Oasis culture was a cosmopolitan exchange economy before extractive rationality dismantled it

Evidence

If Munif ’s writing about the oasis takes on tones of anticipatory elegy (for an authenticity simplified and heightened in remembrance), he nonetheless conveys the cosmopolitan complexity of oasis culture before it was ecologically, culturally, economically, and psychologically unsettled by an instrumental rationality that saw only fossil fuels and relic people, impedimentary Bedouin who, in the name of civilization, modernity, and profit had to be moved and forcibly remade. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 241

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the polyad thread on settler-colonial land/place and ‘extraction-driven landscapes override vernacular community maps’ from ch4 of this same book; also usable alongside Soundscape’s slow destruction of collective sonic culture. — connects to: Genuine folk culture was colonized and extinguished by commodification from the midnineteenth century — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 192; Extractors exempt themselves from local exchange cultures and show incuriosity toward inhabitants — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 241
• QUESTION: The claim that instrumental extractive rationality saw people as ‘relics’ to be remade — how does this map onto the wider literature strand on writer-activists translating between worlds?

Broader Connections

• Extractors exempt themselves from local exchange cultures and show incuriosity toward inhabitants #exemplifies (0.80) — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 241
• Genuine folk culture was colonized and extinguished by commodification from the midnineteenth century #corroborates (0.72) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 192