Decomposition as Life Politics

Soils, Selva, and Small Farmers under the Gun of the U.S.–Colombia War on Drugs

Datos Bibliográficos

ID7193059
AutoresK Lyons (0000-0003-2832-9425, University of California, Santa Cruz, autor de correspondencia), Kristina Marie Lyons
Año2015
Volumen31
Número1
Páginas56-81
Fecha de publicación2015-10-23
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaCultural Anthropology (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0886-7356 • E-ISSN: 1548-1360
EditorialWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.14506/ca31.1.04
OpenAlexW2256136176
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas76
Referencias citadas17

How is life in a criminalized ecology in the Andean-Amazonian foothills of southwestern Colombia? In what way does antinarcotics policy that aims to eradicate la mata que mata (the plant that kills) pursue peace through poison? Relatedly, how do people keep on cultivating a garden, caring for forest, or growing food when at any moment a crop-duster plane may pass overhead, indiscriminately spraying herbicides over entire landscapes? Since 2000, the U.S.–Colombian War on Drugs has relied on the militarized aerial fumigation of coca plants, coupled with alternative development interventions that aim to forcibly eradicate illicit livelihoods. Through ethnographic engagement with small farmers in the frontier department of Putumayo, the gateway to the country’s Amazon and a region that has been the focus of counternarcotic operations, this article explores the different possibilities and foreclosures for life and death that emerge in a tropical forest ecology under military duress. By following farmers, their material practices, and their life philosophies, I trace the ways in which human-soil relations come to potentiate forms of resistance to the violence and criminalization produced by militarized, growth-oriented development. Rather than productivity—one of the central elements of modern capitalist growth—the regenerative capacity of these ecologies relies on organic decay, impermanence, decomposition, and even fragility that complicates modernist bifurcations of living and dying, allowing, I argue, for ecological imaginaries and life processes that do not rely on productivity or growth to strive into existence

Agriculture · Biology · Deforestation (computer science · Indigenous · Livelihood · Political ecology · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Crime, Illicit Activities, and Governance · Law · Wildlife Conservation and Criminology Analyses · Ecology