Latin American ecolinguistics: deconstructing discourse studies, coloniality and industrial environmentalism

2.1 Discourse analysis and critical discourse analysis

According to Arnoux (2021: 714), the critical positioning of the researchers was manifested early: at the end of the sixties South American universities began to consider semiotic perspectives on popular culture and the basic elements of discourse analysis made their appearance. Even before CDA was born as a critical perspective and community of researchers, the region developed a solid tradition analysing the construction of meaning in the media adopting different theoretical frameworks. In Mexico, the Center for Linguistic and Literary Studies of the College of Mexico (Centro de Estudios Lingüísticos y Literarios del Colegio de México), offered in 1976 a Ph.D. course in which a critical revision of Greimas’ semiotic theory was presented (Broden 2021). In 1973, in Argentina, Luis Prieto became chairman of the Linguistics and Semiotics course at the University of Buenos Aires and introduced discourse analysis theories in Argentine universities as a critical perspective. In Brazil, the inclusion of Michel Pêcheux’s materialist discourse analysis, in 1979, meant the institutionalization of discourse studies in the University of Campinas (Arnoux 2021: 714).

During the last twenty years, CDA has achieved a central role among Latin American discursive approaches, providing a great number of researchers as well as topics for research. Regarding recent developments and the current identity of the Latin American discourse studies, Arnoux (2021: 713) points out that:

Discourse Analysis has reached a great level of development and a particular profile in Latin America motivated by the history of the continent, the positioning of researchers and the strong presence of language sciences in its academic and educational institutions. Its specificity, beyond national traditions, is based on the scope of the works, on the strength and continuity of the organizations that bind them together, on many of the networks that are formed and on the shared tasks. In this sense, Adriana Bolivar, when inaugurating the ALED [Asociación Latinoamericana de Estudios del Discurso] Channel, on August 14, 2020, pointed out that the path we walked allows “talking about an analysis of the Latin American discourse”. In the same way, when referring to Discursive Semiotics, Barros (2012) already stated that “semiotic studies in South America are no longer peripheral but, on the contrary, part of a Semiotics in capital letters”. (Arnoux 2021: 713, author’s translation)

Following European authors, CDA in the region developed as a deconstruction of the abuse in power relations – among humans – manifested through discourse and their social implicances. According to Wodak, CDA was born from sociolinguistics due to the lack of interest in sociolinguistics in the structuration of social hierarchies through language. Therefore, CDA and Critical Linguistics (Fowler et al. 1979; Hodge and Kress 1993) presented a social theory of language and its functioning in ideological processes adopting a linguistic methodology (Mendizabal 2018: 18). But, as Stibbe points out, most of this work on language and power focuses on the role of discourse in oppression and exploitation. For example, the journal Discourse & Society is dedicated to “power, dominance and inequality and to the role of discourse in their legitimization and reproduction in society, for instance in the domains of gender, race, ethnicity, class or world religion” (Stibbe 2001: 146). Rare exceptions – as Kheel’s (1995) discussion of the discourse of hunting – mention the role of discourse in the domination of other species by humans. Power is described as a relation between humans only. According to Fairclough (1992: 64), “language contributes to the domination of some people by others”. Following Stibbe (2001), one of the main reasons that animals are excluded from discussions of language and power is that they are not, themselves, participants in their own social construction through language. Stibbe asserts that because of the Marxist roots of CDA, analysis focuses on hegemony, where oppression of a group is carried out ideologically, rather than coercively, through the manufacture of consent (Fairclough 1992). In animals, the power is completely coercive, carried out by people who use animals. They do not consent to their treatment because of “false consciousness” generated through ideological assumptions contained in discourse. But this coercive power used to oppress animals depends on the consent of a majority of the human population who, buying animal products, explicitly or implicitly agrees to the way animals are treated. Therefore, it is in the manufacturing of this consent that language plays a central role (Stibbe 2001: 146).

Nature, on the other hand, unlike nonhuman animals, has entered as a topic in CDS due to the relevance gained by the climate crisis and its consequences on human population (Lamb et al. 2020). Focusing on the negative social effects of climate change, nature has become a subject as long as phenomena have an impact on the human way of life. Political discourse also has adopted the subject due to its social importance and, consequently, nature has become a subtopic in social struggle issues; a new context for social conflict. And this is the way CDA adopts it: not as ecological emergence but as the trigger in social conflict.

This situation is not exclusive to the studies in central countries. European perspectives not only introduced Eurocentric theories but European prejudices as well. In search of a local identity, Latin American discursive studies have focused on local conflicts, such as inequality, racism, gender discrimination, etc. As van Dijk (1999: 24) states, CDA researchers usually adopt the side of the oppressed. Analyses tend to evidence how that oppression is constructed through discourse and, in some cases, highlight a way out of that oppression. Thus, many Latin American studies call for a focus on native South Americans rights and identities, their native tongues, discourses, and social practices as a way to decolonize and modernize Latin American CDA, in many cases romanticizing these identities (Guerrero Arias 2010; Medizabal 2018; Rivera 2015).

Considering historical aspects, there is a major issue in the development of thought in the region: the independence movements that led to the creation of the modern national states remained, in several ways, part of the life in the continent in the form of a mandate for emancipatory thought, questioning the hegemonic knowledge by confronting it with the local context, which leads to a significant degree of autonomy (Arnoux 2021: 713). We can find traces of this emancipatory thought nowadays in the work of most local critical analysts: Viviane Resende’s book, Decolonizar os estudos críticos do discurso ‘Decolonizing critical discourse studies’ (2019) inquires about the colonial matrix and adopts a militant gesture of resistance. It must be noted that her militant gesture asserts the existence of a colonial identity in the local discourse studies.

Latin American countries developed their history by looking at Europe (Forte 2019). Their culture, languages, and traditions were mostly rooted in European traditions with local features. Therefore, it was somehow expected that their academic traditions were founded on European models too. In this sense, works like Resende’s are an example of the deconstruction of colonial models in the Global South and the critical intellectual perspective in a region marked by a turbulent recent history. The difficulties of constructing democracy, expressed in coups d’état, political violence, and military dictatorships, led to intense questioning about the situation of peripheral countries, agency of the centres of power, the marked and progressive subalternation of the popular sectors, and the situation of socially minoritized groups. In all cases, the idea of a common destiny and a true and radical democracy sustained the analytical inquiry (Arnoux 2021: 713–714).

However, this complex context favoured the questioning of discourses before questioning theories about discourse. A social necessity for deconstructing ideologies in certain discourses – mostly right winged and fascist discourses – seems to have prioritized an ideology analysis over a deconstruction of the theoretical tool, which are constructed from a certain ideological point of view too (Varsavsky 1969: 6). Social topics became the issue at hand while European and American theories about language and discourse remained almost untouched. This is the reason why both the types of discourse and the topics addressed must be considered in detail. South American critical discourse analysts have approached a wide range of discourses: from political discourse, journalistic, psychiatric, pedagogic, academic, cinematographic, marketing, and religious and legal discourses (Mendizabal 2018: 22). On the other hand, according to Arnoux (2021: 718), topics addressed have been always related to prejudices and social inequalities: racism, classism, violence towards women and the LGTBIQ collective, migrants and minoritized groups, fake news, communication control and environmental issues.

Regarding environmental issues, Arnoux’s claim seems to be not entirely accurate. Environmental discourses and animal rights have rarely been the object of CDA in the region, although they constitute a critical tradition in themselves. We will approach this topic in the following sections. Regarding theoretical frameworks, the three main theoretical perspectives that influenced Latin American research, according to Bürki and García Agüero (2019), are French School of Discourse Analysis (Althusser 1970; Charaudeau 1983, 2005; Maingueneau 1999, 2014; Pêcheux 1969), Systemic functional discourse perspectives (Fowler et al. 1979; Hodge and Kress 1993; Kress 2003; van Leeuwen 2008) and North American cognitive research on language (Lakoff 1996, 2010).

2.2 Ecolinguistics

As we pointed out, several groups are currently working in the region. The most important of them is the Brazilian Ecosystemic Linguistics also known as the Brazilian School of Ecolinguistics (Couto et al. 2016), which is a well-established and important branch in ecolinguistics with presence in some of the most important universities of Brazil. Hildo do Couto in an interview made by Elza Kioko Nakayama Nenoki do Couto (2013: 78) describes how it was conformed:

In 2010, Davi Borges de Albuquerque, who had already been investigating the linguistic situation in East Timor, joined the UnB in linguistics. The previous year, Elza Kioko had started a postdoctoral study with me, dealing with the language of the gypsies of Aparecida de Goiânia from an ecolinguistic perspective. All this, added to the various disciplines I taught at the university, gave a start to the emergence of what came to be called the Ecolinguistic School of Brasilia. In early July 2012, we had the 1st Brazilian Ecolinguistics Meeting at the University of Brasília. The fact is that we currently have members in other institutions, such as USP, UFRJ, UFG, UEG and the State University of Roraima, among countless others. Well, the variety of ecolinguistics that this group centred on UnB practices was called ecosystem linguistics. (Elza Kioko Nakayama Nenoki do Couto 2013: 78, author’s translation)

Another important active group is located at the Universidad Mayor de San Simón, Cochabamba, in Bolivia (Arratia Jimenez 2019) and a smaller one at the University of Córdoba (Ballesteros 2009; Ballesteros et al. 2015), in Argentina. There are also a few individual researchers spread through the South American area (Bondarenko Pisemskaya 2010; Forte 2020). Some of these perspectives are close to CDA: critical analysis of human relations with the ecosystem and nonhuman animals manifested through discourse in the way Stibbe’s (2015) analysis. Brazilian Ecosystemic Linguistics focuses its interest on the biologic, idealogical, and sociologic aspects of language, following Odense Dialectic Linguistics (Bang and Døør 2007) considering language as a bio-psycho-social phenomenon.

In all, Latin American ecolinguistics is still a developing field. Although the Brazilian School constitutes a big and well-established academic community, many South American universities still consider ecolinguistics as a new and almost unknown branch of linguistic studies and, therefore, CDA and glottopolitics absorb most of the work done in the fields of eco-critical discourses, animal rights discursive perspectives, ecology of languages and surrounding fields and ecolinguistics is neither included in the curricula nor in the study contents.

2.3 Environmental studies and PAL

Outside discourse analysis and ecolinguistics, approaches coming from different branches of social sciences have ventured into the climate crisis subject. Many of the researchers come from fields such as sociology, political sciences, and surrounding fields. And in many cases, they form committees that work and assist the development of public policies about sustainable practices (Sánchez-Calderón and Blanc 2019). These approaches focus on the different dynamics established by central and peripheral countries for industrial development.

In Latin America, industrial practices are linked to practices like the so-called neo-extractivism and agriculture. This kind of approach focuses on a situation analysis:

The massive agrifood model […] presents a huge impact on our health and the lives of animals, plants and fields. It’s a model constructed by big international companies […] Agribusiness model is responsible for the main socio-environmental trouble of Argentina, our potential Chernobyl. (Svampa and Viale 2020: 65, 72, author’s translation)

This perspective, the ‘situation analysis’, grants the researchers a comfortable place to deconstruct the role played by other disciplines approaching the field:

In our country [Argentina] the social and human sciences, with few exceptions, continue to turn their backs on these issues. There are many who still defend a limited and partial approach to the “environmental issue”, more linked to the hegemonic perspective than to the holistic issues and regional languages of assessment that have emerged in recent decades in the heat of struggles. Even in progressive sectors a kind of indifference seems to have settled, if not intellectual laziness, very functional to the crisis, which on the one hand tends to accept the questioning and criticism of current development models, but on the other, without mediation or solid arguments, maintains and repeats like a mantra that the problem is that “there are no other alternatives”. (Svampa and Viale 2020: 13, author’s translation)

As Svampa and Viale (2020) mentioned, most of these Latin American social approaches to the climate crisis adopt an environmentalist perspective.

It is not only human life that is in danger, but also that of other species and the Earth system as a whole. The Anthropocene begins a stage marked by the narratives of the end. Thus, it is not surprising that there is a profuse bibliography on the collapse of human civilization, since there are not a few specialists who postulate that ecocide – what we call here “terricide” – is the greatest threat that threatens world society and life on the planet. If we add to this the equally fearsome hypotheses of a global war and a pandemic, we are faced with factors that, far from being mutually exclusive, can strengthen each other until they coincide in a combinatory process for humanity. (Svampa and Viale 2020: 15, author’s translation)

On the other hand, we also find the group called Latin American Environmental Thinking or PAL, Pensamiento Ambiental Latinoamericano, in its original Spanish. Also born from political sciences and sociology fields, PAL has developed as a political construction of correctness to talk about the climate crisis. Corbetta et al. (2015: 317) present their approach as a multidisciplinary vision:

We believe that the necessary bases to dismantle the unique and linear thinking that the hegemonic and Eurocentric development model has built lies in a Latin American education with relational and territorialized capacity, conceived in an integrative and plural sense; an environmental education supported by a conceptual matrix whose structuring axes are interdisciplinarity, the thematic transversality of environmental issues, the dialogue of knowledge, and environmental ethics, in order to assume the challenge of a new civilizing ethos. (Corbetta et al. 2015: 317, author’s translation)

One of the key concepts that PAL share with ecocritical perspectives is that climate crisis – they call it “environmental crisis” – is a civilizational one, related to an economic, technological, and cultural model. PAL focuses on the colonialist aspects that subaltern human groups (South American natives, the poor, women, African origin people, and the Southern hemisphere) suffer during the exploitation of environmental resources in a globalization process (Corbetta et al. 2015: 317). The solution posed by PAL lies in a vision of sustainability based on the relationship that indigenous-peasant societies maintain with their environment. This perspective roots the notion of sustainability in the cultural knowledge about the biological wealth of the region (Corbetta et al. 2015: 319).

4.1 Gender studies

During the second decade of the XXI Century, the rising political activity developed by a new generation of activists led to a big expansion in the scope of gender studies not only in Europe and the United States but also in other regions of the world such as Latin America, with the movement Ni una menos (Molyneux et al. 2021: 4). Although priorities and practice present important differences within feminism, these differences have helped refine scope and establishing alliances. Theoretical approaches of Latin American feminist movement had already made insinuations since the 1970s, even though only reached academic visibility in the 1980s (Lux and Pérez 2020: 5). The gender movement has succeeded not only in questioning the traditional ways of doing politics and contesting power, but has also promoted a profound epistemological innovation in the field of scientific paradigms, since they have constituted in an instance of epistemological surveillance of scientific discourses about humans and their social context (Aguayo and Nascimento 2016; Ali 1995). Academic gender studies in Latin America cover a range of objects and disciplinary fields, denoting a wealth of intellectual production. They also show a diversity of currents most of them counter-hegemonic (Breilh 2001: 2). Regarding the issue of mainstream gender studies at the university, two tendencies were expressed in these programs: the first sought to penetrate all academic programs while the second tried to strengthen an independent perspective that could train professionals capable of developing research and public politics (Viveros Vigoya 2017).

But the main contribution gender studies have made to modern critical theory is the unit to measure most prejudices: white Christian European heterosexual male (Adams 2015). Of course, misogyny and hate towards women and the LGTBIQ collective are not exclusive to Europe or white Christian countries; but since European culture has managed to currently dominate a big portion of the planet most discourses of hate have their roots in that heritage. Regarding Latin America, feminism and gender studies have developed in areas such as gender and coloniality (Lugones 2007; Sánchez 2005; Segato 2010), social class (Bermúdez 1992), history (Bassanezi Pinsky 2009; Borja 1996), etc. Nevertheless, all topics approach the place of women in society and its impact socially and psychologically.

4.2 Critical animal studies (CAS)

As gender studies, critical animal studies arose from the protest. First, there was a social demand and after a discipline to study it. Animal rights and animal liberation movements had a late start in Latin America: most NGO’s and shelters began their activities and the end of the nineties and the connection among them was not very good (Méndez 2020: 50). Critical animal studies did not were systematized in the region until the establishment of the local branch of the Institute for Critical Animal Studies (ICAS), the Instituto Latinoamericano de Estudios Críticos Animales (ILECA, ‘Latin American Institute of Critical Animal Studies’) in 2011 (Nocella et al. 2014). The ILECA, gained strength around 2013, with a sudden rise in its number of members and at the moment includes researchers from countries such as Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia that had previously been working independently or as part of other organizations.

Coming from fields such as philosophy, political science, cultural studies, and communication, CAS researchers have an interdisciplinarity and decolonial perspective (Ávila Gaitán 2017: 346). In a similar way to gender studies, critical animal studies introduce a rupture in dominant critical studies questioning the historical centrality of human masculinity (Adams 2015). Besides, the peripheral condition of its researchers grants them their decolonial perspective due to the anti-colonialist tradition in which local CDA has its roots. This decolonial perspective, provided by the local tradition of critical studies, enables a certain mistrust towards discursive categories that allows a political reading of the discursive constructions (political in the sense of social change possibilities). We can see here how what constitutes a problem for CDA researchers seems to be some kind of advantage for CAS. Most works from ILECA and its Journal, Revista Latinoamericana de Estudios Críticos Animales (RLECA), present a variety of theoretical approaches to deconstruct the place of specisism in marketing (Benítez 2022), food industry (Bórquez 2022; Varela Trejo and Vargas García 2022), industrial exploitation (Liebsch 2022). Therefore, ILECA studies are not just deconstructing speciesism and anthropocentrism but colonialism as well, introducing, along with Gender Studies, a call for intersectionality.