Arturo Escobar

Arturo Escobar (born November 20, 1951) is a Colombian-American anthropologist and professor emeritus of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA. His academic research interests include political ecology, anthropology of development, social movements, anti-globalization movements, political ontology, and postdevelopment theory.

Escobar is a major figure in the post-development academic discourse and has been described as a "post-development thinker to be reckoned with". He has authored influential books criticizing development practices championed by western industrialized societies and exploring possibilities for alternative visions of development, including Encountering Development (1995) and Designs for the Pluriverse (2018).

Education and career Escobar was born in Manizales, Colombia. in 1987 he received an interdisciplinary Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, in Development Philosophy, Policy and Planning.

Scholarship

Anthropological approach Escobar's approach to anthropology is largely informed by the poststructuralist and postcolonialist traditions and centered around two recent developments: subaltern studies and the idea of a World Anthropologies Network (WAN). His research interests are related to political ecology; the anthropology of development, social movements; Latin American development and politics. Escobar's research uses critical techniques in his provocative analysis of development discourse and practice in general. He also explores possibilities for alternative visions for a postdevelopment era.

Criticism of development Escobar contends in his 1995 book, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World, that international development became a mechanism of control comparable to colonialism or "cultural imperialism that poor countries had little means of declining politely". traced the rise and fall of development through Michel Foucault's discourse analysis, which regards development as ontologically cultural (i.e., by examining linguistic structure and meaning). This led him to conclude that "development planning was not only a problem to the extent that it failed; it was a problem even when it succeeded, because it so strongly set the terms for how people in poor countries could live". He further explored the concept of a pluriverse in his 2018 book Designs for the Pluriverse.

Political ecology Escobar received a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 1997 to study "Cultural and Biological Diversity in the Late Twentieth Century". It was written after years of fieldwork in Colombia with a group of Afro-Colombian activists of Colombia's Pacific rainforest region called the Proceso de Comunidades Negras (PCN). In 2019 he co-created the Global Tapestry of Alternatives process.