Latin American Anthropology Inaugural Seminar by Arturo Escobar

Against Terricide: Pluriversal Politics and Transition Design

Convenors: Ainhoa Montoya (ILAS, SAS), Jessica Sklair (Cambridge), Natalia Buitron (LSE).

This talk discusses five axes or principles of redesign/ing of current anthropocentric systems towards pluriversal transitions, stemming from current Latin American theoretical and political debates. These principles concern the re-communalization of social life; the re-localization of productive activities; the strengthening of autonomy; the depatriarchalization and de-racialization of social relations; and the re-earthing of socio-technical and urban systems. The principles are seen as a response to the imperatives of selective de-globalization and of working against terricide, clearer now than ever with the Covid-19 crisis.

Arturo Escobar is an activist-researcher from Cali, Colombia, working on territorial struggles against extractivism; postdevelopmentalist, post-capitalist and non-patriarchal/non-racist transitions; and ontological design. He was professor of anthropology and political ecology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, until 2018, and is currently affiliated with the PhD Program in Design and Creation, Universidad de Caldas, Manizales, Colombia, and the PhD Program in Environmental Sciences, Universidad del Valle, Cali. Over the past twenty-five years, he has worked closely with several Afro-Colombian, environmental and feminist organizations on these issues. His most well-known book is Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (1995, 2nd Ed. 2011). His most recent books are: Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds (2018), and Pluriversal Politics: The Real and the Possible (2020).

Date: 29 October 2020