101. Activism, Dissent and Webs Of Meaning: Rethinking the Relationship Between the ‘Local’ and the ‘Global’ in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve.
- Author
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Odysseos, Louiza
- Subjects
- *
ACTIVISM , *CIVIL society , *SOCIAL movements , *ACTIVISTS , *DISSENTERS - Abstract
The paper examines the relationship between local practices of dissent and the globally emerging ?civil society?. Scholarship exploring this question tends to be polarized: on the one extreme, it is suggested that local activism emerges organically out of local issues and concerns, and then attempts to fashion alliances with globally active movements and organisations which cohere with its sentiment and understandings of politics. On the other extreme, some scholars suggest that ?global civil society? colonizes local activism by imposing its own, Western concepts and political worldviews onto their local concerns and self?understandings. This polarisation is immediately apparent in perceptions of the relationship between international NGOS and the Bushmen in Botswana and their attempts to prevent their eviction by the state from their diamond-rich lands. The paper utilises Martin Heidegger?s notion of the ?world as a referential totality? in order to theorise the relationship between the local and the global. Re-inscribing the liberal term ?global civil society? as a complex and ever-evolving web of background meaning, as a referential totality against which we orient our existence, it recasts the question of the relationship between the local and the global away from such polarisations. The paper examines the case of the Bushmen?s activism to consider some of these questions: how do activists or dissenters located within postcolonial, indigenous, and local contexts uniquely appropriate norms and references available to them within the web of meaning? How does the appropriation of meaning by local contexts and the ?repetition? of certain types of practices, themselves affect the web? And, finally, what kinds of subjectivities are produced within it? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2004