Toward a Decolonial Alternative to Development? The Emergence and Shortcomings of Vivir Bien as State Policy in Bolivia in the Era of Globalization

There is an urgent demand for the examination of the critical perceptions of new kinds of ‘development’ which are emerging in the Global South in response to—and often opposed to—the global capitalist political economy. This article discusses the case of contemporary Bolivia in which indigenous political alternatives have emerged as the resistance to economic globalization and the powers of capital accumulation, as well as to the cultural and epistemological commitments of the Western order. Through an ethnographic approach, it examines the emergence and shortcomings of the notion of vivir bien—a local, decolonial, indigenous concept of good life—as state policy. It argues that despite its transformative potential, the translation of vivir bien discourses into state practices has not been, to a large degree, achieved.     

Rethinking the Margins/Thinking from the Margins: Culture,Power, and Place on the Frontiers of the New World

In this article, I undertake a critical analysis of the writings that contributed to set up the foundation for eclipsing Amerindian social dynamics and their complexity. Starting from a presentation of Jesuit Jos de Acosta's classifications of the indigenous sociopolitical forms, I show that both the evolutionist and discontinuist perspective still in vogue among some Americanists and the positivist approach of some borderlands historians tend to perpetuate a conquest culture (the material and symbolic power relation of domination) while concealing indigenous social dynamics and adaptation strategies. I end the article by presenting some of the perspectives and concepts developed by a new historical anthropology that seek to re-politicize the production of social and cultural differences otherwise considered as natural.     

Politics of Identity and Identity Policies in Europe: The Case of Peruvian Immigrants in Spain

The indigenous quest for self-determination is an attempt to give voice to local injustice in a universal language, and to make claims to difference via a right that applies equally to all peoples. This article explores recent developments in the transnational indigenous movement's struggle for the right of self-determination by pointing out that this polyvalence-like the indeterminacies of the concepts of "peoples" and "indigenous"-is a productive one that enables indigenous activists to make a unique intervention in international law. Their work aims at creating a new international legal personality based on collective rather than individual rights, and on an understanding of "peoples" as self-determining entities not necessarily aspiring to statehood. This new understanding hinges, in turn, on an emerging perception of the capacity to culture as a general human right. This article addresses recent anthropological texts critical of the transnational indigenous movement to show that the "self" in self-determination as articulated by indigenous activists is not only not accounted for and not protected under current international legal regimes, but is also "a self" through which radical claims to culture and territory are being made.     

Survivors of Woman Abuse

Abstract

The feminist social work and related literature on abused women has focused on women's processes of empowerment but has overlooked the question of women's movement from individual survival to collective resistance. In this feminist qualitative study, I explore the processes through which survivors of abuse by male partners become involved in collective action for social change. Using story telling as a research method, I interviewed 11 women about the processes, factors, insights, and events that prompted them to act collectively to address violence against women. I found that women's movement from individual survival to collective action entails significant changes in consciousness and subjectivity. Women's processes of conscientization are complex, contradictory and often painful because they involve political and psychic dimensions of subjectivity, protracted struggles with contradictions and conflict, and resistance to knowledge that threatens to unsettle relatively stable notions of identity. I suggest that feminist social work theory and practice must take into account three interrelated elements of women's transformative journeys: the discursive and material conditions that facilitate women's movement to collective action; the social, material and psychic costs of women's growth; and the multifaceted and difficult nature of women's journey in recognizing and naming abuse, making sense of their experiences, and acting on this knowledge to work for change. I recommend that feminist social work practice with survivors recognize that survivors can and do contribute to social change, and develop new, more inclusive liberatory models of working with survivors of abuse.     

An Integral Model of Well-Being and Development and Its Implications for Helping Professions

Abstract

This article describes a dieoretical construct that serves as a framework for anti-oppression social transformation work in Latino communities. The authors present an integral model that considers the structures and processes of individual well-being within the context of and in relationship to collective development. With this model as a baseline for a critical analysis of current realities, the authors also examine the forces that hinder individual and collective well-being, particularly, institutional oppression: racism, colonialism, classism, and other “isms.” Based on the belief that institutional oppression robs both oppressor and the oppressed of their humanity, the authors provide an overview of a transformative process model. Implications of the model for the development of professional selves among social workers, counselors, and other helping professionals in relationship to the communities they serve are discussed. Broader applications of the model to other practices of the helping professions are also presented.     

Reading European football,critiquing China: Chinese urban middle class fans as reflexive audience

ABSTRACT

This essay explores European football’s cross-cultural appeals in China by focusing on Chinese fans’ active readings of this globalized cultural text. Using analytical tools from both sport sociology and transnational reception studies, I understand Chinese urban middle-class supporters as a reflexive audience whose meaning-making of European football is contextualized in their local urban experience. The in-depth interviewing reveals that these fans’ interpretations of their favourite European football teams as symbols of ‘collective cooperation’ and ‘beautiful football’ produce critical reflections on the discourses of ‘competitive individualism’ and ‘utilitarian commercialism’ which are part of the rising ideology during China’s neoliberal reform. Through the comparison among European football, Chinese football, and popular ‘national’ sports in China, the participants further contest the prevalence of these discourses in China’s broader economic and social arrangements over which they are engaged in constant material struggles. I further discuss how the transnational consumption of European football offers the Chinese urban middle-class a symbolic space to project their reflexivity on the reforming process.     

Transforming the Springboks: Re-imagining the South African Nation through Sport

Abstract

Nation-building occurs not only through the creation of formal institutions, but also through struggles in cultural and symbolic contexts. In apartheid South Africa, the rugby union Springboks both symbolised and institutionalised a racially based form of ‘bounded citizenship’. In post-apartheid South Africa, the Springboks have emerged as a contested and significant site in the attempt to build a non-racial nation through reconciliation. To explore these contests, we undertook a qualitative thematic analysis of newspaper discourses around the Springboks, reconciliation and nation-building in the contexts of the 1995 and 1999 Rugby World Cups. Our research suggests, first, that the Springboks have been re-imagined in newspaper discourses as a symbol of the non-racial nation-building process in South Africa, especially in ‘media events’ such as the World Cup. Second, we find that there are significant limitations in translating this symbolism into institutionalised practice, as exemplified by newspaper debates over the place of ‘merit’ in international team selection processes. We conclude that the media framing of the role of the Springboks in nation-building indicates that unless the re-imagination of the Springboks is accompanied by a transformation in who is selected to represent the team, and symbolically the nation, the Springboks' contribution to South African nation-building will be over.     

Undercut

ABSTRACT

In this article I consider some representations of the figure of the indigene in contemporary Australia, and their implications for a range of issues and debates in cultural theory. In particular, I examine the positioning of the indigenous body within two related discourses that I term ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘hybridity’, or the discourses of happy hyphenation and happy hybridization, respectively. These discourses, I want to suggest, raise specific problems in an Australian historical context, where the effects of scientific racism are being confronted by indigenous peoples in relation to land rights claims and, more generally, the dominant culture's demands for an ‘authentic’, visible and unproblematic Aboriginality that can be both clearly marked and contained. The figure of Truganini has particular significance in these debates, precisely because her body has figured as the site of geneticist practices and discourses. Simultaneously I locate these representations in the context(s) of the monument year of 1993, contexts that encompass a mesh of interrelated cultural concerns sometimes simplified under the heading of ‘Australian national identity’.     

A Teaching Framework for Transformative Multicultural Social Work Education

Abstract

A major challenge in multicultural social work education is fostering meaningful learning experiences for students by matching educational methods and content to students' individual learning needs and characteristics. Building upon transformative learning theory developed by Jack Mezirow, this paper proposes a teaching framework for transformative multicultural social work education that addresses students' individual learning needs and characteristics. This framework uses the dimensions of cultural knowledge and cultural sensitivity to represent four potential stances of cross-cultural learning in students. The paper provides a detail discussion regarding the learning needs and learning foci of students at each stance, and useful teaching strategies and activities that enhance students' transformative learning process so that they develop integrative knowledge about self and others in a dynamic multicultural society from multiple perspectives.     

A mediating institution?: Using an historical study of advertising practice to rethink culture and economy

Abstract

This paper sets out to review the role accorded to advertising in recent critical work. This work, I suggest, has been underscored by an ‘epochalist’ concern to map distinctions in the form of the culture/ economy relationship between the contemporary era and earlier periods. Significance has been accorded to the particular transformative potential of advertising and this is often related to research which emphasises the increasingly symbolic, persuasive and pervasive nature of advertising. In what follows, I make three central propositions. Firstly, I argue that writers on advertising share a number of concerns particularly about the effect the evolving nature of advertising has on the relationship between people and objects and between culture and economy. Secondly I suggest that these writers share with certain other critical theorists a very particular approach to the definition of key entities like meaning, culture and economy. These very particular definitions are pivotal to the epochalist explanation of advertising's role in the transformation of the culture/ economy relation. Finally, I attempt to show, through a brief look at historical uses of persuasion in advertising, that the problem with epochalist theory lies in a tendency to overgeneralise a wide range of specific forces.     

Ideology in Action: Symbolic Localization of Kurdistan Workers' Party in Turkey

Revolutionary ideologies such as Marxism and Islamism often aim to transform dominant local structures, leading their proponents to find themselves torn between global ideologies and local politics. A critical question arises: What does happen when a revolutionary movement's ideology drastically contradicts with the movement's local pragmatic purposes? Analyzing Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) in Turkey, this article explores the complex process of ideological transformation under the forces of local competition. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogic approach, I introduce the concept of symbolic localization to understand how revolutionary ideologies evolve through pragmatic concerns. Symbolic localization refers to a discursive process of collective reputation work in which social movement activists blend local cultural repertoires and their “we” identity in order to build recognition, legitimacy, and prestige in the eyes of local population. Three major mechanisms of the symbolic localization process are identified: moral authority building, public symbolism, and memory work. Symbolic localization suggests analyzing movement ideology as a discursive process and illuminates how political activists are shaped by relational local engagements.     

Some reflections on contemporary writing in the indigenous languages of America

Abstract

This article surveys recent literatures in the indigenous languages of Latin America. The past decade has witnessed a continent-wide rise in indigenous-language publications – a rise calling for a reevaluation of the critical state of indigenous rights and language policies that was expressed in the context of protests around the quincentennial celebrations of Columbus' 'discovery' of the Americas. The new wave of indigenous literatures has arisen in the wake of dramatic acts of violence, such as military repression and neoliberal economic restructuring. However, the large-scale displacement of indigenous peoples that has resulted from these processes has also provoked a desire among indigenous writers to utilize print media in order to preserve knowledge and communal memory. Drawing on specific examples from contemporary indigenous poetry of Peru and Mexico, the article argues that indigenous literature challenges conceptions of indigenous expressive culture as inherently oral, traditional, rural, and communitarian.     

Workplace occupation and the possibilities of popular power in Chile and Argentina, 1972–6

ABSTRACT

The recent wave of occupations has had a transformative effect on radical politics, but, to date, many have been restricted in their social and spatial expansion. Reflecting on these challenges, this article examines workplace occupation in the coordinadoras interfabriles in Argentina (1975–6) and the cordones industriales in Chile (1972–3) to understand how they overcame barriers to such expansion. Starting from debates in critical geography and social movement studies on space and occupations, I unpack the possibilities for popular power that emerged in this period by using approaches from critical labour studies and autonomist Marxism. First, I outline the generative role of the workplace in producing these possibilities in a context of wider social change. Second, I demonstrate how the capacity for expansion lay in the simultaneous capacity to disrupt and reconstruct social relations derived from solidarities that exceeded the existing physical space of occupation.     

Legal indigeneity: knowledge,legal discourse and the construction of indigenous identity in Colombia

ABSTRACT

This paper analyses the creation of the indigenous legal subject in Colombia from the perspective of legal-knowledge regimens. It analyses the turn from medical psychiatric assessments to indigenous identity to anthropological discourses on cultural differences. This article describes the legal construction of the indigenous subject in two historical moments. On the one hand, in the context of formation of the nation-state in Colombia and, on the other hand, in the transition towards contemporary multicultural constitutionalism within which legal discourse creates taxonomies for the definition of identities and the recognition of special rights to people who claim to be indigenous.     

Sketches of identities from the Mexico–US border (or the other way around)

Abstract

For someone interested in studying the cultures and literatures of Mexico's northern border or those of the US Southwest, it is important to take into account that when trying to investigate the subjects or objects of study – human, textual, or visual – one cannot put aside the ever-present tension between national and regional discourses, nor overlook symbolic representations of those discourses. Consequently, this article proposes to sketch and reflect about some identities of Mexico's northern border that have been articulated from different perspectives and inscribed in literary texts and national and international cinemas. It will also reflect on cultural production from and about Ciudad Juárez at the turn of the 21st century and how that cultural production dialogues with different symbolic representations.     

Modes of Cognitive Praxis in Transnational Alternative Policy Groups

Abstract

Transnational alternative policy groups (TAPGs) are networks and centres within and around which counter-hegemonic knowledge is produced and mobilized among subaltern communities and critical social movements. Based on in-depth interviews with practitioners at 16 TAPGs, this article presents eight modes of cognitive praxis and discusses how they appear in the work of alternative policy groups. The eight modes are not sealed off from each other, but overlap and interpenetrate. In combination, these modes of cognitive praxis strive to produce transformative knowledge concomitantly with knowledge-based transformation. The analysis evidences tracings of a double dialectic in the cognitive praxis of alternative policy groups: a dialectic of theory and practice, and one of dialogue. It is in a forward movement—fostering solidaristic dialogue among counterpublics in combination with the iterative integration of theory and practice—that alternative knowledge makes its indispensable contribution to counter-hegemony.     

The Collective Self and the Ethnopolitical Movement: "rhizomes" and "taproots" in the Amazon

The present situation in the Amazon is frequently characterized by political tensions between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples. As a consequence, indigenous peoples are organizing in order to defend themselves and their land against the encroachment of representatives from the national society. To the Matsigenka, who live in the monta a of southeastern Peru, this process is relatively recent, and so is the conceptualization of ensuing conflicts in ethnic terms. Although ethnic criteria for constructing social identity is still largely alien to most Matsigenka, it has, to the indigenous organizations, come to serve as the model for defining political issues mainly because it is imposed by the dominant national society, which defines the rules. At the same time, categories of beings that are defined in notions of the cosmogony remain a significant factor in the Matsigenka conceptualization of the social world. The employment of two parallel models for constructing identity, which are occasionally conflicting, produces both conceptual confusion and organizational problems for the Matsigenka ethno-political movement.     

Ventriloquism,racism and the politics of decoloniality in Ecuador

ABSTRACT

This article discusses two forms of discrimination against indigenous people: ventriloquism and open racism, and argues that a transition from paternalism to open intolerance has taken place in Ecuador in the context of governmental emphasis on natural resource extraction. Ventriloquism, when non-Indians speak for indigenous people, is analysed through the Sumak Kawsay (Good Living) policies of the government of Rafael Correa (2007–2017). Public racism is examined by looking at government repression against indigenous leaders and communities and Presidential speeches. The article concludes that the state’s ventriloquist and racist discourses and practices are equally rooted in the country’s colonial past. These findings are contrasted with the writings of scholars that have called the government of Mr. Correa decolonizing. The article examines the ways in which decolonial theorists informed and promoted the policies of this regime, and argues that decolonial scholars have been insufficiently self-critical and reflective of their own complicity with the state’s repressive project vis-à-vis indigenous communities.     

Social work and a love of humanity

Abstract

The idea of a ‘love of humanity’, though largely absent from social work literature, is a potent concept for challenging the dominant discourses of individual material wealth, greed and power. It can be associated with the postmodern agenda of emancipation from oppressive discourses of professional ‘expertise’. Love, or a ‘love of humanity’, has the same intent as formulations of social work grounded in postmodern critical theory, but it uses a different language. It uses a language of lived experience and personal commitment - a language that appeals to our hearts -a language passionate about, and incorporating, human rights and social justice.     

Teaching Critical Reflection: A Tool for Transformative Learning in Social Work?

In an Australian Bachelor of Social Work degree, critical reflection is a process explicitly taught in a fourth year subject to students who have returned from their first field placement experience in agencies delivering social work programmes. The purpose of teaching critical reflection is to enable social work students to become autonomous and critical thinkers who can reflect on society, the role of social work and social work practices. The way critical reflection is taught in this fourth year social work unit relates closely to the aims of transformative learning. Transformative learning aims to assist students to become autonomous thinkers. Specifically, the critical reflection process taught in this subject aims to assist students to recognise their own and other people's frames of reference, to identify the dominant discourses circulating in making sense of their experience, to problematise their taken-for -granted ‘lived experience’, to reconceptualise identity categories, disrupt assumed causal relations and to reflect on how power relations are operating. Critical reflection often draws on many theoretical frameworks to enable the recognition of current modes of thinking and doing. In this paper, we will draw primarily on how post-structural theories, specifically Foucault's theorising, disrupt several taken-for-granted concepts in social work.