Abstract
The increasing focus that political ecologists are putting in the role of emotions and affect in environmental conflict, commoning and mobilisation is enriching mainstream analyses that tended to mask the everyday emotional engagements of environmental movements, collectives and communities associated to being exposed to conflict as well as being active in it. By directing attention to two different ways in which grassroots movements and communities in Chile and Mexico facilitate emotional expression in the context of the conflicts in which they are embedded in, I discuss what different roles emotion plays in the defence of the commons, and what political opportunities these different roles imply for movements and collectives. I found a persistent and unresolved tension between the role of emotions as channels for the subversion of hegemonic power, and their role in reproducing hegemonic power dynamics. I suggest that this reveals ‘the emotional’ as a space of power and conflict, and that acknowledging the ambivalent political work of emotions offers opportunities for both researchers and movements to better understand and transform the power inequalities associated to the defence and practice of being-in-common while being exposed to conflict and dispossession.
Introduction
In 2011, in the context of local and global movements (the Indignados in southern Europe, the Arab Spring in North Africa and the Middle East, the Occupy Movement in the United States), feelings of outrage at a lack of basic rights such as access to housing, health, education and decent employment in the context of the politics of neoliberalism, austerity and inequality (Harvey, 2011), inspired thousands of people towards critical inquiry, collective debates and mobilisation. Occupying, discussing and organising life in public squares and beyond was for many both a cause and an effect of the collectivisation of emotions like anger, fear (Cossarini, 2014) and hope (Delgado, 2016). While some authors emphasised the political benefits of those emotions in crafting political subjectivities and actions that conform to a collective ‘us’, a ‘we, the people’ (Delgado, 2016), others alerted to the fact that emotions cementing collective mobilisation could in fact turn, without broader political discussions, into a dualistic ‘we–the other’ (Laclau, 2005; Žižek, 2006). Nowadays, the actual proliferation of right- and left-wing populisms everywhere has reactivated old debates and raised new ones on the strategic function of emotions in politics (Canovan, 1999; Demertzis, 2014; Roberts, 2014; Thomassen, 2014).
If emotions can be key in the uprising and engagement of collective action in broad social and political contexts, they are also key and present in the everyday politics of social-environmental grassroots movements defending their commons. Anyone spending time in sites of environmental conflict is more than likely to perceive the disruptive anger and hope of socio-environmental activists, witness the suffering of communities exposed to violence when struggling to keep their land, water and broader environment or participate in an ethics of care and affect towards the commons, that is their land, territories, lives and livelihoods. In the last years, the field of political ecology has experienced an increasing interest in the role that emotion and affect play in the everyday engagements in the practice of commoning and environmental mobilisation (see for example González-Hidalgo and Zografos, 2017, 2020; Gravante and Poma, 2016; Nightingale, 2011, 2013, 2019; Singh, 2013, 2017, 2018; Sultana, 2015). However, since there has been a trend to mask the key role of these everyday emotional engagements for the politics of environmental mobilisation and commoning, we still need more research to better understand how environmental conflict feels and how those feelings contribute or interfere with power relationships experienced by grassroots when defending their territories, their lives and the commons.
In this paper I reflect about different roles that emotion and affect 1 have for collectives and communities while defending their territories, their lives and the commons, and what opportunities and challenges this diversity of roles offers for the politics of environmental grassroot movements. I reflect upon my analysis and engagement with two environmental conflicts and indigenous and peasant grassroots movements and organisations in Chile and Mexico, where I could observe, participate and analyse different ways in which these movements facilitated emotional expression in the conflicts. My analysis helps me to discuss how emotions contradictorily participate in the everyday dynamics of those movements, and therefore understand the opportunities and challenges when being and co-becoming commoners (Singh, 2017) while being exposed to the threat of land and commons dispossession and ultimately, dispossession of also life and dignity. In that sense, while several studies on commoning focus in collective self-management processes, I focus on commoning in a process of environmental conflict, implying particular collective socio-nature co-becomings in defence of the land, water or environment. As I will discuss later, the processes I engaged with implied intense struggles to defend or recuperate the commons. In these struggles, activists were ambivalently engaged in emotional practices that fostered their being-in-common (while sharing emotional engagements towards the commons in the land occupations, political rituals, demonstrations) as well as exposed to emotional dynamics that hindered their practices of commoning, when feeling their isolation, helplessness, violence and oppression associated to the environmental dispossession and communitarian and family conflicts. This focus in the complex dynamics of power helps to push forward our understanding of how political communities arise and disappear (Nightingale, 2019).
The paper is structured as follows. In Section ‘Co-becomings in commons and conflicts: Emotion and affect while defending the commons’, I shortly introduce the literature dealing with emotion and the commons in political ecology, and how engaging the affective ecologies of commons and conflict may help both researchers and activists to critically reflect on the different ways in which emotions participate or interrupt their processes of being-in-common while defending the land. Section ‘Political ecologies of environmental conflicts in Latin America: Communities defending their territories and lives in Chile and Mexico’ presents an overview of the empirical material that inspires my argument, briefly introducing the general scenario of environmental conflicts in Latin America, and the social-environmental grassroot movements and contexts I engaged with in southern Chile and southern Mexico. In Section ‘Three roles for emotions in environmental conflicts: Emotional environmentality, emotional oppression and emotional environmentalism’, I provide an overview of my findings, highlighting three ways in which emotions interplay in environmental conflicts: emotional environmentalism, emotional oppression and emotional environmentality. Rather than being isolated dynamics that occur independently, I argue that they are simultaneous, contradictory and creative emotional engagements that feed and challenge power relationships in environmental conflicts. This depicts a constantly unresolved tension between the role of emotions as both channels for the subversion to hegemonic power and their role in reproducing hegemonic power dynamics. In Section ‘Discussion and conclusion: The ambivalent political work of emotions’, I conclude by arguing that acknowledging this tension offers political opportunities both for movements and for political ecologists as an entry point to better understand and transform power asymmetries in environmental conflicts.
Co-becomings in commons and conflicts: Emotion and affect while defending the commons
In the field of political ecology, scholars analyse the power dynamics associated to conflicts produced by the asymmetrical distribution of environmental costs and benefits (Martínez-Alier, 2002). These conflicts, usually associated to processes of dispossession, enclosure of the commons and the deepening of extractivism (Svampa, 2015), tend to interrupt, break or force the re-organisation of social practices of cooperation related to the commons, that is, shared resources that are used by many individuals and communities – such as forests, fisheries, water, air and also knowledge – under collectively defined rules that allow these communities to manage resources sustainably and sovereignly (García-López et al., 2016). As a result of the forced, unequal or unconsented changes in the environmental management regimes pushed by the State, private sector or other institutions, local groups stand up to try and counter-hegemonise power and represent themselves politically (Robbins, 2012). The diverse and creative ways in which social movements and grassroots organisations mobilise in the defence of their grabbed, enclosed or contaminated commons has also been one of the key topics in political ecology studies (see for example, Peet and Watts, 1996; Peluso, 1992; Scott, 1985). By practising and defending the commons, these movements pursue to challenge hegemonic power relations, playing with new counter-hegemonies and rearticulating ideas and practices related to democracy, nature and community (García-López et al., 2017).
Similar to other fields, emotions have not found explicit consideration in political ecology until recently, since environmental conflicts have usually been explained as ‘purely rational’ differences related to diverging knowledge, values, discourses and interests in relation to nature and natural resources. Putting emotions back in the analysis of power dynamics in environmental conflicts is helping scholars to observe, document and analyse how local communities confront State and private sector violence, and how their emotional labour and specific expression of emotions are useful for them to craft their collective political subjectivities (González-Hidalgo, 2017; González-Hidalgo and Zografos, 2020). In that sense, this move towards emotion and affect is expanding the way political ecologists think of environmental conflicts, beyond ‘economic, social, or rational choice issues’ but also as ‘emotive realities that have a direct bearing on how resources are accessed, used, and fought over’ (Sultana, 2011: 163). Similarly, the literature of the commons has tended towards the analysis of rules, norms and institutions for the management of shared resources. This lack of attention towards the role of emotions has generated an incomplete understanding of how power operates both in practices of commoning and related to how these practices are disturbed when local communities and collectives face conflict and engage in mobilisation. Only recently, scholars are highlighting the central role that the lived experience by means of emotions, memories and care have for the daily maintenance of the commons (Eizenberg, 2011; Nightingale, 2011, 2019; Pratt, 2012; Singh, 2013, 2017). This focus is letting us better understand how local communities engage in caring for and conserving their commons (Singh, 2018), as well as how and why people with a strong emotional attachment to their commons, may however contradictorily, overexploit them (Nightingale, 2013). Nevertheless, this emotional and affective labour can be importantly disrupted or complexified when commoners and the commons are exposed to dispossession and conflict. Understanding this is key in order to understand how subjectivities are formed by everyday emotional attachments, and how these can be transitory (Nightingale, 2019) in sites where the commons, commoners and the practices of being-in-common are violently exposed to conflict, co-optation and dispossession.
In this paper, I will look at commons as mediated by conflict. This means that I will not explain in detail the embodied practices of local communities and their commons (communal management of lands, territories and knowledge) as independent of conflict and action, but, on the contrary, as part of it. In fact, as I will explain later on, the sites of my research are sites of long history of violent enclosure and dispossession of the indigenous and peasant land, territories and lives, and therefore commons and conflict are inseparable. The processes of becoming commoners in this context, is therefore, not only facilitated by embodied practices of caring the commons (Singh, 2017) but also by embodied shared feelings of anger and sorrow associated to the loss, contamination or dispossession of the commons. While the diversity of emotional engagements in relation to activism has been discussed in research of social movements, where it is argued that a combination of so-called positive emotions (for example, hope) and negative emotions (for example, anger) is needed to sustain activism (Jasper, 2012), in the literature of the ecological commons these emotions have been underexplored. Indeed, despite emotions such as anger and sorrow being traditionally labelled as negative, recent scholarship suggests they are indeed creative resources for communities and movements (González-Hidalgo and Zografos, 2017; Gravante and Poma, 2016; Poma, 2019). I therefore hope that this paper can help in the project of ‘enlivening’ (Vasile, 2019) the research agenda on the commons, not only by talking about the role of ‘unwelcomed’ 2 albeit creative emotions in being-in-common, but also by further contextualising the debate of the commons into the current trends of dispossession, violence and acute conflict.
In a recent paper (González-Hidalgo and Zografos, 2020), we present a theoretical framework for political ecologists willing to think through emotion in the analysis of the environmental conflict. We propose to consider several dimensions (the psychological, the more-than-human, the collective, the geographical and the personal–political) when thinking of emotions in environmental conflicts, based in a review of literature in feminist studies, human geography, social psychology, social movement theory, and social and cultural anthropology. This invitation can also be applied in a fertile way when thinking of the everyday emotional engagements of environmental conflicts associated to the enclosure of the commons, the resistance of the commoning processes and the associated pro-commons movements and mobilisations. In this framework, the psychological dimension refers to the concrete ways in which individuals and communities embody, suffer or make sense of their experiences of emotional distress, trauma, or ‘feeling of powerlessness’ associated to violence, dispossession or the loss of the commons. This implies the consideration of individual and collective, past and present, conscious and unconscious, experiences of material and relational dispossession in different convivial contexts (the living place, the family, the lived experience of belonging to collective, etc.) that shape diverse ways of experiencing concrete environmental challenges. When talking about the commons, the psychological dimension can sometimes explain, for example, why individuals or groups engage differently in the collective defence of the commons (see for example Drury and Reicher, 2000); beyond the question about if they are interested or sensible to the movement, the psychological dimension lets us grasp other relevant issues, associated to, for example, personality traits forged during live experiences that can explain differential forms of feeling and reacting towards the dispossession of the commons. Unfortunately, in some cases, the lived experience of activists exposed to conflict and dispossession is so acute that they can be paralysed, burned-out and even commit suicide through feelings of dispossession or disillusionment (Gravante and Poma, 2018). The more-than-human dimension refers to the daily affective engagements of individuals and communities with the non-human natures they relate to on a daily basis. This is a powerful counter-narrative in the literature about the commons that is emerging recently (Singh, 2013, 2017, 2018), considering human subjectivity and agency as mediated by emotional communication between the human and the non-human and help us to think of ‘being-in-common’ subjectivities as inspired by love (Milton, 2002), caring (Singh, 2013) and everyday affective labour (Arboleda, 2015). The collective refers to the role of emotions as triggers for action, and thus, also, how those actions feed back into activist subjectivities. As explained in the introductory paragraph of this paper, there are several accounts of how indignation and feelings of threat associated to the enclosure of the commons on the one side, and joy and satisfaction for the shared project, on the other side, nourish everyday life of movements with a shared feeling that things can change (Gravante and Poma, 2018; Poma and Gravante, 2015; Vasile, 2019; Velicu, 2015). As social movements scholars argue, the consideration of emotions is highly important for better understanding group structures and strategies, how collective identities are created, and how and why movements sustain, engage or stop their activism (Goodwin et al., 2009; Gravante and Poma, 2016; Jasper, 1998, 2012). The geographical refers to the role that emotional attachment to the places where collectives live and mobilise have as a motor for activism and the creation of political identities (Brown and Pickerill, 2009). As Poma (2019) points out, local and global attachments to nature and other human and non-human beings are the background for the ‘moral emotions’ (in Poma’s words) such as collective group dignity, or frustration and desperation for the authorities in environmental mobilisations. And, finally, the personal–political dimension refers to the acknowledgement of how all these feelings and everyday experiences can be better understood if analysed in the context of power inequalities, along the lines of class, ethnicity, gender, etc. and/or nuanced analysis about how power and social relations of difference are constantly (re)produced in everyday interactions with socio-natures, which has been one of the key contributions of feminist political ecologists towards the understanding of power in environmental conflicts (Nightingale, 2013; Sultana, 2015). This dimension lets us grasp, for example, how power imbalance across the axis of gender and class (respectively) may explain why women may need their own spaces for defining their ways of being critical to top-down forestry and rural interventions (Arora-Jonsson, 2013), and why impoverished fishermen may not participate in institutional meetings and overexploit the commons (Nightingale, 2013).
This framework shows the complex and intricate ways in which emotions participate of everyday dynamics of movements in their struggles and mobilisation for their livelihoods, territories, commons and futures. Nevertheless, as in González-Hidalgo and Zografos (2020), my aim is not to develop a descriptive categorisation of feelings, but to help and discuss how explicitly talking about emotion may effectively help both researchers and activists to broader conceptualisations of power and the role of affective ecologies in fostering and hindering transformative subjectivities and actions (i.e. the political). In this paper, my aim is to continue that line of inquiry, reflecting upon the ways in which emotions promote and interrupt the transformative and emancipatory agendas of local communities defending their territories and commons. Therefore, the main question I seek to answer in this paper is: what roles do emotions play in everyday dynamics in the defence of the commons? I will seek to answer this question going through my research and engagement with grassroots movements in defence of the commons in Latin America. As I will show in the next section, I engaged in Chile and Mexico with self-organised local communities and small grassroots organisations that pursue different strategies to defend, protect or recuperate the peasant and indigenous livelihoods. Their collective management and struggles for land, water and territory, among others, is therefore associated to the environmentalism of the poor (Martínez-Alier, 2002), that is, the defence of the environment associated to the everyday livelihood-based struggles directly based on the commons.
Political ecologies of environmental conflicts in Latin America: Communities defending their territories and lives in Chile and Mexico
Evidence for my argument in this paper is based in my engaged research experience in Chile and Mexico, between 2013 and 2016, as part of my PhD research.
Since its Spanish colonisation, Latin America has been exposed to natural resource extractivism, violence, degradation and developmentalisation processes (García-López et al., 2015; Gudynas, 2009; Svampa, 2013; Ulloa, 2015). However, the amount of extracted materials (metals, oil, coal, soybeans, wood, etc.) and projects related to the generation of energy (such as hydroelectric projects, gas pipelines, etc.) and transport (for example, the Initiative for the Integration of the Regional Infrastructure of South America IIRSA) have shown unprecedented growth during the last decades. Simultaneously, and as a response to this trend of privatisation, dispossession and individualism, grassroots resistances – especially from indigenous and peasant peoples – local, national and regional social movements and civil and uncivil society are increasingly visible in their defence and practice of alternative life forms that are more just, democratic and sustainable (Carruthers, 2008; Delgado, 2013; Martínez-Alier, 2002). These pro-commons bottom-up movements (movements for the defence and community governance of commons) have and are being crucial for the generation of sovereign practices and autonomous areas (see Robson and Lichtenstein, 2013). As Esteva (2010) says, they are not only regenerating the formal traditional commons associated to communitarian property of land, but also creating new commons by means of the re-organisation of the society from the bottom-up in terms of education, health and territory, among others. Nevertheless, while these movements offer creative survival options in hard times and effectively resist the megaprojects promoted in the region (Esteva, 2010), they are also increasingly exposed to violence, criminalisation and repression (see for example Del Bene et al., 2018).
The two cases I present here share several relevant characteristics: (1) they involve sites of historical and contemporary processes of commons dispossession, which allow and call for a critical consideration of the power-laden struggles over the environment; and (2) they are sites of internationally well-known, indigenous Mapuche and Zapatista communities, 3 which are inspiring examples to reflect upon the process of constituting subjectivities in pro-commons mobilisations. They have both challenged, locally and globally, existing power relations and facilitated processes of political subjectivation of the dispossessed, indigenous, peasant communities (Vergara-Camnus, 2009). In both cases, the ongoing violence and dispossession has increased with neoliberal governmentality in the 1990s. Given space limitations I am not able to describe in full detail the sites of research (see González-Hidalgo and Zografos, 2017 and González-Hidalgo, 2017 for details), but in the next subsections I present some of the core characteristics of the movements. In spite of these similar characteristics, the cases and also the collectives I engaged locally are also quite different, as I will discuss now. Nevertheless, the rationale for discussing these two cases is not to develop a comparison between them, but on the contrary to be able to scope the diverse, creative and ambivalent ways in which emotions play a role in the everyday life of environmental conflicts and commoning.
My positionality was a key ethical issue that I reflected on throughout my research. My interest about ‘the emotional’ did not come from my desk, but as a result of my participation in environmental collectives during years, and especially after my first interactions with Mapuche communities in 2013. My long stay in Chile facilitated the generation of other type of materials that could be used in more straightforward ways by local communities (see for example González-Hidalgo, 2015). In Mexico, my research was discussed and coordinated with a local collective supporting indigenous and peasant rights (Edupaz). However, as a Spanish PhD candidate at that point, it was never my aim to claim myself as an expert on the local cultures, cosmovisions and spiritualities. This explains why I use a ‘Western’ account of emotions (such as anger, grief, sorrow) – which was also discussed with local communities 4 – rather than an indigenous emotional terminology, risking misusing it.
Southern Chile: Indigenous Mapuche affecting land and territory
In Southern Chile, I analysed and engaged with the current territorial, land and environmental conflict associated to forestry extractivism by means of tree plantations that grow, partially, at the ancestral territory of indigenous Mapuche. Tree plantations cover almost three million hectares in Central and Southern Chile with high concentration of property and export-related benefits associated to state subsidies and private capital inversions. Tree monocultures have long-lasting impacts on local populations’ daily livelihoods: blocking access to land, reducing availability of water, pollution, forced migration and lack of work opportunities. The most visible mobilisation against forestry extractivism in Chile is currently lead by peasant and indigenous Mapuche communities, who are not only excluded of these benefits but also see how their livelihood commons, water, land access and biodiversity assets are affected by the industry. These impacts are broader in the Mapuche worldviews, since land, forests, sea and rivers are all crucial elements of the Mapuche conception of ‘the territory’. Therefore, some Mapuche communities self-considered as ‘in resistance’ are seeking to recuperate the control over the natural commons, against the state and neoliberal dispossession (Torres-Salinas et al., 2016). Based on their own experience and knowledge, Mapuche mobilisation has recently increased their disruptive capacity and strengthened their convictions around the defence of their identity and the ñuke mapu (‘mother earth’ in Mapudungun, the Mapuche language; ‘Mapuche’ means ‘people of the earth’). Their two main demands today are territorial restitution and their self-determination as people. Undoubtedly, these demands challenge the institutionalism of the unitary and centralist State, and the imposed forest extractivist model (Latorre and Pedemonte, 2016). Since the 1990s, the conflict has experienced increased levels of violence, the last episode taking place in November 2018, when one Mapuche commoner (comunero, as they call themselves), Camilo Catrillanca, was shot dead by the military state police.
Between 2013 and 2016, I conducted, on the one-hand, semi-structured interviews with representatives and staff of State forestry institutions and the main forestry companies active in Chile. I also developed participant observation of the educational and community relations of these institutions with the local communities, relationships established through individual and collective talks as well as workshops that private enterprises organised with the intention of minimising local conflicts and trying to feed or force the emotional engagement between locals and the extractivist industry. On the other hand, I engaged with the Mapuche communities active in one of the areas more heavily planted (in Arauco province, up to 90% of the province areas at some points); I interviewed activists and participated in their commoning activities and processes, such as communitarian meetings, organisation of communitarian meals, political debates and demonstrations, as well as political–spiritual meetings where participants discussed and talked about their strategies in defending or struggling to recuperate their commons, while playing, dancing and praying. My analysis highlights the emotional dimension of these self-organised political rituals, where the collective expression of anger and sorrow, is a crucial resource that helps Mapuche communities maintain their resistance (see more details at González-Hidalgo and Zografos, 2017).
Chiapas (Southern Mexico): Emotional support to social and environmental leaders
In Chiapas, Southern Mexico, I engaged with Edupaz, a local non-governmental organisation working with indigenous and peasant communities in Southern Chiapas. Since the uprising of the Zapatista Army for National Liberation (EZLN) in 1994, diverse struggles for land and territorial recuperation and grassroots commoning have been taking place in Chiapas, in opposition to neoliberal and exploitative projects, combined with claims for self-determination and the recuperation of stolen dignity. Since then, state violence has implied via systematic murder, forced migration and disappearances, persecutions and torture (FRAYBA, 2005), resulting into local communities’ intense feelings of fear, anxiety, tiredness, anger, sorrow, discouragement and increasing incidents of internal confrontation (Pérez et al., 2002). Besides peasant livelihood adversities, peasant and indigenous communities in Chiapas currently face challenges to territorial sovereignty due to several environmental conflicts emerging from mining, hydroelectric projects, privatisation of land and water, deforestation and tourism (Otros Mundos Chiapas, 2015). Many communities mobilise against these projects and seek to gain sovereignty over the collective management of their communal resources (Rocheleau, 2015). However, resisting mining takes a big toll; local leaders and activists have been threatened or murdered or their rights violated (FRAYBA, 2005).
I spent three months in 2015 as an active participant–observant of Edupaz, a local NGO that develops its work mainly in the frontier regions of Chiapas (Southern Mexico) with Guatemala, and occasionally in the high plateau area, working at three levels: solidarity economy, agro-ecology and holistic health. As part of their support to indigenous and peasant communities, Edupaz develops Gestalt Therapy 5 workshops for indigenous and peasant activists. This particular emotional support derives from the trajectory of Edupaz engaged in liberation theology (quite popular in Chiapas) lately combined with indigenous (Mayan) spirituality; Gestalt Therapy results, as practiced by Edupaz, as a broad and eclectic framework that enables Edupaz's engagement with liberation psychology in combination with cultural Mayan particularities. I analysed the work of Edupaz, helping them (as they requested) to systematise and evaluate their emotional support to local communities after more than ten years of therapeutic work in the region. My/our aim was to understand how (or if) the emotional support Edupaz provides was helping (or not) the social leaders they work with. These workshops were inspired by Claudio Naranjo’s training for therapists named SAT (Seekers After Truth); Edupaz called them ‘SAT Maya – Healing the Heart’ (SAT-HTH hereafter). Workshops were 6-days long, intensive and retreat-based, where participants identified and analysed their own set of beliefs, framed during their lives by means of an eclectic array of practices from spiritual and psychological traditions and disciplines, such as meditation, body work and movement, theatre, peer and group therapy. Edupaz initially targeted workshops towards indigenous leaders, defined as those with any kind of active role in their community, such as participating in the social work of the church dedicated to indigenous spirituality (Iglesia Autóctona), land and environmental issues (Pastoral de la Tierra), health or education commissions of Zapatista Communities, or involved in land struggles and others. This research helped me to discuss the role of psychotherapeutic practice in facilitating individual and collective reflexivity, and in fostering political fellowship and participation in community matters. I also learned that, although emotional workshops were facilitating individual and collective reflexivity, and fostering political fellowship and participation in community matters, such ‘healing interventions’ need to explicitly engage with structural issues of power in order to move beyond de-contextualised, and thus depoliticised, reflexivity (see González-Hidalgo, 2017).
Three roles for emotions in environmental conflicts: Emotional environmentality, emotional oppression and emotional environmentalism
In my search for answers for the question what roles do emotions play in everyday dynamics in the defence of the commons?, I found three main forms in which emotions intermingle with power relations in the defence of the commons exposed to conflicts in Chile and Mexico: emotional environmentalism, emotional oppression and emotional environmentality. 6 All of them are intersected by a complex set of dimensions associated to the psychological, the more-than-human, the collective, the geographical and the personal–political dimensions that intersect activists’ subjectivities while defending their commons (González-Hidalgo and Zografos, 2020). These emotions are not merely cultural or non-material (see Butler, 1998; Fraser, 1995), but arise as engaged with the daily experience of living in territories of environmental struggles. I describe these roles in detail, explaining how they result in facilitating or hindering the processes of being-in-common and the politicisation of commoner-subjectivities with concrete examples of the case studies analysed.
Fostering being-in-common: Emotional environmentalism
What I name ‘emotional environmentalism’ refers to the role that emotions have in fostering everyday political subjectivities and mobilisation for the defence of the commons. This emotional environmentalism includes the everyday affective labour developed by commoners in their socio-nature encounters (Singh, 2013, 2018), but also the affective labour that activists do when coping with their collective disruptive feelings associated to the dispossession of their livelihood commons. As I will show in the next paragraphs, a variety of daily emotions and emotional practices – or ‘the wonder of minor experiences’ (Bennett, 2016) – function, for local communities, as inspiration to be engaged in being-in-common as environmental or land defenders, and reflect upon their activism while being exposed to acute conflict. In the quotidian life, walks, meetings, rituals and workshops in both Mexico and Southern Chile appear as emotional, generative communitarian performances in the formation and maintenance of pro-commons subjectivities in the sites of conflict.
In Chile, indigenous communities in resistance express, experience and embody their emotional geographies of anger and sorrow in their daily encounters with the monotonous, dry and fruitless plantations that surround them, in contrast with the nurturing relations they create with native forests that offer a variety of non-timber products. The remaining native forests that grow in the margins of tree plantations help commoners to develop affective co-becomings with nature and others colleagues: finding and sometimes recollecting edible fruits and flowers, mushrooms and leaves and parts of plants for medicine (for the body and the spirit, lawen in Mapudungun) are source of joy and shared power (newen), share of ecological knowledge and plans for future meetings to ensure those species remain there. However, those commons are now scarce, and the majoritarian landscape is constituted by tree plantations; in these, co-becomings happen through conflict. Inter-acting with pines and eucalyptus, commoners share with others their collective feelings of anger given the power inequality that facilitates the daily expansion of plantations while they cannot access their territory, and the sorrow associated to the loss of those (humans and non-humans) that have disappeared in the transition from a native to an extractivist forest. Emotions such as anger do not only appear associated to the imposition of those forestry species, but also about the historical dispossession process. As one Mapuche commoner told me: ‘It rages because they have planted where the [our] grandfather was buried’.
Through movements’ productive engagements with emotions, anger and sorrow become positive resources for defending the commons: sharing them in their everyday conversations, and in their meetings and rituals help to build and maintain their shared critical subjectivities of commoners, while building community engaged in conflict (see also González-Hidalgo and Zografos, 2017). In my research in Southern Mexico, I listened and witnessed local communities’ emotions associated to the ecological or material characteristics of a hard-working, peasant and grabbed territory: interviewees reported family abuses (above all to women and children) for not being male and of working age, power abuses boss–worker in coffee plantations, and physical and emotional wounds such as conflict inside the communities, during their mobilisation for gaining lands. The therapeutic Gestalt workshops organised by Edupaz facilitated that peasant and indigenous leaders could reflect and elaborate their own life stories, which were for some the first opportunity to express silenced emotions associated to everyday abuses and conflicts within household, communitarian and broader dynamics. As several of my interviewees reported, the expression of their own experiences, and the listening to others, helped them to gaining knowledge about themselves individually, but also, to connect their individual emotions to broader power dynamics in the groups they are part of. Several interviewees reported that workshops served to digest their own emotions regarding collective issues and maintain themselves active in communitarian activities. As one activist in a peasant movement told me: during the workshop [organised by Edupaz], I realised that it was not true [that colleagues of the movement hated me], I dared to talk to them … . the people with whom we had occupied and gained lands!! … I could be with them again.
Emotional environmentalism, in the context of the defence of commons in sites of conflicts, is therefore not only about circulation and sharing of mutual socio-natural caring practices but also about a creative and nurturing understanding of the emotional implications of the dispossession of the commons. This can be better understood inspired by ideas of trauma from queer and cultural studies, as posed by Ann Cvetkovich: to depathologize negative feelings so that they can be seen as a possible resource for political action rather than as its antithesis. It’s a search for utopia that doesn’t make a simple distinction between good and bad feelings or assume that good politics can only emerge from good feelings; feeling bad might, in fact, be the ground for transformation. (2012: 2)
Spirituality is, therefore, a resource that creates a power to assist the mobilisation efforts of activists in defence of the commons and their ways of being-in-common (Pulido, 1998). This points, first, to the transformative power of spirituality, recognising the political character of indigenous spiritual and affective politics; and second, in bringing the practice of psychotherapy as related to spirituality. These cultural and spiritual practices constitute processes of co-becomings in between commoners and commons, but also, importantly, among commoners themselves. They contribute to the political by facilitating processes of emotion management (Hochschild, 1979), helping activists in the ellaborations of emotions to be ready for self-defence when they handle emotions that can affect their struggle, or to face dominant discourses or ideologies (Gravante and Poma, 2018); and raising consciousness that helps transform personal emotions into a collectively defined sense of injustice (Reger, 2004). In other words, practices that, as Laura Pulido puts it, offer a connection with power(s) beyond our- selves, … [providing] tremendous strength and courage, not only to withstand suffering … . but the courage to change unjust situations, whether that means protecting those who cannot protect themselves (children, fish, landscapes), or rallying against immoral forces and structures, including patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalist exploitation, and intolerance of sexual differences. (Pulido, 1998: 721)
Hindering commoning: Emotional oppression and emotional environmentality
Emotional oppression
As briefly explained in Section ‘Political ecologies of environmental conflicts in Latin America: Communities defending their territories and lives in Chile and Mexico’, the two case studies presented in southern Chile and Mexico are associated with systemic violence, territorial dispossession and racial, ethnic, class, and gender/sexual exclusions. Emotional oppression refers to the emotional consequences that those violent conflicts have on individuals, households and communities, and also, the ways these are internalised and reproduced among families, communities and movements. Emotional oppression can therefore hinder commoning: activists in defence of the commons may be burnt out (Gravante and Poma, 2018), but also assassinated, threatened, ‘disappeared’ or criminalised, making difficult for them and others to engage into the movements. Emotional oppression refers, also, to the difficult emotional experiences that local communities face without access to their livelihoods commons: if lack of access to water and other everyday natural resources may impact on locals’ mental health, suffering of depression and anxiety (see for example Ženko and Menga, 2019), some of them may find hard to engage with the everyday defence of the commons.
My research in southern Chile shows how forestry extractivism depends and expands not only through emotional environmentality (see below), but also through the circulation of feelings of powerlessness and by states and companies ‘trampling upon’ (as several interviewees said) the dignity of locals. The most cruel and obvious form of denial of the dignity of the premises that are opposed to the forms of ‘development’ imposed, is direct violence, which has caused numerous deaths and injuries in Mapuche territory (Richards and Gardner, 2013). This inevitably affects mobilised Mapuche communities, who shared with me and among them, their feelings of despair, anxiety and desperation in front of the powerful forestry sector and state, and the sometimes lack of support by neighbouring communities in joining the mobilisation. As one young commoner said: Sometimes it is too much … we need to take care of our families, the vegetable gardens or aiming to have something to eat everyday … and then also defend the territory against these powerful people. Sometimes I just need to disappear of the forefront of this struggle, I am exhausted.
Contributing to the studies that analyse the emotional and subjective impact that living in environmentally degraded and extractive environments have on local populations (see Albretch, 2011; Anderson, 2009; Campbell, 1997), this shows that the dispossession of the commons implies present and trans-generational suffering, across class, gender, sexuality and ethnicity. This also points towards considering this suffering as a facilitator of the expansion of hegemonic projects directed at nature and marginalised populations. Imposing sorrows, silences, historical and intergenerational trauma (Mitchell and Maracle, 2005) or the ‘lack of dignity’ onto individuals, communities and whole peoples shows how emotional oppression is at the service of commons dispossession agendas, or, conversely, how dispossession agendas result in and benefit from environmental and emotional oppression.
Emotional environmentality
What I name here ‘emotional environmentality’ refers to the role that emotions can have as facilitators of capital accumulation, since they can be incorporated and strategically used to push disciplinary and hegemonic (territorial, extractivist) projects that extract, enclosure or privatise the commons. Emotional environmentality refers to the subtle ways in which top-down capitalist projects develop, that may end convincing locals to participate in those projects, even if they are not part of them, or even if these can help to the dispossession of their livelihoods and the commons. This is the ‘environmentality’ thesis as explained by Agrawal (2005), where I emphasise the role of emotions and affect in the expansion of the ‘capitalist hydra’ (a monster with several heads), as the Zapatistas name it. Emotional environmentality can, therefore, hinder commoning and being-in-common.
My research in southern Chile showed how emotions are constitutive of the programmes of state and private enterprises that ‘accumulate through disciplining’, where the educational campaigns, negotiations and extortions to prevent fires by state and private institutions revealed how extractivism consciously, strategically and deliberatively designs strategies for disciplining subjectivities and ensures the continuity of their extractivist project (González-Hidalgo and Zografos, 2017; González-Hidalgo et al., 2019). Emotional compensations or ‘painkillers’ (as one interviewee named them, such as offering football courts or hairdressing services) are strategies used by the state and the private sector to convince locals of the benefits of living in between tree plantations, and thus encouraging that locals engage emotionally with tree plantations and the project of building Chile as a ‘forest-extractive country’. In the words of the private enterprises: ‘We reach all generational groups that are close to the plantation’s activity … when there is a good relationship with the companies, communities protect the forest [plantation]’. That is, they present the forestry private assets as locals’ commons, asking or imposing them to take care of them instead of being-in-common and in conflict. Although I did not analyse the process of emotional environmentality in such detail as I did in Chile, in Chiapas Edupaz and other local organisations also commented that after the Zapatista uprising in 1994, the Mexican state begun to offer communities access to ‘development’ and productive projects, with the aim to isolate and dismantle active communities. The offer or such ‘development presents’ were then not offering communities the possibility to decide and sustain their self-management and definition of development strategies (Giovanni, 2016; Starr et al., 2011), but aiming at the demobilisation of the commoners, by means of clientelism and paternalism induced by government programmes and political parties.
This ‘emotional environmentality’ expands the ways in which political ecologists usually use Foucault’s theory of discipline, governmentality and biopolitics. Several political ecologists have criticised the ‘utopian’ aspects of neoliberalism (Harvey, 2005) and extractivism (Andreucci and Kallis, 2017; Svampa, 2011), showing how they come to be associated with narratives of improvement and the education of habits, aspirations and desires (Li, 2007). While imposing spatialities implies also the imposition of concrete forms of political thinking (Dikeç, 2012), this work does not consider if and how imposed modes of ‘spatial-political feeling’ play a role in environmentality process. Scholars closer to emotional and affect geographies, such as Thrift (2007, quoted in Pain, 2009) and Woodward and Lea (2010), have drawn attention to states using ‘affective contagion to control emotions and establish political and moral authorities’ (Pain, 2009: 478). However, this work does not concretely show how these processes take place in emotional terms. Also, Singh (2013) has argued that governmentality and environmentality studies (Agrawal, 2005) have underexplored the role that emotion, affect and the body have in the constitution of individual and collective subjectivities and therefore resisting or interrupting the environmentality process in defence of the commons. While I fully endorse her argument, I do not analyse ‘environmentality’ versus ‘emotion, affect and body’, but show how affect may indeed be a useful path towards discipline.
The term ‘emotional environmentality’ seeks to show specifically how emotions are captured by or inserted into narratives of environmental, extractivist discipline, in ways that ‘the production of new sources of faith and enchantment is crucial to the dynamics of the capitalist economy’ (Konings, 2015). A better understanding of the role of emotions in disciplinary projects can help political ecologists with a sharper understanding of the scope of environmentality dynamics in governing the self, and why individuals and communities end to be engaged or attached to extractivist projects (and therefore absent in the defence of the commons) even if they can be critical or worse-off because of them.
Discussion and conclusion: The ambivalent political work of emotions
In the previous section I have provided some arguments and evidence on how emotions can be useful resources for the political subjectivation and mobilisation of commoning grassroots (fostering being-in-common) as well as providers of opportunities for the incorporation of individuals into capital accumulation projects or their abandonment of commoning grassroots (hindering being-in-common). Nevertheless, emotional environmentalism, emotional oppression and emotional environmentality are not isolated dynamics that occur independently, but simultaneous, contradictory and creative roles in which emotions feed power struggles while defending the commons. While emotions can be entry points towards being governmentalised, or prevent participation in collective projects associated to individual and collective emotional difficulties and interpersonal conflicts, the expression of emotions as part of the commoning processes is useful for crafting collective political subjectivity and agency. This provides a glimpse of the mobile, porous and multiple emotional layers that inform, reproduce and interrupt ‘the political’ in environmental conflicts; layers that when combined inevitably result in a constantly unresolved tension between the role of emotions as channel for the subversion of hegemonic power and their role in reproducing hegemonic power dynamics. In a nutshell, my work shows that emotions contribute, ambivalently, towards both the reproduction and the subversion of hegemonic power. There is, therefore, a persistent and unresolved tension between the role of emotions as channels for the subversion of hegemonic power and their role in reproducing hegemonic power dynamics. I suggest that this reveals ‘the emotional’ as a space of power and conflict, and that acknowledging the ambivalent political work of emotions offers opportunities to better understand and transform power asymmetries in environmental conflicts over commons, by means of capturing the ambivalence and contradictions of power in the processes of commoning.
Ambivalence is, as Butler argues, a fertile site for opportunities for subversion: ‘the subject is itself a site of this ambivalence in which the subject emerges both as the effect of a prior power and as the condition of possibility for a radically conditioned form of agency’ (Butler, 1997: 10). The self-organised Mapuche political rituals in southern Chile and psychotherapeutic workshops in Chiapas (Mexico) point to an important contradiction: in the struggle against dispossession, disciplinarisation and oppression, the feeling of individual and collective distress results nonetheless in political agency precisely because of its expression. I therefore argue that acknowledging (and giving space to) the ambivalent political work of emotions creates the possibility of the practice of passionate political ecologies that let us better understand and transform power asymmetries in environmental struggles in the defence of the commons. Since emotions can draw subjects in different, opposing or competing directions, as well as help bring individuals together under common spaces (of solidarity or coercion), the emotional is a space of ambivalence, power and conflict.
Considering the politically ambivalent character of emotions offers opportunities to incorporate the political information that they provide towards our work and research as political ecologists, but also for local communities and grassroots: this ambivalence offers opportunities when thinking of setting scenarios for productively engaging with emotions in contexts of mobilisation, and how to best exploit politically the workings of those spaces. The two cases I have presented, albeit sharing some characteristics, differ in the fact that, while in Chile the process that facilitates the expression of emotions is part of organic, indigenous self-organised political rituals and meetings, in Mexico, emotional expression appeared related to a structured, externally driven framework within a context of healing. From a political ecology perspective that values autonomous forms of grassroots organisation and commoning, the way in which Mapuche collectively mobilise their emotions to politicise their subjectivities, would probably be catalogued as ‘more political’ than SAT-HTH workshops, which represent an external, non-self-organised form to tackle subjectivities with the aim of individual healing. Nevertheless, my analysis of SAT-HTH workshops also revealed the political opportunities that Gestalt Therapy offered for activists, related to the performance of new subjectivities with the potential of shifting household and communitarian (power) relationships. Moreover, while my analysis of Mapuche’s self-organised political rituals shows the role of emotions in negotiating power ‘outwards’ – mobilised communities and individuals and their relationships with the state, private sector, etc. – my analysis of psychotherapeutic workshops in Chiapas shows emotions being mobilised in negotiating power ‘inwards’, that is to say, for the negotiation of power relationships inside movements, local communities, households and individual subjectivities. This points to the double-sided and interconnected character of ‘the political’ in being-in-common while being exposed to conflict, where ‘implicit activisms’ – ‘small-scale, personal, quotidian and proceeding with little fanfare’ (Horton and Kraftl, 2009: 14) – mutually feed and connect with ‘grandiose’ activisms. This connects with the idea of commons and commoning not only as transforming economic and institutional arrangements, but as transforming our(selves) – and our socio-ecological relations and practices in the everyday. If, as the editors of this special issue say, ‘the real “tragedy” of the commons arises not only from the enclosure of the physical space, but from enclosures of the “conatus” or human striving within capitalist frames’ (this issue), then the ‘social transformation occurs not merely by rallying mass numbers in favour of a cause, but precisely through the ways in which daily social relations are re-articulated’ (Butler, 2000: 14). Considering this ambivalent, non-idealised perspective of emotions may also help to further consider the trouble in commoning, that is, ‘the exclusions, others, and power over that commoning practices create’ (Nightingale, 2019: 31).
For social-environmental grassroots movements being torn while defending and sustaining their commons, how to productively engage the emotional in environmental conflicts remains a challenge. This is especially the case when trying to avoid, on the one hand, crafting collective emotional identities without political discussion (Laclau, 2005; Žižek, 2006), and on the other hand, the fact that the introspection of individual life may distract us from politics (Sharp, 2008). Nevertheless, being more or less explicitly processed, collective action always demands some sort of ‘emotion management strategies’ (Gravante and Poma, 2018). Combining the lessons of both cases analysed, I suggest that politically stimulating scenarios for sharing emotions in a way that productively considers the emotional as a space of power and conflict should: (1) facilitate inter- subjectivity, mutual listening and the expression of disagreements, as well as consider emotions as relational, individual and collective, shaped through encounters between humans, non-humanities and systemic and material structures, and allow for different and conflicting visions; (2) promote reflexivity and consciousness in terms of power distributions as a way to give an account of individual and collective processes of subjectivation in relation to relevant social actors in the conflict and also offering possibilities for reflexivity on power asymmetries or conflict in the internal politics of movements; and (3) enable spirituality and performance, be it in the form of rituals or (public) collective performance in a way in which affective communication among attendants and their ‘spaces of activism’ takes place organically.
In an ideal situation, these requirements should help to acknowledge, express, discuss and shed light on the challenges that movements defending the commons daily face conflict, both in relation to the other social actors in the conflict (outwards) and to individuals and groups inside movements (inwards). Giving a (political) space to emotions within the politics of social movements defending the commons does not mean a total abandonment of reason nor the establishment of restrictive ‘feeling rules’ for social movements (Brown and Pickerill, 2009: 34), but to constantly consider that emotions are part and parcel of embodied, rational deliberation, decision-making and motive-action processes (Nelson, 2013) that participate in the deliberative processes of (re)creating, defending or destroying the commons. This invites us to discuss and establish ways in which we can incorporate emotions as part of our collective discussions, facilitating channels for recognising, ‘expressing and making the best out of the transformational potential of emotion side-by-side with deliberative assemblies’ (Zografos, 2015: 193). Even though combining the requirements I propose can help individuals and movements to acknowledge, express, discuss, decide and act in relation to the different dimensions that constitute their emotional, environmental and activist subjectivities, crafting such spaces (autonomously or with the aid of external facilitators) may not be easy, and in any case the political benefits of sharing emotions are unexpected, given ‘the multiple temporalities, spatialities and emotional registers at work in generating the political’ (Featherstone and Korf, 2012: 663).
Highlights
I analyse two different ways in which grassroots movements and organisations in Chile and Mexico facilitate emotional expression. I discuss different roles that emotion plays in the defence of the commons. Emotions significantly contribute to grassroots, peasant and indigenous struggles for their commons. Emotions can also be channels for the reproduction of hegemonic power dynamics.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I am immensely thankful to all the people who made this research possible in Chile and Mexico, and specially to Mapuche communities in resistance in Southern Chile and Edupaz team in Chiapas for letting me participate and learn of their everyday commoning actions for some time. I am thankful to Gustavo García López, Neera Singh and Ursula Lang for considering my work for this Special Issue, and specially to Gustavo, as well as to Christos Zografos and two anonymous reviewers, for their feedback to previous drafts of this paper.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Research for this paper benefited from EC funding under the Marie Curie Actions—Initial Training Networks—FP7–PEOPLE–2011; contract No 289374—ENTITLE (European Network of Political Ecology).
