Papers and Book Chapters by heike schaumberg
Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 2020
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Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability
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Elsevier
Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability
Volume 43, April 2020, Pages 99-105
Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability
Aboriginal conceptions of the forest in the soy era: frontiers of deforestation in the Argentine Chaco
Author links open overlay panelHeikeSchaumberg
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2020.04.007Get rights and content
Highlights
•
Malnutrition, illness, displacements and environmental disasters are the aboriginal experiences of the advancing agrarian frontier.
•
Wichí accounts of past abundance in the forest offer alternative narratives to a discourse of development and progress that delivers poverty.
•
Collective land ownership is central to the indigenous struggle against deforestation and to social and environmental sustainability.
•
Wichí struggle for collective land ownership undermines the individualistic mantra of ‘private property’ of capitalist social relations.
•
A potential link between deforestation and water drainage requires further research for an effective forest management strategy in the Chaco.
The Argentine Chaco, a subtropical forest region, has been subjected to crippling deforestation. At this juncture of accelerated extractivism and agricultural encroachment on forests, contradictions emerge from contested land rights and exploitative, informal, capital-labour relations involving aboriginal people. This paper reviews key interactions between these macro and micro economic trends and aboriginal engagements with these brisk transformative processes that intrinsically challenge simplistic notions of sustainability.
Con la llegada de Mauricio Macri al poder, en Argentina se vive un clima de cierre de época y de ... more Con la llegada de Mauricio Macri al poder, en Argentina se vive un clima de cierre de época y de apertura de otra. Ese contexto nuevo demanda una reevaluación de lo que fue, lo que hay, y lo que puede suceder en el futuro. Pero esto no es el eje de éste artículo, sino más bien cómo Argentina encaja con los procesos de la crisis global. Esa percepción epocal ocurre en paralelo a los sombríos –y finalmente alarmantes– pronósticos para la economía mundial en el año 2016.
Apenas tres semanas después de iniciado el nuevo año, una fuerte caída de las bolsas del mercado mundial generó mucha angustia sobre un posible retorno a una crisis mundial al estilo de la del 2008. Los datos económicos anuncian un impulso potente hacia la contracción y mayor inestabilidad en los mercados globales. La fuerte baja del precio del petróleo a menos de US$30 el barril y los esfuerzos frustrados de las intervenciones gubernamentales en estabilizar la bolsa china, ponen en duda el análisis del economista marxista Costas Lapavitsas (2013), quien argumenta que la crisis actual es, al fin y al cabo, la del capitalismo financiero en lugar de una de sobreproducción. Sin embargo, la Agencia Internacional de Energía “advirtió recientemente de una sobreproducción de petróleo de al menos un millón de barriles por día para un tercer año consecutivo en el 2016” (Raval, 2015). Se trata de un producto que sigue siendo una mercancía clave en la cadena de producción capitalista y que motoriza la economía mundial a la vez que dirige la política bélica del capital. El mercado financiero refleja la sobreproducción y la tendencia a la caída de la tasa de ganancia la impulsa a través de la competencia capitalista.
The recent wave of important anthropological critiques of the global 'war on terror' is in danger... more The recent wave of important anthropological critiques of the global 'war on terror' is in danger of being undermined by a disciplinary vision that disregards challenging an institutional culture of fear and compliance with injustices and inequality, which is more likely to nurture discrimination and professional malpractices than commi ed scholarship. I am drawing an analogy with Zola's 'J'accuse…!' about how institutional rules of accountability in the tick-box form of neoliberal auditing can serve the purpose of oppressing the rights they are nominally intended to protect. The article argues that debates about disciplinary crisis should be reframed as one about a crisis in the reproduction of scholarship. The discipline needs to employ the anthropological tools of enquiry consistently in its practices and theory, 'at home' and in the wider world. Fundamental questions regarding discriminatory practices and professional ethics in the everyday academic workplace need to be addressed not silenced in order to nurture not only critical but also credible anthropological challenges to important contemporary historical processes.
Bulletin of Latin American Research, 2008
This article analyses ethnographically the reconfigurations of the state and relations of power t... more This article analyses ethnographically the reconfigurations of the state and relations of power through their dynamic interactions with subaltern alternatives that emerged in the 2001 uprising in Argentina. In this regard, it counters influential interpretations of these events articulated within John Holloway’s framework of ‘anti-power’, which ignores the reconstruction of the state, and rank and file trade unionism. The article concludes that intensified class and political struggles in the region offer new spaces for contesting hegemonic reinventions of populism and ‘top-down’ socialism in Latin America.
Other Articles by heike schaumberg
En este último año hemos vivido momentos políticos convulsos en Latinoamérica.
El largo ciclo de ... more En este último año hemos vivido momentos políticos convulsos en Latinoamérica.
El largo ciclo de cambio institucional progresista en el subcontinente parece
erosionarse, pero la reciente ola de movilizaciones está poniendo de nuevo en el
centro de la cuestión la lucha social.
Publicado en: La Hiedra, Número 1, Mayo-junio 2016
Last month Heike Schaumberg looked at Argentina's 2001 neoliberal crisis and the uprising that fo... more Last month Heike Schaumberg looked at Argentina's 2001 neoliberal crisis and the uprising that followed it. With a general election approaching and a Trotskyist on the presidential ballot, she asks whether the far left can make electoral gains and how that relates to the wider social movements.
The debt crisis that is tearing Greece apart has echoes in Argentina at the beginning of this cen... more The debt crisis that is tearing Greece apart has echoes in Argentina at the beginning of this century. Heike Schaumberg draws out lessons from the workers' response to neoliberal strangulation.
Review articles and Commentaries by heike schaumberg
Talks by heike schaumberg
The origins of today’s visibly revived rank and file labour militancy in Argentina have escaped a... more The origins of today’s visibly revived rank and file labour militancy in Argentina have escaped analytical scrutiny. Non-trade union based social movements were the protagonists of the 2001 uprising and its aftermath. The trade union movement was then widely perceived as politically bankrupt and obsolete to working class struggle. Based on nearly two decades of research on and in Argentina, this paper agrees with those Argentine labour historians who contend that the Argentine labour movement had not been as absent from the uprising as is generally suggested. Instead some workers in different workplaces had started an arduous and silent struggle for re-unionisation and rebuilding of rank and file democracy. These developments gained impetus and visibility after the uprising for contingent reasons. Based on my fieldwork since 2003, this paper traces direct and implicit (less visible) dialectical relations between the revival of rank and file militancy, the uprising, and the simultaneously emerging social movements.
Recent historical electoral advances by the Trotskyist left in 2013 demand close scrutiny of the Left’s relationship to the trade union rank and file since the uprising. This electoral gain potentially influences internal trade union conflicts at a time of growing rifts between the trade union federations and an austerity government caught between the devil and the deep blue sea of crisis management and worsening global economic contraction. This paper contemplates the transformative potential of a reviving trade union rank and file militancy and the challenges it faces by analysing its emergence as part and parcel of the working class re-organisation innate to the uprising. The paper offers a critical question up for discussion with significance that is not restricted to Argentina: can this young rank and file militancy capture leadership of the movement at this pressing moment of growing political uncertainty and economic hardship?
Papers by heike schaumberg
The energy unleashed by the 2001 uprising in Argentina and the social movements that both generat... more The energy unleashed by the 2001 uprising in Argentina and the social movements that both generated it and were simultaneously its product, became a powerful device for a political reorganization initiated “from below.” The protagonists comprised large sectors of diverse social strata, which three decades of free-market policies had until then successfully managed to politically disengage and disorganize. At the time of my fieldwork in Argentina between 2003 and 2005, these protagonists recognized their own weaknesses regarding their ability to replace the existing economic and political establishment with their own alternative. Thus they set about negotiating the terms and conditions of the incoming government. Notions of a period of “transition” began to circulate after the 2001 uprising among the emerging social movements and in particular guided the politically moderate mobilized strata in their relationship to both the first presidential elections in April 2003 and the new government. This chapter takes issue with “transition” as a concept to describe this period, and assesses how it informed political interpretations and actions that shaped subsequent political processes.
Anthropology Today, Oct 1, 2006
Bulletin of Latin American Research, 2020
Anthropology In Action, 2009
The recent wave of important anthropological critiques of the global 'war on terror' is in danger... more The recent wave of important anthropological critiques of the global 'war on terror' is in danger of being undermined by a disciplinary vision that disregards challenging an institutional culture of fear and compliance with injustices and inequality, which is more likely to nurture discrimination and professional malpractices than commi ed scholarship. I am drawing an analogy with Zola's 'J'accuse…!' about how institutional rules of accountability in the tick-box form of neoliberal auditing can serve the purpose of oppressing the rights they are nominally intended to protect. The article argues that debates about disciplinary crisis should be reframed as one about a crisis in the reproduction of scholarship. The discipline needs to employ the anthropological tools of enquiry consistently in its practices and theory, 'at home' and in the wider world. Fundamental questions regarding discriminatory practices and professional ethics in the everyday academic workplace need to be addressed not silenced in order to nurture not only critical but also credible anthropological challenges to important contemporary historical processes.
Palgrave Macmillan eBooks, Aug 1, 2014
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Papers and Book Chapters by heike schaumberg
Advanced
Elsevier
Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability
Volume 43, April 2020, Pages 99-105
Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability
Aboriginal conceptions of the forest in the soy era: frontiers of deforestation in the Argentine Chaco
Author links open overlay panelHeikeSchaumberg
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2020.04.007Get rights and content
Highlights
•
Malnutrition, illness, displacements and environmental disasters are the aboriginal experiences of the advancing agrarian frontier.
•
Wichí accounts of past abundance in the forest offer alternative narratives to a discourse of development and progress that delivers poverty.
•
Collective land ownership is central to the indigenous struggle against deforestation and to social and environmental sustainability.
•
Wichí struggle for collective land ownership undermines the individualistic mantra of ‘private property’ of capitalist social relations.
•
A potential link between deforestation and water drainage requires further research for an effective forest management strategy in the Chaco.
The Argentine Chaco, a subtropical forest region, has been subjected to crippling deforestation. At this juncture of accelerated extractivism and agricultural encroachment on forests, contradictions emerge from contested land rights and exploitative, informal, capital-labour relations involving aboriginal people. This paper reviews key interactions between these macro and micro economic trends and aboriginal engagements with these brisk transformative processes that intrinsically challenge simplistic notions of sustainability.
Apenas tres semanas después de iniciado el nuevo año, una fuerte caída de las bolsas del mercado mundial generó mucha angustia sobre un posible retorno a una crisis mundial al estilo de la del 2008. Los datos económicos anuncian un impulso potente hacia la contracción y mayor inestabilidad en los mercados globales. La fuerte baja del precio del petróleo a menos de US$30 el barril y los esfuerzos frustrados de las intervenciones gubernamentales en estabilizar la bolsa china, ponen en duda el análisis del economista marxista Costas Lapavitsas (2013), quien argumenta que la crisis actual es, al fin y al cabo, la del capitalismo financiero en lugar de una de sobreproducción. Sin embargo, la Agencia Internacional de Energía “advirtió recientemente de una sobreproducción de petróleo de al menos un millón de barriles por día para un tercer año consecutivo en el 2016” (Raval, 2015). Se trata de un producto que sigue siendo una mercancía clave en la cadena de producción capitalista y que motoriza la economía mundial a la vez que dirige la política bélica del capital. El mercado financiero refleja la sobreproducción y la tendencia a la caída de la tasa de ganancia la impulsa a través de la competencia capitalista.
Other Articles by heike schaumberg
El largo ciclo de cambio institucional progresista en el subcontinente parece
erosionarse, pero la reciente ola de movilizaciones está poniendo de nuevo en el
centro de la cuestión la lucha social.
Publicado en: La Hiedra, Número 1, Mayo-junio 2016
Review articles and Commentaries by heike schaumberg
Talks by heike schaumberg
Recent historical electoral advances by the Trotskyist left in 2013 demand close scrutiny of the Left’s relationship to the trade union rank and file since the uprising. This electoral gain potentially influences internal trade union conflicts at a time of growing rifts between the trade union federations and an austerity government caught between the devil and the deep blue sea of crisis management and worsening global economic contraction. This paper contemplates the transformative potential of a reviving trade union rank and file militancy and the challenges it faces by analysing its emergence as part and parcel of the working class re-organisation innate to the uprising. The paper offers a critical question up for discussion with significance that is not restricted to Argentina: can this young rank and file militancy capture leadership of the movement at this pressing moment of growing political uncertainty and economic hardship?
Papers by heike schaumberg
Advanced
Elsevier
Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability
Volume 43, April 2020, Pages 99-105
Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability
Aboriginal conceptions of the forest in the soy era: frontiers of deforestation in the Argentine Chaco
Author links open overlay panelHeikeSchaumberg
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2020.04.007Get rights and content
Highlights
•
Malnutrition, illness, displacements and environmental disasters are the aboriginal experiences of the advancing agrarian frontier.
•
Wichí accounts of past abundance in the forest offer alternative narratives to a discourse of development and progress that delivers poverty.
•
Collective land ownership is central to the indigenous struggle against deforestation and to social and environmental sustainability.
•
Wichí struggle for collective land ownership undermines the individualistic mantra of ‘private property’ of capitalist social relations.
•
A potential link between deforestation and water drainage requires further research for an effective forest management strategy in the Chaco.
The Argentine Chaco, a subtropical forest region, has been subjected to crippling deforestation. At this juncture of accelerated extractivism and agricultural encroachment on forests, contradictions emerge from contested land rights and exploitative, informal, capital-labour relations involving aboriginal people. This paper reviews key interactions between these macro and micro economic trends and aboriginal engagements with these brisk transformative processes that intrinsically challenge simplistic notions of sustainability.
Apenas tres semanas después de iniciado el nuevo año, una fuerte caída de las bolsas del mercado mundial generó mucha angustia sobre un posible retorno a una crisis mundial al estilo de la del 2008. Los datos económicos anuncian un impulso potente hacia la contracción y mayor inestabilidad en los mercados globales. La fuerte baja del precio del petróleo a menos de US$30 el barril y los esfuerzos frustrados de las intervenciones gubernamentales en estabilizar la bolsa china, ponen en duda el análisis del economista marxista Costas Lapavitsas (2013), quien argumenta que la crisis actual es, al fin y al cabo, la del capitalismo financiero en lugar de una de sobreproducción. Sin embargo, la Agencia Internacional de Energía “advirtió recientemente de una sobreproducción de petróleo de al menos un millón de barriles por día para un tercer año consecutivo en el 2016” (Raval, 2015). Se trata de un producto que sigue siendo una mercancía clave en la cadena de producción capitalista y que motoriza la economía mundial a la vez que dirige la política bélica del capital. El mercado financiero refleja la sobreproducción y la tendencia a la caída de la tasa de ganancia la impulsa a través de la competencia capitalista.
El largo ciclo de cambio institucional progresista en el subcontinente parece
erosionarse, pero la reciente ola de movilizaciones está poniendo de nuevo en el
centro de la cuestión la lucha social.
Publicado en: La Hiedra, Número 1, Mayo-junio 2016
Recent historical electoral advances by the Trotskyist left in 2013 demand close scrutiny of the Left’s relationship to the trade union rank and file since the uprising. This electoral gain potentially influences internal trade union conflicts at a time of growing rifts between the trade union federations and an austerity government caught between the devil and the deep blue sea of crisis management and worsening global economic contraction. This paper contemplates the transformative potential of a reviving trade union rank and file militancy and the challenges it faces by analysing its emergence as part and parcel of the working class re-organisation innate to the uprising. The paper offers a critical question up for discussion with significance that is not restricted to Argentina: can this young rank and file militancy capture leadership of the movement at this pressing moment of growing political uncertainty and economic hardship?
The issue has now been published.