The Promise of Politics: Place-based Pathways to Agonism among Environmental Activists in India and South Africa

Environmentalism of the poor is increasingly seen to offer effective models of political organization and action to tackle environmental destruction. This study contributes to an anthropological engagement with this phenomenon by illuminating the cultural logics galvanizing environmentalism of the poor in distinct locations, elucidating democratic commitments among marginalized peoples confronting environmental decay, and the ways such commitments fuel activist action. Focusing on anti-dam activism (Pashulok, India) and struggles against industrial pollution (Wentworth, South Africa), I ask: How does the way in which activist groups confront internal difference shape their outward-facing political action? In answering this question, I point to two ways of negotiating political difference: an intergenerational dialogue about the future of development reflected in ritualized re-telling of history among Indian anti-dam activists (vertical pluralism), and a dialogue across historically unthinkable boundaries of race, ethnicity, and ideology palpable among South African activists (horizontal pluralism). I argue that these pluralisms helped activists see the targets of their critique not as enemies to be destroyed but as “adversaries” (Chantal Mouffe), cultivating a space of the political that helps to reimagine democratic practice outside the framework of existing constituted power. By illuminating the vertical and horizontal pluralisms within the two movements, this article outlines differing place-based pathways to agonism, nuancing Mouffe’s theorisation of the concept through ethnographic encounters with political mobilization in “marginal” places.