{"id":196800,"date":"2026-06-30T10:09:15","date_gmt":"2026-06-30T18:09:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=196800"},"modified":"2026-06-30T11:49:25","modified_gmt":"2026-06-30T19:49:25","slug":"196800","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=196800","title":{"rendered":"Arturo Escobar – The Engineer Who Doubted Development"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 1981 a young Colombian with a master’s degree from Cornell University<\/a> took a desk inside the National Planning Department in Bogot\u00e1<\/a>. He had the training for the job. He had studied chemical engineering in Cali<\/a>, spent a year in a biochemistry program at the medical school there, then crossed to the United States and learned food science and international nutrition. Now he sat in the food and nutrition planning units of the Colombian state, helping design programs for the rural poor. The office ran on a faith he had shared since boyhood: that hunger was a technical problem, and that trained men with the right data could solve it. The work produced surveys, target populations, intake tables, projected yields. It turned river towns and mountain hamlets into numbers, and the numbers into policy.<\/p>\n

Something in the procedure caught at him. The categories arrived before the people did. A village became a deficit to be closed, a caloric gap, a case for intervention. The planners spoke of the poor with care and counted them with precision, and the counting decided in advance what the poor were allowed to be: backward, lacking, waiting for the modern world to reach them. He had come to fix the problem. He began to suspect that the apparatus he served helped manufacture the problem it claimed to fix.<\/p>\n

That suspicion became a career. Arturo Escobar<\/a> (b. November 20, 1951) left the planning office, went to Berkeley<\/a>, and spent the next four decades arguing that development, the great post-war project to remake poor nations in the image of rich ones, was less a solution to poverty than a way of seeing that produced poverty as an object to be managed. He became the most cited figure in what came to be called post-development theory<\/a>, a professor at the University of North Carolina<\/a>, a fieldworker among Black communities on Colombia’s Pacific coast, and a theorist of what he calls the pluriverse, a world with room for many worlds. To his admirers he gave language to people the development machine had silenced. To his critics he romanticized poverty and mistook a refusal to measure for a kind of wisdom.<\/p>\n

He was born in Manizales<\/a>, a city built along a knife-edge ridge in the central Andes<\/a>, in the heart of Colombia’s coffee country. The settlers who founded it had come south from Antioquia<\/a>, men with a reputation for work, thrift, and Catholic seriousness, and they raised their houses on slopes so steep the streets seemed to fall away beneath them. Fog moved through the city most mornings. The land shook now and then. The coffee economy gave Manizales its money and its anxieties, a provincial capital looking outward toward Bogot\u00e1 and beyond it toward the United States, where the future seemed to be kept.<\/p>\n

A bright boy from such a place took the path that led up and out, and for a bright boy with a head for figures that path ran through engineering. Escobar enrolled at the Universidad del Valle<\/a> in Cali and earned his degree in chemical engineering in 1975. He stayed for a year of graduate biochemistry at the university’s medical school, then won his way to Cornell, where he completed a master’s in food science and international nutrition in 1978. He had built himself, step by step, into the kind of expert the Third World was supposed to need. He spoke the language of inputs and outputs, of protein deficiency and crop yield. He believed in it.<\/p>\n

The planning office cracked that belief. He had gone in to feed people and found himself instead inside a vast operation of classification. The hungry man became a data point in a national survey, his life rewritten in the grammar of the state. Escobar started to read outside his field, reaching for anyone who could explain what he had seen. He found Michel Foucault<\/a>.<\/p>\n

He read Foucault the way a convert reads scripture, all at once and against everything he had been taught. Here was a thinker who treated knowledge as power, who showed how the modern world built whole categories of human beings, the madman, the criminal, the patient, by the act of studying and naming them. Escobar saw his planning office in those pages. The expert did not simply describe the poor. The expert called the poor into existence as a thing to be governed. In 1984, still a graduate student, he published an essay in the journal Alternatives titled “Discourse and Power in Development,” arguing that Foucault’s tools fit the Third World as well as they fit the asylum and the prison. The essay carried the seed of everything he wrote afterward.<\/p>\n

He took his doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley, in December 1987, in an interdisciplinary program with a name that suited him, Development Philosophy, Policy and Planning. His dissertation bore the title Power and Visibility: The Invention and Management of Development in the Third World. The argument was already whole. The phrase “the Third World<\/a>,” he wrote, named no natural fact. It named an invention, assembled after the Second World War by economists, statesmen, foundations, and aid agencies who looked at most of Asia, Africa, and Latin America and saw a single condition, underdevelopment, that their expertise alone could cure. The label came first. The interventions followed. And the interventions, more often than they admitted, deepened the dependence they promised to end.<\/p>\n

Berkeley in the early eighties handed him the rest of his equipment. He read the poststructuralists and the feminists, the dependency theorists<\/a> who traced Latin America’s poverty to its place in a world economy run from elsewhere, and the political economists who argued about land and class. He took less from the quarrels over ownership than from the prior question of how a society learns to see itself as poor in the first place. He taught at Santa Cruz<\/a>, then at Smith College<\/a>, then at the University of Massachusetts Amherst<\/a>, carrying the argument into seminar rooms, before settling at Chapel Hill, where he would remain until his retirement.<\/p>\n

The book that made his name came in 1995. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World took the dissertation’s claim and pressed it across the whole field of international aid. Development, Escobar argued, arrived in the poor nations as something close to cultural imperialism, an offer that came wrapped in benevolence and that the poor had little means of refusing without seeming to refuse progress itself. The development institutions produced their own truths, the underdeveloped and the traditional and the modern, and those truths organized how millions of people came to understand their land, their work, their food, their forests, and their place in history. Experts claimed a knowledge that crossed every border. Local knowledge they filed under superstition. The book won the 1996 best-book prize of the New England Council of Latin American Studies and went into translation, and a generation of younger scholars read it as permission to stop asking how to do development better and start asking whether to do it at all.<\/p>\n

Escobar found his answer to that question not in a library but on a river. Through the 1990s he gave eighteen months, from 1993 to 1994, and a string of summers after, to fieldwork on Colombia’s Pacific coast, a region of rainforest and mangrove and Black river towns that the rest of the country had long treated as a lethargic and forgotten edge. He went as the partner of a movement rather than the student of a tribe. The Proceso de Comunidades Negras, the Process of Black Communities, had formed to defend the rights of Afro-Colombian<\/a> people to the land their ancestors had worked since slavery. Escobar wrote alongside its leaders, Libia Grueso and Carlos Rosero, and the work changed him again.<\/p>\n

What he learned there became the book Territories of Difference (2008). For the people of the Pacific, land was not a property line or a column in a ledger. It was the ground of memory, kinship, ritual, and survival, the place where a particular people knew how to live. The threat to it came from logging crews, gold miners, oil palm plantations, and the engineers of progress, and behind them, as the decade turned violent, from armed men who cleared the rivers by force. One of his interlocutors told him to listen for the drumming of a place held by capital and still resisting it. Escobar took the phrase seriously. He argued that the movement was not only defending a homeland but composing an alternative, a way of organizing economy, democracy, and the care of a landscape that owed nothing to the planning office in Bogot\u00e1.<\/p>\n

From the rivers he drew the idea that carried his late work. The quarrels over a dam or a mine, he came to think, ran deeper than a fight over resources or a clash of interests. They were collisions between worlds. Modern thought assumes one nature, a single objective world of matter that sits apart from human society and waits to be used. Many of the communities Escobar knew lived inside a different reality, a relational world where rivers, forests, animals, the dead, and the spirits made one another up through their dealings, where a person and a place belonged to each other. To open a mine in such a world did more than scar a hillside. It tore the fabric that held a people and their land and their gods together. He called this study political ontology<\/a>, the politics of what counts as real.<\/p>\n

The argument reached its largest statement in Designs for the Pluriverse (2018). Escobar wrote it as a man watching a civilization run out of road. Climate breakdown, the collapse of species, widening inequality, the hardening of politics, all of it, he argued, came from the same source, a way of life that mistook itself for the only possible one and could imagine no future but more of the same. Reform stayed trapped inside the assumptions it meant to fix. He proposed instead the pluriverse, a world with room for many worlds, where indigenous communities and farmers’ cooperatives and feminist collectives and a thousand local experiments might each hold to their own way of living without bowing to a single model of growth. He drew the vision in part from Andean philosophies of buen vivir, the good life understood as balance among people and with the earth rather than as the steady rise of a number. Diversity, in his telling, became the organizing principle of social life, the point and not the obstacle.<\/p>\n

He turned the same suspicion on the friendliest face of modern environmentalism. Sustainable development<\/a> and the green economy, he argued, often smuggled the market back in through the side door, pricing carbon and biodiversity and the services of an ecosystem as if a forest were a portfolio. That preserved the old faith in growth and called it green. Sustainability, in his account, asked for something harder, a move past growth as the measure of a good life and toward smaller, local circuits of production and self-rule that lived within what a place could bear.<\/p>\n

The objections came, and Escobar’s own discipline raised some of the sharpest. Economists pointed to East Asia, where market-led development pulled hundreds of millions of people out of extreme poverty within a single generation, and asked what the man who romanticized the village had to say to a mother whose child survived because of a vaccine, a road, a clinic, a harvest larger than her grandmother’s. To reject universal standards, others argued, left no way to compare one society’s fortunes with another’s, and no footing from which to build a national policy at all. Anthropologists who admired his care still warned that his portraits of Black and indigenous communities could smooth over the quarrels inside them, the hierarchies, the men who spoke for women, the interests that did not align. And critics of every stripe pressed the practical question. Pandemics, financial panics, a warming atmosphere, these cross every border and answer to no village council. Local autonomy alone might not meet them.<\/p>\n

Escobar and his defenders answered that post-development never opposed change, medicine, or invention. It opposed the single path laid down from above, the model that arrives certain of itself and treats every other way of knowing as a stage to be outgrown. The aim was to widen the range of possible futures rather than to prescribe one for all mankind.<\/p>\n

He retired from Chapel Hill in 2018 with the title of Kenan Distinguished Professor of Anthropology Emeritus, though retirement for him meant only a change of address. He kept his ties to doctoral programs at the Universidad de Caldas in his native Manizales and the Universidad del Valle in Cali, the city where he had once trained as an engineer. In 2021 the American Academy of Arts and Sciences<\/a> elected him a member, a recognition that his arguments had reshaped not one field but several, anthropology and political ecology<\/a> and design and the decolonial thought that traces the long afterlife of empire in the categories of knowledge. He went on writing, much of it now in collaboration, on relationality and on what he calls autonomous design, the effort to let communities shape their tools and institutions to their own values rather than receive them ready-made from states and markets.<\/p>\n

The engineer who once counted the hungry for the Colombian state spent his life arguing that the count was never neutral, that to name a people underdeveloped was already to begin governing them. Whether he was right, whether modernity is the destiny of the species or one road among many that happened to be paved first, remains the open question his work leaves on the table. Few anthropologists of his time forced more people to ask it.<\/p>\n

The Great Delusion<\/em><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

If John J. Mearsheimer’s anthropology is right<\/a>, the political ecology and post-development theory of Colombian-American anthropologist Arturo Escobar confirms how tribes resist universalist systems, even as Escobar’s own utopian conclusions fall apart.
\nEscobar is famous for Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World and his later work on the “pluriverse” — the idea that the world is not a single universe, but a collection of many distinct, interconnected worlds. He documents how Western “development” functions as a totalizing, imperial project that attempts to convert the entire planet into a singular, capitalist, liberal marketplace, destroying the distinct lifeworlds of Afro-Colombian, indigenous, and peasant communities in the process.
\nMearsheimer’s framework in The Great Delusion<\/em><\/a> explains the exact engine behind the tragedy Escobar chronicles. Mearsheimer argues that political liberalism has an inherent crusading impulse. Because liberalism treats individual human rights as universal, liberal states feel a powerful moral obligation to intervene globally, exporting their political and economic models everywhere.
\nEscobar’s entire critique of the post-WWII “development” apparatus is a description of this exact liberal delusion in action. The international planners, economists, and bureaucrats Escobar critiques were motivated by the belief that every society on Earth wants, or should want, the same individualistic, technocratic lifestyle.
\nFurthermore, Escobar’s description of indigenous and Afro-descendant resistance directly validates Mearsheimer’s view that humans are tribal at their core. Escobar shows that when subaltern communities are threatened by development projects, they do not respond as atomistic, rational economic actors looking to maximize personal wealth. They organize collectively, using their ancestral territories, traditional languages, and shared histories to defend their group cohesion. The long human childhood inside these communities ensures an intense value infusion that ties the individual permanently to the survival of the collective. They fight because the universalist engine of development threatens the very existence of their specific tribe.
\nHowever, where the two thinkers diverge completely is on the future of the “pluriverse.” Escobar envisions a radical, emancipatory politics where these diverse worlds can coexist in a non-hierarchical, cooperative global network. He calls for a transition toward a post-capitalist, post-statist world based on mutual recognition and care between different cultures and the Earth.
\nIf Mearsheimer is right, this pluriverse is a dangerous romantic fantasy. The moment the totalizing pressure of the Western liberal empire recedes or fractures, the resulting world will not be a peaceful tapestry of cooperative cultures. It will be an anarchic arena of intense, unmediated group competition.
\nWithout a dominant power or a binding international structure, distinct tribes must prioritize their own security and survival above all else. The very group attachments and deep socializations that Escobar celebrates as tools of resistance are the exact mechanisms that ensure external competition and conflict. If Mearsheimer’s anthropology holds, Escobar’s ethnographic work brilliantly exposes the hubris of liberal universalism, but his vision of a harmonious pluriverse ignores the tragic logic of a world composed of self-interested, defensive groups striving to survive.<\/p>\n

‘A Big Misunderstanding’<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

If David Pinsof is right, the post-development anthropology of Arturo Escobar is an example of an intellectual using an anti-imperialist mission statement to claim high-status authority within the academic hierarchy.<\/p>\n

Escobar spends his career attacking Western ideas of economic progress. In his influential book Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World, he argues that the concept of the Third World was manufactured by Western powers after World War II. He claims that development programs are not objective efforts to help poor nations, but are language-based mechanisms used to control, standardize, and dominate non-Western societies. From a traditional postcolonial viewpoint, his work is a breakthrough that exposes how Western institutions misunderstood local realities and caused immense harm by imposing a single economic model.<\/p>\n

A Pinsofian analysis strips away this framework. The rise of international development programs did not happen because Western economists had a cognitive brain-fart or misunderstood local cultures. The post-war geopolitical landscape was a high-stakes, zero-sum competition over resources, global markets, and geopolitical alliances. Western states and local elites used development aid as a rational, self-serving weapon to secure influence and control the coercive apparatus of local states. The actors involved understood their incentives perfectly.<\/p>\n

By framing global inequality as a problem caused by Western discourse, Escobar creates a high-status mission statement. This position makes the critical anthropologist the elite technician who can dismantle Western hegemony. His later work, Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds, argues for a transition toward a world where many worlds fit together, relying on local autonomy and ecological harmony.<\/p>\n

This narrative provides university circles with a sophisticated platform to critique global capitalism and signal absolute moral superiority. If Pinsof speaks the truth, Escobar did not discover a fixable intellectual error. He executed a highly effective academic strategy, using sharp critiques of the West to climb the university hierarchy and secure immense prestige, citations, and authority within Latin American studies and global anthropology. His theories map the hole global development is stuck in, while ensuring his own high-status position at the top of the cultural marketplace.<\/p>\n

The Heretic’s Chair<\/strong><\/p>\n

Development was a field before Arturo Escobar entered it, in the sense Pierre Bourdieu<\/a> (1930-2002) gave the word. A field is a structured space of positions, and the agents who hold those positions struggle over a single prize: the authority to say what the field is about and who may speak for it. In development that authority belonged to the economists, the planning ministries, the World Bank, the foundations. They held the field’s dominant capital, which was numeracy, the model, the survey, the prestige of science applied to poverty. They held its doxa too, the belief so widely shared that no one inside the field had to argue for it, that poverty was a technical problem and growth the cure. Men quarreled fiercely about means and agreed without noticing about the ground beneath the quarrel. That agreement was the doxa, and it set the price of every move a player might make.<\/p>\n

Escobar arrived with the wrong capital. A boy from Manizales, a coffee city stacked along an Andean ridge, took the ladder a bright provincial took, which ran through engineering. He earned a degree in chemical engineering at the Universidad del Valle in Cali in 1975, added a year of biochemistry, then carried the credential north to Cornell and a master’s in food science and international nutrition. By 1981 he sat in the food and nutrition planning units of Colombia’s National Planning Department in Bogot\u00e1. He stood at the orthodox center of the field, holding orthodox capital. He could speak protein deficiency and crop yield. The men who ran the field recognized him as one of their own apprentices.<\/p>\n

Then he changed his capital, and changing it changed his stance. Bourdieu observed that newcomers poorly endowed in a field’s dominant currency carry an interest in subverting the rate at which currencies convert. The man who cannot win by the established rules has reason to rewrite them. Escobar could not out-economist the economists. A Colombian engineer in an American program did not out-rank a Chicago modeler on the modeler’s own scale. So at Berkeley, where he took an interdisciplinary doctorate in 1987, he imported a capital that the planning ministry could not price and the American academy of the 1980s prized highly. He brought in Michel Foucault.<\/p>\n

Foucault was minted in the field of Parisian high theory, where his coin ran strong. In a food-and-nutrition planning unit that coin bought nothing. In the American social sciences of the period, hungry for theory and turning against positivism, it bought a great deal. Escobar carried it across the border and spent it. His 1984 essay in the journal Alternatives, written while he was still a student, argued that Foucault’s tools fit the Third World as well as they fit the clinic and the prison. His 1987 dissertation, Power and Visibility, turned the planning office he had served into the object of analysis. The technical capital of the engineer he traded down. The theoretical capital of the Foucauldian he traded up. And his peripheral origin, a liability on the orthodox scale, he converted into a credential of its own. He could name the violence of the categories from inside the country the categories described.<\/p>\n

Encountering Development (1995) was the position-taking that the trajectory had prepared. Bourdieu held that a stance in a field draws its meaning from its place in the field, by relation to the stances it opposes. Post-development meant what it meant against the orthodoxy. Escobar did not propose to do development better. He denied development the right to exist as a project, called it an invention assembled after the war by experts who produced the underdeveloped as an object they alone could manage. The stance sat where the trajectory had placed him. A rising outsider, armed with imported theory, born on the receiving end of the apparatus, attacks the center’s monopoly on knowledge. Position and position-taking lined up, which is the homology Bourdieu looked for and found almost everywhere. The shape of the man’s place in the game predicted the shape of his play.<\/p>\n

The field Escobar indicted rewarded him for the indictment. Encountering Development took the 1996 best-book prize of the New England Council of Latin American Studies, came out of Princeton, went into translation, and seated its author. He taught at Santa Cruz, at Smith, at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and then at the University of North Carolina, where he held the Kenan Distinguished Professorship of Anthropology, an endowed chair, the high symbolic capital a discipline reserves for its consecrated. In 2021 the American Academy of Arts and Sciences elected him. The man who taught a generation to distrust expert authority became an authority, cited, anthologized, set on syllabi as the name a student must know to enter the conversation.<\/p>\n

A field consecrates the heresy it can absorb, and the most successful heretic is the one who hands the field a new orthodoxy to consecrate. Post-development and the decolonial thought around it built their own circuits of consecration, the university press that published Territories of Difference (2008), the Latin American councils that anthologized him, the doctoral programs that trained students in the idiom, a canon with its own founding names and Escobar among them. Heresy that wins stops being heresy. It becomes a pole, and younger players orient toward it and against it as they once oriented toward the World Bank. The rebel against the center founds a center.<\/p>\n

Through the 1990s Escobar gave eighteen months and a run of summers to fieldwork among the Black river communities of Colombia’s Pacific lowlands, writing alongside the leaders of the Proceso de Comunidades Negras, Libia Grueso and Carlos Rosero. The alliance imported recognition by the dominated, a currency the metropolitan theorist cannot manufacture at his desk, and that recognition converted back into academic symbolic capital at a favorable rate. The activist-researcher who shares authorship with movement leaders and writes in Spanish for Colombian presses holds a distinction the armchair theorist cannot claim. The risks on those rivers were real, the logging crews and the miners and the armed men who later cleared the water by force, and the work was sincere. Sincerity does not exempt a move from the economy it operates within. The alliance was honorable and it was also capital.<\/p>\n

Bourdieu warned against the scholastic point of view, the standing error of the man freed by leisure, by skhol\u00e8, from the urgencies of practice. The scholar projects his own contemplative relation to the world onto the people he studies, and reads theory into lives lived without it. Escobar attributes to the Pacific communities a relational ontology, a worked-out understanding of being where rivers, forests, the dead, and the living constitute one another. By Bourdieu’s logic the fisherman on the river has a practical sense, a feel for the game of his own life, and might recognize little of himself in the ontology a professor draws from his practice. The pluriverse of Designs for the Pluriverse (2018) carries the marks of a scholastic object, the world as it appears to a man with the time and the training to theorize worlds. Whether the people inside it would know the portrait is a question Escobar presses on the development economist far harder than he presses it on himself.<\/p>\n

Bourdieu made reflexivity the price of the sociologist’s authority. The analyst must objectify his own position in the field, must perform the objectification of the objectifying subject, must turn the lens that exposes everyone else back onto his own chair, his own consecration, his own interest in the truths he tells. Homo Academicus turned that lens on the French university and on Bourdieu’s own place in it. Science of Science and Reflexivity made the demand a rule. Escobar turns discourse analysis on the development expert with rigor and never quite turns it on the development critic. He has gone some distance. He helped build the World Anthropologies Network against the dominance of the metropolitan academy, published in Spanish, shared authorship with Grueso and Rosero, and returned in retirement to teach at the Universidad de Caldas in his native Manizales and the Universidad del Valle in Cali, acts that work to unsettle and redistribute his own position. Partial credit stands. The harder objectification he leaves alone. He does not account for the symbolic profit a man draws from speaking for the dominated, for the way an attack on expertise can be the most effective method of accumulating expert authority, for the endowed chair underwritten by the economic capital his own theory traces to extraction and growth. The honest reflexive accounting sits at exactly the place he declines to look.<\/p>\n

The engineer who indicted the count holds the chair the field keeps for its most consecrated, and his theory explains his rise more completely than he allows. Bourdieu reads that as confirmation rather than refutation. A field that can convert its critic into its laureate has lost nothing it cannot afford, and the critic who accepts the laurel proves the field’s reach rather than his escape from it. Escobar mapped the production of legitimate knowledge about the poor and won, by that map, a high position in the production of legitimate knowledge about the poor. The map was good. It was good enough to chart the cartographer, had he chosen to stand inside his own picture.<\/p>\n

Notes<\/p>\n

The Bourdieusian apparatus is standard: the heretic with heterodox capital who subverts the rate of exchange comes from The Field of Cultural Production<\/i><\/a> and The Rules of Art<\/i><\/a>; the consecration of absorbable heresy from the same; the scholastic point of view and skhol\u00e8 from Pascalian Meditations<\/i><\/a>; the reflexivity demand and the objectification of the objectifying subject from Homo Academicus<\/i><\/a>, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology<\/i><\/a>, and Science of Science and Reflexivity<\/i><\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Buffered Pluriverse<\/strong><\/p>\n

Charles Taylor<\/a> (b. 1931) drew the modern self as a fortress. He called it the buffered self, the self that sets a hard boundary between mind and world and keeps the meaning of things on the inside. For the buffered self, thoughts and purposes live within, the world without is matter and force, and nothing out there can reach across the wall and seize the soul. No spirit inhabits the river. No power radiates from the relic. Meaning becomes the mind’s own work, and the disenchanted cosmos lies open to inspection, measurement, and use. Taylor set against it an older figure, the porous self, the self with no such wall. For the porous self the boundary leaks. Spirits move through the world and through the man. Objects carry charge, places hold power, the dead remain present, and a person stands exposed to forces that come from outside and lay hold of him. Meaning resides in the cosmos and the cosmos presses in. The long passage Taylor traced in A Secular Age<\/em><\/a> (2007) runs from the second self to the first, from a world charged with presence to a world emptied of it and handed over to the human mind.<\/p>\n

Arturo Escobar drew the same two pictures and called them worlds. He gave the modern picture a name he borrowed from the sociologist John Law (b. 1946), the one-world world, the conviction that one reality exists, a single objective nature standing apart from human society, available to science and open to development. Against it he set the relational worlds of the people he studied on Colombia’s Pacific coast, where rivers, forests, animals, the living, and the dead make one another up through their dealings, where territory holds memory and presence, and where to open a mine tears a fabric rather than clearing a site. Escobar’s one-world world is Taylor’s disenchanted cosmos written at the scale of a civilization. His relational worlds are the porous self enlarged into a way a whole people lives. The match is close enough that the two men seem at moments to describe the same loss in two vocabularies.<\/p>\n

They are allies before they divide. Taylor spent much of A Secular Age<\/em><\/a> attacking what he called the subtraction story, the flattering account modernity tells of its own arrival, that the modern self is what remains once superstition and enchantment are stripped away, that we did not build the disenchanted world so much as wake up and see through the old illusions. Taylor denied it. Disenchantment was made, not unveiled, constructed across centuries of religious and intellectual labor, and the buffered self is an achievement with a history rather than the natural shape of a mind that has stopped being fooled. Escobar denies the same story in his own terms. The one-world world did not discover the one true nature. It manufactured that nature as a category and imposed it through conquest, science, and the development project, and it filed every other reality under myth. Both men refuse the idea that modern reality is simply reality, the residue left when the errors are removed. On that ground they stand together.<\/p>\n

Escobar came up as the most buffered kind of modern subject. A chemical engineer trained at the Universidad del Valle, a year of biochemistry, a Cornell master’s in food science, a desk in Colombia’s National Planning Department where hunger arrived as a caloric deficit and a village as a row in a table. He spent his youth inside the immanent frame, the term Taylor used for the closed world of natural causes within which the buffered self learns to think, the frame that needs no God and no spirit to run. Then he read Foucault, took a Berkeley doctorate, and turned against the whole apparatus that had formed him. The convert against disenchantment was himself disenchantment’s finished product. He learned porosity the way a man learns a second language in adulthood, by study, after the first language has already shaped his mouth.<\/p>\n

Can a man who has become buffered will himself porous again? Taylor’s answer leans toward no, or toward not at will, and not all the way. The buffered condition, once reached, runs deep and proves hard to leave. Even the modern believer believes as a buffered self, choosing faith against live alternatives, holding it inside a frame that offers other options on every side. Taylor called the modern situation one of cross-pressure, the pull between a fullness sought within the immanent frame and the intimations of something beyond it that the frame cannot quite silence. The porous self did not feel cross-pressed. He had no menu. He lived inside one cosmos and took it as the world. The man who feels the pull toward re-enchantment feels it as a buffered self longing for what the buffered self by definition has lost, and the longing cannot simply hand back what disenchantment took. You cannot unknow the wall by wishing it gone.<\/p>\n

Designs for the Pluriverse (2018) proposes a world with room for many worlds, and it draws much of its hope from the relational worlds of indigenous and Black communities, from Andean buen vivir, from ways of living that never passed through disenchantment at all. For the people on those rivers the porous world is not a recovery. They never left it. Their fullness comes from outside the self, from territory and ancestor and the web of beings, the way Taylor said fullness comes to the porous. The trouble sits with the man holding the book and most of his readers. Escobar addresses a buffered audience, the cross-pressed citizens of the one-world world who feel the malaise Taylor anatomized and reach for a way back. To them the pluriverse arrives as an object of longing and election. They choose it as a value, adopt it as a commitment, design toward it as a goal. And election is the buffered self’s signature move. The porous self does not select his cosmos from a catalogue of available worlds. He lives inside the one given to him. To make porosity a choice is already to stand outside it, on the buffered side of the wall, picking.<\/p>\n

One designs from the buffered position. Design is the stance of the disengaged mind that stands before the world, surveys its options, and arranges matter toward a chosen end, which is the engineer’s stance, the planner’s stance, the stance Escobar held in Bogot\u00e1 before he renounced it. The porous self does not design his world. He is held by it. A project to design the conditions for porosity carries the form of the thing it means to escape. Escobar reaches for re-enchantment with the tools of disenchantment, theorizes relationality in the systematic register of a man trained to systematize, and produces a general account of worlds that resist general accounts. By Taylor’s logic this might be the deepest mark of the buffered self at work, the move that turns even the longing for porosity into one more object inside the immanent frame, managed, modeled, and willed.<\/p>\n

Escobar shows some sense of the bind. He writes of sentipensar, thinking and feeling together, an effort to reach past the buffered separation of cold cognition from the rest of a life. He insists he learns from the communities and refuses to speak above them. He distrusts the academy that houses him and writes in Spanish for Colombian readers as well as in English for the metropolitan one. These moves work against the wall and earn partial credit. They do not close the distance the frame keeps open. A professor who locates fullness in another people’s cosmos has located it by an act of the modern self, the act of a man free to range across worlds and settle his longing where he chooses. The freedom to choose your enchantment is the buffered self’s freedom, and exercising it leaves the wall standing. Taylor knew the longing well and treated it with tenderness, and he held that honest re-enchantment for a modern man has to pass through the immanent frame rather than around it, has to be built in what he called the subtler languages rather than reclaimed by a return to a porosity the modern self can no longer inhabit on command. The pluriverse, read through Taylor, looks less like a recovered way of living than like the most generous form the modern malaise can take, a buffered intellectual’s love for a porosity he can name, defend, and admire across a distance he cannot cross.<\/p>\n

Taylor did not mock the longing or rank the buffered self above the porous. He mourned what disenchantment cost and thought the modern condition impoverished in plain ways, and a man who feels that loss and works to keep other worlds alive does something Taylor honored. The communities of the Pacific coast hold a fullness the one-world world cannot supply, and defending their territory defends their porosity against the engineers and the miners who would flatten it into resource. Escobar stands with them, and the standing is real. The question is only whether he can join them where they live or can stand beside them and point, and whether the pluriverse offers the buffered reader a door or a window. Through a window a man sees the lit room and feels the cold of the glass.<\/p>\n

The boy from Manizales crossed the wall going out and spent his life trying to find the way back through. He learned the second language well enough to teach it. He never quite recovered the first. That might be the truest thing the frame reveals about him, and the most sympathetic, that he wrote his largest book as a map home for people who, like him, can read every word of the directions and still arrive as visitors.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 1981 a young Colombian with a master’s degree from Cornell University took a desk inside the National Planning Department in Bogot\u00e1. He had the training for the job. He had studied chemical engineering in Cali, spent a year in … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[42717],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-196800","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropology"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t