narratives against mining, grounded in their unique position as agrarian women who defended human and non-human life. They spoke on radio shows, marched in streets, staged protests at government offices, and travelled throughout rural areas to share their knowledge about the effects of mineral extraction.<\/p>\n\"\"<\/span>Riot police confront peasant women blocking the Pan-American Highway in protest of a proposed gold mine.<\/small><\/span>\n\"\"<\/span>A women\u2019s group member holds a picket sign attached to stalks of maize reading: \u201cThis is what is produced with healthy water no contamination.\u201d<\/small><\/span>\n

In learning \u201chow to speak\u201d their activism challenged the pervasive sexism within an anti-mining movement that was organized by male-dominated communal water-boards. While the water-boards were democratically run, Rosita and Do\u00f1a Patricia told me that they would never be elected to the leadership because of their lack of formal education. In the rural Andes, women are not explicitly barred from participating in water board meetings or holding office, but they become excluded through a common perception that men \u201cknow what to say and how to say it\u201d (Bastidas 2005: 160).<\/p>\n

Formal education and the ability to \u201cspeak\u201d becomes a rationale that reinforces gender asymmetries in community politics. The women\u2019s group challenged exclusionary political practices by rejecting the masculine standards of speech that can stir up a crowd. A former president of the women\u2019s group prided herself on \u201cspeaking\u201d at a rally. She told me that it did not matter if the words come out \u201cgood or bad\u201d as long as she spoke.<\/p>\n

When mining conflicts erupted, tensions over the gendered organization of politics came to the fore. In an interview, Rosita recounted that in 2007 the anti-mining movement blockaded the Pan-American Highway and, in the face of mounting police repression, became split over the decision to continue to protest or to participate in a government dialogue. She criticized Luis, then president of the communal water board for deciding to participate in a government dialogue. She and other women in the group believed that such dialogues were efforts to manipulate and pacify the movement. In a verbal confrontation with two men from the water-board, Rosita challenged Luis\u2019 decision. In response, the men involved defended Luis\u2019\u00a0actions and called her \u201cstupid.\u201d Rosita believed that Luis often acted in self-interest, \u201cto become big, like Herod [from the bible].\u201d<\/p>\n\"\"<\/span>Rural peasants organized by communal water-boards converged upon the city of Cuenca to march against legislation that would permit mining.<\/small><\/span>\n

Rosita and a group of women maintained their membership with the community water-board, but politically aligned themselves with the National Coordinating Committee for the Defense of Life and Sovereignty (CNDVS, by its Spanish acronym)\u2014a radical, pro-peasant anti-mining group with Marxist-feminist leanings that favored street protests over state dialogue.<\/p>\n

I met Rosita through my work with the women\u2019s group. In April 2008, she and other members of the CNDVS staged a road-blockade on the Pan-American Highway. She was violently arrested\u2014hit, dragged, and stepped on by police before being shoved into a paddy wagon. My writing and research skills became useful to the organization. I wrote a popular news article on the protest and arrests, and documented her story for a human rights legal petition.<\/p>\n

Our agendas were not, however, always so closely aligned. Shortly after the protest, the Ministry of Mines and Petroleum organized a consultation meeting with civil society organizations to discuss a draft mining law. While the activist groups rejected the invitation, I opted to attend because at the time I believed it was an important opportunity to understand state discourses around mining and get a better sense of what kind of \u201ccivil society\u201d groups participated in such events.<\/p>\n

The event was held in the city of Cuenca on the side of town where rural peasants came to sell their products and in a building that formerly housed an important state agrarian modernization program. At the start of the meeting, a group of protestors outside could be heard yelling \u201cYou don\u2019t sell the Motherland (la Patria), you defend it.\u201d I stood up to look out\u00a0the window and I saw the women\u2019s group alongside some of their male allies from the CNDVS. From down below Rosita saw me in the window. At a meeting the following day, she and others were upset with me. They said that I was wearing a tie.<\/p>\n

Indeed, I had worn a cowl-necked double breasted knit jacket to the government consultation forum, which, in their view, stood in for a man\u2019s tie. My body was that of a\u00a0minero,\u00a0<\/em>a masculine term that can be applied to women. The term is a gendered critique of mining supporters who align themselves with a masculine, imperialist endeavor. The women\u2019s group made hard distinctions between themselves as radical anti-mining activists and male\/imperialist pro-mining groups. They used this distinction to question my affinity to their cause. I was in drag. I was suspected for betraying the organization. Yet, without having attended the government dialogue I would have not learned that multinational mining company employees positioned themselves as \u201cciudadanos\u201d (national citizens) who called on the government to control \u201cradical environmental groups\u201d obstructing mineral projects. A couple of months later, rumors broke out that I was a mining company informant and in September 2009, I was asked to \u201ccool off\u201d my collaboration.<\/p>\n

The following year, I was able to continue my research in the area with the support of many but not all of my previous collaborators. I regained relationships with Rosita and her neighbors, and expanded my collaborators to include the communal water boards that brought together men and women against the mine project.<\/p>\n

My relationship with Rosita evinces the ways that the endeavors of ethnographic research and activism diverged, and underscores the different ways in which we were positioned. Our relation reveals the potential for \u201cawkward dissonance between feminist practice and the practice of the discipline\u201d of anthropology (Strathern 1987:277). Rosita\u2019s criticism of my attendance in the mining dialogue exposed the ways in which activists and ethnographers are differently positioned in the field. Judith (Jack) Halberstam points to a \u201cshadow\u201d feminism in which \u201csubjects refuse to cohere; subjects who refuse \u201cbeing\u201d where being has already been defined in terms of a self-activating, self-knowing liberal subject\u201d (2011: 126). By rejecting the government\u2019s proposal in mining policy, Rosita and the activists with whom she was protesting refused to embody a subject position based on neoliberal citizenship and participation. She drew upon the same feminist practice to negate participation and authorization of the research return workshop.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/span>The women\u2019s group enact a refusal to speak and eat in protest against the criminalization of CNDVS activists. The yellow sign reads \u201cDown with the fascist and repressor government in service of imperialist mineros [miners].\u201d<\/small><\/span>At once collaborating and refusing to collaborate, Rosita\u2019s actions can be interpreted in the words of Donna Haraway (cited in De la Cadena 2015): \u201cwe do not need a totality in order to work well. The feminist dream of a common language\u2026is a totalizing and imperial one,\u201d (33-34). Rosita and the women\u2019s group enact different kinds of feminist practice: speaking at crowds, blocking streets with their bodies, and refusing to be \u2018appropriate\u2019 subjects. Feminist practices have implications for politically-aligned research, enabling both convergences and divergences between activism and research. If failure can be interpreted as a modality of resistance to neoliberal discourse of heroic success (Halberstam 2011), then what might the failure to fuse activism and ethnographic research into a seamless \u201cwhole\u201d mean?<\/p>\n

In this essay, such failures signaled a partial connection that emerged under conditions of political division and heterogeneous activist practices. A commitment to work within circuits of partial connections embraces the awkward and messy relationships that energize and confound politically-aligned ethnographic research.<\/p>\n

\n

Teresa A. Vel\u00e1squez<\/em><\/a>\u00a0is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the California State University in San Bernardino. Her research on the intersection of mining activism and state resource policy in the Southern Ecuadorian Andes examines the reconfiguration of farmers\u2019 relationship to their watershed. She is especially interested in the ways in which scientific and Andean knowledge practices are mobilized in anti-mining activism and the dynamics of race\/ethnicity, class, and gender in the protest movement.<\/em><\/p>\n

Header image shows two women walking through the Quimsacocha wetland slated for gold mining. In Quechua, Quimsacocha means three lakes. Photo by Kl\u00e9ver Calle.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

References<\/strong><\/p>\n

Bastidas, Elena P. 2005. \u201cWomen and Water in the Northern Ecuadorean Andes.\u201d In\u00a0Opposing\u00a0Currents: The Politics of Water and Gender in Latin America,\u00a0<\/em>edited by Vivienne\u00a0Bennett,<\/em>\u00a0Sonia D\u00e1vila-Poblete, Mar\u00eda Nieves Rico, 154-169. Pittsburgh: University of\u00a0Pennsylvania Press.<\/p>\n

De la Cadena, Marisol. 2015.\u00a0Earth beings: Ecologies of practice across Andean worlds<\/em>.\u00a0Durham:Duke University Press.<\/p>\n

Halberstam, Judith. 2011.\u00a0The Queer Art of Failure.<\/em>\u00a0Durham: Duke University Press.<\/p>\n

Hale, Charles R. 2001. \u201cWhat is activist research?\u201d\u00a0Items and Issues: Social Science Research\u00a0Council<\/em>\u00a02(1-2): 13-15.<\/p>\n

Strathern, Marilyn. 1987. \u201cAn Awkward Relationship: The Case of Feminism and\u00a0Anthropology.\u201d Signs. 12(2): 276-292.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Welcome. Please read the\u00a0instructions\u00a0for reviewing before commenting.\u00a0We ask contributors to be generous when thinking along with our pieces and to keep in mind that the final chapters are intended to be short essays.\u00a0Visit matteringpress.org for more information on its other books. Readers might\u00a0also want to have a look at this resource created by one of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4615,"parent":0,"menu_order":29,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/processing.matteringpress.org\/ethnographiccase\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1231"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/processing.matteringpress.org\/ethnographiccase\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/processing.matteringpress.org\/ethnographiccase\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/processing.matteringpress.org\/ethnographiccase\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/processing.matteringpress.org\/ethnographiccase\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1231"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/processing.matteringpress.org\/ethnographiccase\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1231\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8638,"href":"https:\/\/processing.matteringpress.org\/ethnographiccase\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1231\/revisions\/8638"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/processing.matteringpress.org\/ethnographiccase\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4615"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/processing.matteringpress.org\/ethnographiccase\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1231"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}