A PICARESQUE CRITIQUE: The Anthropology of Disasters and Displacement in the Era of Global Warming and Pandemics

Publication Date

1-1-2023

Document Type

Contribution to a Book

Publication Title

Anthropology and Climate Change: From Transformations to World making, Third Edition

DOI

10.4324/9781003242499-5

First Page

62

Last Page

76

Abstract

In several “post-disaster” resettlements in the Chimborazo Province of the Andean highlands of Ecuador, displaced campesinos find not only their homelands but also their mobility practices unsettled. In the era of global warming and open-ended upheavals wrought by colonialism and the excesses of extractive capitalism, open-ended itinerancy displaces mobility as the field and problematic of critique and inquiry as it exposes cascading contingencies of precarity without end. This chapter is a variety of picaresque critique, storying the itinerancy of rogues (strange strangers) lost to their lands and communities as they reveal and embarrass the power relations that subtend the parameters of the possible. Along the way, I examine how my interlocutors in Penipe have iterated with stories – explicitly and implicitly – to enroll actants in political projects and more-than-human assemblages to realize otherwise possibilities in times of crisis and change. I conclude with a reflection on the need to story new politics of deservingness for both the itinerant rogues and the vitalist ecologies excluded from stories of the future.

Department

Anthropology

Link to Full Text

Share

COinS