Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology最新文献

Campesinos (peasants) and norteños (northerner entrepreneurs) in highland Huamachuco, la Libertad, northern Peru—reconcile their mining within Andean practices about the perceived sentience and agency of mountain-ancestors (apus). They do so by engaging in two different types of apu cannibalism that are antithetical to each other. I analyze how the conflict between Andean campesino communities who practice small-scale underground mining on the apu El Toro site, and, the Summa Gold open-pit mining company (owned by former campesinos now norteño) also on apu El Toro, reshapes, on both sides, relationalities with mountain-ancestors and capitalism. I explore miners’ practical moral economies with apus, the local government, and legal authorities to secure economic and political benefits as their worlds are transformed by capitalism. I also analyze how the power inequality between campesino and norteño miners shapes these exchanges, their ability to control the limits of extractivism, and the rhetoric around mining contamination.

Utopian futurism is not often discussed as a motivating factor behind social science research, and in this article Colombian linguist Felix Manuel Burgos and US anthropologist Les W. Field take up that motivation in re-assessing one period in the history of Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC). Founded in 1964 and impelled by events that exploded in 1948, FARC's history offers a window into a movement marked by a deeply dystopian trauma at its very start. In this article, with their utopian imaginations to one side, Burgos and Field dialogically consider the period of the Zona de Despeje (the demilitarized zone FARC dominated from 1998 to 2002), animated by the memory narratives of Félix Manuel Burgos who lived in that zone as a primary school-teacher during those years. Through their dialogue, they consider the idea of “anti-utopia” as potentially descriptive of the ZDD, specifically, as well as the FARC's overall historical character.

In 2020, as a result of border closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic, thousands of forcibly displaced migrant families, mainly of Venezuelan origin, entered Chile through unauthorized crossings. In response, the Government activated administrative measures to restrict mobility and promoted the militarization of the border. Although these measures did not limit people's entry, they were threatened by illegal collective expulsions and by a “humanitarian” intervention that aggravated the crisis. In this context, we explore through a collaborative ethnography, how the control of cross-border mobility is linked to and reinforced by the health control of this population, threatened by the international border order. Specifically, we illustrate the effects of transit density on displaced persons, based on the management of the “migratory crisis” through the “Colchane Plan,” and we analyze the humanitarian response as a form of government that invisibilizes and naturalizes serious consequences on the health of bodies in mobility.

The paper reflects on the experiences of the porous body of a radical street performer from Medellin, Colombia. His narratives emphasize the reciprocal relationship between the knower and the known: as Ingold suggests, “to know things you have to grow into them and let them grow in you so that they become part of who you are.” Furthermore, his narratives help to unravel the underlying threads of his actions, and the construction of his porous subjectivity. The article contributes to our understanding of mimesis in anthropological discourse, the relational and embodied nature of human existence, and the role of possession in cultural resistance and social transformation. Following Bernardo's pedagogy, the writing interweaves poetry, narrative, and theoretical concepts in seeking not to close meaning, but to open spaces to be inhabited.

This article analyzes how the agency of state maps triggered conflicts between rural communities, pilgrims, and state institutions, in which some mountains emerged as multiple entities within and beyond the nature-culture divide. The Quyllurit'i shrine is the focus of an important pilgrimage in the Andes. The Peruvian state established the shrine´s Protected Area in 2010 but had been granting mining concessions around it. Confronted with a state map of the Protected Area surrounded by mining concessions, the pilgrims' organizations called for their nullification and staged protests in Cuzco city in 2016. Meanwhile, the community within which the shrine is located experienced the establishment of the Protected Area as a process of land expropriation. Its members were holders of the mining concessions and aimed to conduct mining on their lands. Mining concessions, the Protected Area, and land titles were the state maps mediating these conflicts.

This article examines how educators and students at the Instituto Superior Intercultural Ayuuk (ISIA), an intercultural university in Oaxaca, Mexico, are decolonizing education. They do so by drawing on forms of praxis that are salient in Ayuuk indigenous communities, across Oaxaca, and in Latin America. While scholars have demonstrated how indigenous “cosmopolitics” exceeds western norms, research on why some forms of knowledge gain traction outside of their original context has been scant. I utilize the framework of translation to examine three visions of Ayuuk praxis at the ISIA and to suggest why some forms of knowledge are successfully translated across the epistemological boundary between community knowledge and school knowledge. Focusing on the epistemological negotiations between Ayuuk students and professors highlights the challenges of decolonizing education, even when all key actors are indigenous.  This work thus contributes to a growing body of scholarship concerned with constructing robustly plural and decolonial societies and institutions. 

This article explores how kichwa midwives negotiate interculturality as both cultural knowledge-holders and clinical practitioners. Kichwa midwives in the Ecuadorian Amazon face a dynamic set of barriers in their position as healers, birth care givers, and indigenous activists, including intercultural government policies aimed to delegitimize them, consistent othering in relationship to biomedicine, and shifting generational involvement in kichwa health practices. Midwives engage in a complex set of relationships with the state, relying on it for the “rights” to practice their knowledge, while simultaneously being undermined by the state's promise of interculturality. I demonstrate how kichwa midwives practice “strategic entanglement” as a form of resistance and argue for a renegotiation of the definition and role of interculturalidad in the context of state-controlled birth care.

Post-structuralism's focus on hegemonic power, subjection, and political opportunity remains pre-eminent in political anthropology, but its appropriateness for the post-neoliberal conjuncture is up for question. While the arrival of neoliberal multiculturalism brought contingent identities and strategic deployment of culture-as-product into focus, questions remain about how and why some groups mobilize to claim cultural rights while others decline to do so. For this reason, this article returns to an earlier concern in Latin American political anthropology with cultural differences in the conceptualization and execution of political organization and power. This argument is based on two ethnographic case studies—from the Venezuelan Pume and the Ecuadorian Shuar—that demonstrate the contemporary significance for indigenous politics of evolving autochthonous notions of power and their expression in conventional forms of social organization. These politico-cultural qualities are already constituting the form and objectives of indigenous political action prior to their expression in the public fora whose terms and opportunities are often presented as driving indigenous people's politics. Such an approach is important for understanding the dilemmas of solidarity as indigenous groups become more empowered and diverse in their political orientations.