Defying Displacement: Grassroots Resistance and the Critique of Development

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments If one pursues a project over a certain number of years, in this case close to ten, the list of people that have contributed to the final product can be quite long. Almost as long can be the list of ways that people have helped, sometimes without realizing it, ranging from providing places to stay to great conversations filled with valuable insights over beer or coffee to reading suggestions to careful readings and incisive critiques. There are people who have been working in the field of development forced displacement and resettlement as long or longer than I have who encouraged this project from the beginning, when I began to look at the connections between the “disasters of nature” and the “disasters of development.” The three earliest, to whom I owe great thanks, are Art Hansen, Elizabeth Colson, and Ted Scudder. I am also very grateful for the participants in the annual Latin American Conference on Development and Displacement at the University of Florida in 1980, especially Scott Robinson, Gustavo Lins Ribeiro, and Teresa Serra. In 1995 at the First International Conference on Development-Induced Displacement and Resettlement at the Universityof Oxford’s Refugee Studies Programme, I was fortunate in meeting Chris McDowell, Andrew Grey, Darrell Posey, Alicia Barabas, Miguel Bartolome, Walter Fernandes, Hari Mohan Mathur, and Susan Tamondong, all of whom personally or through their work contributed to this effort. The core document on which this larger work is based was produced as part of a project at the Refugee Studies Programme [now Refugee Studies Centre (rsC)] entitled Improving Outcomes in Development Induced Displacement and Resettlement Projects, which was organized by Chris de Wet (Oliver-Smith 2001; see also Oliver-Smith 2006). The participants, Chris de Wet, Alan Rew, Eleanor Fisher, Balaji Pandey , Dolores Koenig, and the various consultants to the project, including Acknowledgments xi Dan Gibson, S. Parasuraman, and Warren Waters, as well as David Turton and Sean Loughna from the rsC, are all gratefully acknowledged. Several of the case studies and other materials I use first appeared in that project document and in Applied Anthropology: Domains of Application, edited by Satish Kedia and John van Willigen, Praeger Press 2005. Over the years the leadership and staff of the International Rivers Network , now known as International Rivers, have assisted and supported this work in many ways, ranging from places to stay while researching in Brazil to unlimited use of their extraordinary library to the invitation to observe the second International Meeting of Dam Affected People and their Allies in Rasi Salai, Thailand, in 2003. In particular I am very grateful to Patrick McCully , Aviva Imhoff, Monti Aguirre, Glenn Switkes, and Selma Barros. Most recently, assistance and support for this project came from the members of an Advanced Seminar on Development Forced Displacement and Resettlement that I organized at the School of American Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 2005. Gregory Button, Michael Cernea, Dana Clark, Ted Downing, William F. Fisher, Barbara Rose Johnston, Satish Kedia, Dolores Koenig, Ted Scudder and Chris de Wet all produced superb papers for that event and our recent book (Oliver-Smith 2009b). Moreover, their support, encouragement, and assistance have been very important in the development and completion of this present effort. Most of us have known each other for many years, and while we don’t always agree, we’ve been a congenial group, and our conversations in many contexts over those years constitute a rich vein that I have and will continue to mine as our work in this field proceeds. I am deeply grateful to them all. I also want to express my great thanks to Dana Clark, Ted Downing, Barbara Rose Johnston, Monica Montalvo, Scott Robinson, Renzo Rosales, Glenn Switkes, and Kayana Szymczak for the generous contribution of their excellent photographs for this book. The cover image was inspired by The Woods Within, a sculpture by Alison Saar. And, finally, I would like to thank my family. My sons Daniel and John, teenagers when this project began and today young men engaging with energy and vision the challenges of this complex world, supported my efforts cheerfully during the ten years of work on this project. And to my wife Kerry, who has sustained this project with her wisdom and humor, my love and thanks. THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK Defying Displacement THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT...