Valeria Sosa Garnica
In this essay, I will discuss the embodiment of racist, colonial, and capitalist structures in geographic imperatives and use the Tsotsil concept of Kanal to describe systematic dehumanization and despiritualization.
For Indigenous, peasant, and rural peoples, land and territory are more than work and food. They are also culture, community, history, ancestors, future dreams, life, and mother. But for two centuries, the capitalist system has deruralized, expelled the peasants and indigenous people, changed the face of the Earth, dehumanized her.
Andres Aubry[1]
As discussed in the previous reflection, ch’ulel is the multiplicity of potentiality of positive relations with everything that exists in the world. In the Tzotzil language, there exists a (relatively new) concept that signifies a negation of ch’ulel, that is, the mode of relating within a capitalist system. Kanal refers to work that is done for a patron (boss) to earn money. For Tsotsils, this represented the birth of a new social relation that is not work, which holds a collective connotation in Tzotzil culture, but exploitative systems that undermine the ability of a community to maintain their autonomy and effectively destroys the community. If you don’t even have time for yourself, how will you have time for your community?
Kanal spurs a cycle of desperation-dependence-displacement; by ensuring a community’s dependence on outside sources of capital, community members are driven by desperation to engage further in kanal, resulting displacement from their communities and native lands, perpetuating the domination of landed elites over Indigenous peoples (Fitzwater). According to Klein, through this cycle of kanal Chiapas continues to function as an internal colony, with natural resources extracted and sent to central and northern Mexico, and, I would add, extracting and dispossessing Indigenous labor. This domination — in the case of Chiapas, the domination of Indigenous people by landed elites — resembles a process of “dominating natural otherness, and resembles a particular mode of extraction” (Hage). Kanal points us not only to the colonization that birthed the word, but the structure of perpetual plunder that colonial racist exploitation under a capitalist system engenders.[2] Not only that, but it “reproduces and legitimates the very wild, unchecked, and inhumane capitalism that governs the overexploitation of nature” (Hage). This leads us to what Hage calls generalized domestication[3], what Russell Means attributes to the industrial society, and Murray Bookchin points out as the ultimate cause of the ecological and capitalist crisis–the violent relations of domination, subordination, and domestication of humans towards nature (and non-humans).
Human domination over nature is an inherent part of kanal and capitalism, as is the de-spiritualization of nature is necessary to enable its exploitation and savage primitive accumulation (Means). Similarly, to justify exploitation and enslavement, peoples are dehumanized into domesticated and subordinated ‘non-humans.’ This dual process of de-spiritualization and dehumanization embodied in the geographic imperative of plunder and exploitation through kanal/capitalism defines the ‘de-ch’ulelization of the world, the beginning of the death of a mode of relating with the environment based on the Mayan cosmovision. And, with it, the monopolizing of a single mode of relating to one’s environment based on domination and domestication.
Wow, that’s really depressing. When I first learned about this structure of human superiority and domination of nature (or, at least, when it was first pointed out to me) in a talk by Murray Bookchin’s daughter, I was in shock. Of course! This made perfect sense! But where does this leave us in terms of struggling towards ecological, liberatory, and transformative human experiences of social relations? While kanal does mark the ‘de-ch’ulelization’ of the world, ch’ulel as it is experienced by Tsotsils is far from dead. The other way around — resistance to the monopoly of domination and domestication as the single mode of relating to the environment is today strong. The centrality of a’mtel (community-based collective work and other types of labor that are not subject to the logic of kanal) in Zapatista communities serves the dual purpose of enabling the day-to-day operations and embodies a struggle for decolonization to “undo the re-production of colonial forms of exploitation and domination to build a different world and way of life” (Fitzwater). The structures of racism, colonialism, and capitalism are entrenched and inseparable from the land on which they play out and the material conditions they produce. Their stakes are in the savage creation of capital through perpetual plunder. Thus, our relation to land informs our social relations amongst each other, as informed by the social structures we inherit.
From mi papi and mami’s small garden behind our house to wide stretches of reclaimed Zapatista land, resistance to capitalism and domination lies in the land and our relation to it. Ruth Wilson Gilmore argues that the process of making a place, a geographic imperative, lies at the heart of every struggle for social justice. Justice embodied is always spatial. The revolution will not necessarily come through the cosecha of turnips and eggplants, but through a return and recovering “of the multiplicities of modes of inhabitance that capitalist modernity has excluded and marginalized” (Hage). My point is this — we cannot talk about liberation with talking about the environment and land we inhabit, and how we relate to the world and imagine future worlds. In other words, we need un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos.
[1] Klein, Compañeras.
[2] The term kanal is the tsotsilization of the Spanish word “ganar”, which means to make money.
[3] Generalized domestication, as described by Hage, is a “mode of inhabiting the world through dominating it for making it yield value — material or symbolic forms of sustenance, comfort, aesthetic pleasure, and so on. It is about the domestication of one’s whole environment, what is true of the logic of domestication in relation to one species is also true in relation to the environment as a totality. It is a relation of domination that aims to be lived as a relation of non-domination.”
Una Kaxlan En Su Patria 