M Blaser
Biographic Data
| ID | 8427 |
|---|---|
| NAME | M Blaser |
| GIVEN NAMES | M |
| FAMILY NAME | Blaser |
| SIGNATURE | BLASER M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Memorial University of Newfoundland |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5613-6669 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 886 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 24 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1969 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
The vanishing forest that does not disappear
This commentary engages Özge Can Doğmuş's argument that disappearance should be understood as an effect of unequal exposure to finitude. Drawing on an ethnographic vignette from the Chaco forest, it argues that this formulation presupposes the stability of disappearance as an event, whereas political ontology requires treating the event itself as uncertain and relationally constituted. The article's tension between a Heideggerian grounding in fin…
Postscript
In this commentary, I reflect on the illuminating effects of comparative play. Reading the contributions from the vantage point of work on cosmopolitics and political ontology in Latin America, it examines what comparison brings into view and what it unsettles. The contrast drawn between cosmopolitical arrangements in Southeast Asia and those in the Americas is shown to be illuminating insofar as similar histories of entanglement, accommodation, …
Sobre o Antropoceno propriamente político, ou sobre a disposição propriamente política para o Antropoceno
The environmental crises referenced by the term Anthropocene incite responses that reflect different understandings about the right way to live on Earth. This, one would expect, should generate a proliferation of disagreements and an expansion of politics. Yet, so-called post-political authors warn that, instead, the way in which the Anthropocene has been brought to the public eye implies an emptying out of politics and a disavowal of the inheren…
Desde la racionalidad cosmopolita a la ontología política y la cosmopolítica
Este diálogo con Mario Blaser recorre su trayectoria desde Argentina a Canadá, en el cual revisita uno de sus primeros artículos, que fue publicado en la revista Runa. Archivo para las Ciencias del Hombre. A pesar de la perspectiva culturalista que hegemonizaba la Antropología argentina a comienzos de la década del noventa, y de la falta de conceptos adecuados para canalizar las inquietudes en aquél entonces, Blaser encuentra allí preocupaciones …
On the properly political (disposition for the) Anthropocene
The environmental crises referenced by the term Anthropocene incite responses that reflect different understandings about the right way to live on Earth. This, one would expect, should generate a proliferation of disagreements and an expansion of politics. Yet, so-called post-political authors warn that, instead, the way in which the Anthropocene has been brought to the public eye implies an emptying out of politics and a disavowal of the inheren…
Prácticas otras de conocimiento(s)
Esta obra colegiada tiene un encuentro luminoso con la liberación de los pueblos oprimidos. Su destino está trazado: va a convertirse en una obra de referencia y lo será cada vez más en la medida en que los años pasen. Es una obra de nuestro tiempo, en lo que nuestro tiempo ofrece de más genuina esperanza a los pueblos oprimidos, de más articulada visión de los retos de la liberación, de más consistente diseño de los caminos sentipensantes de la …
Prácticas otras de conocimiento(s)
En este tomo II escribimos consultoras activistas, feministas pos y decoloniales, investigadores(as) activistas, activistas investigadores(as), así como profesores investigadores latinoamericanos(as), socialistas y latinoamericanistas. Cada uno(a), a nuestra manera, situamos y problematizamos nuestras prácticas de conocimiento, deteniéndonos unas en las dimensiones epistémicas, éticas, de género y de poder; otros, en las metodológicas, políticas,…
Doing and undoing Caribou/Atiku
More than one and less than many, has become a refrain to depict the notion of multiplicity. Borrowed from Mariyln Strathern, Annemarie Mol mobilized the refrain to succinctly capture the complex result of a series of operations that make a variety of practices hold together as a singular thing. In this article, I seek to explore some consequences of the proposition that multiplicity can be figured in, at least, two different ways: as diffraction…
Outra Cosmopolítica É Possível
O conceito de cosmopolítica desenvolvido por Isabelle Stengers e Bruno Latour permite manter aberta a questão de quem e o que pode compor o mundo comum. Deste modo, cosmopolítica oferece uma ferramenta para se evitar as armadilhas da política razoável [reasonable politics], uma política que, definindo de antemão que as diferenças em jogo em um dado desacordo fazem referência a uma realidade única, torna possível deixar de lado algumas preocupaçõe…
Es otra cosmopolítica posible
una serie de relaciones y prácticas que muchos innu ven como fundamentales para su existencia
The Uncommons
This article introduces the term uncommons as a conceptual response to questions that emerged in the context of conflicts around the scale and scope of diverse "commons" that are under threat by extractivism. It introduces the articles for this special issue, which were the result of an invitation to think with the concept of uncommons for a variety of situations. It is concluded that these articles provide a strong grounding to think of uncommon…
Is Another Cosmopolitics Possible
The concept of cosmopolitics developed by Isabelle Stengers and Bruno Latour keeps open the question of who and what might compose the common world. In this way, cosmopolitics offers a way to avoid the pitfalls of reasonable politics, a politics that, defining in advance that the differences at stake in a disagreement are between perspectives on a single reality, makes it possible to sideline some concerns by deeming them unrealistic and, therefo…
Anthropology and STS
In this multi-authored essay, nine anthropologists working in different parts of the world take part in a conversation about the interfaces between anthropology and STS (science and technology studies). Through this conversation, multiple interfaces emerge that are heterogeneously composed according to the languages, places, and arguments from where they emerge. The authors explore these multiple interfaces as sites where encounters are also site…
Ontology and indigeneity
The first challenge faced by a project that seeks to bring concerns with ontology and indigeneity into a conversation is to sort out the various (and possibly divergent) projects that are being mobilized when the former term is used, not the least because what do we mean by ontology impinges upon how we can conceive indigeneity. In this article I play a counterpoint between two 'ontological' projects: one in geography, that foregrounds a reality …
Ontological Conflicts and the Stories of Peoples in Spite of Europe
Ontological conflicts (conflicts involving different assumptions about “what exists”) are gaining unprecedented visibility because the hegemony of modern ontological assumptions is undergoing a crisis. Such crisis provides the context and rationale for political ontology, a “project” that, emerging from the convergence of indigenous studies, science and technology studies (STS), posthumanism, and political ecology, tackles ontological conflicts a…
Reconfiguring the Web of Life
Storytelling Globalization from the Chaco and Beyond
About the Series Map List Preface Introduction. Globalization and the Struggle for Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise Part One. Puruhle/Genealogies 1. Laissez-Faire Progress: Invisibilizing the Yrmo 2. State-Driven Development: Stabilizing Modernity 3. Sustainable Development: Modernity Unravels? Part Two. Porowo/Moralities 4. Enacting the Yrmo 5. Taming Differences Part Three. Azle/Translations 6. Translating Neoliberalism 7. A World in which Many …
Political Ontology
In this article I seek to put into conversation two different but convergent intellectual/political projects, Lawrence Grossberg's ‘radically contextualist cultural studies’ and ‘political ontology’, an emergent analytical framework being developed by a loosely connected network of scholars. Central to both projects is the question of modernity, but while Grossberg's cultural studies focuses on the possibilities for multiple modernities immanent …
From Progress to Risk
The rationality that has made the adoption of participatory methodologies coherent for development is underlined. Post-development and reflexive development perspectives are compared and critically engaged. Changes in mainstream development discourses and practices, particularly their embracing of participation, point to the emergence of post-disciplinary technologies of control and the displacement of the notion of progress by that of risk. Thes…
The Threat of the Yrmo
Various misunderstandings and conflicts associated with attempts to integrate Indigenous Knowledges (IK) into development and conservation agendas have been analyzed from both political economy and political ecology frameworks. With their own particular inflections, and in addition to their focus on issues of power, both frameworks tend to see what occurs in these settings as involving different epistemologies, meaning that misunderstandings and …
The "Lettered City" and the Insurrection of Subjugated Knowledges in Latin America
This article explores how the knowledge practices of some academic-intellectuals are shifting in such a way as to signal a radical departure from the "traditional" role that academic-intellectuals have had in Latin America. This re-direction is part of a much larger process, namely, the gradual rejection of the modern project by increasingly larger sectors of the Latin American population, and their ongoing efforts to bring about "worlds and know…
Border Dialogue
Development and Changing Sovereignties
Introduction aux incommuns
Dans cet article, le terme « incommun » est présenté comme une réponse conceptuelle à des questions soulevées dans un contexte de conflits entourant l'échelle et l'étendue de plusieurs « communs » menacés par l'extractivisme. Il présente les articles de ce numéro spécial, soumis en réponse à l'invitation à réfléchir sur le concept des « incommuns » dans des situations variées. Il conclut que ces articles constituent un fort ancrage suggérant que …
Ontological Conflicts and the Stories of Peoples in Spite of Europe
Ontological conflicts (conflicts involving different assumptions about “what exists”) are gaining unprecedented visibility because the hegemony of modern ontological assumptions is undergoing a crisis. Such crisis provides the context and rationale for political ontology, a “project” that, emerging from the convergence of indigenous studies, science and technology studies (STS), posthumanism, and political ecology, tackles ontological conflicts a…
Ontology and indigeneity
The first challenge faced by a project that seeks to bring concerns with ontology and indigeneity into a conversation is to sort out the various (and possibly divergent) projects that are being mobilized when the former term is used, not the least because what do we mean by ontology impinges upon how we can conceive indigeneity. In this article I play a counterpoint between two 'ontological' projects: one in geography, that foregrounds a reality …
The Threat of the Yrmo
Various misunderstandings and conflicts associated with attempts to integrate Indigenous Knowledges (IK) into development and conservation agendas have been analyzed from both political economy and political ecology frameworks. With their own particular inflections, and in addition to their focus on issues of power, both frameworks tend to see what occurs in these settings as involving different epistemologies, meaning that misunderstandings and …
Is Another Cosmopolitics Possible
The concept of cosmopolitics developed by Isabelle Stengers and Bruno Latour keeps open the question of who and what might compose the common world. In this way, cosmopolitics offers a way to avoid the pitfalls of reasonable politics, a politics that, defining in advance that the differences at stake in a disagreement are between perspectives on a single reality, makes it possible to sideline some concerns by deeming them unrealistic and, therefo…
The Uncommons
This article introduces the term uncommons as a conceptual response to questions that emerged in the context of conflicts around the scale and scope of diverse "commons" that are under threat by extractivism. It introduces the articles for this special issue, which were the result of an invitation to think with the concept of uncommons for a variety of situations. It is concluded that these articles provide a strong grounding to think of uncommon…
The "Lettered City" and the Insurrection of Subjugated Knowledges in Latin America
This article explores how the knowledge practices of some academic-intellectuals are shifting in such a way as to signal a radical departure from the "traditional" role that academic-intellectuals have had in Latin America. This re-direction is part of a much larger process, namely, the gradual rejection of the modern project by increasingly larger sectors of the Latin American population, and their ongoing efforts to bring about "worlds and know…
Anthropology and STS
In this multi-authored essay, nine anthropologists working in different parts of the world take part in a conversation about the interfaces between anthropology and STS (science and technology studies). Through this conversation, multiple interfaces emerge that are heterogeneously composed according to the languages, places, and arguments from where they emerge. The authors explore these multiple interfaces as sites where encounters are also site…
On the properly political (disposition for the) Anthropocene
The environmental crises referenced by the term Anthropocene incite responses that reflect different understandings about the right way to live on Earth. This, one would expect, should generate a proliferation of disagreements and an expansion of politics. Yet, so-called post-political authors warn that, instead, the way in which the Anthropocene has been brought to the public eye implies an emptying out of politics and a disavowal of the inheren…
Doing and undoing Caribou/Atiku
More than one and less than many, has become a refrain to depict the notion of multiplicity. Borrowed from Mariyln Strathern, Annemarie Mol mobilized the refrain to succinctly capture the complex result of a series of operations that make a variety of practices hold together as a singular thing. In this article, I seek to explore some consequences of the proposition that multiplicity can be figured in, at least, two different ways: as diffraction…
Es otra cosmopolítica posible
una serie de relaciones y prácticas que muchos innu ven como fundamentales para su existencia
Introduction aux incommuns
Dans cet article, le terme « incommun » est présenté comme une réponse conceptuelle à des questions soulevées dans un contexte de conflits entourant l'échelle et l'étendue de plusieurs « communs » menacés par l'extractivisme. Il présente les articles de ce numéro spécial, soumis en réponse à l'invitation à réfléchir sur le concept des « incommuns » dans des situations variées. Il conclut que ces articles constituent un fort ancrage suggérant que …
Introduction aux incommuns
Dans cet article, le terme « incommun » est présenté comme une réponse conceptuelle à des questions soulevées dans un contexte de conflits entourant l'échelle et l'étendue de plusieurs « communs » menacés par l'extractivisme. Il présente les articles de ce numéro spécial, soumis en réponse à l'invitation à réfléchir sur le concept des « incommuns » dans des situations variées. Il conclut que ces articles constituent un fort ancrage suggérant que …
Development and Changing Sovereignties
Border Dialogue
The "Lettered City" and the Insurrection of Subjugated Knowledges in Latin America
This article explores how the knowledge practices of some academic-intellectuals are shifting in such a way as to signal a radical departure from the "traditional" role that academic-intellectuals have had in Latin America. This re-direction is part of a much larger process, namely, the gradual rejection of the modern project by increasingly larger sectors of the Latin American population, and their ongoing efforts to bring about "worlds and know…
Political Ontology
In this article I seek to put into conversation two different but convergent intellectual/political projects, Lawrence Grossberg's ‘radically contextualist cultural studies’ and ‘political ontology’, an emergent analytical framework being developed by a loosely connected network of scholars. Central to both projects is the question of modernity, but while Grossberg's cultural studies focuses on the possibilities for multiple modernities immanent …
From Progress to Risk
The rationality that has made the adoption of participatory methodologies coherent for development is underlined. Post-development and reflexive development perspectives are compared and critically engaged. Changes in mainstream development discourses and practices, particularly their embracing of participation, point to the emergence of post-disciplinary technologies of control and the displacement of the notion of progress by that of risk. Thes…
The Threat of the Yrmo
Various misunderstandings and conflicts associated with attempts to integrate Indigenous Knowledges (IK) into development and conservation agendas have been analyzed from both political economy and political ecology frameworks. With their own particular inflections, and in addition to their focus on issues of power, both frameworks tend to see what occurs in these settings as involving different epistemologies, meaning that misunderstandings and …
Storytelling Globalization from the Chaco and Beyond
About the Series Map List Preface Introduction. Globalization and the Struggle for Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise Part One. Puruhle/Genealogies 1. Laissez-Faire Progress: Invisibilizing the Yrmo 2. State-Driven Development: Stabilizing Modernity 3. Sustainable Development: Modernity Unravels? Part Two. Porowo/Moralities 4. Enacting the Yrmo 5. Taming Differences Part Three. Azle/Translations 6. Translating Neoliberalism 7. A World in which Many …
Reconfiguring the Web of Life
Ontological Conflicts and the Stories of Peoples in Spite of Europe
Ontological conflicts (conflicts involving different assumptions about “what exists”) are gaining unprecedented visibility because the hegemony of modern ontological assumptions is undergoing a crisis. Such crisis provides the context and rationale for political ontology, a “project” that, emerging from the convergence of indigenous studies, science and technology studies (STS), posthumanism, and political ecology, tackles ontological conflicts a…
Ontology and indigeneity
The first challenge faced by a project that seeks to bring concerns with ontology and indigeneity into a conversation is to sort out the various (and possibly divergent) projects that are being mobilized when the former term is used, not the least because what do we mean by ontology impinges upon how we can conceive indigeneity. In this article I play a counterpoint between two 'ontological' projects: one in geography, that foregrounds a reality …
Anthropology and STS
In this multi-authored essay, nine anthropologists working in different parts of the world take part in a conversation about the interfaces between anthropology and STS (science and technology studies). Through this conversation, multiple interfaces emerge that are heterogeneously composed according to the languages, places, and arguments from where they emerge. The authors explore these multiple interfaces as sites where encounters are also site…
Is Another Cosmopolitics Possible
The concept of cosmopolitics developed by Isabelle Stengers and Bruno Latour keeps open the question of who and what might compose the common world. In this way, cosmopolitics offers a way to avoid the pitfalls of reasonable politics, a politics that, defining in advance that the differences at stake in a disagreement are between perspectives on a single reality, makes it possible to sideline some concerns by deeming them unrealistic and, therefo…
The Uncommons
This article introduces the term uncommons as a conceptual response to questions that emerged in the context of conflicts around the scale and scope of diverse "commons" that are under threat by extractivism. It introduces the articles for this special issue, which were the result of an invitation to think with the concept of uncommons for a variety of situations. It is concluded that these articles provide a strong grounding to think of uncommon…
Prácticas otras de conocimiento(s)
Esta obra colegiada tiene un encuentro luminoso con la liberación de los pueblos oprimidos. Su destino está trazado: va a convertirse en una obra de referencia y lo será cada vez más en la medida en que los años pasen. Es una obra de nuestro tiempo, en lo que nuestro tiempo ofrece de más genuina esperanza a los pueblos oprimidos, de más articulada visión de los retos de la liberación, de más consistente diseño de los caminos sentipensantes de la …
Prácticas otras de conocimiento(s)
En este tomo II escribimos consultoras activistas, feministas pos y decoloniales, investigadores(as) activistas, activistas investigadores(as), así como profesores investigadores latinoamericanos(as), socialistas y latinoamericanistas. Cada uno(a), a nuestra manera, situamos y problematizamos nuestras prácticas de conocimiento, deteniéndonos unas en las dimensiones epistémicas, éticas, de género y de poder; otros, en las metodológicas, políticas,…
Doing and undoing Caribou/Atiku
More than one and less than many, has become a refrain to depict the notion of multiplicity. Borrowed from Mariyln Strathern, Annemarie Mol mobilized the refrain to succinctly capture the complex result of a series of operations that make a variety of practices hold together as a singular thing. In this article, I seek to explore some consequences of the proposition that multiplicity can be figured in, at least, two different ways: as diffraction…
Outra Cosmopolítica É Possível
O conceito de cosmopolítica desenvolvido por Isabelle Stengers e Bruno Latour permite manter aberta a questão de quem e o que pode compor o mundo comum. Deste modo, cosmopolítica oferece uma ferramenta para se evitar as armadilhas da política razoável [reasonable politics], uma política que, definindo de antemão que as diferenças em jogo em um dado desacordo fazem referência a uma realidade única, torna possível deixar de lado algumas preocupaçõe…
Es otra cosmopolítica posible
una serie de relaciones y prácticas que muchos innu ven como fundamentales para su existencia
On the properly political (disposition for the) Anthropocene
The environmental crises referenced by the term Anthropocene incite responses that reflect different understandings about the right way to live on Earth. This, one would expect, should generate a proliferation of disagreements and an expansion of politics. Yet, so-called post-political authors warn that, instead, the way in which the Anthropocene has been brought to the public eye implies an emptying out of politics and a disavowal of the inheren…
Sobre o Antropoceno propriamente político, ou sobre a disposição propriamente política para o Antropoceno
The environmental crises referenced by the term Anthropocene incite responses that reflect different understandings about the right way to live on Earth. This, one would expect, should generate a proliferation of disagreements and an expansion of politics. Yet, so-called post-political authors warn that, instead, the way in which the Anthropocene has been brought to the public eye implies an emptying out of politics and a disavowal of the inheren…
Desde la racionalidad cosmopolita a la ontología política y la cosmopolítica
Este diálogo con Mario Blaser recorre su trayectoria desde Argentina a Canadá, en el cual revisita uno de sus primeros artículos, que fue publicado en la revista Runa. Archivo para las Ciencias del Hombre. A pesar de la perspectiva culturalista que hegemonizaba la Antropología argentina a comienzos de la década del noventa, y de la falta de conceptos adecuados para canalizar las inquietudes en aquél entonces, Blaser encuentra allí preocupaciones …
The vanishing forest that does not disappear
This commentary engages Özge Can Doğmuş's argument that disappearance should be understood as an effect of unequal exposure to finitude. Drawing on an ethnographic vignette from the Chaco forest, it argues that this formulation presupposes the stability of disappearance as an event, whereas political ontology requires treating the event itself as uncertain and relationally constituted. The article's tension between a Heideggerian grounding in fin…
Postscript
In this commentary, I reflect on the illuminating effects of comparative play. Reading the contributions from the vantage point of work on cosmopolitics and political ontology in Latin America, it examines what comparison brings into view and what it unsettles. The contrast drawn between cosmopolitical arrangements in Southeast Asia and those in the Americas is shown to be illuminating insofar as similar histories of entanglement, accommodation, …
Sociology (16 works) · Political science (14 works) · Philosophy (12 works) · Politics (11 works) · Epistemology (10 works) · Law (10 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Computer Science (6 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (6 works) · Ontology (6 works)