The Chicken and the Quetzal

The Chicken and the Quetzal

Incommensurate Ontologies and Portable Values in Guatemala's Cloud Forest

  • Author: Kockelman, Paul
  • Publisher: Duke University Press
  • ISBN: 9780822360568
  • eISBN Pdf: 9780822374596
  • Place of publication:  Durham , United States
  • Year of digital publication: 2015
  • Month: December
  • Pages: 208
  • Language: English
In The Chicken and the Quetzal Paul Kockelman theorizes the creation, measurement, and capture of value by recounting the cultural history of a village in Guatemala's highland cloud forests and its relation to conservation movements and ecotourism. In 1990 a group of German ecologists founded an NGO to help preserve the habitat of the resplendent quetzal—the strikingly beautiful national bird of Guatemala—near the village of Chicacnab. The ecotourism project they established in Chicacnab was meant to provide new sources of income for its residents so they would abandon farming methods that destroyed quetzal habitat. The pressure on villagers to change their practices created new values and forced negotiations between indigenous worldviews and the conservationists' goals. Kockelman uses this story to offer a sweeping theoretical framework for understanding the entanglement of values as they are interpreted and travel across different and often incommensurate ontological worlds. His theorizations apply widely to studies of the production of value, the changing ways people make value portable, and value's relationship to ontology, affect, and selfhood. 
 
 
  • Cover
  • Title
  • Copyright
  • Contents
  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction: Enclosure and Disclosure
    • A Strange Form of Sovereignty
    • Enclosure and Disclosure
    • The Portability of Value
    • Summary of Chapters
  • Chapter 1. NGOs, Ecotourists, and Endangered Avifauna: Immaterial Labor, Incommensurate Values, and Intersubjective Intentions
    • Early Scientific Expedition
    • Other Interventions as an NGO
    • Early Days of Ecotourism
    • Beautiful Simplicity
    • Ecotourism in Alta Verapaz
    • Environs and Employees of the Ecotourism Project
    • Priming the Ecotourism Experience
    • Being an Ecotourist
    • Standards and Singularities
    • Immaterial Labor, Incommensurate Values, and Intersubjective Intentions
  • Chapter 2. A Mayan Ontology of Poultry: Selfhood, Affect, and Animals
    • Birds as Emblems of Eras and Identities
    • Frames of Value
    • A Brief History of Loan Words and Loan Birds
    • Taxonomies as Denotational and Connotational Domains
    • Chickens as Addressees and Affines
    • Ontologies Disclosed in the Midst of Discursive Disruptions
    • Ontology
    • Social Relations Mediated by Chickens
    • Selfhood
    • Brooding Hens, Tabooed Acts, Corporate Units of Accountability
    • Reason, Desire, and Domestic Animals
    • Chickens and Children
    • Signs of Fear, Cowardice, Anxiety, and Gender
    • Ride of the Chicken Hawks, Effervescence of a Community
    • Affect
  • Chapter 3. From Reciprocation to Replacement: Grading Use Values, Labor Power, and Personhood
    • Apples and Oranges, Coffee and Corn
    • Becoming Use Value
    • Modes of Replacement
    • Earthenware Griddles and Metal Griddles
    • Comparing Men, Boys, Women, and Money
    • Potentia and Personhood
    • Sufficiency, Subjectivity, and Substitutability
    • Entities, Qualities, Quantities, Necessities
    • “The Most Prophetic Pointer Ever Made in the Realm of Social Science”
    • Qualia, Quantia, and Equalia
  • Chapter 4. From Measurement to Meaning: Standardizing and Certifying Homes and Their Inhabitance
    • High­Quality but Uninhabitable Homes
    • Capacitation and Commensuration
    • The NGO Gauges and Grades Its Own Interventions
    • Standardization, Certification, Internalization
    • Techniques of Measurements
    • Grading Homes
    • Grading People
    • Gender Hierarchies and Age Grades
    • Precision and Decoration of Homes, Parasites and Hosts
    • From Contract to Status
    • Value and Meaning Revisited
    • An Epilogue of Sorts
  • Conclusion: Paths, Portability, and Parasites
    • Going Awry, Leading Astray
    • Frame, Failure, Function
    • Topologies of (and in) Transformation
    • Some Paths to and through Chicacnab
    • Portability Revisited
    • Overtakings and Undertakings
  • Notes
  • References
  • Index

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