Indigenous Movements, Self-Representation, and the State in Latin America
Indigenous Movements, Self-Representation, and the State in Latin America

Author: Kay B. Warren

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2010-07-22

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0292786743

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Throughout Latin America, indigenous peoples are responding to state violence and pro-democracy social movements by asserting their rights to a greater measure of cultural autonomy and self-determination. This volume's rich case studies of movements in Colombia, Guatemala, and Brazil weigh the degree of success achieved by indigenous leaders in influencing national agendas when governments display highly ambivalent attitudes about strengthening ethnic diversity. The contributors to this volume are leading anthropologists and indigenous activists from the United States and Latin America. They address the double binds of indigenous organizing and "working within the system" as well as the flexibility of political tactics used to achieve cultural goals outside the scope of state politics. The contributors answer questions about who speaks for indigenous communities, how indigenous movements relate to the popular left, and how conflicts between the national indigenous leadership and local communities play out in specific cultural and political contexts. The volume sheds new light on the realities of asymmetrical power relations and on the ways in which indigenous communities and their representatives employ Western constructions of subjectivity, alterity, and authentic versus counterfeit identity, as well as how they manipulate bureaucratic structures, international organizations, and the mass media to advance goals that involve distinctive visions of an indigenous future.

Cultural Agency in the Americas
Cultural Agency in the Americas

Author: Doris Sommer

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2006-01-19

Total Pages: 393

ISBN-13: 0822387484

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“Cultural agency” refers to a range of creative activities that contribute to society, including pedagogy, research, activism, and the arts. Focusing on the connections between creativity and social change in the Americas, this collection encourages scholars to become cultural agents by reflecting on exemplary cases and thereby making them available as inspirations for more constructive theory and more innovative practice. Creativity supports democracy because artistic, administrative, and interpretive experiments need margins of freedom that defy monolithic or authoritarian regimes. The ingenious ways in which people pry open dead-ends of even apparently intractable structures suggest that cultural studies as we know it has too often gotten stuck in critique. Intellectual responsibility can get beyond denunciation by acknowledging and nurturing the resourcefulness of common and uncommon agents. Based in North and South America, scholars from fields including anthropology, performance studies, history, literature, and communications studies explore specific variations of cultural agency across Latin America. Contributors reflect, for example, on the paradoxical programming and reception of a state-controlled Cuban radio station that connects listeners at home and abroad; on the intricacies of indigenous protests in Brazil; and the formulation of cultural policies in cosmopolitan Mexico City. One contributor notes that trauma theory targets individual victims when it should address collective memory as it is worked through in performance and ritual; another examines how Mapuche leaders in Argentina perceived the pitfalls of ethnic essentialism and developed new ways to intervene in local government. Whether suggesting modes of cultural agency, tracking exemplary instances of it, or cautioning against potential missteps, the essays in this book encourage attentiveness to, and the multiplication of, the many extraordinary instantiations of cultural resourcefulness and creativity throughout Latin America and beyond. Contributors. Arturo Arias, Claudia Briones, Néstor García Canclini, Denise Corte, Juan Carlos Godenzzi, Charles R. Hale, Ariana Hernández-Reguant, Claudio Lomnitz, Jesús Martín Barbero, J. Lorand Matory, Rosamel Millamán, Diane M. Nelson, Mary Louise Pratt, Alcida Rita Ramos, Doris Sommer, Diana Taylor, Santiago Villaveces

Mobilizing for Democracy
Mobilizing for Democracy

Author: Vera Schatten Coelho

Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.

Published: 2013-04-04

Total Pages: 214

ISBN-13: 1848139152

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Mobilizing for Democracy is an in-depth study into how ordinary citizens and their organizations mobilize to deepen democracy. Featuring a collection of new empirical case studies from Angola, Bangladesh, Brazil, India, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa, this important new book illustrates how forms of political mobilization, such as protests, social participation, activism, litigation and lobbying, engage with the formal institutions of representative democracy in ways that are core to the development of democratic politics. No other volume has brought together examples from such a broad Southern spectrum and covering such a diversity of actors: rural and urban dwellers, transnational activists, religious groups, politicians and social leaders. The cases illuminate the crucial contribution that citizen mobilization makes to democratization and the building of state institutions, and reflect the uneasy relationship between citizens and the institutions that are designed to foster their political participation.

The Ecological Native
The Ecological Native

Author: Astrid Ulloa

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-09-13

Total Pages: 319

ISBN-13: 1135475849

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This text analyzes indigenous peoples' processes of identity construction as ecological natives. It opens space for reconstructing all the different networks, conditions of emergence, and implications (political, cultural, social and economic) of one specific event: the consolidation of the relationship between indigenous peoples and environmentalism. This text is based on ethnographic information and focused on the historical process of the emergence of indigenous peoples' movements in Latin America, in general, and indigenous peoples of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta do Columbia (SNSM), in particular. It demonstrates the process of the construction of indigenous peoples' environmental identities as an interplay of local, national and transnational dynamics among indigenous peoples and environmental movements and discourses in relation to global environmental policies.

Elusive Unity
Elusive Unity

Author: Fernando Armstrong-Fumero

Publisher: University Press of Colorado

Published: 2012-08-15

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 1607322390

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In Elusive Unity, Armstrong-Fumero examines early twentieth-century peasant politics and twenty-first-century indigenous politics in the rural Oriente region of Yucatán. The rural inhabitants of this region have had some of their most important dealings with their nation’s government as self-identified “peasants” and “Maya.” Using ethnography, oral history, and archival research, Armstrong-Fumero shows how the same body of narrative tropes has defined the local experience of twentieth-century agrarianism and twenty-first-century multiculturalism. Through these recycled narratives, contemporary multicultural politics have also inherited some ambiguities that were built into its agrarian predecessor. Specifically, local experiences of peasant and indigenous politics are shaped by tensions between the vernacular language of identity and the intense factionalism that often defines the social organization of rural communities. This significant contribution will be of interest to historians, anthropologists, and political scientists studying Latin America and the Maya.

The SAGE Handbook of Comparative Politics
The SAGE Handbook of Comparative Politics

Author: Todd Landman

Publisher: SAGE

Published: 2009-06-30

Total Pages: 585

ISBN-13: 1446206556

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′Editors Landman and Robinson have compiled an excellent tour d′horizon of comparative politics. Distinguished contributors explore theoretical and methodological issues as well as examine the critical substantive domains that animate today′s comparativists. Graduate students and academics will want to keep this volume on their book shelf′ - Professor Mark Irving Lichbach, University of Maryland ′The SAGE Handbook of Comparative Politics is a major new resource for scholars of comparative politics, and of political science more generally. The Handbook covers the field with admirable thoroughness, but does not sacrifice depth for breadth. The chapters are written by notable scholars who provide rich discussions of their topics, and help to move the sub-discipline forward′ - B. Guy Peters, Professor, University of Pittsburgh The SAGE Handbook of Comparative Politics presents; in one volume, an authoritative overview of the theoretical, methodological and substantive elements of comparative political science. The 28 specially commissioned chapters, written by renowned comparative scholars, guide the reader through the central issues and debates, presenting a state-of-the-art guide to the past, present and possible futures of the field. The Handbook is divided into three parts. The first considers comparative methodologies and reviews the interactions between various sub-fields of comparative politics: political economy; political sociology; area studies; international relations; and institutional analysis. The second section examines nine ′classic′ issues of concern to comparativists, including government formation, political behaviour and democratization. In the final section, nine new and emerging areas of comparative research are considered, such as terrorism, electoral corruption, human rights and regional integration. The SAGE Handbook of Comparative Politics is an essential resource for researchers in political science, political sociology, political economy, international relations, area studies and all other fields with a comparative political dimension.

Indians and Leftists in the Making of Ecuador's Modern Indigenous Movements
Indians and Leftists in the Making of Ecuador's Modern Indigenous Movements

Author: Marc Becker

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2008-08-18

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 0822381451

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In June 1990, Indigenous peoples shocked Ecuadorian elites with a powerful uprising that paralyzed the country for a week. Militants insisted that the government address Indigenous demands for land ownership, education, and economic development. This uprising was a milestone in the history of Ecuador’s social justice movements, and it inspired popular organizing efforts across Latin America. While the insurrection seemed to come out of nowhere, Marc Becker demonstrates that it emerged out of years of organizing and developing strategies to advance Indigenous rights. In this richly documented account, he chronicles a long history of Indigenous political activism in Ecuador, from the creation of the first local agricultural syndicates in the 1920s through the galvanizing protests of 1990. In so doing, he reveals the central role of women in Indigenous movements and the history of productive collaborations between rural Indigenous activists and urban leftist intellectuals. Becker explains how rural laborers and urban activists worked together in Ecuador, merging ethnic and class-based struggles for social justice. Socialists were often the first to defend Indigenous languages, cultures, and social organizations. They introduced rural activists to new tactics, including demonstrations and strikes. Drawing on leftist influences, Indigenous peoples became adept at reacting to immediate, local forms of exploitation while at the same time addressing broader underlying structural inequities. Through an examination of strike activity in the 1930s, the establishment of a national-level Ecuadorian Federation of Indians in 1944, and agitation for agrarian reform in the 1960s, Becker shows that the history of Indigenous mobilizations in Ecuador is longer and deeper than many contemporary observers have recognized.

Making Indigenous Citizens
Making Indigenous Citizens

Author: María Elena García

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 9780804750158

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Taking on existing interpretations of "Peruvian exceptionalism," this book presents a multi-sited ethnographic exploration of the local and transnational articulations of indigenous movements, multicultural development policies, and indigenous citizenship in Peru.