An Anthropology that takes position_DRAFT_EASA2018_Moritz Engel&Christian Schirmer_ (original) (raw)
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Creative Resistance And Utopian Subjectivities: Zapatista Autonomy As Discourse, Power, And Practice
2018
This thesis explores the Zapatistas’ autonomous project based on an alternative discourse that acts as resistance to the hegemonic system of neoliberalism and the regimes of power that maintain it. Drawing from Escobar’s (1995) post-structuralist discursive analysis, it traces the reinforcing relations of power in the hegemonic system through examining the development discourse, its connections to coloniality, and its privileging of Euro-centric forms knowledge which shape subjectivities to set the limits of possibility and, in that, assert violence towards non-dominant peoples and the environment. Thus, in order to change the dominant order and prevent this violence, there must be change at the level of discourse. The Zapatistas have created an alternative discourse (Zapatismo) that provides the basis for utopian creative resistance through opening the limits of possibility and capacitating people to create their ideal realities. The thesis explores the effects of this discourse on...
Social Movement Studies, 2014
In 2011, the great recession that had already shaken global capitalism ignited a world-wide wave of of protest. The compelling need to understand both the causes of the economic crisis and its relationship to this global wave of popular insurgency has sparked a revived interest in Marxism, not just among activists, but also among younger social movement scholars frustratedwithwhat Buechler describes as a ‘mainstream socialmovement analysis [that] has been devoid of the critique that animates the social movements it studies’ (2000, p. xii). Marxism and Social Movements is a significant expression of that revival and a demonstration of what it has to offer. The volume brings together 18 chapters by 20 social movement scholars from 7 countries working in 8 disciplines. It is divided into three parts. The first part addresses the broad theoretical questions, both critiquing mainstream academic social movement theory and interrogating what a Marxist theory of social movements might entail. The second part examines through specific concrete analyses how movements actually work, exploring the political questions that confront movement participants, and arguing for a dialectical understanding of how movements develop. The last part is a bit of a catch all, gathering together both broadly comparative historical studies and several chapters focused on more recent movements against neoliberalism. While the last two parts include several very good pieces that illustrate the power of Marxism as a framework for analyzing a wide range of contemproary and historical movements, it is the Introduction and the chapters gathered in first part that should command the attention of the field as whole.
In book: Reframing Latin American Development, Routeldge, 2018
In many aspects, through its theory and practice, the Zapatista movement has become a bea-con of inspiration for critical thinking on development. Faced with the ferocious onslaughtagainst humanity represented by the deep crisis through which the world today is passing, itis essential to understand the fundamental characteristics of contemporary capitalism and toseek and struggle for a pathway towards emancipation. This need becomes particularly im-perative in the face of the deep and severe current crisis — which some analysists describeas terminal — and the resounding failure of both capitalism, even in the form of human de-velopment, and so-called ‘actually existing’ socialism to overcome the upheavals of a classdivided society.
An Attempt to Understand and Reflect on the Construction of Zapatista Resistance in Chiapas, Mexico
2018
The following paper is an attempt to understand and reflect uponon the construction of Zapatista resistance in Chiapas, Mexico. The Zapatista uprising January 1st, 1994 was the beginning of a struggle for autonomy and subsistence largely led by indigenous communities. The author will attempt to ground the Zapatista resistance in the long history of resistances in Chiapas and consider the new element in the oppressive structures in Mexico that is neoliberalism. After discussing the historical context, the paper will read the Zapatista organization and practices alongside theoretical conceptualizations ranging from Gramscian and Laclau-Mouffian hegemony as well as Castoriadian discussions on the project of autonomy to the theory of becoming posed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. After arguing that no theoretical conceptualizations can nor should adequately capture Zapatista lived experience, the paper will engage with anthropological insights largely infused by the Anthropology of Becoming presented by João Biehl and Peter Locke as well as the concept of prefiguration explained by Marianne Maeckelbergh. These approaches finally present new starting points for a positioning of anthropologists in contemporary social struggles that are defined by action and a desire for another world
International Political Sociology 7:2, 2013
This study is about strategies of neoliberalization in relation to practices of dissent and resistance. It explores how struggles arising in the context of neoliberalization may be subject to entanglement within the very processes they seek to contest and—in so doing—interrogates the political stakes of neoliberal governmental rationality. Drawing upon extensive ethnographic research, I trace the international trajectory of mobilizations against the dispossession visited upon Colombian farmers in the context of BP’s investment in oilfields in the mid-1990s. Reasoning through attention to the ways in which this one specific struggle was neutralized, I suggest that a key aim of neoliberal strategies of political control is to accomplish a sort of “political hygiene” by nullifying politically surplus subjects and containing dissent within manageable parameters. The invocation of discourses of rights and civil society can be seen to be integral to neoliberal political rationality in this regard, but rights are comprehended within a symbolic structuration of the population that coincides with neoliberal logics. I suggest that such logics are directed not so much at incorporating the population into a generalized “right of death and power over life,” as Foucault famously put it, but at inscribing subjects into networks of unstable and precarious private contract that constrict the wider obligations of population and citizenship commonly associated with liberalism. Discourses of rights, civil society, and development are not antidotes to socioeconomic dispossession or armed repression. Rather, all of these are complementary components of strategies aimed at the domestification of dissent.
Autonomist Marxist Interpretations of the Zapatista Uprising: A Critique
Science & Society, 2018
The 1994 Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico suggested a rupture with Marxist orthodoxies and the possibility of a new radical anti-capitalist politics. Arguing that they should be viewed as transitional between the “old” hierarchical forms of the Leninist party and the “new” distributed network form of the multitude, Autonomist Marxist theorists Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, John Holloway, and Harry Cleaver have broadly influenced how both scholars and activists understand the Zapatistas. Their interpretations, however, neglect the critical function of centralized and disciplined organization within the networked forms considered emblematic of the Zapatistas, contributing to a distorted understanding of the genesis of their distinctive politics. Hardt and Negri's insight that forms of revolutionary organization parallel the organization of production suggests an alternative interpretation: that the hybrid distributed and hierarchical character of the Zapatista organization is better understood as keeping pace with the similarly hybrid logic of global capitalist production and accumulation. Read More: https://guilfordjournals.com/doi/abs/10.1521/siso.2018.82.4.531
Building Post-Capitalist Worlds: Zapatistas, Via Campesina and other rebellions*
2015
In the context of the prevailing abundance of diversity (biological, ethnic), the profound social inequalities, and the trends and attitudes of hegemonic forces in Latin America, a coherent process of environmental governance is proving difficult and environmental injustice is aggravated. Regardless of where one turns in the region, there is an increase in the number and intensity of conflicts between groups committed to promoting economic development (i.e., growth), and those claiming to speak for the planet and/or the welfare of the large majority of the population or particular minorities, who feel excluded from these processes and are bearing the brunt of the negative impacts of these activities. This paper gives voice to the actors actually involved in developing alternatives to the development proposals of the hegemonic forces driving the transformations in their societies. These alternatives emerge from groups whose organizations are shaped by different cosmologies, products ...