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January 4th – 9th, 2017, San Pedro de Atacama in Northern Chile.
LASI 2017 was dedicated to the concept of Emergent Democracies – New Forms of Coexistence. This concept refers to transformations in the form of democratic rule and their impact on how we might understand and theorize contemporary democracies in social theory. We are inspired by the unstable yet insistent claims for participation, influence, and self-determination that have emerged from groups and people after the end of the Cold War and at a moment when history, and hence politics, allegedly had come to an end.
These circumstances are intensively present in Latin America. For instance, in the case of Chile, the country re-emerged as a fragile democracy in 1990 after the defeat of the Pinochet dictatorship today standing as a consolidated liberal state. However –or for the same reason- it is facing increasing demands from a citizenry that feels alienated from the ruling elites, with the sense that democratic rule cannot fulfill the expectations of socio-economic stability and prosperity it evokes. Democracies, in other words, are always emergent and constantly experiencing the contradictions inherent to the liberal model of governance. For the same reason, too often democracies are incapable of fulfilling the expectations they evoke. This is not simply a question for “more or less” democracy, but rather a question of which ways of life, social relations, geopolitical configurations, human-environment relations, and economic arrangements are made possible in the name of democracy.
Workshops:
Racism and Prejudice: A social dominance approach to democracy
Jim Sidanius (Harvard University) – Héctor Carvacho (Universidad Católica – CIIR)
Informed by Marxism, Neo-classical Elitism theory (e.g., Michels, 1911; Mosca, 1896; Pareto, 1901), Social Identity Theory, Realistic Conflict Theory, and Evolutionary psychology, Social Dominance Theory (SDT) posits that systems of group-based social oppression and inequality such as racism, sexism, nationalism, religious sectarianism, classism and speciesism, etc. are specific instantiations of the general tendency for human social systems to organize themselves as group-based social hierarchies. Generally, SDT argues that the degree of social oppression and social hierarchy within a given society at any given time is the net result of the interplay between two multileveled sets of counteracting and contradictory social forces: hierarchy-enhancing social forces and hierarchy-attenuating social forces. These hierarchy-enhancing and hierarchy-attenuating social forces consist of: social ideologies, social customs, social stereotypes, individual behavioral predispositions, social values, asymmetrical ingroup bias, self-debilitating social behaviors, and the contents of institutional social allocations.
This workshop aimd to explore more deeply and comprehensively specific examples of the interplay between these multileveled social forces that are thought to contribute to the creation, maintenance, and re-creation of group-based social inequality hierarchy. The aim is to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of the dynamics of group-based inequality through a mixture of discussion of the literature, the design of new studies, and individual consulting sessions linked with the specific research interests of the participants.
Environmental conflicts, development and indigenous people
Tom Perreault (Syracuse University) – Manuel Prieto (Universidad Católica del Norte – CIIR)
The scholarly field of political ecology emphasizes the power relations operating in multiple socio-spatial scales, through which we understand, access, and manage nature. Concisely stated, political ecology focuses in the socio-environmental relations within in a wider context of political ecology. From this perspective, the analysis of environmental governance focuses on the inherent power relations embedded in the process of the institutionalization of natural resource management, its distribution, and the social conflicts that they imply. This perspective allows us to reveal the paradoxes and contradictions of capitalism as a way of production and circulation, and democracy as a form of political organization.
With the aim of interrogating these contradictions and paradoxes, this workshop examines how nature is material and discursively intertwined with political ecology and the politics of social identity. Particularly, this issue has been analyzed in the processes and politics of extractivism in Andean countries. We use cases related to mining, hydrocarbons, and water as analytical lenses for examining the interactions between environmental management, development discourses, indigenous-peasant movements, ideas of citizenship, and the processes of state formation. We studied cases from Colombia, Ecuador, Perú, Bolivia, and Chile. The workshop emphasized the dialectic relation between institutional arrangements, material practices, and the social responses involved in extractivist activities.
State formation and sovereignty. A view from anthropology.
Thomas Blom Hansen (Stanford University) – Helene Risor (Universidad Católica – CIIR)
“What is a state if not a sovereign?” asked Clifford Geertz in 2004 in one of his very last articles. In this piece Geertz admitted that an older “island and mountain anthropology” had been ill-equipped to understand the rough and tumble of the birth of new nations and states across the global south in the 20th century. This was largely because anthropologists, from the marginal locations they studied, had accepted the dominant fiction projected by all would-be nation states as “leviathan machines”, i.e. that the state comprehensively ruled a territory and a population and that the state represented a modern and rational form of unitary governance. None of this ever happened in practice, and Geertz argued that anthropologists were uniquely equipped to investigate and understand the ensuing ‘confusion’ – his term for the complicated, historical layers of authority, power, attachments, and loyalty that today constitute states and politics in most of the world.
This new ‘anthropology of the state’ began in the 1990s and has since then become one of the biggest and liveliest areas within the discipline, supplanting an older, moribund “political anthropology” that had focused mainly on so-called traditional modes of power, kingship, and authority. This workshop will introduce some of the key texts and debates that gave rise to this new branch of anthropology. We also traced how this has enabled two other lines of inquiry that have gathered a lot of force in the past decade: (1) studies of how legal sovereignty can be projected by the state but is often at odds with how sovereign power is lived, understood, and contested by local communities; (2) how enforcing the order and the monopoly of violence in the vast and sprawling urban areas across the global south has proved to be one of the most difficult and intractable challenges for the modern state, as well as for other social forces such as socio-political movements and religious institutions.
Ethnic identity and modernity: everyday perspectives on conflict
Sharika Thiranagama (Stanford University) – Marjorie Murray (Universidad Católica – CIIR)
Ethnicity is one of the most compelling and modern ways in which people – in the midst of considerable global and local uncertainty – imagine and narrate themselves. This workshop will take an anthropological look at both the modernity and the compulsions of ethnic allegiance, and ask why struggles over ethnic identity so frequently are violent. Our questions will be both historical – how, why, and when did people come to think of themselves as possessing different ethnic identities – and contemporary – how are these identities lived, understood, narrated, and transformed, and what is the consequence of such ethnicization?
We discussed anthropological perspectives which ask how people themselves locally narrate and act upon their experiences and histories. Through this we will approach some of the much broader and yet everyday questions that many of us around the world face: how do we relate to ourselves and to those we define as others; and how do we live through and after profound violence?
Human Rights, violence and transitional justice
Karine Wanthuyne (University of Ottawa) – Salvador Millaleo (Universidad de Chile)
Transitional justice is a field of post-war inquiry and intervention focused on addressing the legacies of past human rights violations in the hope that doing so will contribute to a more peaceful and just future. The “transitional” in transitional justice refers to times of political, social, economic, and cultural transformation — indeed, upheaval — generally arising from the breakdown of an authoritarian or violent regime and the movement to one that is considered more democratic. Transitional justice embodies a liberal vision of history as progress, a teleological model in which the harms of the past may be repaired in order to produce a future characterized by the non-recurrence of violence, the rule of law, and a culture of human rights. And yet, a cursory glance across most of Latin America would lead one to question tidy boundaries between “conflict” and post-conflict” societies, and to call for a close examination of new configurations of violence and violent actors, processes of criminalization and securitization, and how the architecture of impunity is produced and maintained.
This workshop took up these questions, incorporating insights from anthropology, security studies, gender studies, and post-colonial theory. We will explore how social phenomena and demographic groups are “securitized,” by whom, and with what consequences; how human rights activism and vernacularization may fail with regard to the “slow violence” that renders certain people “disposable” and their communities “unimagined”; how impunity functions at multiple scales of analysis; and how sexual and gender-based crimes of the past and the present remain those violations for which justice remains a distant horizon.
Authorized and Unauthorized Autonomies
Charles Hale (University of Texas at Austin) y Rosamel Millaman (Universidad Católica de Temuco)
The purpose of this workshop was to explore the history of what might be considered the fundamental political demand of subordinated and colonized peoples of the Americas since the rise of the nation-state: Autonomy. Our outlook is critical, considering evidence that autonomy as a political horizon has lost its allure, at least when achieved through negotiated devolution of resources and authority, regulated and limited by the state. We explore the implications of this and other limiting conditions of “permitted” autonomies, focusing especially on the protagonists’ growing skepticism, and then we examine the content and trajectory of the “unauthorized” variants, both in practice and in people’s political imaginaries.
