LAUSR

First of all, my deep gratitude to Professor Michaeline Crichlow for her initiative to do this special review section on Territories of Difference, and to both Paige West and Eric Thomas for engaging seriously with the book. Readers acquainted with the book will recall that it is organized around six concepts (place, capital, nature, development, identity, and networks), with a chapter devoted to each. These concepts, I argued then, are central to political ecology. Broadly speaking, they are also central to the kinds of social problems and social theory issues dealt with by Cultural Dynamics. I thus hope their thoughtful texts, and my response that follows, will be of interest to journal readers. Let me start with what I consider the most relevant question raised by Paige West. Territories came out in 2008; most of it had been written, however, by 2004. As Paige says, “the already complicated concepts” the book dealt with “have become even more complicated.” This is a beginning point. While it would be ludicrous to attempt even a cursory glance at what has changed in the analysis of the six concepts over the past decade, I would like to highlight a few major trends that were somewhat anticipated, but insufficiently treated, in the book and that have become more prominent to today’s social theory debates since then. These trends are related to debates on ontology, politics and the pluriverse. Before I do that, however, I would like to discuss briefly some aspects of Paige’s and Eric’s responses that I found particularly insightful. The first is Paige’s engaging comments about place. As she argues, place continues to be as central today as it was during the previous two decades. I can add that while the spatial turn in social theory displaced place’s centrality from the geographical, sociological, and anthropological imagination for some time (1990s–2000s), particularly in discussions of globalization, the reiteration of the salience of place in vogue since the middle of the past decade continues to be important. Paige’s question, “how do we narrate the now” now, in place, “in a way that might help us all move beyond what is killing our world” seems to be a particularly powerful and constructive articulation. Despite their brevity, her ethnographic descriptions of Maimafu, narrating its intersecting pasts and presents, its locations and dislocations, are a very nice example of what she means by new ways to narrate place at present. In a recent work (Escobar, 2014), I re-narrate some of the places and processes analyzed in Territories, foregrounding or rearticulating certain features, such as their being “ontologically occupied” by large-scale extractive operations. (I do not expect readers to have read or even know about this work, since I am very much aware that what is not written in English does not exist for the 740460 CDY0010.1177/0921374017740460Cultural DynamicsBook Forum research-article2017