Robert Goddard - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Robert Goddard
The Latin Americanist, 2018
The Chicken and Quetzal: Incommensurate Ontologies and Portable Values in Guatemala's Cloud Fores... more The Chicken and Quetzal: Incommensurate Ontologies and Portable Values in Guatemala's Cloud Forest, by Paul Kockelman, focuses on different aspects of the author's experience in the small village of Chicacnab from 1997 to 2000. One can almost trace his journey from the offices of the local NGO, Proyecto Eco-Quetzal (PEQ), which had started an "intervention" to save the quetzal bird from extinction through the stimulation of ecotourism, to the village of Chicacnab, where he lived with one of the hosts and even helped the wife to bury a dead baby chicken. Kockelman argues that the PEQ has unwittingly helped to open Chicacnab up to the neoliberal world by commodifying both the quetzal and the labor of the people of Chicacnab. He then flips the coin, examining the way the people of Chicacnab place value on things in their lives, from chickens to labor, arguing that while the intervention has changed inter-village labor relations, these things are still internalized through an "incommensurate ontology." Reading this as a Colonial Mexican historian, I found some of the methodological sections dense, but the examples capture a vivid picture of a moment in a process that has been happening since the Spanish arrived in the New World. Kockelman's investigation of the gendered world of the Q'eqchi' raises a number of historical questions. As Kockelman points out, James Lockhart found that chickens were so intimately related to the Spaniards who brought them to the New World that some early Nahua dictionaries imagined the word Castilla(n) to mean "land of the chickens" (53). He notes that although Q'eqchi' speakers did not consider their own word kaxlan, meaning both chicken and foreign, to be a loan word, it likely came from the Spaniards' Nahua "assistants." He also finds a relationship between the words xul (wild in relation to animals) and Chool, the name of the people of the area before they were "reduced" in the congregaciones of the Sixteenth Century. One wonders then, how much of the gendered differentiation between forest/men/wild and village/women/tame came out of the Spanish (or Nahua?) reorganization of native lives? Or how much of this "re-organization" fit into a gendered binary? In either case, Kockelman finds that Chickens are so intimately connected to the women raising them that women's daily activities were thought to have repercussions on the bodies of the chicks. For instance, he notes that it is believed that if a woman heats up a griddle without putting maize dough on it, the chicks will not hatch (72). In light of my own work on spiritual ecology, this illustrates a deep connection between the physical and spiritual worlds, where even minor transgressions can create an imbalance in the natural world.
ariel: A Review of International English Literature, 2017
Journal of The Historical Society, 2013
American Anthropologist, 2004
... 4 The Triangular Trade 44 5 Martha Brae and Its Surroundings 45 TABLE 1 Number of Farmers by ... more ... 4 The Triangular Trade 44 5 Martha Brae and Its Surroundings 45 TABLE 1 Number of Farmers by Parish and Size of Farm, Jamaica, 1988 134 ... But other than for the work of a few anthropologists, the images of these remote, non-Western societies were almost entirely imaginary ...
Agricultural History, 2001
L'A. decrit la crise de l'industrie du sucre de la Barbade, liee a une bataille ideologiq... more L'A. decrit la crise de l'industrie du sucre de la Barbade, liee a une bataille ideologique entre un gouvernement regi par des noirs et une industrie dirigee par des blancs
The Latin Americanist, 2018
The Chicken and Quetzal: Incommensurate Ontologies and Portable Values in Guatemala's Cloud Fores... more The Chicken and Quetzal: Incommensurate Ontologies and Portable Values in Guatemala's Cloud Forest, by Paul Kockelman, focuses on different aspects of the author's experience in the small village of Chicacnab from 1997 to 2000. One can almost trace his journey from the offices of the local NGO, Proyecto Eco-Quetzal (PEQ), which had started an "intervention" to save the quetzal bird from extinction through the stimulation of ecotourism, to the village of Chicacnab, where he lived with one of the hosts and even helped the wife to bury a dead baby chicken. Kockelman argues that the PEQ has unwittingly helped to open Chicacnab up to the neoliberal world by commodifying both the quetzal and the labor of the people of Chicacnab. He then flips the coin, examining the way the people of Chicacnab place value on things in their lives, from chickens to labor, arguing that while the intervention has changed inter-village labor relations, these things are still internalized through an "incommensurate ontology." Reading this as a Colonial Mexican historian, I found some of the methodological sections dense, but the examples capture a vivid picture of a moment in a process that has been happening since the Spanish arrived in the New World. Kockelman's investigation of the gendered world of the Q'eqchi' raises a number of historical questions. As Kockelman points out, James Lockhart found that chickens were so intimately related to the Spaniards who brought them to the New World that some early Nahua dictionaries imagined the word Castilla(n) to mean "land of the chickens" (53). He notes that although Q'eqchi' speakers did not consider their own word kaxlan, meaning both chicken and foreign, to be a loan word, it likely came from the Spaniards' Nahua "assistants." He also finds a relationship between the words xul (wild in relation to animals) and Chool, the name of the people of the area before they were "reduced" in the congregaciones of the Sixteenth Century. One wonders then, how much of the gendered differentiation between forest/men/wild and village/women/tame came out of the Spanish (or Nahua?) reorganization of native lives? Or how much of this "re-organization" fit into a gendered binary? In either case, Kockelman finds that Chickens are so intimately connected to the women raising them that women's daily activities were thought to have repercussions on the bodies of the chicks. For instance, he notes that it is believed that if a woman heats up a griddle without putting maize dough on it, the chicks will not hatch (72). In light of my own work on spiritual ecology, this illustrates a deep connection between the physical and spiritual worlds, where even minor transgressions can create an imbalance in the natural world.
ariel: A Review of International English Literature, 2017
Journal of The Historical Society, 2013
American Anthropologist, 2004
... 4 The Triangular Trade 44 5 Martha Brae and Its Surroundings 45 TABLE 1 Number of Farmers by ... more ... 4 The Triangular Trade 44 5 Martha Brae and Its Surroundings 45 TABLE 1 Number of Farmers by Parish and Size of Farm, Jamaica, 1988 134 ... But other than for the work of a few anthropologists, the images of these remote, non-Western societies were almost entirely imaginary ...
Agricultural History, 2001
L'A. decrit la crise de l'industrie du sucre de la Barbade, liee a une bataille ideologiq... more L'A. decrit la crise de l'industrie du sucre de la Barbade, liee a une bataille ideologique entre un gouvernement regi par des noirs et une industrie dirigee par des blancs