Eight Thousand Solutions to the Same Problem (original) (raw)

Seminal ideas for old and new problems in Latin America: José Medina Echavarría and his legacy

Tapuya: Latin American Sicience, technology and society, 2023

José Medina Echavarría is known as one of the most important sociologist of the twentieth century in Latin America.During his exile in México, Puerto Rico and Chile, he developed vast intellectual networks that contributed to the complex process of institutionalization of sociology in our contries. In this paper, we explain how this was possible through new editorials, translations on social sicence topics, seminars, debates, and the foundation of importante departments of Sociology. These included a doble contribution of Medina: a reflection on sociology that require a precise conceptual language, and what he called vertical and horizontal theories. And second, guiding efforts with the critical analysisi of the modernization processes in this continent after the Second World War. We analyze in both these contributions the clear legacy of Max Weber´s theory of action and his economic sociology.

Contemporary Indigenous Social and Political Thought in Latin America (1960-2020)

OXFORD BIBLIOGRAPHIES, 2021

Introduction The contemporary continental emergence of a significant number of indigenous intellectuals who have been trained in the academic fields of social sciences (history, anthropology, sociology, linguistics, law, education, etc.) and have continued to be engaged with the social struggles of their ethnic communities of origin is a major sociocultural phenomenon not so well known in Latin America. Beginning in the 1960s, but with a stronger sociopolitical visibility in the 1980s and 1990s, indigenous intellectuals’ production of knowledge has become the backbone of many indigenous movements and proposals in the continent. Just like the booming appearance of modern indigenous literary writers (see Oxford Bibliographies article in Latin American Studies “Indigenous Voices in Literature”), the contemporary rise of indigenous intellectuals has reconceptualized indigenous communitarian worldviews and contributed to the study of their own social realities from their specific needs, cultural perspectives, and native languages. Indigenous intellectuals and scholars have flourished in the early 21st century, transforming knowledge and academic discourses into tools of indigenous cultural self-recognition; criticism of neocolonial forms of subordination and exploitation; and new conceptual ways of understanding history, democracy, communal life, political participation, cultural representation, and our human relationship with nature (Mother Earth). The purpose of this bibliographical essay is to offer an interdisciplinary and continental comprehensive view about these critical reflections, research studies, reports, interviews, essays, testimonies, manifests, discourses, and other conceptual contributions of Latin American indigenous intellectuals and communitarian leaders from the 1960s to the present. I have limited this vast and complex intellectual production to three fundamental indigenous debates: first, the criticism against neocolonialism, racism, and discrimination; second, self-defense of indigenous human rights and pluricultural laws; and, third, the development of judicial systems to protect the rights of Mother Earth—all of which lead to constructing new societies based on universal principles of ethnic diversity, respect for social equality and reciprocity, and living together in harmony. There are many other areas of indigenous sociopolitical production that are not considered here. That is why this study is a modest and preliminary tribute to a long and much more complex indigenous intellectual production that emerges based on exclusion, discrimination, and other forms of social inequality still suffered by many indigenous peoples in Latin America. This essay, thematically organized, provides an inclusive selection of a very heterogeneous spectrum of contemporary Latin American indigenous intellectuals, academics, activists and communitarian leaders, in conjuction with others who have been inspired or influenced by them. The purpose here then is to visibilize these contemporary indigenous authors, thinkers, and activists, even if their ideas, studies, and social reflections can be related to precolonial or colonial times. The strong presence of social leaders such as Berta Cáceres in Honduras, Isildo Beldenegro in Mexico, or José Tendetza in Ecuador, and many many others—some of whom have been killed, tortured, and criminalized— cannot be separated from the concepts and critical studies produced by indigenous intellectuals. I want to thank Agustín Grijalva and Maria Warren for their invaluable help. https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199766581/obo-9780199766581-0245.xml?q=Grijalva%20&fbclid=IwAR02XRk8o66fbQrslTmGUsa1wHJcwXo09D\_sBbht1cw3qOiTVamwQ273ul0#firstMatch

New Approaches to Latin American Studies preview.pdf

New Approaches to Latin American Studies: Culture and Power offers researchers and students from different theoretical fields an essential, turn-organized overview of the radical transformation of epistemological and methodological assumptions in Latin American Studies from the end of the 1980s to the present. Sixteen chapters written by experts in their respective fields help explain the various ways in which to think about these shifts. Questions posited include: Why are turns so crucial? How did they alter the shape or direction of the field? What new questions, objects, or problems did they contribute? What were or are their limitations? What did they displace or prevent us from considering? Among the turns included are: memory, transnational, popular culture, decolonial, feminism, affect, indigenous studies, transatlantic, ethical, post/hegemony, deconstruction, cultural policy, subalternism, gender and sexuality, performance, and cultural studies.

A philosophical conversation with Lorena Cabnal from Guatemala

Revista Estudos Feministas, 2023

In this paper I want to focus on the feminist Lorena Cabnal from Guatemala. I want to do so through her words in various spaces: videos, conferences, conversations with her, and her writings. My final goal is to engage with Cabnal's ideas/actions not only as feminist thought, but as philosophical formulations, even though they are not presented as they are usually presented in traditional academia, and they are not formulations involving universal categories. I want to talk with/from the concepts she develops in/with her experience in the same way as we usually engage with concepts formulated by an intellectual recognized as such by academia. My conversation with Cabnal will be grounded in my particular experience as a mestiza woman philosopher from Colombia