The Silences of Dispossession

An exploration of omissions, or silences, in previous investigations of agrarian transformations by foregrounding indigenous experiences of capitalist development. Providing a rich and detailed ethnographic study, Mercedes Biocca shows how capitalist processes are perceived, experienced, and either confronted or accepted depending on the different ways in which dispossession, resistance, and negotiation have become embedded in the collective local memory. Challenging accounts that efface the agency of subalterns in shaping rural dynamics, and ignore the diversity of perspectives within indigenous groups, Biocca untangles the connections between global, national, and local spatial scales in her analysis of accumulation by dispossession.