Storytelling Globalization from the Chaco and Beyond

Storytelling Globalization from the Chaco and Beyond is a project that seeks to create space for new articulations of modernity and globalization. Through his frequent interactions over the past seventeen years with the Yshiro communities in Paraguay, who view storytelling and representation as active aspects of lived experience and social organization, Mario Blaser challenges the modern principles that on the one hand narrate globalization as the expansion and radicalization of modernity, but on the other hand describe globalization as an alternative to modernity. To avoid reaffirming other academic norms and dualities that feed into the modern myths of globalization, Blaser himself disavows the object/subject relationship in his ethnography and instead of representing with "accuracy" the lifestyles and ideas of the Yshiro communities, he narrates his own personal experience and the viewpoint(s) created following his dialogues with the village elders. Blaser shows that to view globalization as a natural progression of modernity is to enable neoliberalism, with its government and development institutions that rely heavily on expert and academic knowledge, to flourish. Embracing pluriversality, which has been rendered invisible over the last five hundred years by Western claims to universality, is an essential part of Blaser's project as he gives voice to a community that has been silenced and assimilated by a sequence of imposed colonial and developmental projects but nevertheless is not entirely engulfed in the myths of modernity. Much of the book traces the historical progression of the Yshiro community, from their first encounters with Western agents and resulting local nationalist conflicts to the present day crisis of modernity. This crisis has enabled the Yshiro to reclaim the traditions, narratives, and performative myths they were once forced to abandon in favor of Western modes of thought. By relating these narratives in a manner that is as unadulterated as possible, Blaser attempts to reveal the rise of a pluriversality that challenges the very basic myths of modernity and that truly turns globalization into an empowering agent for the subaltern.