Suchergebnisse

The traditional image of South American Indians in loincloths & glittering feather headdresses, or in ponchos playing the panflute, seems definitively out of date. Indians no longer live lives of isolation on their reservations. These days, the continent's 44 million strong indigenous population has organized into a significant social & political force. The election last December of Evo Morales in Bolivia, the good turnout for Ollanta Humala in Peru & the unseating of three presidents under pressure from popular uprisings in Ecuador all show that indigenous movements have reached maturity. Everywhere they are fighting against expropriation of natural resources, against an ultra-liberal economic model which undermines their ancestral values of sharing & solidarity, in order to end their exclusion & subservience. Their aim is to take their destiny into their own hands & impose their vision of the world. But will their powerful North American neighbor eventually weigh in against them? Let us hope not. Adapted from the source document.

A review essay on a book by Courtney Jung, The Moral Force of Indigenous Politics (New York: Cambridge U Press, 2008).

The ethnography of an indigenous student organization based in Iquitos, the largest town in Peruvian Amazonia, allows one to examine the experience of its leaders. On the basis of skills acquired through contact with schools and activist organizations, these new leaders are asserting themselves via ever more visible mobilizations. The process of politicization through which students learn to demand their rights in the name of an indigenous identity is examined from the point of view of their place in urban spaces of activism. It is in such spaces that definitions of indigenous leadership are developed. These come into conflict with other, more traditional organizations and contribute to internal tensions within the "indigenous people's movement". The networks of mediation in which indigenous students participate -- networks that serve as conduits for the messages that local authorities, ecological activists and petrol companies wish to pass on to indigenous communities -- underscore the ambivalence of this protest movement. Adapted from the source document.

A number of villages in the Northwest of Argentina are adopting the status of 'indigenous community'. Being recognised as such afford access to a range of legal instruments that permit communities to reclaim their territories which, despite having been occupied for generations, were taken by large landowners during periods of conflict. Activists are at the forefront of these movements and participate actively in the process of the ethnicisation of social claims common across the region. Nevertheless, the identification of rural Andeans as 'Indians' is not simple when Indians have a long history of being rendered invisible and denigrated. The manner in which these activists, whom we describe as 'cultural smugglers' have managed to reverse the stigma of being Indian and revindicate it with pride, requires closer study. They participate in a struggle against dominant local discourses in order to establish, if on a modest level, a certain level of social justice. We will explore the ways in which their discourses, which have achieved a certain amount of success in the media, are interpreted and lived by the villagers who are not altogether disposed to recognising themselves as descendants of a barbarian and pagan people. We will shed light on different representations of the Indian that coexist - and sometimes clash - in contemporary Argentine society and how these complicate the emancipation movement initiated by indigenous organisations. Adapted from the source document.

Like all political parties in post-apartheid South Africa, the ANC, the anti-apartheid national liberation movement today in power, deploys strategies for presenting racial collective identities. The ANC is a nationalist movement that takes a multifarious and ambiguous stance: it presents itself as a liberation movement, not only for the indigenous population of South Africa, but also for all populations that were in the past oppressed by apartheid, which it brings together under the category "blacks". Lastly, it presents itself as a non-racial movement for all South Africans. At the time of elections, in particular, the Party manipulates this threefold stance on the racial question in order to form coalitions. In this respect, it constructs and symbolically maintains collective identities and groups, seeking to arrogate to itself a monopoly over their representation in the political space. Opposition political parties challenge these strategies, leading to a battle over classification in which the ANC and other parties confront one another in an effort to impose legitimate categories for interpreting the social world. Adapted from the source document.

In its liberal version, multiculturalism advocates a policy of recognition based on a movement toward freedom of choice and autonomy, which requires the simultaneous recognition of cultural affiliation. On this basis, one can identify three reasons for the recognition of differential rights based on membership in national groups: 1) equality: the minority group suffers an injustice that can and must be corrected, 2) history: the minority enforces a claim based on previous agreements (e.g. treaties between settlers and indigenous peoples) or jurisprudence, 3) the intrinsic value of cultural diversity. This article examines the first type of justification, which concerns the level of fundamental principles, by analyzing the double challenges of multiculturalism: being "tolerant to differences," while ensuring social justice and cohesion. Adapted from the source document.

Far from being a monolithic entity, the Catholic Church, in Mexico, as elsewhere, has given rise to numerous schools of thought, often mutually contradictory, sometimes even in conflict with the institution. Among these, liberation theology and indigenous theology have participated in the formation of social movements and national tracts of civil society. The impact of indigenous theology in the diocese of San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, is but an example of this. These activisms, to which religion has contributed, are currently considered to be at the forefront of the struggle for democracy and human rights. Yet, they result from combining two political cultures a priori quite distant from the principles of representative democracy: Catholic anti-liberalism, anti-modern by nature, and Marxist-inspired revolutionary leftism. This article seeks first to reconstruct these democratic activists' paradoxical genealogy. It then analyzes their progressive turn towards democratic ideals and the ensuing socio-political consequences. The argument will thus show these movements' ambivalent commitment to democratic principles, as well as their implications for Mexico's current democratization process. Adapted from the source document.

This article examines the manner in which representatives of indigenous peoples use the platform of the United Nations and an international movement in ninety countries to construct the principles upon which they may be recognized as collective, rights bearing subjects. In 2007, this movement -- largely unstructured but effective in terms of strategic alliances -- successfully established a legal instrument at the level of the international community: the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. In order to be moral and because they can have political, financial and legal consequences, these measures are capable of giving rise to significant transformations in the fields of politics, governance and autonomy. The need to participate in the activities of the United Nations allowed the formation of a collective native "us", structured a space for demands that went beyond the institution and related it to the field of human rights in other areas of public policy. By contributing to the fabrication of norms, this multi-headed policy actor furnished itself with a collective voice on the international scene capable of resolving the tensions inherent to spatial dispersion, linguistic fragmentation and political atomization. As an international entity, it raises a number of questions regarding locally observed discrepancies, modes of identification, state classifications and political and economic experiences. Adapted from the source document.

Cases selected in the rural areas of Peru and Ecuador make it possible to apprehend three dimensions of political anthropology : the relations between thé indigenous communities and the state, forms of domination expressed in terms of kinship and reciprocity, and the cultural specificities of contemporary political movements.

Michel Aoun is in a category all his own. A Christian general who came late to the political scene, he was first commander of the armed forces, then prime minister of Lebanon. He opposed the Taif agreement of 1989, maintaining that it legitimized Syrian control over his country. Choosing exile over submission, he returned triumphant to his native land as soon as Syrian troops withdrew in 2005-then executed a spectacular about-face in 2006. The uncontested winner of legislative elections in regions with a Christian majority, Michel Aoun was unable to agree on the make-up of a government with the new sovereignist movement led by Rafic Hariri's son Saad. This led him to join the opposition and on February 6, 2006 he signed a political agreement with Hezbollah, the Islamic resistance party and the primary ally of Syria and Iran. In a compelling interview with Sibylle Rizk, General Aoun explains this turnaround and its consequences for the future of Lebanon and the region. Adapted from the source document.

This article examines the most common accounts of multicultural reform in Latin America as well as the principal analyses of the Indian movement in this same region. The positions adopted by three generations of native informants regarding official assimilation (1920-1980) and diversity (2000-2010) policies are described on the basis of an historical and ethnographic survey carried out in a rural area of Mexico, Milpa Alta, where the population has been identified as descended from pre-Columbian inhabitants. The article argues that multicultural policies, international human rights legislation and, often, native political discourse are in tension with national systems of alterity. In the case studied here, multicultural policies are grafted on to a configuration which situates native populations in an archetypal position of alterity. It is, however, an endogenous alterity since it is imagined to be a constitutive part of a larger national "us" conceived of as uniformly mestizo. Its specificity notwithstanding, the Mexican example allows us to consider the importance of the exogenous or endogenous character of alterity in discussing the consensus today enjoyed by the multicultural model. Adapted from the source document.

Social movments in Latin America : what lessons for Africa ?
Social movements, particularly those of peasants, have proliferated in Latin America more than in Africa (with exception of Kenya, Algeria and Zimbabwe) probably because the impact of (internal) colonialism has been more blatant. Destruction of the agricultural life support systems of the indigenous peasants led to massively organized peasant movements or rebellions in Mexico, Bolivia, Brazil and Cuba to achieve land reform. Presently the process of peasant mobilization, now enhanced even by the Churches, is hindered or blocked with foreign support (often CIA), in the interest of local and global power elites.

This article seeks to reconstruct the historical and geographical dynamics explaining the significant presence of women in the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN). First appearing in the poor Mexican state of Chiapas in January, 1994, this new type of revolutionary movement is the culmination of a wide variety of changes modifying the life of indigenous men and women in the region, and particularly, the social relations between the sexes. Making up a third of the Zapatista forces, the women were able to integrate the question of gender and formulate the Revolutionary Law of Women. Without them, the EZNL would have no doubt been a very different kind of movement, even though remaining a military organization dominated by men.

The mobilization of the zapatistas represents the first revolutionary movement of a new type to appear in Latin America since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The movement has no international point of reference and is, instead, attempting to build its own momentum in reference to local issues and the Maya cultural identity. The Catholic Church has a twofold intervention in this process: on the one hand it supports the formation and emergence of new political actors, on the other, it acts as a mediating force between the zapatistas and the Mexican federal government.
The author studies this process of mediation in which Monsignor Ruiz has become an essential actor given the space and the function given him by the revolutionary movement and the indigenous organizations involved in the conflict. In this context the role of the Church is not limited to that of an active political agent (intervening through days of fast, pilgrimages, stations of the cross, reading of certain relevant passages of the Bible), but is also central in the processes of negociations (as in Central America) and pacification.
The struggle in Chiapas calls for a reassessment of concepts such as religion, politics and modernity in situations where the Church assumes functions that go beyond its traditional spheres of influence.