Suchergebnisse

AbstractWhat is life like after drift‐cocaine arrives in a village on Colombia's Northern Pacific coast? Drift‐cocaine is a side‐effect of the interdiction of drug transport boats heading towards Central and North America as part of the US‐Colombian War on Drugs. Villagers refer to drift‐cocaine as the White Fish. Through ethnographic engagement with Afro‐descendant peoples in Chocó, this article explores the effects and relations that emerge from an ocean turned into an amphitheatre of fishing livelihoods, drug traffickers, and military operations. By taking seriously the White Fish as the way people refer to cocaine, I focus on gossip and rumour as the strategies they employ to discuss the pervasive effects of the drug trade. I trace three interrelated discussions – concerning violence, cocaine, and the White Fish – in order to argue for the usefulness of gossip and rumour in investigative ethnographies of violence.

Book Review of Escobar, Arturo. 2018. Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy and the Making of Worlds.

The dynamic frontier-making in Colombia's Amazon department of Caquetá is the focus of this article. Since the mid-nineteenth century, booms and busts of commodity production have been associated with violent struggles as actors have challenged pre-existing orders and authorities. At different times, the area has been controlled by the Catholic Church, the Colombian state, FARC and paramilitary groups, following the different boom-and-bust cycles of commodity production. We use this case to theorise on the general mechanisms behind frontier-making. Reading the frontier literature through the lens of the coloniality of power, we draw four interrelated categories to access frontier-making analytically: commodity production, dispossession, hegemon, and subjectivities. These are used to explain six distinct periods in the political economy of Caquetá and its spatial reconfigurations. We argue that current issues of distrust on the state, violence, and land grabbing, are best understood as part of a historical continuum of multiple actors keeping the area as a frontier space.