coe008_nelson.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:26] Welcome back to the Cultures of Energy podcast, I

Speaker2: [00:00:29] Thank you very much.

Speaker1: [00:00:30] I am Dominique Boyer. Just having been cut off by my co-host,

Speaker2: [00:00:34] O this co-host right here. Oh yes, so many. How? Yes.

Speaker1: [00:00:38] As always, I

Speaker2: [00:00:39] Promise never to do it again.

Speaker1: [00:00:41] As always, coming to you from the basement of London Library at Rice University, thanks to the Digital Media Commons and special thanks to the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences sense cultures of energy Borg, who sponsors our podcast. We have a great show this week, as always.

Speaker2: [00:00:57] Shouldn't that be? Which sponsors are a podcast?

Speaker1: [00:00:59] Did I say who? It's OK. Well, it's

Speaker2: [00:01:01] Made of people. We're made of people.

Speaker1: [00:01:03] We're made of people. In the end, all people all the way down, just material.

Speaker2: [00:01:06] It's all turtle material, all the way down.

Speaker1: [00:01:09] It's just atoms and blood and guts.

Speaker2: [00:01:11] And I'm not talking about the adamski atoms, but the &TO and the atomic atoms.

Speaker1: [00:01:16] Obviously, we're lacking a little focus this morning, but we do have a great show for you. And our interview this week is with Diane Nelson, a professor of anthropology at Duke University, who has been doing really fascinating work in Guatemala for years and years on the aftermath of state violence on Mayan revitalization. And her most recent book is called Who Counts, which came out with Duke University Press last year. And it focuses on a lot of things. But one of them is this sort of resistance to Western mathematics and Mayan a sort of return to Mayan numeracy in Guatemala. And there's also an anti-mining angle to it, too. So there's a connection to the environment, but all of that is complicated and will be worked out in due course. What I want to say about Diane Nelson also, and this is not exactly, I would say, a pet peeve of mine, but just an observation about our fellow academics and anthropologists is that oftentimes there seems to be, despite having what I think is probably one of the best jobs in the world still, which is to be a tenured professor of anthropology or tenured professor at a research university. And even though that is increasingly not the norm and because of casualisation is increasingly difficult, a difficult kind of job to get. For those of us who have these jobs who are fortunate enough, I always feel like we should be enjoying them more like we should be having more fun. We should be having a little more joy in our work. And Diane Nelson is somebody who seems to take a lot of joy in her work. In addition to being a brilliant scholar, she's a fun person and she brings performative into her work. Anyone who's seen one of her lectures knows that it's not just, you know, the thoughts on the paper, but she really makes it into a performance. So anyway, really glad that she's with us this week.

Speaker2: [00:03:11] Well, you'll find out in our conversation that she is absolutely the reverse of someone who is all about sort of dry, intellectual laboring in the trenches of the archives because you're actually going to get to hear about an exciting experience just briefly of hot tub being in Puerto Rico as a feminist act. So be aware like you've thrown down the gauntlet to make for a more exciting academic life. And already, Diane Nelson is a couple of decades ahead of us and that and that endeavor.

Speaker1: [00:03:44] It really seems like she is. Yeah.

Speaker2: [00:03:46] So in this conversation, we do talk about mining and the kind of the dark side of these extractive practices and what it means for indigenous and mestizo people in places like Guatemala, and also the impact that it has in the environment and in ecosystems where this is taking place. But we also have some really interesting conversations about numeracy, like you mentioned and the action and the practice of counting. So who counts in the sense of who qualifies as a valid subject as a human being versus a non-human being? So how that accountancy comes into play in terms of who's valid in the eyes of the state or in the eyes of human rights discourses, for example, but also who counts in the sense of who is able to undertake the practice of counting and how the practice of counting makes a difference. And so we get to hear about the base 20, which is the Mayan system. So get your 400s ready. This is a good test for everyone who's been living in a base ten world. Get out your calculators and start thinking differently

Speaker1: [00:04:55] Because you're so sick of based on like Face Tan can just

Speaker2: [00:04:59] Go well, you could. You could double up or double down on base tea and start thinking in those kinds of metrics because it's a different kind of kind of process. We also have some fantastic conversations about the beginnings of zero zero as a no or a non no. How zero can be taken, either as the sum of nothing, you know, nothing can be. Begin with zero or the zero is the origins of everything in the world and very different ways of thinking about that. But I think one of the key things that we get from Diane Nelson's discussion is that for several decades now, and I'm not going to give you the precise here, but I feel like it was around 1995 or so that she started working in Guatemala. So she's been working in a country that has suffered one of the most massive genocides in human history, primarily against indigenous people in a very biologically rich environment, I might add. And so I think one of the things that we can learn from scholars who work with survivors of genocide is how we might think about the parallels between the Anthropocene and genocide. If there's something, if you know, if there's if we see parallels there between genocide and extinction, for example. So these are these are key moments.

Speaker1: [00:06:19] Well, it's going to be a great interview. Listen on. But before that, did you want to make?

Speaker2: [00:06:24] Yeah. Well, the other thing that we kind of can't help but think of when we think of Mayan calendars, I mean, any of us who've lived in the North and been anywhere near a movie theater in the last couple of decades are things like the Mayan calendar at 2012, right? And all the big blockbuster movies and all of the hype and scare about that. So you have these movies like Apocalypto, which was just a gory bloodbath that's, you know, supposedly this Mayan apocalypse. And and then you had the movie 2012, which I think I had the pleasure of not seeing because I think I've heard pretty terrible things about it. But when it gets us thinking about and we've been talking about this for a while, we have for a while is to, you know, whether it might be interesting to do a conversation about some of these films that are maybe they have a kind of an apocalyptic edge to them, but more than that, they have a cliffie potential to them. They have a climate science fiction potential to them, but not just in the form of the novel novel or the sci fi, but in the form of filmic form,

Speaker1: [00:07:31] Sounding the social unconscious for the symptoms of our Anthropocene condition. How about that something like that?

Speaker2: [00:07:38] Yes, exactly. Yeah. And also visualizing, I guess too, although we'd be sounding it out here. So you think of films like Elysium or Interstellar is is another potential community gravity Mad Max Fury Road.

Speaker1: [00:07:56] Oh, that's a good one. That's a very good one.

Speaker2: [00:07:58] Maybe the Martian, Martian and gravity are perhaps useful in the sense that they kind of signal, you know what a post Earth life might be like. And you know what? We're going to have to manage and negotiate. So I think they they offer a lot there, too, or whatever. You know this next James Cameron avatar vehicle is going to be like, that's guaranteed to have some kind of right, you know, end of the environmental world as we know it, you know, eco side bent to it.

Speaker1: [00:08:28] So it's kind of a callback to some of the things we're talking to Paolo Bacigalupi about our very first podcast. So yes, we should definitely do that. Let's think about that. And and whenever

Speaker2: [00:08:39] The water knife comes out, you know, has that other really big book of his? I'm sure that's going to be a movie. It's it's built for a movie.

Speaker1: [00:08:46] Sure, it should be.

Speaker2: [00:08:48] It reads like it's ready to go just straight into production.

Speaker1: [00:08:52] Didn't commit to. He didn't say there was anything actually under discussion. But anyhow, so for the moment, though, let's move on to the interview with Diane Nelson.

Speaker2: [00:09:11] So we are sitting here today with Diane Nelson, and it's so lovely to be here with you, I think you might be actually the best humored anthropologist ever. Thank you. You've always had such a fantastic sense of humor, and it's something that you've brought into your work, too. Way back in the olden days, I did a review of your first book, and I remember there was so much fantastic humor in it and use of comic strips and even about these topics that were fairly well, not fairly but very dire and and disturbing. And yet you were able to sort of blend humor into it. So it was just, I think that's a really wonderful part of your work.

Speaker3: [00:09:50] Thank you. I feel like it's a very difficult task for an anthropologist, especially one who's Caucasian and comes from the United States, and so is a gringa right. Someone who's crossed that border to try to represent in a way that is actually loyal to what people have experienced in a place like Guatemala, especially given the role of the United States historically in the history of that country. And over and over again, this feeling of being there and witnessing something that felt unbearable and then finding that Guatemalans would like do this, turn this sort of talking into something that made it bearable, right? Almost through an act of will, but often through humor. And so trying to not just get into that mode of like I am the I have suffered because I am bringing you these stories, which is, of course, incredibly problematic. But then also again, trying to represent in as real a way how people have dealt with things like the histories of racism in Guatemala, the histories of this war that was genocidal and somehow getting through that. And so I know it's sometimes in the Mary Douglas sense. It's almost like dirt. It's matter out of place to bring humor into some of these sites. And yet it's also the way that so many people live through them. So again, trying to make that present again to represent is part of what I've tried to do. I'm glad it worked for you. I know it hasn't always worked for everyone of my readers.

Speaker2: [00:11:22] It worked for this one, for sure. And so we were just actually before we started talking for the podcast, we were reminiscing about about the olden days and times in cities and talking about David Bowie. And so I had a recollection of another shared event that that you and I had. And this is the little Easter egg question, because we were joking last night that you were going to try and grow a mustache between yesterday and today when we were meeting up because you wanted to be as good as John Hartigan, who came in with the massive mustache and we got to talk all about his stash, and here are the entire story. But so even though you have not successfully grown a mustache overnight

Speaker3: [00:12:09] Despite menopause,

Speaker2: [00:12:12] Give it time we can. We can always aspire. I will. I will remind you of hot tub being together in Puerto Rico. Oh yeah. So and you don't remember this, I'm sure, but I do, because you were the famous Diane Nelson. I was like, There she is. There she is. So we were having the Latin American Studies Association conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and I just had to remind you about that because there's nothing quite as exquisite as going to an academic conference and then going hot to being with a bunch of scholars is it's the strangest form of sociology. So how do we make that environmental? Let's ask you this question. I was trying to I'm like grasping for a question there because really, I just wanted to talk about hot tub being in Puerto Rico, but I

Speaker3: [00:12:59] Love that memory. And I, I mean, in some ways, to me, that's what feminism has brought to the academy is like, Yes, you have bodies. We're not a Cartesian brain in a vat, although sometimes it feels like you're in a vat in a hot tub. I don't know if you remember, but the joke we were saying was, as someone who has worked in Central America, you've worked there too. The question of like Puerto Rico being kind of so betwixt in between and like some of it feels just like mainland United States, and some of it feels just like Latin America, but the sort of in between ness of it. And then we got to the hot tub and there were, I think there were like 20 people in a place. Yeah, exactly. We're like, Yeah, this is the Latin America part where everybody gets in in the U.S. there would have to be all this space and all that sort of Anglo body problem. I was like, Oh yes, now we're really in Latin America because we're all, we're all happy and close together.

Speaker2: [00:13:50] Right? And it's hard to imagine this happening at the anthropology meetings, but it does happen at the Latin American Studies meeting, and that is a very good thing. So I also wanted to take some time to talk about a recent book of yours, which is called Who Counts the Mathematics of Death and Life After Genocide. So clearly, you know, a very serious book, but again, the ways that you've woven humor into it, I think is really fantastic. One of the key tropes that we see in the book is this question of numeracy. And so you you write in the book about, you know, the Mayan calendar and the way that Mayan people have used numbers differently than than our systems here in the North. So they have a base tow system of of accounting and we use a base 10. And so these are different numeric systems. And when we're talking about numbers and numerics, there's a lot of philosophical questions to sort of pose to to those forms of accounting, write those forms of metrics. And one of the things that's become very prominent in our discourses around the Anthropocene and environmental change is the use of numbers to tally and threatened, perhaps to try and create a set of techniques for frightening people or informing them. And so I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about the specific power of numbers to inform the way that we think about the world, either effectively or more consciously. And you know how you how you see those numerics working in terms of of human sociality in Guatemala or or elsewhere? What is the power of numbers for us?

Speaker3: [00:15:42] That's a very rich question. I will try to answer it somewhat concisely like numbers would do. Well, first, I chose the title because it kind of works on exactly that tension that you're bringing up, the question of who counts is kind of literally who is able to add and subtract who is considered capable of these sort of very intense intellectual. Calculative possibilities, and, you know, when we think about the history of Western thought it's always been about that belongs to white men, right? And again, whether it's Descartes or Conte's right, what is the sort of functioning subject? It's the one that can sort of manipulate these things. And of course, Mary Poovie has done that nice work of showing us how numbers sort of stop being connected to necromancy and alchemy, and these things that were actually seemed quite dangerous and being brought in, you know, over centuries and sort of Euro America through double entry bookkeeping, which of course, is deeply connected to capitalism and extracting surplus, but brought that in to become the modern fact, right? That thing that stands objective, alone, unconnected, you know, in any way. So counting to me in that first sense of like one two three four five or, you know, doing the labors of mathematics of adding, subtracting, multiplying, dividing connects very completely and complexly to the idea of who counts in the sense of who matters.

Speaker3: [00:17:06] And so much of those histories are also about who gets included and the fully human and who is then dehumanized, which is, of course, about indigenous people. Historically, Africans throughout the enslavement process, it's women very much right. That joke about, you know, remember the old Barbie who had a voice box and said, counting is hard. And the way many of us when you bring up affect, right? That numbers are actually incredibly shot through with feeling and either senses of worth or being unworthy that I can't do it. I can't do the sum. And then that being part of like the reason why you don't deserve full human rights because you don't count you, you can't count. So I was trying to sort of think a bunch of those things together in terms of what's going on in Guatemala, which is a very small country. It's the size of Ohio. And yet I think there's so many things going on there that connect up to these large, the large scale issues you're asking about in terms of the Anthropocene and sort of how something like numbers can work through and against experiential sort of projects to produce. And here you're talking about the ethics of trying to scare people, right? Like, Do this now or you will die, do this now or your children will suffer these horrible, you know, hunger game like experiences.

Speaker3: [00:18:23] And yet what I was also trying to think very much about is someone who has found numbers in math very frightening for much of my life and I still actually count on my fingers is to not disdain. Right? The embodiment of numbers, the relationally of numbers, the sort of labors that numbers can do. And when you brought up questions about Mayan math, I kind of got pulled into this whole project by kind of following folks that I had been working with around more obvious cultural rights practices after the genocide, as these people were starting to go into workshops where they were being taught, how to read pre-Columbian Mayan glyphs and where they were being taught to do some of that sort of calculative work with this other number formation. And so I started taking those classes with some of my friends and sort of activism circles and being like, Whoa, this is so interesting because the numbers themselves were important. But then there was all of this aura around the numbers, and I don't have any. If you have seen stand and deliver that film about sort of teaching Latino Chicano kids calculus, and in Los

Speaker2: [00:19:34] Angeles, a true story are based on a true story. Yes.

Speaker3: [00:19:37] And I don't know if this line was actually spoken by the actual math teacher, but it's in the film where he's he's trying to encourage these young people who can feel that they don't count right there, the the subaltern. And yet, he says, you know, math is in your blood bottles. You know, the Maya knew zero before anyone in Europe did. Yeah. So that way in which again, sort of the number brings the sense of pride, right? It doesn't belong to white people, actually. We had it first, right? So being in these spaces and having you know, yes, these are generally white people who are teaching it a pig, roofers and archeologists. And I totally give a shout out to them spending their summers doing this work. But to hear someone tell them, No, you knew. You know, your ancestors knew that Venus was a planet and not a star before the Greeks did all this highly vaunted people. Right? Your people knew about zero centuries before it became it came into use in Europe. And then suddenly, you know, some of those senses of who counts, he matters start to turn on their head. So that's part of what I was trying to think about throughout the course of the book. Mm hmm. The question about numbers in the Anthropocene might be bigger because numbers are, of course, not objective. They don't stand alone. They're always being produced. Helen Veron, who's done really wonderful work on mathematics across different understanding systems, talks very much that sort of. Targets are always being made and unmade, right, the very process of going from one to two to two itself, right? Is this constant movement within numbers? And once you think of them as related rather than, you know, that sort of myth of them standing alone, it helps you do other kinds of work. I think, to think about them as being brought into not only relations between each other, but but within sort of sets of people. So yes, don't be afraid of numbers, I guess is what we're missing with this. Mm hmm.

Speaker2: [00:21:37] Mm hmm. Yeah. And we can we can come back to those numbers as a source of comfort at times two or as instruments or tools for making certain arguments, right? But they're never neutral and they're never neutered in terms of their their power to have influence. As the sociologist know very well, right, the kind of the quantitative, the metrics may make a difference in terms of making a case.

Speaker3: [00:22:02] Yes, very much so. And again, but to think about that historically that it's really only in the past 150 years that numbers could do that kind of work, I think helps us to fetishize them. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm.

Speaker2: [00:22:15] So, you know, one of the other things that is remarkable about Guatemala and about Mayan people in particular, I mean, we've been talking about how, you know, they came up with the concept of of zero before anyone else. And there's a beautiful set of of glyphs in your book that show representations of of zero, which are very unique and distinct, but also very, very lovely to look at just, you know, as a kind of an object or an image.

Speaker3: [00:22:46] And can I just add to that? One of the things that kind of blew my mind is, if you know, Brian Rothmans beautiful book called signifying nothing about the sort of. Just. The horror of the emptiness that zero brought with it when it came through Arabic enumeration in and again through double entry bookkeeping, which also brought all these forms of capital relations and accounting. And you know, he reads King Lear as sort of this long disquisition on zero as the horror right that the nothing can come from nothing. And what's so interesting is that the Mayans zero doesn't carry that. And in fact, the glyphs that you're talking about are shells or flowers or seeds, which are often also very close to representations of women's genitalia. So it's very much this sense of a beginning of life, a place in which sort of, you know, a seed is simultaneously the end of something the plant that gave, you know, gave us the seed in the beginning of the next generation. So I find that really interesting, and I found that folks who are thinking through this within Mayan revitalization work, you know, keep trying to think about the ground zero of genocide, but not as that sort of destruction of everything that emptiness the null category, but as this new beginning for something else. So I found that really helpful for thinking to

Speaker2: [00:24:06] Zero as a kind of origin. Yeah, place, right? And yeah, all these different ways of sort of conceptualizing it or living with this so-called no right. It becomes a very metaphysical question, I think. Yeah. I mean, one of one of the other things we know about about Guatemala, of course, is that the country and particularly indigenous people and campesinos really suffered extraordinarily through the genocide. And genocide is a kind of optic that we often hear about the Anthropocene as well. Right, although maybe not put in precisely those terms. So I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about what it means to work in a place that has experienced the massive, massive loss of human life and destruction of environmental spaces that came along with that to some degree and life ways that were destroyed also as families were were murdered. And you know, whether there's lessons for us there for thinking about our own collective future in terms of the environmental crises that that we're facing now. If there's lessons that we can take away from from the experience of genocide and and to kind of fold that into our our ways of approaching questions of environmental destruction and potential loss of a lot of biotic life.

Speaker3: [00:25:36] It's a big question. I guess one of the things that would help me start to answer it is the way that Donna Hurunui has been talking about the Anthropocene by saying it should probably be called the capitalism. Yes, right? And the ways in which the the really massive murder of people over the course of the sort of early 1980s in Guatemala that the genocide was about capital relations, right? It wasn't. There was a huge amount of racism. But you follow Eric Williams's argument, right, that racism is not a cause of exploitation, of particularly colored people, but it comes through capitalism itself and the way it, you know, is sort of a machine for sorting and creating the people who are going to exploit and the people who will be exploited. And so and what the United Nations Commission for Historical Clarification report did in the 12 volumes was this double work of counting because no one had actually been able to count up the number of losses, the number of massacres, in part because there had been such massive destruction and people had been, you know, scattered all over and had also been traumatized. But it also told this story of those numbers being in relation to these longer term relational cities, right to the land, to particular forms of production.

Speaker3: [00:27:04] And I know there can be a sort of very strong romantic tendency to think about indigenous peoples and their relations to land as somehow being, you know, in the noble savage trope. And yet, I mean, the way in which so many people that I know in Guatemala, the relationship to the land and the corn and the sort of old mythic stories about what a human being is made of. If you understand your your essence, your ontology, being corn, right, the sort of origin stories that humans were made by the deities out of corn. It does create this different sort of relation to the land, and many people do these reciprocal engagements right, leaving gifts before they begin to cut open the Earth. Following some of these things that U.S. farmers are now realizing, you have to leave lands fallow, you have to, you know, sort of put crops in that gives something back to the land, the so-called sacred trinity of Latin America, right with the corn and the beans and the squash, which sort of taken give in these sort of complex ways, completely different to the mono cropping right? The kinds of

Speaker2: [00:28:11] Ceremonies, right? The three

Speaker3: [00:28:12] Sisters? Exactly. Yeah. And so those kinds of knowledge is that people totally maintain in the face of, you know, sort of encroaching mono cropping are very much also what the war was about. People saying, we need land, we need to sort of defend, you know, our communities in relation to those landscapes and our ability to feed ourselves and this other sort of form, which is like, No, you're going to be enclosed, you're going to be cut off from that land. What Marx calls bloody legislation, right? That does that sort of work of then freeing people to become labor on mono cropping coffee or coffee or cotton or sugar? And now, of course, African palm and some of these other newer mono crops that are going in. So that struggle right, which is about genocide, is very much about the capitalist scene, too. So I see them as intimately linked, and I think a lot of the Mayan activists see them is also intimately linked.

Speaker2: [00:29:09] Mm hmm. I mean, you know, speaking of of land and different forms of farming and movement for a very long time and the pattern which is in the northern part of Guatemala and is a heavily forested region in or was. And that's kind of part of the question here, too, is that at least for many decades, people from various parts of Guatemala have been coming to the pattern and sort of, you know, finding a niche and finding a space or making a space in the forest. And often, you know, migrants to these these spaces come where the roads have been laid right. So as as agriculture occurs or as you know, whatever forms of modernist industrialization happens to be going on. So goes the road and so goes the the people who would then come and inhabit some spaces in the forest. This has been very controversial. From an environmental point of view, because slash and burn practices take place as people move into these spaces and try and find sustainable living spaces for themselves and their families. They tend to be impoverished people. And yet there's an environmental consequence to that, too. So I wonder if you can speak a little bit to that question of. You know, sort of merging into the forest and how that equates with questions of human rights for the ability of people to make a living and survive not in opposition to, but perhaps, you know, juxtaposing that against the question of quote unquote environmental rights and the need to preserve these these lungs of the Earth. It's, you know, they sort of famously like to say about rainforest regions.

Speaker3: [00:31:07] That's a nice bringing a lot of things together. It's actually there's a whole sort of area that I condone jungle area, which the lowlands on the other side of the Mahtani Mountains and then go up into sort of the southern part of Chiapas and then through Pétain. So which has been heavily forested historically, although this is also the place where those quote unquote great Mayan civilizations arose. So archaeologists actually talk somewhat tongue in cheek about the Maya scene, in which the ways in which human sort of livelihoods in that in those areas, they see these massive transformations that occurred from sort of. 200 100 B.C. through to the sort of flourishing of the classic Maya period, massive transformations that, you know, those forests are actually relatively new. Five or 600 years old. So again, just to remember these longer, these long dead days and then to put this and I know there's a sort of tendency among some environmentalists as well as looking down on Guatemala from sort of the position of the United States. And those are our lungs, of course, whose are they to not think again about these longer histories, even if we just think about the last hundred years in Guatemala, where rather than sort of create a land reform that would give land to the people who needed it, which is, of course, what Jacobo Arbenz was trying to do in the 1950s, when he was overthrown by a CIA coup was to divide up some of these big plantations or producing against sugar bananas through incredibly non-sustainable ways like massive use of fertilizers and pesticides and herbicides.

Speaker3: [00:32:52] Instead of breaking those up right, what the coup did was stop any sort of ability to do that. So what the army, the military governments that were put in place after 1954 did was they sent colonizers into those forest areas. People weren't going there on their own. They were struggling to sort of stay where they were and be able to subsist on the land that was being encroached on by coffee and other things. So they were being sent up there to do this. Just unbelievably backbreaking work, you know, surrounded by snakes and trees that, if you touch them, could kill you. And I mean, I've talked to people who were part of some of those early colonization efforts. And again, all these other doors had been closed by politics. And this, as you said, was sort of the place to be able to feed their families. And there was an interesting combination with some of the liberation theology priests who were also working, who were helping sort of with this colonization effort because they also saw all those doors closed and that being the only window for getting people to be able to live. So the beginnings of that destruction were this complex concatenation of these sort of hopes for these other ways of being in relation to the world and to each other with the military.

Speaker3: [00:34:08] And, you know, sort of capitalist projects. And then those areas which were not heavily populated, but with people who had gone through that backbreaking labor and basically had developed revolutionary consciousness by doing that became places where the guerrilla were quite strong in the 60s and 70s, and so they became intensely militarized. That's where a lot of the major massacres of the war in the early in the late 1970s and early 1980s occurred in the baton in an area that's called the ISKCON. And so once those people were cleared out but they had put in some cash crops, they were, you know, put in some maize or corn. Then what the army did was take people who had been supporting them or had been militarized through these paramilitary civil patrols and gave them that land right once all the work had been done. They literally moved into these people's houses who had either been killed or had gone to take refuge in Mexico, in southern Mexico. So then you see this really interesting connectivity between some of those people. And I think the Zapatista project in the early 90s, I think it came out of those refugee and that sort of landscape and set of people thinking and working together

Speaker2: [00:35:22] And also the La Comden,

Speaker3: [00:35:23] Which then becomes a heavily militarized zone. Right when the Mexican army comes in from the other side. So you see the set of things happening and then as Guatemala sort of goes through the worst of the war in the late in the mid 80s and comes out and trying to sort of get back onto international lending patterns and, you know, get aid again after being a human rights pariah. Part of what they were going to do was also use this quote unquote empty land to sort of. U.s. World Bank funding and other ways to start started development project. And so that's when you get increasing colonization, that's when you get the literally people kind of sent there by the army to do that first, like very, very difficult work with almost no technology at all. And then right behind them come like African palm mana cropping plantations, which I had actually not been to the baton since the early 1990s. I went in 1985 and it was pretty amazing forest cover and I went again two years ago, and it was just literally from horizon to horizon. Hour after hour in a little microbus, African palm and nothing else.

Speaker2: [00:36:41] And that's used as a cooking oil.

Speaker3: [00:36:42] It's a cooking oil as well as a biofuel. So it's simultaneously about producing, but it's also speculative, like there's a lot of financial investments in African palm sort of. With this idea, it's going to go somewhere else in addition to where it is. So you just see in that incredibly fragile space of, you know, what was a rainforest, you know, all these sort of different tendrils of people's hopes and dreams and also completely smashed because the other sort of thing that had started occurring even in the 1960s when that whole zone was militarized is drug transshipment. Not so much production, but much more transshipment. And that was I don't think anyone doesn't understand that it was also the members of the military who were heavily involved with that and like, literally pretend didn't have a government. It only had military until the mid-1980s and precious woods and other kinds of things that, you know, sort of making the military very financially secure. Complicated stories, which also led them to be able to carry out genocide because they didn't really care about the elites quite so much because a little bit like the FARC in Colombia, they they had their own sort of sources of revenue. But some of the most elite military who were actually trained up in the Bataan became the basis of the Zetas, right? This this cartel and those are all Guatemalans trained in, you know, genocidal civil war who are carrying that out. So you see this whole concatenation of interests going on there, which makes these bigger questions of how does one save a rainforest or how does one sustain, you know, a space of that kind of biodiversity and photosynthesizing and carbon sequestration and all those things we care about now? It's very complicated, right? How to understand what's going on there? What to me doesn't seem complicated. Is this very simplifying attempt to sort of blame these small farmers right for what's going on

Speaker2: [00:38:39] Because that's often how it's framed.

Speaker3: [00:38:41] Exactly. And and that just is this nice disguise or camouflage for all the other interests that are actually doing the destruction. Mm hmm.

Speaker2: [00:38:49] Mm hmm. Right. And the fact that you can see African palm plantations for, you know, miles and miles on every horizon line, it's pretty disturbing that that's even changed in that short amount of time. Perhaps not surprising, but still disturbing. So we were talking about, you know, thinking about the kind of slash and burn practices or quit in agriculture and the the trees manas, the three sisters. I realized that we should maybe describe what that is. I mean, it's sort of a very famously, I guess, well known in Latin America, a form of horticulture in a very sustainable form of horticulture where you have corn growing and corn, of course, grows up in a stalk and gets very tall and makes for a very nice poll of sorts. And then you have beans which like to wrap around something in order to be happy in their plant life and beans also provide nitrogen fixing in the soil. So those two are happy together. Two sisters already, and then we have the third sister, which is squash and squash, of course, grows across the soil and provides erosion protection and, you know, fortifies the soil in its own form. So here you have this sort of perfect confluence of biotic forms. And the other spectacular thing about the rice manas is that eaten together, this is a complete protein.

Speaker3: [00:40:25] And so and with the sort of what's often called montée, right? But like all of the wild plants and other things that sort of, you know, grow around it, many of which are edible, many of which sort of sustain beehives and sustain, you know, sort of these other multi species life life forms, right? You know, so you have your chickens running around in there and you know it again, I don't want to be romantic because it's not like, this is necessarily it's

Speaker2: [00:40:52] Hard not to be romantic about that, but I

Speaker3: [00:40:54] Said, I know, but it's not. It's it's this connection between the human life, right? What is a well-rounded diet in relation to the landscape, which is also sort of getting and giving in this sort of these cycles, right? And okay, we'll just be romantic.

Speaker2: [00:41:12] Yeah, I think every once in a while

Speaker3: [00:41:14] You're allowed to do just came through Valentine's Day.

Speaker2: [00:41:17] It's okay. We're after love you guys. We're softies. But you know, who's not a softie? Are these folks that are being called Knuckle Granados? Oh, are they the? So can you explain to us?

Speaker3: [00:41:34] Yeah. So the other thing that's been happening to the forest is cattle ranching, which is true throughout Latin America. And some of that is for, you know, sort of meat eaters. I am one. So I I admit my complicity in this. But then there's also this interesting way in which cattle ranching became connected to sort of this again, a certain kind of masculinist romantic understanding of the cowboy and the ranch and the corridos. Read about writing your horse. And I remember in the early in the early 1990s when I was working in some of these areas, partly on the human rights effects, but then also seeing around me what was happening since the mid-80s when I had first gone there, increasing numbers of cattle and people up in that area would say, Well, there's this joke. I don't know if you've heard it and the effect of the humor question and the joke, I'll have to do it sort of half Spanish and English was that, you know, there's a tourist and he's like, up there and the econ and Southern Patton, and he's like driving around and he just sees all this cattle, which is ganado, right? Cattle is Gonzalo in Spanish. And you know, he runs into this guy who's this big, you know, military colonel out writing this really nice Arabian horse. And, you know, he says, Oh, you know, McFee like this. There's so much cattle here. It's total ganado. Is it all cattle? He's asking? And the colonel just laughs and says, Ganado, No, it's total roboto.

Speaker2: [00:43:11] Ha, nice.

Speaker3: [00:43:12] Ok, so he gets the joke because she's bilingual. Ganado can mean both cattle and one like, you know, you want it like a prize. And he's like, No, none of it's one. It's all stolen. Yeah, right? So it gets like from that perspective of the subaltern, like who it is that's putting this in and at what cost, right? None of this is done by their own labor. It's from stealing the land, stealing the money to buy the stock, the livestock. So we see a lot of that happening. And then of course, we get the whole financial question of money laundering. And what are people to do when you have big wads of cash from narco trafficking, from drug trafficking? And one of the ways that people quote unquote sembra is to put that money into cattle because there are some cows that cost a lot of money. And you can claim that you know this prize bull costs this many millions of dollars, and then all that money will also be laundered. So that kind of scale between the actual cow, the cash cow, and then, you know, the ways in which it does this other work, you know, through banking and other things.

Speaker2: [00:44:18] So and these are other forms of plantation.

Speaker3: [00:44:20] Yes, exactly. They're in exactly those places that cause deforestation and again, that often come in on the heels of poor people who have been who have done some of that work of basic deforestation. And then they can put a road in and then they can start bringing, you know, displacing those people again, who then go further into the forest. And then the following

Speaker2: [00:44:40] And the chain continues,

Speaker3: [00:44:42] Yeah, the chainsaw continues

Speaker2: [00:44:44] The chainsaw. Yeah, well, put. I know that in one of the sort of later chapters in the book, you talk about hydroelectric power and other sort of energy sources in in Guatemala. And I wonder if you can talk a little bit about these questions of of mind power, literally when we're thinking about, you know, the generation of electricity and the use of certain kinds of resources. What what are you seeing unfolding there? Well, the story, I guess I

Speaker3: [00:45:23] Want to start to talk about hydroelectric power with my own position, understand myself as an environmentalist, and that hydroelectric is seen as one of these clean, you know, sustainable renewable energy sources like wind in the work that you've done so beautifully. And you know, how could that be bad? And learning is anyone who studies the war in Guatemala, that there was this very famous through struggle. It was first very hidden massacre of people along a river that was called the Rio Negro the Black River. And the reason these massacres occurred was because they were going to put in a dam and the people were refusing to leave. And so there was sort of a period of time in the early 1980s when just every village along the river was wiped out, like literally everyone they could find was killed and there was actually a town called Rio Negro that a few people survived. And a few people. Yeah, it's just an incredibly hideous story about nine kids watch their mothers and fathers be murdered. And then they were adopted by local civil patrol paramilitaries as their quote unquote children and were basically made into slave labor. And so much later, several years later, members of their family, aunts or uncles realized that they were still alive and tried to sort of get them away from these.

Speaker3: [00:46:58] Incredibly, I mean, local people, but with the full power of the military behind them, this amazing story. And I know this story because some of the former residents of Rio Negro who were displaced have come back and created a new village above high above where they were before, but above the sort of level of the lake that was created by the dam. And part of what they're doing is what they call community tourism, and they invite people. I went, It's a very weird thing to do as an anthropologist to come and stay there. They have a guest house. Members of the community have taken cooking lessons so they know how to cook for foreigners and the food that we like. And then they'll sort of take you around and show you different spots like caves where they hid, you know, when the military came and then people who went through the massacre and now a younger generation who've been taught this story will take you along this path that goes up a mountain where the soldiers took people and then murdered them, and they'll tell you the story of what happened that day.

Speaker3: [00:48:08] And so it puts hydroelectric in a whole new light to go to this village of New Rio Negro and talk to these folks about, you know, what that dam has meant for their lives and the way in which sort of that one sort of cut into the landscape and that sort of stopping, you know, both of the flow of the water, but also the flows of their everyday lives just reverbs through time. The gentleman who told us his story had been one of the enslaved children and the rest of his story is even more horrifying. But now he has his own kids and he's back and he's, you know, sort of struggling for people to know this story and even says, I don't know why I was not killed, maybe to tell this story as part of it. And he told me, I'm telling you the story will hopefully continue. So the ways in which something like hydroelectric can be right, very hopeful. The space of maybe taking without completely extinguishing like so much of the fossil fuels. But then what's so ironic, of course, about this dam is that none of that electricity and power that was generated was for anyone in that area.

Speaker2: [00:49:21] Right, right. That always seems to be the case.

Speaker3: [00:49:23] Exactly. It was to be exported partly to Mexico. Some of it down to Guatemala City. It sort of enabled the rise of the makela structure, right? These sort of, you know, just in time workplaces where people are making cheap, you know, clothes and electronics. And also this other sort of terrible environmental projects, especially going on since the war ended. I'm beginning to mine gold mines, silver mines, other kinds of precious metals and which take inordinate amounts of electricity. And so, you know, sort of those same small elites who were running the war are also trying to find different, you know, sources of that kind of electricity to support these transnational companies as they go about mining and setting up maquilas. So this little town of the new Rio Negro does not have electricity. Right? Even though their lives at all?

Speaker2: [00:50:15] Yeah.

Speaker3: [00:50:16] And you know, I start that chapter by talking about how amazing it is because I. And going to these Maya Glyph workshops and so much of what they're about is being able to tell time and sort of know where the planets and the Moon is and the sort of role of the Milky Way and you know, and how it's in these glyphs on these stele. And then to see the Milky Way, which is so hard to see even in the United States, except in the most remote areas. And suddenly there it was over this. You know, this lake and I don't have any light pollution, and it's because they don't have any light pollution. So just utter horrific contradiction right at the core of that beautiful thing sort of begins trying to think about power and power, both in that sense of electricity and, you know, things that run stuff. But also, what does it mean for those people to sort of labor to empower themselves even as they're facing, you know, this dam, the military that will put it in at any cost? And the story of vinegar is actually quite incredible because they were one of the first communities before they moved back to get reparations from the states.

Speaker3: [00:51:26] They took a case against, you know, the people, not only the military, but also the elites and the banks that funded that dam to the Inter-American Human Rights Court and got reparation payments, which is part of how they were able to create the new town. And they've actually, just through all sorts of solidarity networks, put new funding restrictions through the United Nations through the United States Congress that if there are possibilities that something that's being funded by U.S. banks or U.S., you know, sort of foreign foreign funding that they have to be aware that there can't be human rights abuses. It's it might it might not seem like a very huge thing, but it sort of is a major, major gain in terms of human rights in relation to sort of funding and finance. So sorry, there's so many details. I'm like, how do I tell this story without it taking 100 years? But. Their willingness to keep struggling even after they lost so many people in such a horrible way. That, to me, is my own power. So trying to think those in relation to these other forms of kind of empowerment? Mm hmm.

Speaker2: [00:52:39] Mm hmm. And how how amazing that they were able to be sort of on the forefront of of acquiring the reparations after this kind of energetic displacement and, well, destruction. It wasn't just displacement, it was exactly, you know, massacre, essentially. But that energy was sort of the pivot. The pivot for those for the reparations to come about to seems like an important moment. Yeah.

Speaker3: [00:53:05] And to hold the banks accountable. Exactly. You know, just like with the Natco Ganado, there's always this sense of like, they're above it. They had nothing to do with it, right? And finance becomes such an invisible space, you know? And again, this is why accounting right in accounting procedures and yeah. Elizabeth Warren are also so important, right? Because how how to account for what happened there? You also have to take those invisible sites right of the banks and where the money comes from and where the money, I mean, the interest payments alone. You know that the World Bank has made millions and millions of dollars off that dam. Mm hmm. So.

Speaker2: [00:53:42] To to kind of close out, I thought, I'm just, you know, ask a kind of massive question, and that is why not?

Speaker3: [00:53:51] It's like zero communal sort of end, but it's just the beginning.

Speaker2: [00:53:55] Yeah, exactly. Let's do the metaphysics of zero for a while now. No, it won't be that big, but I just wanted you to maybe to reflect for a second on what you see. Anthropology or anthropologists being able to bring to questions of environment and changing ecology is like, what are the the sort of skills or practices or sentiments or attitudes or schooling that that anthropology has as potential to bring to these larger questions of environmental change?

Speaker3: [00:54:30] I love this question because I love anthropology and in part, I know you set up kind of sociologists as one of our self constituting others. And you know,

Speaker2: [00:54:40] That was cruel. Sorry, sociology listeners, I really didn't mean it.

Speaker3: [00:54:45] I'm not putting you down, but I think anthropology is special, and one of the ways in which it is is to go back to one of our founding or confounding fathers, Branislav Malinowski, who said, like the anthropologist goal is to think things in their totality right to sort of thinks about culture as a body that we have these undergirding skeletons. But then there's the flesh and blood, right? The way that different people, even within sort of a cultural form, will live out what it means to sort of exist in that place. So he says, you always have to think about both of those things together. And you know, the social science is often talked about as the structure versus agency debate, right? But I think thinking them dialectic early, right? Not as this false binary is part of what anthropology does, right? We we do think like sociologists, right? We do use numbers. We do try to see kind of larger ways in which sort of historic forces produce conditions of possibility. But then we're also really trying to think like on the ground, right? What do people do with those, those conditions, right? The military and elites in Guatemala, they just assumed when they killed a bunch of indigenous people that they were just going to shut up and go away.

Speaker3: [00:56:04] And on the contrary, there's been this massive revitalization project not only for their sort of sense of being in the world, but as larger sort of campaigns around human rights about ecological rights, making connections through all these different sort of assemblages with people in all sorts of different places. I mean, a lot of the Mayan activists I know, like travel around the globe telling stories about what they've done. The very recent trial of General Rios Montt, where he was found guilty of genocide, was, you know, pushed by Mayan women, most of whom are monolingual and, you know, don't even speak Spanish. And yet they created this case that was the first and judicial global judicial history of finding a general guilty in a national court and under a government of another general. I mean, it wasn't like there was a state that was really backing this, but they did it. And now all over the world, people said, Well, if in little Guatemala, they can do this, I'm sure. Maybe we can try this too. And literally, just last week, February 1st, the very first trial for sexual enslavement is opened in Guatemala, again pushed by Mayan women. And it's this concatenation of possibilities that allow those women right to do this thing that also has global reach.

Speaker3: [00:57:25] You get these precedents in place legally, and all this other stuff can happen. So anthropology, I think, is the way to think through that, right? It, you know, participant observation. Anthropologists go and live with these people and try and figure out what is it about them in their particularities that makes this possible. But then, you know, sort of also going out from there into these other scalar kind of models and see like and what does that do? Right? So in that way, kind of like the humor that we started out with, it's almost optimism of the will and Gramsci sense of refusing to be like, Oh, these structures are gigantic, right? They seem so impossible to counteract. And yet we find over and over and over and over and over again on the ground, right? And even this thinking about, you know, this these this new coalition that calls itself the CIA, right? The Cowboys and Indians who are working against Keystone. And, you know, just these places where these unexpected things come together, people's optimism, people's willing to struggle. I think anthropology helps us see both of those. That's great. I love that.

Speaker2: [00:58:35] And I just realized that since we began with humor, we have to close out with humor. And so I have to find this. Comic strip that's in the the beginning of your book on Page 22. So this is bizarro, who is this comic strip down to write his, you know? Yeah, Dan Pereiro is his name. Bizarro, I guess is the Strip's name, but hilarious stuff. So here we have an image of. An ancient Mayan person, apparently a man. Two of them and they're sort of talking and one of them is holding this giant stone codex. It's a calendar calendar, a calendar. And he's saying to his friend, I only had enough room to go up to 2012. So he's he's stitched the entire calendar into the stone. Except there's only enough room to go to 2012, and his buddy says, Hey, that'll freak somebody out someday. Hilarious.

Speaker3: [00:59:32] So of course, referring to the sort of hoopla about the Mayan apocalypse and the year 2012, which

Speaker2: [00:59:38] And in fact it did freaked a lot of people out.

Speaker3: [00:59:41] Did you know NASA actually put up a special website to sort of say the world is not ending like they were forced to do that

Speaker2: [00:59:49] The tax dollars at work?

Speaker3: [00:59:50] Exactly, but much better for NASA than war in the Middle East, right? Or anywhere else. But what's so interesting is that idea of ending is so connected to kind of an accountant's understanding of zero, right? Like the balance accounts, that's over. And for the Maya, again, zero is not about ending, it's about beginning so nice.

Speaker2: [01:00:12] And on that note, we shall end.

Speaker3: [01:00:14] Thank you so much for this opportunity. This has been really fun. Cool.