Recently, I was at the doctor’s office (I’m fine, thanks) and I started sifting through all the magazines. You know, all the magazines that you don’t usually read that suddenly look slightly more appealing when there’s no other choice. Yes, those. And then I saw one of the covers. It was Sunset magazine’s August 2018 issue. I saw the picture and it just seemed familiar. I didn’t look too closely, but it reminded me of the Cape region of Baja California Sur, which is where I have been working since 2009.

Probably just a chance resemblance, right?

So then I opened it up and started reading the issue’s introduction by the editor-in-chief, Irene Edwards.  Her piece is titled “The Case for Wanderlust.” She opens with the acknowledgement that the kind of work she does is a privilege. She recounts her earlier days, when she worked for a travel magazine in New York, and the travel itineraries featured “cost considerably more than [her] annual salary.” In those days, she writes, “my work felt like a portal into another existence, one of lavish hotel suites and town cars that whisked you to and from the airport.”

Edwards makes a case for the value of travel, of seeing other places and people. “[A]t every budget,” she writes, “the benefit of travel is universal–its ability to bring you outside your comfort zone and teach you about landscapes and lives beyond your own.”

As Edwards winds toward her conclusion, she gets philosophical about travel as a form of personal growth. It is Sunset magazine, after all. She quotes the late Anthony Bourdain, who once said “The journey changes you; it should change you.” He’s probably right. But, she admits, the journey also “changes the destination itself.” On this point, Edwards is probably right too.

And then she mentions her visit to “Costa Palmas” and the “East Cape of Baja California,” and the familiarity of the cover image suddenly makes sense. It looks familiar, because I know that place. Edwards tells us why her visit to Costa Palmas was so bittersweet:

Years from now, if I’m lucky enough to return, I will gaze at the superyachts in the marina and remember the serene and empty shore I set foot on, the moon rising on a beach with not a single other person in sight. But this is the magazine editor in me–I can’t help myself. When I see something this special, I want to share it with you all.

So here’s the thing. “Costa Palmas,” which is currently being promoted and branded as a new, exclusive, elite destination on the East Cape, is located in the small coastal town of La Ribera, home to a few thousand people who have lived there for a long time. This is not some empty terra nullius. It is a coastal community full of homes, histories, and lives. It is not an unknown, untouched place without history…despite the images being portrayed in tourist media.

Costa Palmas is the latest iteration of a development project on the East Cape of Baja California Sur, Mexico. The project began about a decade ago, and involved a lot of talk about money, investment, and of course jobs. For various reasons, the project has lingered, stalled, and stumbled its way forward. The original project, once known as “Cabo Riviera,” has been rebranded as Costa Palmas. And tourism media does some of the work of this rebranding, helping to transform this place into a destination.

This very magazine is an artifact and agent of that change. This is the kind of “worlding” that Spivak points us to, in which already existing places are represented as if they are “uninscribed territory” (Spivak 1990:1).[1] Edwards makes it sound like not a soul has ever stepped foot in this place, except for the folks who created Costa Palmas out of the mystical ethers of paradise…and the few magazine editors who managed to locate this marvel of time and space. Luckily, all of us, as readers and travelers, get to share in this rare jewel of a place just by reading along. And, if the news gets out, floods of tourists will indeed go seek out this supposedly untouched place. The underlying message, of course, is that we should get down there while the getting is good. This is how “paradise” is produced, packaged, sold, and ultimately overrun.

I have been watching the reconstruction of this place for about a decade. As Paige West (2014:426) argues:

Tourism, with its constant production of new illusions of the ‘further beyond’–sites and frontiers that are not ruined by tourism–is a never-ending form of accumulation by dispossession. It is relentless in its search for new images and new destinations; however, these newly discovered places are not really very new at all.[2]

Tourism discourses help to bury not only the histories of places, but also the claims and land rights that come with them. In La Ribera, these erasures have been ongoing for several years. In 2013 I wrote a short piece about this development site for Anthropology of Work Review. Back then, the project was called “Cabo Riviera,” and it was slated to be yet another golf course-marina-hotel destination with about 5,000 or so rooms. The Cabo Riviera development resulted in extensive change along the coast, including the removal of wetlands during the construction of a marina. These changes were not without controversy, and the project had its share of local resistance and protest.[3] The long story short, though, is that the Cabo Riviera project faltered, leaving a semi-developed site to linger on the landscape for several years. Costa Palmas is the latest attempt to pull this project from the ashes and re-brand La Ribera as an exclusive destination, waiting to be discovered. Tourism media helps lay the groundwork for all of this. Check out this coverage over at Forbes, which reads more like a real estate investment ad than journalism:

Surrounded by organic orchards and farms and including a stunning 250 slip deep-water marina, the area will be home to an all-new Four Seasons Resort and Private Residences Los Cabos, a Robert Trent Jones II 18-hole golf course, and the Costa Palmas Beach & Yacht Club with space for superyachts up to 250 feet. This will ultimately become one of the more exclusive billionaire retreats, considering the current popularity of neighboring La Paz, which hosted a dozen of the wealthiest families and their superyachts over New Year’s Eve.

Through such narratives, “new” destinations are made. The material changes and transformations of place, such as using heavy equipment to literally reshape the land, are just one part of the process. Another key component is changing the discourse of place–the ideas, beliefs, and knowledge that shapes perceptions of destinations. And this is where (tourism and real estate) media comes into the picture. A place needs to be produced in more ways than one in order to wrest it away from its (already populated, historical) past and turn it into the next desirable, exclusive, and empty paradise. This is dispossession by media saturation.

What is most striking to me, reading through some of this media about Costa Palmas, is that the town of La Ribera often receives little mention. For many who come, the little town may end up being a curious, quaint, secondary footnote to Costa Palmas. And this is how erasure and accumulation by dispossession work. One image, one ad, one brief editor’s note at a time.

[1] Spivak, Gayatri. 1990. The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues. Sarah Harasym, ed. New York and London: Routledge.

[2] West, Paige. 2014. “Such a Site for Play, This Edge”: Surfing, Tourism, and Modernist Fantasy in Papua New Guinea. The Contemporary Pacific, Volume 26(2):411-432.

[3] See this video from 2009 by filmmaker Carmina Valiente: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hd0AeTGuisA and this video from the Colectivo Pericú in 2011: https://colectivopericu.net/tag/la-ribera-baja-california-sur/

Ryan

Ryan Anderson is a cultural and environmental anthropologist.

Source

Escobar casts wide the net of his critique, his objective is not merely to tackle neoliberal capitalism, rampant individualism, patriarchy or colonialism — although each of those topics are explored in detail. He is writing against nothing less than all of modernity, a “particular modelo civilizatorio, or civilizational model… an entire way of life and a whole style of world making.” Our toxic, modern lifestyle in the Global North and the way it understands (or fails to understand) the relationality between humanity and other forms of life plays the dominant role in creating the contemporary crises. To preserve the future we need a different way of life and way to relate to all of life, “no less than a new notion of the human.” The crises are inseparable from our social lives. We need to step outside of our established worldviews to bring about significant transformations. Is this possible? How can we achieve such a transition?

The monumental scale of this task is not lost on Escobar. “[It] is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of modernity,” he writes. Subverting all of modernity seems impossible in no small part because the modern worldview precludes some epistemic domains, limiting our ability to dream some dreams. How could one even know where to begin to think these thoughts, much less teach others to think them? The answer will not come from within, says Escobar quoting the German sociologist Claudia Von Wherlof, “This rupture is almost unimaginable anywhere, except within the indigenous worlds.”

We are facing modern problems for which there are no modern solutions, hence the need to learn from non-modern or a-modern worldviews. With a nod to Melanesian and Amazonian studies, and a smattering of asides to Buddhism, Escobar turns to a cohort of Latin American activists living in small-scale communities and their work to secure autonomy within their respective territories.

Imagining autonomy as a subject for design, Escobar’s innovation is to bring the ontological turn to bear upon design theory. He writes, “If we start with the presupposition, striking perhaps but not totally far-fetched, that the contemporary world can be considered a massive design failure, certainly the result of particular design decisions, is it a matter of designing our way out?” Design offers a tantalizing tangibility, “critical design is critical thought translated into materiality… All good design offers an alternative to how things are.” To riff on the classic Anthropology as Cultural Critique, this is design theory as cultural critique.

Design, by virtue of its materiality, ‘hardwires’ particular kinds of politics into bodies, spaces, or objects. Quoting Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa, “A building is not an end in itself. A building conditions and transforms the human experience of reality; it frames, structures, articulates, links, separates and unites, enables, and prohibits.” The design of infrastructure has implications for what kinds of relationalities are possible when humans occupy those spaces or access those resources. Changes in infrastructure design have the potential to change relationality, hence material designs have ontological implications. If we are to change our being-in-the-world we need to consider our ontology, the infrastructure of our reality, as something with the potential to be designed. To do so successfully, Escobar argues, ontological design ought to be for and from spaces of political autonomy.

We can think of this as a kind of meta perspective, designing designs. Traditionally design has been about objects and things, but Escobar wants us to attend to how designs structure being-in-the-world and how our being-in-the-world structures the kinds of designs we make. How do we reform design on the meta level such that new worlds and ways of being are possible? How do we design for dreams of futures that have a future?

A major problematic presents itself. Isn’t autonomous design basically an oxymoron? Escobar’s autonomous design is anti-development, but isn’t all design, to some extent like development, imposed from the outside? Design and design theory, Escobar argues, epitomize modernity and we can read the failure of development and the imminent threat posed by a capitalism unrestrained as design failures. Thus, the crucial question: can design be creatively reappropriated by subaltern communities? Can we change traditions traditionally? Advancing this notion requires a reconceptualization of what design, long a handmaiden to consumer manufacture, is and can be.

In order to subvert the capitalist, modernist heritage of design, Escobar turns to the radical political critiques offered by indigenous activists in Latin America. The result is a theory of what one might call deep design. By working at ontological depths, Escobar hopes to get at what he calls the Pluriverse, or, to paraphrase the Zapatistas, a world where many worlds fit. As a shorthand one might think of the Pluriverse as offering alternative worlds, although that word is not quite right. Escobar reminds us, “It is not about ‘expanding the range of choices’ (liberal freedom) but is intended to transform the kinds of beings we desire to be.” He writes, “I present ontological design as a means to think about, and contribute to, the transition from the hegemony of modernity’s one-world ontology to a pluriverse of sociocultural configurations; in this context designs for the pluriverse becomes a tool for reimagining and reconstructing local worlds.” Design for radical transformation will come from radically different, non-modern, relational world views.

Escobar’s literature review and theoretical discussion stand out. Some of the ground he covers includes critical design studies, ethnographic approaches to design, participatory design, and decolonized design. Anthropology has a lot to offer design, Escobar argues, because we study the interplay of materiality, meaning, and practice. Anthropologists could explore how design gets depoliticized, demonstrate how to insert reflexivity into design, and reinfuse design with politics. The author commands a truly astonishing grasp of global literature. Escobar’s discussion is built on a foundation of work emanating from a panopoly of Latin American scholars, all of whom appear to be fascinating in their own rights. Its embarrassing to admit, but there is literally a whole other world of socio-cultural scholarship outside of North America and Europe of which I am almost completely ignorant. Through Escobar I felt like I was glimpsing the depth and breadth of that body of literature for the first time.

His theory is challenging. Often I found myself reading and then rereading passages, letting it sink in, and then going back to reread again. The book is very well written and I was never made to feel like this extra effort was a burden. I enjoyed the challenge! Early on he claims to lean heavily on Heidegger, especially “the question concerning technology” and “dwelling.” I must confess that Heidegger is a weak point for me. My strategy was to piece together a bread crumb trail from phenomenology to the anthropology of experience and more familiar ground. But to be honest, another reader with a more sophisticated grasp of Heidegger might have composed a different review than I.

Ontological studies are theoretically exciting because they upset long-held notions of truth. The idea that there is one nature (one reality) and many cultures. That the world carries on by itself, that it exists outside us. All this and more are brought into question.

Moderns imagine the world as an inanimate surface to be occupied; for many relational cultures, on the contrary, humans and other beings inhabit a world that is alive. While moderns occupy space, non-moderns dwell in places.

I think what this comes down to is an ontological critique of modernity rooted in ethno-philosophy. For Escobar the significance of bringing these discussions back to design is about stepping away from purely theoretical spaces and towards the domains of materiality and experience.

There are some extraordinarily strong sub-chapters on ontology, political ecology, feminism, and epistemologies of the South. I do not consider myself an expert in any of these fields, but even with my limited background I felt like I was able to grow my understanding through Escobar’s work. Much to my delight I felt like, for the first time, I was really “getting it” when it came to the ontological turn.

What defines this turn is the attention to a host of factors that deeply shape what we come to know as reality but that social theory has rarely tackled — factors like objects and things, nonhumans, matter and materiality (soil, energy, infrastructures, weather, bytes), emotions, spirituality, and so forth. What brings together these very disparate items is the attempt to break away from the normative divides, central to the modern regime of truth, between subject and object, reason and emotion, living and inanimate, human and nonhuman, organic and inorganic, and so forth. This is why this set of perspectives can properly be called postdualist. More colloquially, it can be said that what we are witnessing with postdualist, neomaterialist critical theories is the return of the repressed side of dualisms — the forceful emergence of the subordinated and often feminized and radicalized side of all the binaries.

He explores the related projects of feminist political ecology, which delves into “other ways of worlding, including new insights about what keeps the dominating ontologies in place.” Adjacent is political ontology, which “examines political strategies to defend or re-create worlds that retain important relational and communal dimensions.” Turning toward the indigenous is necessary, Escobar argues because, “To think new thoughts, by implication, requires stepping out of the epistemic space of Western social theory and into the epistemic configurations associated with the multiple relation ontologies of worlds in struggle.”

Although Escobar calls his work postdualist political ecology and sharply critiques Cartesianism he relies on dualisms throughout, including: North and South, modern and non-modern, patriarchal and non-patriarchal, etc. The author claims that his objection is not with dualism in essence, but with dualism’s dominance and role in constituting the dominant, modern ontology that he is writing against. I am less persuaded by this rhetorical move, especially given the strength of the claims he is making. This strikes me as similar to Spivak’s “strategic essentialism” of which I am also skeptical. In the final chapter, Escobar addresses this and other critiques he anticipates. I found it quite refreshing to read a work of theory that effectively concludes with a critique of itself.

Finally, to bring this all back to design: “what would it entail to construct a non-Eurocentric design imagination?”

[An] ontological approach to design provides paths towards imagining design practices that contribute to people’s defense of their territories and cultures. We will call this approach autonomous design.

I came to this book because the prospect of autonmous design was so appealing, I knew nothing of Escobar’s position beforehand but the phrase was enticing. I work in public libraries, where our ethos is “give the people what they want.” If people want sewing circles, you organize sewing circles. If people want to play Magic: The Gathering, you play Magic: The Gathering. If you live in a food desert and people want groceries, you get them their groceries. The professional public librarian ought not imagine themselves as limited to books and shushing, we are creators and facilitators. Its a bit like applied anthropology, a bit like design. The notion of bringing autonomy into the mix seemed a natural fit for an exsquitely local institution like a public library.

After reading this book, I did not feel well prepared to bring my supervisor plans for an autonomous design program. It did encourage me to think deeply about serving my community, how I might discover what my community needs, and how those needs could be addressed. With its emphasis on the global ecological crisis it made me think and rethink about how something like, say, low high school graduation rates might be related to people’s relations with the natural environment. I found this book to be productively challenging and was not at all disappointed in it even when book’s utopian visions seem distant and their general applications to anthropology unclear.

Escobar has very little to say about urban life in the Global North. Or whether we can think of something like gentrification as a design problem (I think we can). He intentionally limits himself to a few Latin American case studies. It was never the author’s intention to solve all the design problems in the world or claim that his theoretical innovation is the only solution. Nevertheless, I would welcome a study of ontological design that was more explicitly suited to the needs of everyday people in urban/suburban United States. One work which Escobar discusses at length, Ezio Manzini’s Design, When Everybody Designs : An Introduction to Design for Social Innovation looks like it has a lot of potential for my needs. I skimmed the first few chapters and I’m very excited to read it in greater detail later. Also, I think the language of Manzini’s work, in contrast to Escobar’s high theory, will have a better reception among my peers.

One aspect of this book that I wish was been better developed is hinted at in Escobar’s frequent asides to the role of religion in creating and sustaining modernity, and the potential spiritual side of autonomous design and political ontology. He critiques organized religion, along with governments, corporations, and universities, as among of the principle contributors of modernity and its failed design projects. In his discussion of Latin American activism he alludes to the role played by liberation theology and even mentions it as among the factors in his personal biography motivating him in this project. He also makes a number of references to Buddhism in thinking about alternatives to dualism and explaining the ontology of relationality. He even includes Bob Marley on the dedication page and name checks “Redemption Song”! There’s obviously something going on here with religion, ontology, autonomy, and materiality, but Escobar is opting to dance around the issue (to a reggae beat, no doubt) rather than going on at length to unpack it. I’m curious to hear him elaborate on this subject! How does a critique of “progress” square with an embrace of liberation theology? Does the power of design truly stem from its materiality, or is there some magic at work here too? Where does religion fit into convivality and the commons? Surely it must factor into well-being and Buen Vivir somehow. In this work, Escobar chooses to answer other questions.

Its difficult to say who this book is for. “Social Theory – Latin American Studies – Design Theory” read the topic headings at the top of the back cover. That’s an odd Venn diagram. This would be a good fit in a grad seminar on the ontological turn of course, but it would also be a good theoretical core for any study of social movements. Someone interested in getting to know Latin American social theory could curl up with this bibliography and find dozens of erudite scholars from the South to explore. I enjoyed reading this book, it was difficult but not out of my league. The language is so strong, I never felt like I was getting the run around. Some passages were heavy and I couldn’t lift them on my first try. It wasn’t punishing, merely hard.

By way of farewell, I’d like to dedicate a song to Arturo Escobar, Paul Simon’s “Everything bout it is a love song,” from his 2006 album Surprise, a late career gem produced by Brian Eno. Is singer-songwriter electronica a thing? Maybe it should be.

Anyways. When Escobar writes that design theory ought to be steered towards “practices attuned to the relational dimension of life,” we must recognize that the word “life” is doing double duty here. Although Escobar chooses not to make this sartorial decision, we might read this notion of life as Life with a capital ‘L’. On the page it is life — as in quotidian life, everyday life — but the implication is Life itself, all of planet Earth. And when Simon’s lyrics swoops from from bittersweet Homeric metaphors of riverbanks and arrows and frost to visions of reincarnation, finally coming to rest in outer space, “The Earth is blue and everything bout it is a love song” we know that he too is talking about life. Love is life and all life comes from love, and by love I mean doing it.

Look outside your window. Life is everywhere! Where did all that life come from? I’ll give you a hint, its the opposite of war. Bird songs and insect calls, the bold colors of flowers that entice pollinators and inspire human devotion. Everything bout it is a love song.

Matt Thompson

Matt Thompson is Community Services Librarian for the public library in Suffolk, Virginia. He has a doctorate in anthropology from the University of North Carolina and has been blogging with Anthrodendum née Savage Minds since 2010.

Source