02/06 | Mario Blaser’s Seminar

On June 2nd, we will be joined by Mario Blaser (Memorial University of Newfoundland) for two events: in the morning, the seminar “The Uncommon in Transitions: From Replacement to Re-placement,” and in the afternoon, a conversation with Mario Blaser.

The seminar will take place in the María Moliner Room (1F) of the Center for Human and Social Sciences (C//Albasanz, 26-28- 28037) at 12:00 pm, and the conversation will be held at the Ateneo La Maliciosa (C/Peñuelas 12, Madrid) at 7:00 pm.

Mario Blaser

Mario Blaser, an anthropologist and professor at Memorial University in Canada, has worked with the Yshir people of the Paraguayan Chaco and more recently with the Innu people of the Labrador Peninsula.

Mario Blaster has investigated the politics of colonization/decolonization through the analysis of conflicts related to development and/or conservation projects. In this line of research, he has developed a “political ontology,” an analytical framework that questions whether conflicts surrounding what are defined as resources (whether natural or artificial) are simply reducible to that. The paradigmatic example would be a conflict over the prohibition of caribou hunting, which local indigenous peoples might oppose because it interferes with their relationship to a “guardian spirit,” while the state sees it only as an animal, a natural resource that must be managed and protected. The usual characterization of this type of conflict as a clash of cultural perspectives on an “animal” is entirely insufficient from the point of view of political ontology, since it opens the door to establishing a hierarchy among “cultural perspectives,” a hierarchy that often makes local perspectives “more cultural” than those supported by science, the state, and corporations. Political ontology argues that these types of conflicts involve a clash of realities that is often resolved through colonial imposition. The key question posed by political ontology is how to address these conflicts without resorting to colonial impositions.

For him, working with and learning from Indigenous traditions opens a path to addressing, in unexpected ways, the challenges we face today, from growing inequality to environmental crises. His aim is to rescue from imposed invisibility the idea that other viable forms of existence exist, while simultaneously showing how these forms of existence struggle against an invasive modernity that tolerates nothing different from itself. Some of the themes through which he addresses this general problem include: