The Global Idea of 'the Commons', Volume 10Donald Macon Nonini Berghahn Books, 2007 - 138 pages During the last three decades, corporations allied with scientists and universities, national and regional governments, and international financial institutions have, through a variety of mechanisms associated with neo-liberal globalization, acted to dispossess large proportions of the world's population of their commons' resources and enclose them for profit making. In response, throughout the global South and in the cities of the global North, large numbers of people have formed movements to defend the commons in all their variety. The idea of the commons has thus emerged as a global idea, and commons have emerged as sites of conflict around the world. The essays in this forum assess strategically the situations of selected commons in a variety of diagnostic sites where they exist, the ways in which they are being transformed by the incursions of capital and state, and the ways in which they are becoming the locus of struggle for those who depend on them to survive. Donald M. Nonini is Professor of Anthropology and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Anthropology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He has published numerous books, articles, and book chapters on Southeast Asian state formation, the cultural politics of Chinese transnationalism in and from Southeast Asia, and local politics in the southern United States. Recent articles include "Diasporas and Globalization" (2005) and "Indonesia Seen by Its Outside Insiders: Its Chinese Alters in Transnational Space" (2006). His latest book, co-written with Dorothy Holland et al., is Local Democracy Under Siege: Activism, Public Interests and Private Politics (2007). |
Contents
The Global Idea of the Commons | 1 |
Collectivism Universalism and Struggles over | 26 |
The Commons in an Amazonian Context | 41 |
Resisting the Neoliberal Enclosure of Life | 53 |
Reflections on Intellectual Commons | 66 |
Boyer | 89 |
Notes on Contributors | 136 |
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Anthropology Appalachian Appalachian State University Bayh-Dole Act biodiversity biotech Bollier Bromley Bruce Kapferer capital capitalist coalitions Cofán common property regimes common-pool resources commons-making conservation corporate alliance costs Couto crisis cultural debts decades diverse drug ecological economic emergency enclosure essay Ethics Europe European example exist farm farmers Fisher free spaces genes genetic commons genetic material gift economy gifts global South health commons health services Huaorani human ibid individual industrialized institutions intellectual commons intellectual property International inventions issues kinds of commons knowledge labor land license livelihoods Médecins Sans Frontières mediating structures medicine ment mons Myles Horton natural-resource commons neo-liberal networks Nonini North Carolina organizations Ostrom patents percent policies political population practices production professional dominance property rights protection recent regional Research Tools rural Scharper scientific commons Secoya shared Shuar stavudine strategies struggles survival tion transnational University Press users Washburn weardown World York