Resumen de Emotional political ecologies: the role of emolions in the politics of environmental conflicts : two case studies in Chile and Mexico /
This thesis explores the usually unseen and undervalued political work that emotions do in environmental conflicts. As several feminist and affect political ecologists and geographers have begun to discuss, analysing the role of emotions in environmental conflicts can enable a better understanding of how social and economic orders develop, how political subjectivities are built and how and why social mobilisations take place. However, we still need to better understand, both conceptually and empirically, the relations between emotion, power and environmental conflict. This thesis first delineates a theoretical framework for the consideration of emotion in political ecology, what I name Emotional Political Ecologies (EmPEs), reviewing work in the field of feminist political ecology, emotional geographies, social and cultural anthropology, social psychology and social movements. This critical literature review indicates that EmPEs need to employ a multi-dimensional framework that captures the psychological, more-than-human, geographical, social and political dimensions that intersect subjectivities in environmental conflicts. My review also defines the research gaps addressed in this thesis: the need to engage with “negative emotions” – such as anger or trauma – present in environmental conflicts, as well as to further explore the political ecologies of “healing”.
The empirical chapters of this thesis are organised under a shared research strategy, adapting established political ecology research strategies – case study method with an emphasis on ethnographic methods – in order to grasp “the emotional”. In the first empirical case of this thesis, I analyse the historical and contemporary development of forestry extractivism in southern Chile, specifically in and around indigenous Mapuche territories. My analysis shows that commercial forestry advances by securing the control of land through disciplinary interventions, which aim to govern subjectivities and create subjects that can help secure capital accumulation and extractivism. Nevertheless, individuals and communities obstruct this project by mobilising sovereignty claims that permit them to exercise control over their own subject-making. My analysis highlights the emotional dimension of this process of political subjectivation, especially via the collective expression of “negative” emotions such as anger and sorrow, which I found to be crucial resources that help Mapuche communities maintain resistance. In the second empirical chapter of this thesis, I explore the ways in which psychotherapeutic practice sheds light on indigenous and peasant subjectivation processes through analysing the Gestalt Therapy workshops organised by a local NGO in southern Chiapas, Mexico. Empirical evidence serves as the basis from which to discuss the role of psychotherapeutic practice in facilitating individual and collective reflexivity, and in fostering political fellowship and participation in community matters. My analysis also establishes that “healing interventions” need to explicitly engage with structural issues of power in order to move beyond de-contextualised, and thus depoliticised, reflexivity.
My research enables a discussion of the political work of emotions in environmental conflicts, highlighting three simultaneous, contradictory and creative ways in which emotions interplay in environmental conflicts: emotional environmentality, emotional oppression and emotional environmentalism. This interplay highlights an ambivalence, that is to say a constantly unresolved tension between the role of emotions as a channel for the subversion of hegemonic power and, conversely, their role in reproducing hegemonic power dynamics. I argue that considering “the emotional” as a space of power and conflict offers opportunities for socio-environmental movements to open new spaces for re-articulating power relationships inside and outside movements, as well as for political ecologists to further consider the private and public, the individual and collective spheres of environmental conflicts and the unstable standpoints of the different social actors participating in conflicts. Further exploring the field of EmPEs can inform political ecological analysis aimed at unpacking and transforming the subtle power relationships and challenges that environmental conflicts involve.
