Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
565
q 2016 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved. 0011-3204/2016/5705-0002$10.00. DOI: 10.1086/688580
566
Current Anthropology
newable energy in the one region in the world that gets the
majority of its electricity from non-fossil-fuel sources, foreshadowing conicts and resolutions that may become all the
more common in a post-fossil-fuel future. And so, in struggling
for energy/hydroelectric sovereignty at Itaip, social movements
in Brazil and Paraguay touched on issues concerning contentious
water resources the world over.
The Anthropocene has made natural resources all the more
fraught by calling into question just exactly whose priorities
and claims have precedence. Contests over natural resources
have increased with the growing awareness that humans have
become a planet-shaping force, altering biological, climatological, and geologic systems in manners so catastrophic that
the viability of human life itself is threatened (Aravamudan
2013; Chakrabarty 2008). As nature-as-an-accumulation strategy expands to include DNA sequences and energy potentials,
decision-making processes over the use and ownership of resources have entered into a new era of heightened complexity.
But for all the novelty of a future endangered by anthropogenic
climate change, this is not the rst time that such a sharp disjuncture between an old world and a new one has called into
question the very way humans relate to one another and to
the earth with ramications that restructured the global political economy. In the early sixteenth century, the worlds largest
empire also faced a similarly unprecedented dilemma: how to
comprehend the Americas and their inhabitants in light of the
already rapacious conquest and the desirability of New World
resources. My contention is that categories embedded in the
school of Salamancas discussion have increased resonance today precisely because of the unknown catastrophic potential
from the Anthropocene.
To untangle these threads, this article bookends a discussion of various theoretical approaches to sovereignty with
ethnographic data from Paraguay. In the rst section of the
paper, I give a more detailed introduction to Itaip Dam and
hydroelectric politics in the Fernando Lugo era. I then discuss
sovereignty as commonly studied within political science as
well as more familiar anthropological interventions on the subject before turning to challenges to nation-state-centric and
biopolitical denitions of sovereignty raised by counterhegemonicwhat I have called subalternsovereignty movements, such as tribal, food, seed, and hydroelectric sovereignty
struggles. The third section of the paper then builds the case
for the Spanish juristic origins of the kinds of sovereigntyrelated themes that we see arise in subaltern sovereignty struggles by detailing the contributions of Francisco de Vitoria. The
key insight that comes from recognizing the inuence of the
school of Salamanca is that, in imperialism, nature and necropolitical killability are united via economics and justied by
cultural inferiority. The nal section returns to the ethnographic case from Paraguay and refracts subaltern sovereignty
struggles through the lens of Salamanca to show how commerce, natural resources, and cultural otherness are enmeshed
in sovereignty.
Folch
567
568
Current Anthropology
the discussion on hydroelectric sovereignty entirely by framing his teams proposals in terms of two well-established international legal principles: pacta sunt servanda (agreements
must be kept) and rebus sic stantibus (things thus standing).
Whereas the leftists demanded a renegotiation of the treaty,
effectively upending international legal practice, the technocratic team invoked international legal structures in support of
Paraguayan claims. Balmellis team was not merely placating;
they had their own international legal-political project that
saw the binational dam as a way to implement a new political
economic order within Paraguay.
It is beyond the scope of this article to explore the ramications of these different political projects, how it came to be
that Itaip was the locus for so many debates on sovereignty,
or what this all might herald for energy and water politics in
the twenty-rst century. Instead, I focus on how the expansion
of counterhegemonic sovereignty struggles calls for better theorizing of sovereignty. The complaint began on the Paraguayan
left, part of the Latin American new left that has developed after
the fall of the Soviet bloc and in the midst of dissatisfaction with
Eurasian political-economic categories (Escobar 2010; Mignolo
2005). Moreover, Paraguay has a long tradition of local progressive activism; for example, the 1936 Febrerista Revolution
was an autochthonous socialist movement independent of both
Moscow and Beijing. Important critique from below is being
done in Paraguay; the denition of sovereignty, the problems by
which it has been lost, and what should be done with it do not
simply follow in the mold of North Atlantic political-economic
categories.
Approaches to Sovereignty
Understanding sovereignty has been one of the central concerns of North Atlantic political science from the moment
sixteenth-century French theorist Jean Bodin (1992) dened
sovereignty as the absolute and perpetual power of a commonwealth, without limits of time, power, or function (1).
Writing to other political scientists and policy makers on state
sovereignty in the context of late twentieth-century weak states
and globalization, Krasner (1999) distinguishes four ways that
the term has been used, though he acknowledges that there
may be others. The rst two look inward, while the latter two
turn outward. Interdependence sovereignty he describes as
a governments ability to control what moves across its borders as well as its ability to use its borders as a means of control. By domestic sovereignty, he means the way authority is
organized within a certain polity. Westphalian sovereignty
refers to a governments autonomy from external authority
and takes its origin from the 1684 resolution to European religious wars that determined that the religion of the magnate
was the religion of the land. This is closely linked to international legal sovereignty, which is the mutual recognition
of states (often signaled through consular exchange, treaties,
and membership in international organizations). Krasners at-
Folch
569
570
Current Anthropology
political strategy (57). For Coronil, the land that is then inected is oil in Venezuela. In Paraguay, it is hydroelectric
potential. Today, the growing interest in infrastructure, in STS,
and in the impacts of the Anthropocene has cemented the
theoretical, not just empirical, importance of materiality to
lived human experience and the structure of human societies. And so, while there is notable theoretical richness in anthropological writing on sovereignty issues as biopolitical exception and necropolitics, the literature does not draw the
same depth to an analysis of subaltern sovereignty movements
or their contentions over natural resources and the fundamental role played by violence in originating an unequal politicallegal hierarchy.
Folch
571
572
Current Anthropology
millions of those who were not citizens in the sixteenth century. Economics and the desirability of the natural resources
of the Indians were at the very center of just war theory and
the origins of the sovereignty doctrine.
By turning to natural law, Vitoria followed in the footsteps
of another Dominican, Thomas Aquinas. The underlying
premise to Thomistic natural law was that it was universally
rational and applicable to all human communities, regardless of religion. De Indis, in fact, interweaves a discussion of
Aristotles Nicomachean Ethics with exhortations from the
Old and New Testaments. Vitoria argued for the rationality
of the Indians and therefore the recognition of their rights
under natural law, which they themselves forfeited by violating that law. If natural law is universally reasonable, as Vitoria
maintained, then any who challenge the Western legal structure of international law are fundamentally unreasonable. There
is a tension between the rationality of the Indians and their
cultural otherness. In De Indis, commerce presumes universal
rationality, which was why preventing trade was a violencejustifying violation. The universality of reason plays a critical
role in Vitorias thinking; this is why he does not consider the
doctrine of discovery legal justication for conquest. He does not
need to. Rational use, not rst discovery, confers rights of
ownership and control.
Vitorias thinking made its way to the rest of non-Iberian
Europe after his death. His theological reections published
posthumously in Lyon in 1558 deeply impacted Grotius, who
cites him more than a hundred times in On the Law of Spoils
and in his most enduring work, On the Law of War and Peace.
Grotius had a tremendous inuence on Hobbes and Locke
and, thus, on the development of classical liberalism in the
North Atlantic world. The school of Salamanca appears in
Boswells 1791 biography of Samuel Johnson, who quips, I
love the University of Salamanca; for when the Spaniards
were in doubt as to the lawfulness of their conquering America, the University of Salamanca gave it as their opinion that
it was unlawful (Boswell and Birrell 1901:117). Even Schmitt
sees Vitoria as seminal in modern European thought, devoting an entire chapter of The Nomos of the Earth (2006) to his
thinking, unlike any other theorist treated there. He writes,
The rst question in international law was whether the lands
of non-Christian, non-European peoples and princes were
free and without authority, whether non-European peoples
were at such a low stage of civilization that they could be the
objects of organization by peoples at a higher stage (Schmitt
2006:137138). Schmitt holds that modern European international law is based on the American land grab, which resulted in a new spatial order where the New World was the
exception and Europe the place of law.
But while Schmitt treats Vitoria as a medieval theologian,
legal historians read him as a modern jurist. Through Vitoria,
a discourse on sovereignty and otherness developed that secularized and rationalized the conquest in terms of commerce
and natural resources. This move gave impetus to the political
legal system that underpinned the emerging capitalist world
economy. Antony Anghie and Robert Williams show the systematic ways that the conceptualization of sovereignty occurred in the crucible of colonialism, foregrounding desirable
natural resources, economic imperative, and the other as culturally inferior.
Williamss scholarship is primarily concerned with understanding the place of Native Americans in Western legal
thought, but his work engages much more widely. Regarding
Vitoria, the University of Arizona law professor writes, In applying Thomistic natural-law discourse to the question of the
legal rights of the Indians, Victoria inaugurated the rst critical
steps toward a totalizing jurisprudence of international order
a Law of Nations intended to regulate all aspects of the relationship between independent states (Williams 1990:96). Specic European values were claimed to be universally held values.
Thus, a particular asymmetrical relationship and the principles to justify it were universalized as the pattern to govern all
interstate, intercommunal dynamics. The principles were purported to be equitable and the various participants equals, but
because the Indians failed to meet rational, universal standards,
they were forever relegated to subaltern status and not permitted to exercise sovereignty. For half a millennium, Williams
(1990) writes, Western legal thought has sought to erase the
difference presented by the American Indian in order to sustain the privileges of power it accords to Western norms and
value structures (326). For Williams, Vitoria was the rst to
erase the difference of Native Americans by simultaneously asserting and then removing their legal rights.
Anghie, a law professor at the University of Utah, has a
broader scope on the use of law in colonialism and postdecolonization in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. He argues
that international law was created to resolve problems arising
from an unprecedented situation of Spanish-Indian contact
(Anghie 1999, 2005). He thus grounds all subsequent international law in a colonial encounter, showing how law regarding governance and property has been systematically used
to disenfranchise and dispossess, linking imperial projects to
the emergence of the sovereignty doctrine. Beginning with
Vitoria, Anghie (2005) sees a close association between sovereignty, property, commerce, and acceptable government:
Vitorias arguments are based on the concept of property,
which is intimately connected in his thought with issues
of legal personality and sovereignty. Thus the crucial consequence of being recognized as a legal person, as possessing
reason, is the acquisition of the right to own property. . . .
Taken together, these statements go very far toward asserting that non-European sovereignty is subject to a foreigners
right to trade. Crucially, then, one of the major functions
of government was to ensure that international commerce
would be furthered. (251)
Williams (1990) also notes the importance of economic imperative in Vitoria: Victoria had elevated the prot motive to
an extremely privileged status in his totalizing discourse of a
universally obligatory natural Law of Nations (102). The uni-
Folch
573
failed states. Current attempts to radically redene rights, status, and sovereignty demonstrate the imbalances internalized
and normalized within law. And so we should not be surprised
to see challenges not merely to the accepted interpretation of
international legal principles or to specic treaties but also
to the underlying precepts of the entire system. We also might
expect that, when such challenges are made by subaltern sovereignty movements, their opponents might counter that there
is something unreasonable and irrational about them.
574
Current Anthropology
The Itaip hydroelectric dam was built during the Colorado Party dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner (19541989) in
Paraguay and the Brazilian military government (19671985).
Although Stroessner fell in a coup in 1989, his party continued
in power, controlling the symbolic and nancial resources of
the state. Fernando Lugos presidency arose out of a nationwide grassroots protest against then president Nicanor Duarte
(20032008), whose machinations to gain reelection were so
egregious that even part of his own Colorado Party mutinied.
A nonpartisan charismatic spokesman, Bishop Lugo emerged
in 2006 as the moral leader who promised a new Paraguay and
a new politics. With growing momentum, a small team of leftist activists who had been persecuted by the dictatorship in their
youth gathered around the bishop with a vision to transform
Lugos moral authority into a political one. They formed the
leftist social movement Tekojoja, successfully uniting popular
groups and political parties across the spectrum.4
Ricardo Canese, a critic of Itaip Dam dating to his days as
an engineering student, was a founding member of Tekojoja
and part of Lugos inner circle. Under Caneses inuence, Tekojoja not only criticized the nancial mismanagement by
Paraguayan ofcials in the dam but actually challenged Brazilian imperialism by demanding a recovery of Paraguays hydroelectric sovereignty and a renegotiation of the Itaip Treaty
itself. Doing so would bring in riches that the government
would invest in education, health, and jobs, ushering in the
social development promised but never delivered by other governments (Tekojoja Public Platform, April 2008). Like other
governments in Latin Americas leftward turn, social equity
would be attained not through revolution but through energy
rent.
It was a shock to the political discourse in Paraguay. Political
elites distanced themselves from any language that might upset the powerful neighbor, but the gamble paid off. Brazilian
President Lula da Silva promised to discuss the issue, should
Fernando Lugo win the election. As soon as Lugo stepped into
ofce in August 2008, he appointed Canese to a cabinet-level
position as head of a special Commission on Binational Hydroelectric Entities (CEBH), the negotiating team responsible for meeting with the Brazilian Foreign Ministry. The CEBH
negotiating team was staffed primarily by Tekojoja activists,
who had considerable experience in community organizing
but less in international diplomacy.
Hydroelectric sovereignty came to be dened even as it
became accepted as a goal (Folch 2015). In a book titled Recovering Paraguays Hydroelectric Sovereignty, Canese (2007)
explicitly outlined the core goals as (1) libre disponbilidad, the
ability to freely access all of Paraguays electricity, including selling to parties other than Brazil, and (2) precio justo,
receiving a fair price based on the market (101). Language
from Caneses manifesto and from Tekojojas political platform made its way into the Va Campesina Why We Are
4. The j in Guaran is pronounced like jam in English; the last syllable is accented.
Folch
One Brazilian government ofcial, an expert in ParaguayBrazil relations, said to me, Why is the treaty so unfair?
Everything was for free. The Paraguayan economy grew 10 percent a year while Itaip was built. We are not to blame that
the money that came here was not spent on Paraguay but went
to the pockets of the barons of Itaip or to the regimes. In
other words, the status quo of Itaip was framed as a result of
and, indeed, a protection against Paraguayan moral failings.
In the rhetoric of the Brazilian government, risk constitutes virtue and therefore provision of all of the collateral for the construction debt granted the moral high ground. Unstated in all
of the outcries against Paraguayan freeloading, however, was
the controversy over the massive construction debt, which had
quadrupled due to questionable arrangements between Itaip
and the Brazilian utility company, harming the nancial solvency of the dam and beneting Eletrobrs (C. Folch, unpublished data). Discourses of corruption serve as politically expedient accusations while not being applied consistently.
Lugo, Canese, and the leftist Paraguayan negotiators repeatedly threatened to recur to arbitration by The Hague,
although they never did (ABC Color 2007b). At times, Paraguayan attempts to regain hydroelectric sovereignty moved beyond just challenging the interpretation of the Itaip Treaty to
questioning its basic legality and legitimacy. During the January
2009 public presentation in Asuncin, one of the CEBH negotiators argued that because the 1973 Itaip Treaty was signed by
two bloody dictatorships, its validity was dubious. The
Congress of Vienna gives Paraguay the right to annul the
treaty, said Caneses ally, Domingo Lano, an elder statesman
of the left. Paraguay can do this unilaterally, or it can be done
bilaterally. Vigorous applause met this pronouncement. The
Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (1969), of which
both Brazil and Paraguay are parties, codied contemporary
international law and recognized the rights of states when
forming treaties, but the process of annulling treaties was more
complicated than what Lano implied.
This explanation was one I heard repeatedly in conversations with Lugos progressive basethe very fact that the
treaty was passed by a military regime that ruled through
state terror meant that the treaty did not represent the wishes
of the Paraguayan people, and it should therefore be nullied. Yet it is not standard legal principle to claim that the
retroactive delegitimacy of rulers negates the validity of treaties. Instead, pacta sunt servanda (promises must be kept) is the
common practice. Brazilian government ofcials expressed unabashed condence even in private that The Hague and any
other international legal body would side with the Brazilian
government in the event the matter were brought before the
court.
But instead of international arbitration, Presidents Lugo and
Lula signed an agreement resolving the diplomatic tensions and
raising the price paid for Paraguays electricity in July 2009. Interestingly, the terms of the 2009 agreement were initially developed by Paraguays other negotiating team, the energy sector technocrats led by Itaips Paraguayan Executive Director
575
Conclusion
The struggle for hydroelectric sovereignty encountered a number of constraints that point to shortcomings in subaltern social movements and to changes we may see around nature/
energy in the future. One challenge Lugos close allies faced
was that, while operating in the idiom of international law,
their Brazilian counterparts were more accustomed to the
terrain. Because government negotiators insisted on revoking pacta sunt servanda, the popular Paraguayan claims were
taken less seriously. Moreover, the technocratic team headed
by Itaip Executive Director Balmelli deliberately appealed to
576
Current Anthropology
Acknowledgments
I thank Mark Aldenderfer and three anonymous reviewers at
Current Anthropology as well as Alessandro Angelini, Marc
Edelman, Julie Skurski, and Katherine Verdery for their comments on earlier versions of this argument. The shortcomings that remain are my own. This article is based on eldwork
conducted in Paraguay (20072010), supported by the WennerGren Foundation and the Fulbright Institute of International
Education. Writing was supported by the Mellon/American
Council of Learned Societies and the New York Public Librarys
Wertheim Study.
Comments
Jessica R. Cattelino
Department of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles,
341 Haines Hall, Box 951553, Los Angeles, California 90095, USA
( jesscatt@anthro.ucla.edu). 5 IV 16
Folch
and the qualities of water. Folch urges anthropological theorists of sovereignty to take better account of international
ordering, especially in the wake of disciplinary conversations
about sovereignty that focused on state authority and biopolitics and featured keywords such as decision, exception, bare
life, and body. Sovereignty struggles between sovereigns
in this case, between Paraguay and Brazil over the economics
of hydroelectric poweroften take place on different terrain.
The stuff of such (violence-backed) sovereignty claims, Folch
says, are cultural difference, control over natural resources,
and economic power. Suggesting an alternative genealogy of
sovereignty through the writings of Vitoria and others in the
Spanish school of Salamanca, Folch informs/reminds readers
that the modern (inter)national order was born not with the
Treaty of Westphalia, the doctrine of discovery, or the consolidation of liberal democracy but rather/also with traditions
forged in the colonization of the Americas. Vitoria queried the
legitimacy of colonial rule, endorsing European takeover in
limited circumstances, such as indigenous peoples insufcient and/or irrational use of resources. We hear echoes of this
in Lockes theory of property and government and in the anthropologically well-documented blame game by states and
NGOs of indigenous peoples for allegedly causing ecological
degradation by improper resource use.
In the genealogical spirit, I would like to suggest another,
less temporally and disciplinarily distant reference point. During the 1980s and 1990s, a substantial anthropological literature on nationalism grappled with the postcolonial condition
and, more broadly, the analytical and political dilemmas that
pervaded when groups sought freedom through the nationstate. Like Folch, scholars such as Partha Chatterjee, Lila AbuLughod, and Akhil Gupta called for ethnographic attention to
the international order of things and to the ways that claims
to, or on behalf of, nation were not simply about consolidating
internal rule but were also, always, about asserting political
legitimacy in relation to others. Scholars showed how a logic
of seriality (it is Benedict Andersons phrase) facilitated
nations claims to equality and recognition against the backdrop of imperialism and dependency. Whereas anthropological studies of sovereignty generally have highlighted its violence, earlier research on nation and nationalism more closely
aligned with the circumstances Folch analyzes. What would it
look like to revisit such proximate studies for the purpose of
analyzing sovereignty in its present-day forms? What kinds
of politics might come into view, including about nature and
economy?
Indigeneity matters in all of this, not only because it was a
key problem for Vitoria but also because of the importance of
indigenous sovereignty in todays world. The question of sovereignty in anthropology has interested me since a time just
before Agambens work began to circulate widely in the eld.
In the late 1990s, when I sought funding for doctoral research
on Seminole sovereignty and high-stakes casino gaming, grant
reviewers expressed skepticism that sovereignty was an anthropological concept. Meanwhile, American Indian Studies
577
scholars long and increasingly had been addressing indigenous sovereignty as claim, category, practice, status, and history. Soon, anthropological attention turned to sovereignty,
and in 2004 the conference of the Society for Cultural Anthropology even took sovereignty as its theme. Conference
goers met in a Portland hotel decorated with historical images
of the Lewis and Clark expedition, complete with an image of
American Indians on our room key cards. Notably, however,
vanishingly few papers addressed indigenous sovereignty. It
was a post-9/11 moment, when the problematics of sovereignty helped anthropologists gain traction on emerging forms
of power: Agamben, more than Foucault, could account for
Guantnamo Bay. Soon, the word sovereignty appeared everywhere, in anthropology grant applications and dissertation
titles. A readers report on my book manuscript referred to
sovereignty as the avor of the month. Much had changed in
a few short years.
Still, dominant anthropological approaches to sovereignty
worked better for describing and theorizing settler state sovereignty than indigenous sovereignty. What would it take to
recenter indigeneity in theories of sovereignty? Although indigeneity does not seem to be a focus of these negotiations between Paraguay and Brazil, what should we make of Guaran
linguistic and discursive presence or, more importantly, of
the question of indigeneity that haunts Folchs use of Vitoria?
Indigenous sovereign formations are critically important for
rethinking the relationships among sovereignty, economy, and
nature. This is the case not only when indigenous groups are
the focus of analysis but in everything from international disputes over natural resources to the buen vivir movement in
Latin America to analyses of American power in todays global
order. For example, my analysis of Florida Seminole gaming
entailed taking (inter)dependency seriously as a site of sovereignty, and this, at least for me, had implications for sovereigntys theorization beyond Indian country.
Water calls attention to undertheorized aspects of sovereignty. The Paran River divides Paraguay and Brazil, even
as it is fed by tributaries and carries soil particles from each.
Waterways can divide, but freshwater also connects and poses
notorious challenges to borders as it ows across them; builds,
erodes, and recontours land; and connects far-ung communities. Waters temporalityfor example, across seasons or
water yearsis an awkward t for bureaucratic timekeeping.
Water troubles private property, implicates people in the wellbeing of others, and creates interdependencies: it is no coincidence that nation-states build authority by harnessing water.
Increasingly frequent calls for watershed governance compel
attention to underanalyzed aspects of sovereignty. Folch takes
water to be a social relation. I would love to hear more: In what
sense? With what implications for theorizing sovereignty?
What would come of analyzing the Itaip hydroelectric dam
alongside an account of, say, the Guarani Aquifer, an enormous underground freshwater reservoir that many parties
indigenous peoples, corporations, regional interests, and even
the George Bush familyeye as critical to global water sus-
578
Current Anthropology
tainability? I am less certain than Folch that rethinking sovereignty in light of Vitoria offers insights into the Anthropocene per se, but without doubt this stimulating paper pushes
toward future anthropological work on sovereignty in the international ordering of environment and cultural difference.
Jeffrey S. Kahn
Department of Anthropology, University of California, Davis, 328
Young Hall, One Shields Avenue, Davis, California 95616, USA
( jskahn@ucdavis.edu). 21 IV 16
Anthropologists have been studying sovereigntys political ctions (Fortes and Evans-Pritchard 1966 [1940]), its expressive
performances (Geertz 1980), and its mimetic potentialities
for some time (Merry 2000). It was not until the rst decade
of the new millennium, however, that sovereignty and its
more brutal dimensions took center stage (Cattelino 2008:
212, n. 22). This disciplinary shift was facilitated in part by
the work of Giorgio Agamben, whose interweaving of Carl
Schmitt, Michel Foucault, and Hannah Arendt offered up a
provocative theoretical framework that seemed ready-made
for an academy confronted with the conundrums raised by
resurgent executive power in a time of perceived crisis. Over
the years, however, a bare life fatigue has set in, giving rise
to pointed critique (Comaroff 2007; Jennings 2011); more cautious assessments of the presence, or nonpresence, of necropolitical violence (Ticktin 2011); and ethnographically grounded
alternative formulations (Cattelino 2008).
Christine Folchs thought-provoking piece joins these critical voices with a complex analytical and ethnographic interweaving of its own. For Folch, the widespread uptake of
Agambens preoccupation with bodies and the exception has
blinded us to important questions regarding land, resources,
and community. She nds the elements of a corrective reframing in the writings of Francisco de Vitoria, a sixteenthcentury Dominican jurist and Thomist theologian known for
his assertion of Indian rights in the Americas (Koskenniemi
2011:68). Folch contends that Vitorias focus on the relation
of sovereignty to resources and property, as opposed to merely
governance, can orient the discipline anew, curing us of our
myopic xation on bodies and bare life while illuminating
phenomena like the infrastructure-centered hydroelectric
sovereignty movements she describes. Boldly and creatively,
Folch adds a historical dimension to her argument, positing a
dark symmetry between the epic destruction contemplated by
Vitoria in the wake of Spanish imperialism and the looming
catastrophe of anthropogenic climate change that has become
synonymous with the current moment.
Folchs call for a refocusing on questions of land, property,
and empire in debates over sovereignty is welcome, although
her effort to distinguish herself from the existing literature is
perhaps a bit overdrawn. Questions of territory and imperialism have been central to a host of recent anthropological
Folch
Ronald Niezen
Department of Anthropology, McGill University, 855 Sherbrooke
Street West, Montreal, Quebec H3A 2T7, Canada (ronald.niezen
@mcgill.ca). 27 V 16
579
of international law, turning to the sixteenth-century Spanish jurists of the Salamanca school, Francisco de Vitoria in
particular, who expressed a view of the peoples who were
encountered and conquered by imperial power that emphasized their possession of reason and ability to govern themselves and control their natural resources. Folchs paper thus
pushes the boundaries of the ecological sovereignty movement at both ends of the historical spectrum, arguing for inspiration from a deep historical source and pressing its future
consequences forward to the as-yet-to-unfold, shaping the contests of the Anthropocene to come.
Each of these two ambitious goals is fraught with difculty.
First, although Vitoria can be seen as an inuential precursor
of Grotius in the foundations of international law, one should
be cautious in drawing inspiration from these early origins
going back to a school of thought that was active before international law as such can be said to have existedwith reference to the contemporary phenomena that seem to reect
this schools progressive tendencies. In the contemporary ecological sovereignty movement(s), are we really witnessing a
reengagement with a sixteenth-century precursor of international law, or is this more of a fortuitous, disconnected symmetry of thought? And if it is the latter, are there still lessons
to be drawn from this intellectual history with reference to
the challenges of coming to terms with the phenomena sometimes referred to as the Anthropocene? There are two risks inherent in engaging with sixteenth-century scholarship in this
way: one is to misinterpret the work of Vitoria and others by
imposing present concerns on their work, and the other is
to overlook the complexities of the statist system of international law by turning for inspiration to sources that may have
inspired but that predate international law as such.
In addressing these questions, lessons can be drawn from
the international movement of indigenous peoples. In this context, too, Vitorias name has come up as a source of early opposition to the ideas of aborigines as natural slaves and
the related doctrine of discovery. But the place of indigenous
peoples in international law actually began with an assimilative intent, in the initiatives of the International Labour Organization in the 1950s. And even in its contemporary form,
the United Nations remains solidly, persistently state centric,
despite the apparently growing inuence of NGOs in a wide
range of policies and processes of international law. The development of indigenous peoples as a global movement, oriented in part toward environmental justice and claims of selfdetermination, is closely connected to changing structures and
roles of global organizations, the growing inuence of NGOs,
and the networking possibilities inherent in new media. And
let us not overlook the rise of a human rightsinspired conception of humanity accompanying all of this, one that transcends the human rights movement as such and that, indeed,
might tangentially draw inspiration from precursors such as
Vitoria. But to what extent does the Salamanca school really
have increased resonance in the context of the unknown catastrophic potential from the Anthropocene?
580
Current Anthropology
M. Lois Stanford
Department of Anthropology, New Mexico State University, MSC
3BV, Las Cruces, New Mexico 88003, USA (lstanfor@nmsu.edu).
31 V 16
In her study of Paraguayan political movements, Folch analyzes the emergence of hydroelectric sovereignty as a political discourse, pointing to historical discussions of the school of
Salamanca during the sixteenth century. She draws on the work
of Francisco de Vitoria to examine how Spain could both recognize the rights of indigenous peoples over their lands at the
same time that Spain validated its right to engage in justiable
war and exert sovereignty over indigenous peoples. This doctrine formed much of the basis of European efforts to rationalize their domination over Latin America. Yet in her discussion
of subaltern sovereignty movements, she cites a different literature, one that reects the development of indigenous sovereignty in American Indian history. Here, some of the issues addressed may also provide insights into Paraguayan reections
on hydroelectric sovereignty and emergent binational linkages
between Paraguayan and Brazilian subaltern political movements.
First is the issue of colonial powers historical disregard for
indigenous sovereignty, leading to their efforts to carry out
genocide and assimilation. In the United States and Canada,
indigenous scholars may acknowledge the concept of sovereignty as a European construction, but they also contend
that at time of contact Indigenous Nations were politically independent and governing themselves under their own laws
Folch
is water; it is environmental sustenance and cultural preservation. In the US West, American Indian nations have fought
most passionately to regain sovereignty over water rights and
distribution. Initially, some of these efforts targeted the negative consequences of dam constructions (Church et al. 2014),
but recently some American Indian nations now claim ownership of the dams themselves, using water itself as the mechanism to reassert their sovereignty (Krivonen 2013).
Fourth, this reafrmation of sovereignty is different, clearly
distinguished from the sovereignty discussions of the Salamanca school, because it comprises a collective sovereignty.
As Folch notes, the developing worlds subaltern movements
now organized around food, land, and water are grounded in
the conceptualization of collective rights and responsibilities
that cannot be appropriated by individuals or corporations.
This notion of collective sovereignty questions the legitimacy
of any treaty or trade agreements that would alienate people
from their sustenance. As well, collective sovereignty is inextricably linked to practices of collective responsibility. In the
case of the food sovereignty movement, as exemplied in the
Declaration of Nylni (Nylni 2007), food sovereignty places
the producers at the center of food systems since it is these
same producers who save and reproduce the seeds, grow the
food, and maintain the diversity and sustainability of the agroecological system. Their collective sovereignty and responsibility ties them not just to their society today but also to
generations of producers and breeders before and after them.
As Folch notes in her conclusions, the Itaipu sovereignty
crisis suggests that these movements hold implications beyond the borders of Paraguay. In particular, the potential subaltern alliances between Brazilian and Paraguayan groups
suggest the emergence of common perceptions, mistrust, and
rejection of the government trust. For indigenous sovereignty
among American Indian and First Nations, these emergent
alliances reect a long history of mistrust and broken treaties, as they do among indigenous populations in the Brazilian Amazon. As well, these underlying questions could form
the foundation a collective sovereignty that questions the legitimacy of the Paraguayan government to exercise authority
over its own people.
Finn Stepputat
Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS), stbanegade 117,
2100 Copenhagen , Denmark (fst@diis.dk). 11 IV 16
581
582
Current Anthropology
As Barker (2005) point out, you may ask why these subaltern sovereignty movements use a notion that carries the
horrible stench of colonialism, and with Edelman (2014) you
may furthermore ask who or what is the sovereign here. Sovereignty is not a completely free-oating signier but attaches,
explicitly or implicitly, to some kind of moral or political community and hence to denitions of membership. Subaltern
sovereignty entails questions of which forms of liferelated to
forms of production, exchange, and consumptionare deemed
worthy of support and protection and which will be excluded or
abandoned through the policies and laws that aim at enforcing
food sovereignty, for example. Ultimately, violence and bodies
are part of the question of subaltern sovereignty as well.
Ethnographically, Folch should be congratulated for entering the eld of international diplomacy, politics, and law, which
could easily receive more attention from anthropologists. Scholars from international relations and political science are increasingly trying to include ethnographic and practice-oriented
approaches, and like theories of sovereignty, the practice of international relations could provide a point of bridging and exchange between these disciplines and anthropology.
In addition, Folch should be congratulated for bringing
attention to the older tradition of scholarly thinking on sovereignty. Yet the article serves to underline that one of the
main challenges currently is to address the question of how
the plurality of claims to sovereignty at different scales and in
different domains is organized, of how the always relational,
incomplete, and partial forms of sovereignty exist together in
shifting constellations and with what effects. A less charged
concept than sovereignty would be welcomed, though.
Reply
If misrecognition of the lifeways and lives of the indigenous
peoples of the Americas was a central feature of the European
conquest, then what my generous responders demonstrate and
call for is a series of recognitions. The ve essays encourage and,
in fact, recognize connections between conversations on natural resource sovereignty and other scholarly debates and urge
me to do the same. Several of the writers even take up the genealogy motif, querying the ones I have used and suggesting
others. Although there was some overlap between interlocutors,
the remarkable diversity of their comments make a stronger
case than I could in my paper alone that the Paraguayan struggle for hydroelectric sovereignty speaks to wider concerns.
Over the past 2 decades, a trend has emerged in the humanities and interpretive social sciences to turn to indigenous
cosmovisions for more than just an interesting contrast to
Western knowledge structures but rather to retheorize ontologies and epistemologies and disciplines. My article approaches
its task of critique from a different direction, although it in-
cludes similar building blocks. I use European thinking on indigeneity as well as decolonial arguments on indigenous sovereignties to illuminate the Anthropocene. In doing so, I seek
to recenter perspectives and debates that have been among
the most marginalized. To be clear, these voices have been
marginalized not because of their weaknesses but because of
their strength. The power of indigenous critiques to uproot
Western foundations is the very reason they have been silenced.
Indigenous sovereignties call into question the basic premises
of private property and the inevitability of value structures that
undergird the global capitalist system. But my paper was not
about indigenous sovereignty per se. Instead, I have argued
that to make sense of hydroelectric sovereignty and other new
political economic modalities, particularly in the midst of a growing awareness of ecological crisis, the disjuncture stemming
from the discovery of a new world offers a way to synthesize
political economy and political ecology. To explore this synthesis, in the next few paragraphs I will discuss four interrelated
themes proffered by the responders: water as a social relation,
the place for Vitoria, postcolonial state debate questions, and
lessons from indigenous critiques of political economy.
1. Cattelino and Stanford both remark that my assertion that
water is a social relation beckons more clarication of this
Marxian take on natural resources. The labor theory of value
reminds us that though a commodity may look like a complete
whole on its own, it carries with it the human effort in cultivating it, extracting it, and manufacturing it. The fetish quality
of commodities conceals the social dynamics underneath production, making it seem that a shoe is just a shoe and not
the labor time, the factory, and the leather-making tools. Commodities cannot, by denition, exist outside of human contexts.
Yet when Stanford writes that culture and livelihood are inseparably linked from the perspective of Native American
nations, she suggests that critiques of the fetishization of nature
run deeper than nineteenth-century political-economic literature and, in fact, points to ways that analyses of capitalism that
nevertheless arise from a Western context are limited. Enlightenment thought understands humans as separate from
nature. We can imagine anthropocentric questions like, What
is the proper relationship of the government to nature? And
we can speak of nature as a site of untapped resources, waiting
to be incorporated into a distinctly human economy. The alienation implied in these conceptualizations mirrors the commodity fetish. Asserting that water is a social relation is an attempt
to get past this alienation because water has fetish properties,
obfuscating the human-human and human-nonhuman relationships behind it.
The aphorisms are many: we are told that humans are 75%
water, that we can live only a few days without it, that agriculture accounts for 70% of water consumption. Because of
the material role of water in our very bodies, there is no water
separate from its life implications, and its meaning is linked
to other relationships. As an inorganic thing, water links all
living things. It contains within it the history of life, of human
relationships and activities, because all water is recycled. What
Folch
583
on postcoloniality in hydroelectric and other subaltern sovereignty movements. Cattelino notices resonances with subaltern
studies and wonders what ecodimensions to anticolonial
nationalisms scholars may have missed; Stepputat argues that
since sovereignty attaches to a moral or political community,
it entails denitions of membership. Thus, subaltern sovereignties highlight how natural resources sit amid social relations and how hydroelectric sovereignty, specically, makes
claims about the proper contours of the Paraguayan nation. Ethnography may address how and even why sovereignty adheres
to certain moral communities and not others. Moreover, because water and other renewable resources do not coincide with
national boundaries, they imply a new negotiation of legitimate
claims making. And so, water cycles are a means by which one
national community may petition a different national state. But
that Westphalian ideals prove insufcient to questions of power
under environmental strains does not negate the value of tracing
state power expressed through sovereignty claims. Rather, the
complexity of the system calls for more study because although
sovereignty claims are difcult to parse, we see them increasingly mobilized to steer political change.
Catellino, Kahn, and Stepputat take up the critique implied
in the choice for beginning with the Spanish juristic tradition
rather than Agamben or Foucault. They remind us that Agambens exploration of bare life, though itself perhaps ahistorical,
rose to prominence because of how presciently it accounted
for the historically rooted crises of the post-9/11 era. That is,
historical context makes different sovereignties possible and
relevant. The growing counterhegemonic struggles over tribal,
food, and seed sovereignties insist on reconnections to state and
territory. And the fact that subaltern sovereignty movements
can practice new populisms and do invoke other political projects, as Niezen points out, reveals intentionalities in the connections between social justice movements beyond just rhizomatic networks.
4. Examining hydroelectricity and Vitoria through analytical lenses attentive to subaltern perspectives allows for the
chance to essay what recentered indigeneity brings to scholarship. Anghie and Williams, legal scholars on whose thinking
on Vitoria and international law I have leaned, are members
of communities struggling against European colonial legacies
(Williams is an enrolled member of the Lumbee Indian Tribe,
and Anghie is originally from Sri Lanka). By denaturalizing
liberal democracy, indigenous approaches to sovereignty instead interrogate the tacit acceptability of colonialism and the
killability of bare life. Stanford identies striking parallels between the Paraguayan hydroelectric and American Indian contexts, showing how theory from indigenous margins speaks
to nonindigenous concerns. She notes the devastation of the
War of the Triple Alliance and points out the contradiction
of signing a questionable energy treaty with one of the same
nations that almost eradicated the populace of Paraguay barely
100 years before. She thereby emphasizes a reading of history
that does not take for granted the rightness of Euro-descended
political practices by instead highlighting state violence as re-
584
Current Anthropology
References Cited
ABC Color. 2007a. Brasil promete aumentar compensacin de Itaip. January 9.
. 2007b. Lugo propone recurrir a La Haya si Brasil no acepta renegociar
Itaip. February 28.
. 2009. El n de la Guerra Grande. July 24. http://www.abc.com.py
/nota/6891-el-n-de-la-guerra-grande/ (accessed July 25, 2009).
Abrams, Philip. 1977. Notes on the difculty of studying the state. Journal of
Historical Sociology 1(1):5889.
Adelman, Jeremy. 2006. Sovereignty and revolution in the Iberian Atlantic.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo sacer: sovereign power and bare life. Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press.
. 2005. State of exception. Kevin Attell, trans. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Anghie, Antony. 1999. Finding the peripheries: sovereignty and colonialism in
nineteenth-century international law. Harvard International Law Journal
40(1):171.
Folch
. 2015. The cause of all Paraguayans? dening and defending hydroelectric sovereignty. Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 20(2):242263.
Ford, Stephen John. 2013. Sovereignty: do First Nations need it? http://
idlenomore.ca/sovereignty_do_rstnations_need_it. [MLS]
Fortes, M., and E. E. Evans-Pritchard, eds. 1966 (1940). African political
systems. New York: Oxford University Press. [JSK]
Geertz, Clifford. 1980. Negara: the theatre state in nineteenth-century Bali.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. [JSK]
. 2004. What is a state if it is not a sovereign? reections on politics in
complicated places. Current Anthropology 45(5):577593.
Grice-Hutchinson, Marjorie. 1952. The school of Salamanca: readings in Spanish
monetary theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Grotius, Hugo. 2005 (1625). The rights of war and peace, book I. Richard
Tuck, ed. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. [JSK]
Hansen, Thomas B., and Finn Stepputat. 2006. Sovereignty revisited. Annual
Review of Anthropology 35:295315.
Harvey, David. 2003. The new imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Huerta de Soto, Jesus. 2009. Money, bank credit, economic cycles. 3rd edition.
Melinda A. Stroup, trans. Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute.
Idle No More. 2013. Press release. January 10. http://www.idlenomore.ca
/about-us/press-releases/item/87- (accessed August 16, 2015).
Itaip Binacional. 2010. Memoria Anual 2009. https://www.itaipu.gov.py
/sites/default/les/2009.pdf.
Jennings, Ronald. 2011. Sovereignty, political modernity, and anthropology: a genealogy of Agambens critique of sovereignty. Anthropological Theory 11(1): 2361.
Keal, Paul. 2003. European conquest and the rights of indigenous peoples: the
moral backwardness of international society. New York: Cambridge University Press. [JSK]
Keene, Edward. 2002. Beyond the anarchical society: Grotius, colonialism and
order in world politics. New York: Cambridge University Press. [JSK]
Kennedy, David. 1986. Primitive legal scholarship. Harvard International Law
Journal 27(1):198.
Koskenniemi, Martti. 2011. Empire and international law: the real Spanish
contribution. University of Toronto Law Journal 61(1):136. [JSK]
Krasner, Stephen. 1999. Sovereignty: organized hypocrisy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Krivonen, Marci. 2013. Tribes in Western U.S. use water to assert sovereignty.
Aspen Public Radio. http://aspenpublicradio.org/post/tribes-western-us-use
-water-assert-sovereignty#stream/0. [MLS]
Las Casas, Bartolom de. 2007. Historia de las Indias. Libro segundo. Tomo 3.
Alicante: Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes. http://www.cervantesvirtual
.com/obra-visor/historia-de-las-indias-tomo-3-0/html/ (accessed July 26, 2009).
Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The production of space. Cambridge: Blackwell.
Leo, Sergio. 2007. Agrados Bolvia, Uruguai e Paraguai. Valor Econmico,
August 1.
Locke, John. 1980 (1690). Second treatise on government. Indianapolis: Hackett.
[JSK]
Lomnitz, Claudio. 2004. Response to Geertz, what is a state if it is not a sovereign? reections on politics in complicated places. Current Anthropology
45(5):591.
Mamdani, Mahmood. 2008. The new humanitarian order. The Nation, September 29.
Mbembe, Achille. 2003. Necropolitics. Public Culture 15(1):1140.
Merry, Sally Engle. 2000. Colonizing Hawaii: the cultural power of law.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. [JSK]
Mignolo, Walter. 2005. The idea of Latin America. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Mitchell, Timothy. 2006. Society, economy, and the state effect. In The Anthropology of the State. A. Sharma and A. Gupta, eds. Pp. 169186. Malden,
MA: Blackwell.
585
Nylni. 2007. Declaration of Nylni. http://www.nyeleni.org/ (accessed
September 2, 2015).
O Globo. 2008. Itaipu: paraguaios descontentes com parceria by Agnaldo
Brito. February 28. http://oglobo.globo.com/servicos/blog/comentarios.asp?
cod_Postp91322 (accessed October 22, 2012).
Ong, Aihwa. 1999. Flexible citizenship: the cultural logics of transnationality.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press. [JSK]
. 2006. Neoliberalism as exception: mutations in citizenship and
sovereignty. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Ong, Aihwa, and Stephen J. Collier, eds. 2005. Global assemblages: technology,
politics, and ethics as anthropological problems. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Ramn Hernndez, O. P. 1991. The internationalization of Francisco de
Vitoria and Domingo de Soto. Fordham International Law Journal 15
(4):10311059.
Rodrguez, Ileana. 2001. Reading subalterns across texts, disciplines, and theories:
from representation to recognition. In The Latin American Subaltern Studies
Reader. Ileana Rodrguez, ed. Pp. 132. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Roitman, Janet. 2004. Fiscal disobedience: an anthropology of economic regulation in Central Africa. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Roseberry, William. 1994. The language of contention. In Everyday forms of
state-formation: revolution and the negotiation of rule in modern Mexico.
Gilbert Joseph and David Nugent, eds. Pp. 355366. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Schmitt, Carl. 1985. Political theology: four chapters on the concept of sovereignty. George Schwab, trans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
. 2006. The nomos of the Earth. G. L. Ulmen, trans. New York: Telos.
Schrijver, N. 2000. The changing nature of state sovereignty. The British Year
Book of International Law 1999. Oxford: Clarendon. [FS]
Scott, James Brown. 1934. The Spanish origins of international law. Oxford:
Clarendon.
Simpson, Audra. 2014. Mohawk interruptus: political life across the borders of
settler states. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. [JSK]
Singh, Bhrigupati. 2012. The headless horseman of central India: sovereignty
at varying thresholds of life. Cultural Anthropology 27(2):383407.
Steinberg, Philip E. 2001. The social construction of the ocean. New York:
Cambridge University Press. [JSK]
Stoler, Ann Laura. 2006. On degrees of imperial sovereignty. Public Culture 18
(1):125146. [JSK]
Ticktin, Miriam. 2011. Casualties of care: immigration and the politics of
humanitarianism in France. Berkeley: University of California Press. [JSK]
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 2003. Global transformations: anthropology and the
modern world. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. [JSK]
Tsosie, Rebecca. 2003. Conict between the public trust and the Indian Trust
Doctrines: federal public land policy and Native Indians. Tulsa Law Review
39(2):271311. [MLS]
Vattel, Emer de. 2008 (1758). The law of nations; or, principles of the law of
nature, applied to the conduct and affairs of nations and sovereigns, with three
early essays on the origin and nature of natural law and on luxury. Bla
Kapossy and Richard Whitmore, eds. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. [JSK]
Vitoria, Francisco de. 1975 (1532). Relecciones sobre los indios y el derecho de
guerra. 3rd edition. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe.
Wagner, Andreas. 2011. Francisco De Vitoria and Alberico Gentili on the legal
character of the global commonwealth (October 1, 2010). Oxford Journal of
Legal Studies 31(3):565582. Available at http://ssrn.com/abstractp1844085.
Weber, Max. 2004. Politics as a vocation. In The vocation lectures. Pp. 3294.
Indianapolis: Hackett.
Whigham, Thomas L. 2002. The Paraguayan War: volume I. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Williams, Robert A. 1990. The American Indian in Western legal thought: the
discourses of conquest. Oxford: Oxford University Press.