11/06/2024
This week’s EcoGathering explores enclosure — seen by many as the beginning of capitalism as a dominant economic system. Enclosure is the process by which early capitalists laid claim to the commons — land, rivers, fisheries, etc., by privatizing and limiting access to them, including to those who managed them for generations. Inherent in the process of enclosure was the act of breaking people's connections to the land, to their lifeways and livelihoods, and to each other. is a predicate for separation.
These domineering and extractive ways of relating weren’t just limited to the land and livelihoods but also to the bodies of people assigned the role of woman, disrupting bodily sovereignty. During the enclosures, the majority of women were forced to provide labor, in the form of care work, without compensation or at minimal wages and their subsistence was taken away. Those who resisted or practiced rituals that reaffirmed relationality to the land, were condemned as witches and, oftentimes, executed.
Though buried under several centuries of history, awareness of the enclosures is essential to understanding some of the deep-seated drivers of contemporary power-relations and politics. Some say that authoritarianism is inevitable under late-stage capitalism, others aver that is late-stage patriarchy. Capitalism and both got a huge boost through the enclosures.
Join us to explore these connections and some of the historical shifts that set the stage for a volatile present in which access to land, rights to inhabit particular places, bodily autonomy, reproductive behavior and labor, and the very constructs of gender are again being used to consolidate power, wield it undemocratically, and condone violence as a tool of control.
Find the link to sign up in our bio (click upcoming ecogatherings). Thursday, November 7, 6:00-7.30 PM ET.
