Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology最新文献

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.

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.

This article shows the political adaptations of the yajé ritual in the Ecuadorian Amazon. It focuses on the siekopái's practices of resistance, negotiation, and self-affirmation around three contemporary issues: the recognition of their ancestral territory, the demand for reparations for environmental damage resulting from oil exploitation, and the management of care during the COVID-19 pandemic. We argue that the inclusion of the yajé ritual in these contexts corresponds to a contested shamanic tradition, and that the deployment of its political potential is due to communal reasons and the shamans' negotiating skills in the invisible world. We conclude that the adaptations indicate an institutional flexibility that has allowed the siekopái to survive to this day in a changing and threatened environment.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a period of inflection in the growth of native corn revivalism in Oaxaca, Mexico. New businesses opened selling food and drinks derived from native corn, events such as seed-swaps were inaugurated, and farmers who had previously grown hybrid corn began experimenting with native seeds. This revivalism was not merely commercial or gustatory, but entailed a re-evaluation by revivalists of their relationship to native corn. Such relationships became increasingly framed through mutual vulnerabilities. In this article I argue that native corn revivalism is a direct response to the COVID-19 crisis. I explore how vulnerability featured in my interlocutors’ tellings of the crisis, demonstrating that it offered an analytic through which they theorized and constructed relationships. This approach builds upon interpretations of crisis as narrative form, but turns its attention away from the power-effects of crisis narratives to instead look to the relationships that such narratives engender.

In 2013,the Dominican Republic's highest court ruled to retroactively apply the elimination of jus soli citizenship, commonly known as birthright citizenship. The ruling impacted more than 200,000 Dominicans of Haitian descent and culminated a decades-long attack on territorially based citizenship in the country, which largely provided access to the children of Haitians, who make up more than 80% of the country's migrants. The intensification of anti-birthright citizenship politics and the implementation of a host of restrictive measures since 2004 shifted focus from the male labor as the primary target of migrant control, to the “pregnant migrant.” This article examines how these policies shaped Dominico-Haitian women's experiences of motherhood by drawing on interviews and participant observation undertaken from 2014 to 2018 in and around Santo Domingo. I argue that anti-birthright citizenship politics target Black women's reproduction in a form of racialized violence that shares continuities with the nation's history of enslavement.