Abstract
In the title of his take-no-prisoners critique of development economics and the globalization of capitalism, Sheppard refers rhetorically to the question of development. More than rhetorical, the double entendre is a complex citation of both Development proselytizing – or spreading capitalism and the ‘good life’ (as Sheppard refers to it) to the world beyond the G8 – and narratives (or imaginaries) that account for the emergence of global inequities and how they continue to be maintained despite (or because of) free market capitalism. The terrain over which this critique rambles is vast and advocacy of a substitution of neoclassical market-based economic theory with a geographic and relational-based theory of human production seems at times a thinly veiled promotion of a particular disciplinary perspective. Nonetheless, the attack is on point, particularly at this moment in which the excesses of unregulated capitalism are painfully evident as well as its proclivity to exacerbate human misery and climatological havoc. As an anthropological archaeologist who has tackled some of the same issues (and authors) as does Sheppard, I relate his exercise in critical thinking to three points: (1) how naturalized capitalism impedes our ability to imagine alternative economic realities in deep history and correspondingly to theorize the emergence (and dissolution) of economic complexity; (2) why the triumphal narrative of ‘How the West was Won’ has proven so intractable; and (3) how alternative imaginaries rooted in indigeneity can unsettle the hegemony of market capitalism. In the course of this commentary, I draw upon research in the Maya region of Central America. Finally, I consider whether a geographically inspired political economy as proposed by Sheppard will facilitate better conceptualization and problem solving in reference to global inequality.
Social theorists and philosophers are fond of archaeological concepts. Foucault (1994) referred to the historical dissection of human sciences as ‘an archaeology’. Giddens (1979: 110) saw social processes that operated over the longue durée as ‘sedimented space-time relations'. DeLanda (2006), by way of Deleuze, elaborates the time-crafted archaeological concept of assemblages in order to generate a more realistic approach to social ontology that non-categorically expresses constitutive parts of complex entities (human and otherwise). This generous borrowing has not been unidirectional; archaeologists have dipped into the well of classical and neoclassical theory to frame economic investigations and shape interpretation of the past. As the social science of the materialized long term, the discipline of archaeology is fundamentally concerned with questions of emergence, complexity, resilience, and dissolution. Methodologically, naturalized capitalism has played a seldom-acknowledged but influential role in the ‘reading’ of economic relations in deep history and correspondingly in theories of complexity. While there is nothing inherently wrong with the open architecture of archaeological theory (similar in its synthetic character to geographical theory), the adoption of assumptive premises such as methodological individualism and perhaps territorialism as discussed here by Sheppard, as well as that of humans as rational economic agents, is of questionable epistemological value to understanding non-capitalized economic relations. Elsewhere (McAnany, 2010), I have critiqued the culturally tone-deaf propensity of economists – a point that Sheppard repeatedly asserts although from a different perspective. The embrace of alterity and alternate imaginaries is a matter of epistemological robusticity in the analysis of past as well as contemporary realities.
In terms of the future, Sheppard advocates ‘taking temporality seriously, as an unknowable future rather than an equilibrium trajectory’. This exhortation could be extended to the past as well. Sheppard pointedly refers to Jared Diamond’s (2005) Collapse as a ‘Malthusian morality play’ designed for US audiences who pursue what Diamond sees as a short-sighted and unsustainable lifestyle. The collection of essays in Collapse are long on message and highly selective in fact selection (McAnany and Yoffee, 2009). In using the past to serve the present – as does Diamond in Collapse – the reality of long-term resilience and the success of societies such as those of Rapa Nui, the Maya region, or the US Southwest (see, respectively, Hunt and Lipo, 2009; McAnany and Gallareta Negrón, 2009; Wilcox, 2009) is lost amid the colonial-inspired myths of indigenous failure and extinction that swept the path for European colonization. By modeling the past as a morality play for the present, indigenous descendant communities are presented not as ‘people without history’ (Wolf, 1982) but as people with a history of failure. Not coincidentally, descendants of these same communities are now targets of economic development policies that come under critical scrutiny by Sheppard.
As noted in Sheppard’s critique, a unique convergence of historical factors conspired to produce ‘the Americas', which provided Europe with a safety valve through the shedding of excess population as well as a place to produce inexpensively highly valued tropical crops such as cotton, coffee, sugar, and cacao for an expanding European market. The pernicious wealth inequities created by this exploitation are still observable in nationalist-based Gini coefficients and have confounded the efforts of development economists. Why is this so? Why have parts of Latin America, in particular, proven all too pertinent to the ‘development of underdevelopment’? In this part of the world, the promise of globalized capitalism – to improve living conditions for impoverished peoples – has proven apocryphal in a way that is particularly rankling to those for whom the promise goes unfulfilled. When this reality intersects with the still prevalent triumphal narrative of ‘How the West was Won’, the dissonance is more than striking. It provides a graphic case-in-point of the intellectual impoverishment and methodological inadequacies of neoliberal development policies. Culturally tone-deaf and ahistorical, many development initiatives have succeeded only in enhancing the wealth of an upper class that self-identify as ethnically distinct from the underclass and shop as well as educate their children either in the USA or Europe. In this regard, Sheppard refers to the distinctive social, philosophical, and economic circumstances that gave birth to European capitalism. This fact alone should alert astute economists to the fact that the recipe for tasting ‘the good life’ will require creative alteration if not wholesale re-creation before it is capable of alleviating the poverty and misery of the underclass in Latin America – many of whom are racially stigmatized descendants of those who first encountered Europeans in the 16th century.
For those who self-identify as indigenous – such as the seven million+ Mayan-speaking peoples of southern México, Belize, Guatemala, and western Honduras – the process of nation-building has been as destructive as colonization (McAnany and Parks, forthcoming). With emphasis on an imaginary of national unity and a singular identity, many rights and privileges upheld and protected during colonial times were rolled back during the 19th century when the current republics emerged. For instance, the Social War (formerly called the Caste War) of Yucatán, México, was one of the longest-running insurgencies of the 19th century and fomented by encroachments on traditional land holdings that accelerated wildly after independence from Spain in 1821. Thus, indigenous peoples find themselves in a double bind: first as members of nation states with whom they are often in conflict, and second as the constituent population sector that occupies the low end of economic profiles based upon a methodological territorialism that comes under close scrutiny in Sheppard’s essay.
Internet and social networking sites provide accessible media for indigenous contestation not only of the globalization of capitalism but also of the deleterious impact of resource extraction and energy consumption (its umbilical cord) on the health of the planet and its inhabitants (e.g. http://www.yachaywasi-ngo.org). Subaltern voices question increasingly the price that must be paid to share in ‘the good life’ (repudiation of indigenous values and removal from family and community) and pointedly note that violation of traditional covenants with the earth and the uncertain environmental future that we now face has been ‘achieved’ with extremely limited participation by indigenous peoples. In the Toledo District of Belize, Central America, the predominantly Mayan-speaking population has succeeded in contesting a nationally sponsored program of land privatization (http://indigenouspeoplesissues.com). In effect, the Supreme Court of Belize has ruled that the national government must recognize the land rights of indigenous peoples and the right of communities to hold land communally.
In Guatemala, where ethnic-based violence reached genocidal proportions during the 1980s, Maya people are working legislatively to regain control of sacred ancestral sites that are the focus of a billion-dollar tourism industry (Gomez, 2010). Throughout the Maya region, funding for development programs has spotlighted heritage tourism to the point of oversaturation, which engenders yet another cycle of unfulfilled promises. When Maya heritage sites from the much-valorized Classic period of colossal architecture and divine rulers are recognized as World Heritage Sites – places such as Chichén Itzá – Maya people often benefit only on a basic level by selling curios and working in tourist hotels and restaurants (Casteñada, 1996). Maya heritage tourism provides static economic opportunities and seldom is structured with an eye towards capacity building or co-management. The intersection of indigenous rights and cultural heritage is increasingly contested terrain (http://www.machiproject.org; Silverman and Fairchild Ruggles, 2007) upon which alternative imaginaries and practices rooted in indigeneity can potentially unsettle the hegemony of market capitalism. This is particularly the case in reference to the commodification of sites of cultural heritage that serve the tourism industry.
Will a geographically inspired political economy as proposed by Sheppard facilitate better conceptualization and problem solving in reference to these trenchant global inequities? Do geographers possess more rigorous or perhaps more realistic methods for analysis of ‘alternative modalities of interaction and coordination’ as discussed here in reference to indigenous Maya peoples? How exactly do geographers ‘take temporality seriously’ and factor historical dialectics into paths for the future? Finally, how do we model – geographically or otherwise – co-constitutive entanglements among social, political, economic, and other entities? These are daunting challenges to current business-as-usual in which quantitative sophistication masks overly simplistic operating assumptions. Economists have long been critiqued by social theorists for their failure to take human intentionality and cultural diversity seriously (see Bourdieu, 2005: 1–13, for a recent flogging). Is economic geography to assume the privilege and responsibility of steering an unwieldy and increasingly unstable global economy towards more equable waters? ¡Buena suerte!