Self-Devouring Growth

Julie Livingston, a 2013 recipient of a MacArthur “Genius Grant,” is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at New York University and author of Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic, also published by Duke University Press, and Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana.

“Highly engaging, deeply thoughtful, and beautifully written, Self-Devouring Growth helps us to understand the environmental dangers the planet faces not as something to be avoided or prevented, but as something to expect and to live through. Julie Livingston's thinking about environmental and other futures is a breath of fresh air and cuts across stale debates around economic development and environmental sustainability in a very original way.” - James Ferguson, author of (Give a Man a Fish: Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution) “Julie Livingston's concept of ‘self-devouring growth’ will become an essential tool across many forms of scholarship-and for concerned earth dwellers across the planet. As Livingston puts it, “GROW! is a mantra so powerful that it obscures the destruction it portends.” Self-Devouring Growth tells of the failure of Botswana's public water system, strained by failing rains and pumped dry by mining and commercial beef rearing for export. Regarded as a success of development, Botswana is the ideal site for a parable of the Anthropocene.” - Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, coeditor of (Feral Atlas: The More-than-Human Anthropocene) "Livingston has written a beautiful book, which speaks from Tswana cosmology towards the complexities of global problems, and that points towards forms of activism that we can all take forward." - Shannon Morreira (Africa Is a Country) "An imaginative parable about human society and life on Earth. . . . The author notes that everyone cries foul when poorer countries achieve a standard of living enjoyed elsewhere, yet the global inequality reflected in this complaint suggests the need for collective creative thinking about new forms of growth for life on Earth to survive. Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers."- E. P. Renne (Choice) "I find self-devouring growth a powerful and clarifying concept. I’m more accustomed to thinking about the climate change emergency through numbers, like the temperature beyond which the earth must not warm, or the number of tons of carbon we can safely put into the atmosphere. Instead, Livingston illuminates our way of life. She is asking a lot of the reader: she is asking us to understand that many of the things that make us feel well, prosperous, and secure are the very things that are killing us. . . . It is deeply unsettling to live with." - Emily Callaci (Dissent) "Livingston has forged a path into an anthropology of futures, one responsive to and reflective of the Anthropocene and the threats to human survival we witness daily on our ever-more vulnerable planet. She offers methodological and conceptual tools that will enable other scholars to grapple with futures, those that are unfolding now because of self-devouring growth, and those we want to imagine differently. This book is for everyone." - Sharon R. Kaufman (Medical Anthropology Quarterly) “I like reading Julie Livingston’s Self-Devouring Growth as a push against the consumption of modernist time-that is, against the suspension of historical flux, imaginative possibility, and alter-social development.... The book so convincingly dispels efforts to reduce the planetary condition to a matrix problem begging for technological solutions....” - Alex Blanchette (Somatosphere) “It is a testament to the distilled clarity and prescience of Julie Livingston’s parable of a book that its title, Self-Devouring Growth, can strike one immediately as both so true and suddenly so evident....”- Abou Farman (Somatosphere) “[Self-Devouring Growth is] a book that offers an elegant and important argument about industrial capitalism and growth that is devouring the world in which we live.... It is a book firmly grounded in critical medical anthropology, which has for a long time dug into the political economy of health and the structural violence of capitalism....”- Fanny Chabrol (Somatosphere) Only Julie Livingston could write this book because of the sources, sensibilities, and experiences from which she draws.... [She] leads us to think about the biggest burning question of our common era: What kind of future is possible when our ways of living are literally invested in our collective destruction?”- Juno Salazar Parreñas (Somatosphere) “Through the realist genre of the parable, this marvelous little book discusses an interconnected world organized by ‘self-devouring growth’.... This immensely readable book will appeal to a broad audience of academics, policymakers and practitioners in international development....” - Tanya Matthan (Progress in Development Studies)

• Acknowledgments  ixPrologue: A Planetary Parable 11. Rainmaking and Other Forgotten Things  112. In the Time of Beef  35Cattle to Beef: A Photo Essay of Abstraction  613. Roads, Sand, and the Motorized Cow  854. Power and Possibility, or Did You Know Aesop Was Once a Slave?  121Notes  129Index  153