Commodified Communion: Eucharist, Consumer Culture, and the Practice of Everyday Life

Abstract

regional focus on Abya Yala/Afro/Latino América, Escobar’s decolonial lens and focus on the (re)localization of action invite any reader to extrapolate his ideas to other contexts. Nevertheless, the book’s greatest strength is also its greatest weakness: it raises a plentitude of intriguing and extremely relevant questions that it does not intend to answer. This even evokes a slight sense of dissonance within Escobar’s main argument and his commitment to ‘the kinds of politics that defend a deeply relational understanding of life’ (xiii): On the one hand, the book aims to make radical claims by shifting towards radical relationality. On the other hand, it then compromises this radicality by continuing to accommodate political designs that may not sufficiently grasp the interconnectedness of life and the resulting necessity to see all forms of (in)justice as interdependent. If ‘pluriversal politics itself involves ... inhabiting a spectrum from the radically relational to the modernist liberal’ (xvii), one cannot help but wonder if this is a pluriverse that the planet wants and needs. Hence, a tension remains as to whether Pluriversal Politics is actually radical enough. Finally, returning to the main goal of the book and Escobar’s explicit request to evaluate it ‘by the extent to which it succeeds in opening up the... imagination to... an ontological politics towards the pluriverse’ (x), it certainly accomplishes its aim. Even more so, it invites the reader to re-imagine pluriversal politics not as the mere designs for pluriversal transitions (xvi) but as the strategies that foreground an acknowledgement of a multiplicity and hierarchy of worlds and, consequently, a redistribution of power. Such a step may require what Latour called a metaphysical ‘bomb’, referring to Viveiros de Castro’s work, rather than an exclusively relational lens. But, who knows; in the spirit of imagining possibility differently, perhaps there is indeed another ‘possible’ possible beyond the one(s) presented by Escobar?