IRC: Troubling States of Matter in the Americas presents Rachel Cypher with "Ecological Siege: Dispossession through Ecocide in Argentina"

The annihilation of Indigenous lifeworlds in Argentina was not an accident of conquest. It was central to it. In this talk, Rachel Cypher will describe what she calls the ongoing, centuries-long "ecological siege" against Ranqueles in central Argentina, who through ingenious appropriation of settler species defended one of the longest-held Indigenous territories in the Americas. Moving from the 16th century to the present day siege of genetically modified soybeans and glyphosate, the talk will examine dispossession through ecocide, as well as consider the ongoing resurgence and survival of Ranqueles and their lifeworlds.  

 

Rachel Cypher grew up in the borderlands of the Sonoran Desert and spent much of her childhood with the group that built Biosphere 2, an ecological test capsule for life on Mars. This experience shaped her current research interests, which engage with ongoing questions of how the environment makes us who we are, and how we make the environment. Putting gender, race, and class at the center of her inquiries, she also experiments with new forms of storytelling and ways of knowing the world. Her dissertation, “Belonging in the Pampas,” examined the cattle-man love affair that made the settler colonial state of Argentina, while her current research explores the spread of mesquite forests by Indigenous cattle herding in both the western Pampas and the southwestern United States. She received her BA from Penn, MA from UC Berkeley, PhD from UC Santa Cruz, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship with Penn Program for Environmental Humanities.