Papers by Piergiorgio Di Giminiani
Discourses of innovation are prone to homogenisation, and as such,
their effects in the developme... more Discourses of innovation are prone to homogenisation, and as such,
their effects in the development of Indigenous enterprises are
highly ambivalent. The elusiveness of innovation can also work as
a flexible set of ideas through which Indigenous entrepreneurs
reconfigure existing commercial practices. Focussing on two
Mapuche enterprises, this article explores how innovation in the
context of Indigenous entrepreneurship is performed as a process
of cultural translation. We advance a definition of innovation
focused on the transformation of Indigenous daily practices into
valuable products within a market dominated by non-Indigenous
clients and mediators.
Discourses of innovation are prone to homogenisation, and as such, their effects in the developme... more Discourses of innovation are prone to homogenisation, and as such, their effects in the development of Indigenous enterprises are highly ambivalent. The elusiveness of innovation can also work as a flexible set of ideas through which Indigenous entrepreneurs reconfigure existing commercial practices. Focussing on two Mapuche enterprises, this article explores how innovation in the context of Indigenous entrepreneurship is performed as a process of cultural translation. We advance a definition of innovation focused on the transformation of Indigenous daily practices into valuable products within a market dominated by non-Indigenous clients and mediators. RÉSUMÉ Les discours d'innovation sont enclins à l'homogénéisation et, de ce fait, leurs effets dans le développement des entreprises autochtones sont hautement ambivalents. Le caractère insaisissable de l'innovation peut également se traduire par un ensemble d'idées flexible, à l'aide duquel les entrepreneurs autochtones peuvent reconfigurer des pratiques commerciales existantes. Notre étude se concentre sur deux entreprises Mapuche, et nous y explorons comment, dans le contexte de l'entreprenariat autochtone, l'innovation est pratiquée comme un processus de traduction culturelle. Nous offrons une définition de l'innovation qui se concentre sur la transformation de pratiques journalières autochtones en produits de valeur dans un marché dominé par des clients non-autochtones et des médiateurs.
Drawing on the experiences of caring in agriculture and forestry among Mapuche landholders of Chi... more Drawing on the experiences of caring in agriculture and forestry among Mapuche landholders of Chile, this article advances a definition of care as an act of relating intervening mutual articulations of vitality. Caring for nonhumans entails a reflexive awareness of the ontological and ethical limits of human care, limits made visible by the nonhumans' potentials to respond to our actions and affect us. Reflections on the limits of care foster an attentiveness to the conditions responsible for nonhumans' ability of enchantment, a term that in Bennett's proposal concerns an awareness on the singularness and surprising character of life. First, this article characterizes care as a human intentional action targeting dependent nonhumans, such as crops. Second, it illustrates the recalcitrance of some nonhumans to human care, as in the case of forests in Indigenous southern Chile. Third, it shows how care emerges from ethical aspirations and concerns, such as those at the core of Mapuche engagements with cultural reclamation and conservation.
Revista de Antropologia da UFSCar, 2018
Esse artigo analisa formas ideais, possíveis e reais de engajamento ambiental entre o povo Mapuch... more Esse artigo analisa formas ideais, possíveis e reais de engajamento ambiental entre o povo Mapuche. Material etnográfico centrado nas práticas agrícolas entre os residentes rurais de Mapuche, e suas conexões com a indústria do agronegócio mostram como ideias indígenas de “respeito” e princípios ontológicos de consciência não-humana são constantemente negociados na mediação entre a vontade de proteger a terra e a necessidade de explorála para garantir a continuidade das conexões de terra sobre as quais o pertencimento Mapuche se baseia. Dilemas ambientais oferecem uma perspectiva crítica ao fenômeno da assimilação, o qual se baseia em preocupações sobre a adoção de práticas socioecológicas associadas aos winka (pessoas não-indígenas) e alteridade com gerações passadas, cujos valores ambientais são admirados enquanto considerados inadequados em face dos desafios da agricultura de pequena escala.
AIBR. Revista de Antropología Iberoamericana, 2015
Marcio Goldman, doctor en Antropología por la Universidad Federal de Río de Janeiro y actualmente... more Marcio Goldman, doctor en Antropología por la Universidad Federal de Río de Janeiro y actualmente profesor del Museo Nacional de la UFRJ, se ha dedicado al estudio antropológico de las religiones afrobrasileñas y de la política. Ha sido profesor visitante en distintas universidades como la Universidad de São Paulo (USP), Universidad de Cabo Verde y Universidad de Chicago. Entre los libros publicados por Marcio Goldman encontramos Razão e Diferença. Afetividade, Racionalidade e Relativismo no Pensamento de Lévy-Bruhl (1994), Alguma Antropologia (1999) y Como Funciona a Democracia. Uma Teoria Etnográfica da Política (2006 —traducido al inglés como How Democracy Works. An Ethnographic Theory of Politics, 2013—). Su trabajo ha sido publicado en numerosas revistas como Social Analysis, Mana y Ethnos. Actualmente, Marcio Goldman lleva a cabo una investigación acerca de las cosmopolíticas de las religiones de matriz africana en Brasil a partir de un trabajo de campo realizado en un terreir...
The Routledge Handbook of Latin American Development, 2018
Basado en la observacion etnografica de la relacion entre pequenos agricultores y funcionarios es... more Basado en la observacion etnografica de la relacion entre pequenos agricultores y funcionarios estatales, este articulo nos muestra como las acciones institucionales de transferencia de conocimiento oficial generan practicas de monitoreo y control mediante las cuales tanto el conocimiento ambiental local como las acciones de los actores estatales se ven marginalizados a favor de la implementacion de modelos legales para el uso de recursos naturales. La aplicacion de un modelo de conocimiento oficial, basado en los mecanismos de auditoria, constituye una solucion gubernamental a la reestructuracion de la intervencion estatal bajo el neoliberalismo, el que apunta a favorecer la inclusion de los pequenos agricultores en el mercado global, conforme al principio de responsabilidad individual y la consecuente reduccion financiera e ideologica de politicas sociales colectivas.
City & Society, 2020
El 3 de marzo de 2020, pocos días después de las primeras noticias sobre la difusión a nivel glob... more El 3 de marzo de 2020, pocos días después de las primeras noticias sobre la difusión a nivel global del COVID-19, Santiago de Chile registraba el primer contagiado, un turista de regreso de Europa. Durante los siguientes días, más casos se dieron a la luz, en su gran mayoría asociados a viajes de turismo en el extranjero y concentrados en los barrios de residencia de la clase alta. Durante los primeros días de la pandemia, el gobierno de derecha del empresario Sebastián Piñera tomó una estrategia comunicacional centrada en una imagen de preparación y control. En este primer periodo, el gobierno implementó "cuarentenas dinámicas", esto es, aislamientos rotativos para distritos específicos de Santiago, con el fin de controlar la difusión del COVID-19 sin alterar las actividades productivas. Los expertos criticaron abiertamente esta política. 2 Sin embargo, el gobierno no solo persistió en esta medida, sino también elaboró un plan de regreso a lugares de educación y trabajo. Anunciado públicamente el 24 de abril bajo la premisa de que Santiago debía volver a una "nueva normalidad", el "Plan de Retorno Seguro" de Piñera se 1 Este texto se inserta en el marco de los siguientes proyectos de investigación: Proyecto Anillos ANID-PIA SOC180033, CIIR (ANID/FONDAP/15110006), COES (ANID/FONDAP/15130009) y FONDECYT 1191377. 2 Ver, por ejemplo, "COVID-19: Chile no está aplanando la curva, la perdimos de vista:" https://ciperchile.cl/2020/04/16/covid-19-chile-no-esta-aplanando-la-curva-la-perdimos-de-vista/; y "Chile doctors fear complacency over Covid-19 after initial successes:"
Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, 2018
Over the last three decades, national governments and international agencies have introduced a gr... more Over the last three decades, national governments and international agencies have introduced a growing number of entrepreneurial programs as a panacea for problems of economic precariousness and exclusion. This article illustrates some of the effects of entrepreneurial discourses and state actions among Mapuche rural residents in Chile. I argue that becoming an entrepreneur is an open-ended process in which state-supported microenterprises consolidate imaginaries of individual self-realization and ethnic autonomy while effectively establishing new bonds of dependence with state and market actors. The effects of entrepreneurial discourses and state actions examined in this article constitute a type of power formation that I define as a 'governance of hope.' This term refers to a disputed political field in which hope is at once an object capitalized by the state apparatus and a source of critical knowledge about ethnic hierarchies within indigenous populations.
Indigenous Life Projects and Extractivism, 2019
use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you g... more use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this book are included in the book's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the book's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
Anthropological Theory, 2019
Under settler colonialism, dispossession is enabled by discursive strategies aimed at curtailing ... more Under settler colonialism, dispossession is enabled by discursive strategies aimed at curtailing indigenous entitlement to land. One such strategy is the mutual determination of the native-settler categories whereby the native status is bound to a condition of ahistorical emplacement to specific tracts of land, while settlers can claim native status towards the nation state as a whole. The settler-native dichotomy fails to account for the possibility that settlement could be appropriated by indigenous collectivities as a process constitutive of land attachment and a sense of belonging. This analysis of memories and practices of indigenous settlement in the Mapuche frontier region in Chile indicates that, unlike dominant narratives of emptiness and environmental transformation reproduced under settler colonialism, indigenous settlement can unfold as an unstable ontological achievement aimed at both transforming and maintaining the land’s topological diversity and ability to partake i...
Anthropological Forum, 2018
All rights held by Piergiorgio Di Giminiani and Marcelo González Gálvez. You need to get the auth... more All rights held by Piergiorgio Di Giminiani and Marcelo González Gálvez. You need to get the author's permission for uses other than teaching and personal research.
Social Analysis, 2019
Once conceptualized as self-evident connections between discrete social units systematized throug... more Once conceptualized as self-evident connections between discrete social units systematized through ethnographic fieldwork, relations are being increasingly treated as instantiations of local ontological theories. The ethnography of indigenous South America has provided a source of inspiration for this analytical shift. As manifested in the contributions to this special issue, at the core of indigenous practices and discourses on relations lies a tension between ‘dependence on otherness’ and an ‘ethics of autonomy’. In this introduction, we revisit this tension by focusing on the ‘taming of relations’, a process through which subjects attempt to maintain the autonomy of each being vis-à-vis their relational constitution dependent on others. We argue that rather than being a necessary condition, autonomy is always a partial outcome of relations linking human and non-human others.
Ethnos, 2019
Far from being inert materials activated by human ingenuity, natural resources come to be constit... more Far from being inert materials activated by human ingenuity, natural resources come to be constituted through ongoing processes of translation, through which they acquire new potentialities and meanings. In introducing this special issue, we make the case for anthropological attention to processes of translation in the making and unmaking of "natural resources". We review the key concept of translation for anthropology and explore some of its multiple analytical possibilities in the context of human-environment relations. We focus on the enactment of material transformations (as the result of both relations of mutual determination with humans and processes of objectification of the environment), the implications of incommensurability and erasure in processes of (attempted) translation, and the indeterminacy that accompanies the generative work of translation. We propose a twofold definition of environments as both translating subjects and objects of translation, and describe how the articles in this collection deploy thorough and historically-informed ethnography to extend our understanding of the work of translation in constituting natural resources, though (re)configurations of materials, relations and values.
Conservation and Society, 2019
Geoforum, 2018
The current boom of private conservation reveals a strong alignment between neoliberal processes ... more The current boom of private conservation reveals a strong alignment between neoliberal processes of dispossession and environmentalism. Yet, private conservation can also serve as the setting for the development of critical environmental agendas raised by NGOs. Based on ethnographic research in the southern Chilean Andes, this article shows that dispossession and collaboration are intertwined features of private conservation. These two processes are engendered by changes affecting not only farmers' access to natural resources, but also their specific forms of engagement with landscape constitutive of senses of belonging. Property constitutes a compelling technology in the enforcement of wilderness enclosures and yet it can offer means for farmers to mediate between conservation and farming concerns. Attention to mediations and property exposes the ambivalences of private conservation under neoliberalism.
The Geographical Journal, 2018
The categorization of natural landscape features places a socialized and ordered lens on the land... more The categorization of natural landscape features places a socialized and ordered lens on the landscape. In the case of natural waterways, it creates a regional hydrologic vocabulary, based in physical processes and cultural history. This study uses the unique combination of hydrological and cultural characteristics found in Chile to determine the degree to which local waterway classifications of waterways as rivers (río in Spanish) provides insights to the cultural role in perceiving and describing such important landscape elements. The results indicate that waterway classification is strongly influenced by different regional cultural perspectives, which are also affected by their regional climates. This variety of hydrologic vocabularies presents distinct zones of waterway classification throughout Chile, with implications of these differences affecting territorial planning, water management, and even international relations.
Estudios atacameños, 2016
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Papers by Piergiorgio Di Giminiani
their effects in the development of Indigenous enterprises are
highly ambivalent. The elusiveness of innovation can also work as
a flexible set of ideas through which Indigenous entrepreneurs
reconfigure existing commercial practices. Focussing on two
Mapuche enterprises, this article explores how innovation in the
context of Indigenous entrepreneurship is performed as a process
of cultural translation. We advance a definition of innovation
focused on the transformation of Indigenous daily practices into
valuable products within a market dominated by non-Indigenous
clients and mediators.
their effects in the development of Indigenous enterprises are
highly ambivalent. The elusiveness of innovation can also work as
a flexible set of ideas through which Indigenous entrepreneurs
reconfigure existing commercial practices. Focussing on two
Mapuche enterprises, this article explores how innovation in the
context of Indigenous entrepreneurship is performed as a process
of cultural translation. We advance a definition of innovation
focused on the transformation of Indigenous daily practices into
valuable products within a market dominated by non-Indigenous
clients and mediators.
Indigenous and legal land ontologies, two very different and sometimes conflicting processes. Indigenous land ontologies are based on a relation between two subjects—land and people—both endowed with sentient abilities. By contrast, legal land ontologies are founded on the principles of property theory, wherein land is an object of possession that can be standardized within a regime of value. Governments also use land claims to domesticate Indigenous geographies into spatial constructs consistent with political and market configurations. Exploring the unexpected effects on political activism and state reparation policies caused by this entanglement of legal and Indigenous land ontologies, Di Giminiani offers a new analytical angle on Indigenous land politics.
Los editores de este libro, Piergiorgio Di Giminiani, Ángel Aedo y Juan Loera González nos invitan a acercarnos a estas preguntas mediante distintas experiencias provenientes de cinco continentes, que analizadas de forma comparativa, nos entregan diferentes lecturas sobre configuraciones novedosas entre política, medioambiente y bienestar. Estos tres elementos son constitutivos de lo que los editores definen como ecopolíticas globales, es decir el conjunto de prácticas de poder que se despliegan en el juego móvil de las relaciones entre agentes humanos y no humanos en contextos tanto de interacción como de fricciones globales.
Presentando, por un lado, diferentes casos etnográficos y por el otro, textos de reflexión teórica sobre el tema, el presente volumen explora la manera en que las tecnologías engendran, modifican y se ven envueltas en la disolución o transformación de las relaciones sociales.
Las distintas contribuciones de este libro presentan una innovadora reflexión sobre los alcances teóricos, políticos y religiosos de los procesos sociales y culturales en América Latina, centrada en aquellas técnicas mediante las cuales los seres humanos se abren y dan sentido al mundo.
Este libro incluye textos de los siguientes autores:
Ángel Aedo, Cristóbal Bonelli Iglesias, Diana Espíritu Santo, Piergiorgio Di Giminiani, Sergio González Varela, Martin Holbraad, Tim Ingold, Daniel Miller, Johannes Neurath, Helene Risør, Inger Sjørslev, Nico Tassi.
Los editores de este libro, Piergiorgio Di Giminiani, Ángel Aedo y Juan Loera González nos invitan a acercarnos a estas preguntas mediante distintas experiencias provenientes de cinco continentes, que analizadas de forma comparativa, nos entregan diferentes lecturas sobre configuraciones novedosas entre política, medioambiente y bienestar. Estos tres elementos son constitutivos de lo que los editores definen como ecopolíticas globales, es decir el conjunto de prácticas de poder que se despliegan en el juego móvil de las relaciones entre agentes humanos y no humanos en contextos tanto de interacción como de fricciones globales.