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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
After the Decolonial examines the sources of Latin American decolonial thought, its reading of precursors like Fanon and Levinas and its historical interpretations. In extended treatments of the anthropology of ethnicity, law and religion and of the region's modern culture, Lehmann sets out the bases of a more grounded interpretation, drawing inspiration from Mexico, Brazil, Bolivia and Chile, and from a lifelong engagement with issues of development, religion and race. The decolonial places race at the centre of its interpretation of injustice and, together with the multiple other exclusions dividing Latin American societies, traces it to European colonialism. But it has not fully absorbed the uniquely unsettling nature of Latin American race relations, which perpetuate prejudice and inequality, yet are marked by métissage, pervasive borrowing and mimesis. Moreover, it has not integrated its own disruptive feminist branch, and it has taken little interest in either the interwoven history of indigenous religion and hegemonic Catholicism or the evangelical tsunami which has upended so many assumptions about the region's culture. The book concludes that in Latin America, where inequality and violence are more severe than anywhere else, and where COVID-19 has revealed the deplorable state of the institutions charged with ensuring the basic requirements of life, the time has come to instate a universalist concept of social justice, encompassing a comprehensive approach to race, gender, class and human rights.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Preface: In the Time of COVID
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Glossary
Introduction
The institutional and social setting
Critique of the decolonial
The colonial in anthropology
Popular religion, culture and ethnicity
Race, ethnicity and gender: in search of social justice
Evangelical Christianity
Indigenous movements and democracy
Notes
1 The Latin American Decolonial
The ‘decolonial’ in universalist mode: Said and Fanon
Fanon and Sartre: blacks and Jews
Latin American and Latin Americanist postcolonial theories
Quijano, Mignolo, Santos
The grounded decolonial
Philosophical lineage
The true taboo-breakers: autonomous feminism takes on the world
Intersectionality
Cultural and ethnic difference also intersect
Notes
2 Indigeneity, Gender and Law
The colonial in modern Mexican social science
Deep Mexico
The Zapatista uprising of 1994 in Southern Mexico
Interculturalidad: cultural difference in knowledge, education and law
Legal pluralism as ventriloqual universalism
State-sponsored indigenous classification
Notes
3 Religion and Culture: Popular, Indigenous and Hegemonic
Indigenous religion is also popular Catholicism
The dialectic of the erudite and the popular
Bolivia: a crucible for the intellectual, anthropological and political intersections of ethnicity and authenticity
Conclusion
Notes
4 From Popular Culture to the Cultures of the People: Evangelical Christianity as a Challenge to the Decolonial
Pentecostalism and neo-Pentecostalism
Conclusion
Notes
Conclusion: Democratizing Democracy
The decolonial
A discrete universalism
Gender
Women in religion and social movements
After the decolonial
Notes
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Preface: In the time of COVID
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Glossary
Introduction
Begin Reading
Conclusion: Democratizing Democracy
References
Index
End User License Agreement
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Dedication
For Maxine Molyneuxandin memory of Guillermo O’Donnell
After the Decolonial
Ethnicity, Gender and Social Justice in Latin America
David Lehmann
polity
Copyright © David Lehmann 2022
The right of David Lehmann to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2022 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3754-9
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lehmann, David, author.Title: After the decolonial : ethnicity, gender and social justice in Latin America / David Lehmann.Identifiers: LCCN 2021016748 (print) | LCCN 2021016749 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509537525 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509537532 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509537549 (epub)Subjects: LCSH: Latin America--Social conditions--21st century. | Latin America--Economic conditions--21st century. | Equality--Latin America. | Latin America--Race relations. | Multiculturalism--Latin America. | Sex role--Latin America.Classification: LCC HN110.5.A8 L424 2022 (print) | LCC HN110.5.A8 (ebook) | DDC 306.098--dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021016748LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021016749
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Preface: In the time of COVID
Being a Latin Americanist is an emotional involvement. Over fifty years, my life has been enhanced immeasurably, and sometimes dominated, by the irresistible embrace of friendships, partnerships and solidarities. It is like a force field, a vortex, not infrequently tied to utopian imaginaries and the political crises in which they lie buried – crises which in these fatal, murderous years of 2020 and 2021 (as so often, everywhere but Uruguay and Costa Rica) have tested the frontiers of credibility.
It has been an intellectual, professional and personal roller-coaster rising and falling between ephemeral victories of progress and justice and long periods of despondency – the pain of Chile’s September 1973, of Argentina’s dirty war, of Peru’s Sendero Luminoso … Few of us do not have friends and colleagues who have suffered exile, imprisonment, torture and death, and that was before the unspeakable, indescribable cruelty of the current occupant of the Brazilian presidency and the irresponsibility of his Mexican counterpart, together presiding over the deaths of hundreds of thousands from disease and organized violence – a multiple of all the dictatorships together.
In the 1970s, Latin American Studies were a festival of ideas and conviviality shrouded in the hope that eventually times would improve and that we would contribute to that improvement. Debates and disputes among the theoretical-political factions raged – in the days when we used to speak to each other. Ours is the luckiest generation ever – something for which future, less fortunate generations may not forgive us. We have been blessed with an abundance of research and travel funding, and the internationalization of postgraduate education which has opened the way to enduring intellectual partnerships and personal friendships.
If I write a book which is quite critical of some of the most influential progressive ideas of our time in Latin America and beyond, it is because of those experiences and those tragedies. The record of left wing and progressive governments in the region is deeply disappointing: the only truly successful ones were the two terms of Lula’s presidency in Brazil, and Mujica in Uruguay. But even Lula’s time in office was tarnished by corruption, and then retrospectively by the trials (literally) and tribulations of his successor Dilma Roussef. The impeachment of Dilma, in her second term, was ruthlessly unfair, subjecting her to cruel, shameless, misogynistic vilification. The only other truly left-wing governments were Chile’s Unidad Popular, the first period of the Peruvian military regime inaugurated in 1968, and the early Sandinistas, but they all crashed out in military overthrow, economic crisis or armed insurrection openly supported by US intervention. In the light of subsequent prevailing orthodoxies, even the Christian Democrat government that preceded Unidad Popular, could be regarded as left wing. I do not regard post-1973 Peronism as a left-wing, let alone socialist, force, nor will I confer that title on Chavez-Maduro or Correa. They used control of the state to perpetuate themselves in power and neuter opposition, without undertaking sustainable universalist programmes to eliminate poverty or reduce inequality: instead they have distributed benefits to their followers and prebends to their associates and sought to suffocate the media. Evo Morales, like Lula-Dilma, did undertake consistent left-wing reforms only to fall victim to his own abuse of power. Cuba belongs in another category: while Castro’s road to power has been imitated, without success save, briefly, in Nicaragua, no political force has ever proclaimed Cuba as a model of government or development.
The leading figures of the decolonial have assembled in a single category the highly diverse group of Chavez-Maduro, Correa, Morales, Mujica and Lula-Dilma, and adopt a dismissive attitude to Marxism; their interpretations privilege culture and colonialism, race and ethnicity over economics, capitalism and class. I ask whether they offer a convincing diagnosis of the current situation and its origins and whether it offers a basis for a historical project to pursue social justice.
I use the words social justice in a universalist sense: sustainable redistribution of income and wealth that extends into the future and is not undone by coups d’état or economic crisis. It is a demanding criterion, for sustainability means that reforms are not undone even in the event of electoral defeat. If they are not politically sustainable, what is the point?
The decolonial is likely to label such universalism ‘neoliberal’ and ‘Eurocentric’. Yet, when I look beyond the grand schema to the research it inspires and the movements it applauds, I find, despite explicit or implicit protestations to the contrary, that the aspirations of legal and feminist anthropologists and indigenist movements like the Zapatistas, especially indigenous women leaders, are universalist. They are sceptical of projects of cultural regeneration unless they go together with commitments to gender equality, to a reduction of class inequality and to an end to the organized violence which is more pervasive in Latin America than in almost any other part of the world.
The leading figures of the decolonial (its ‘gurus’) – Aníbal Quijano, Boaventura de Souza Santos, and Water Mignolo – give a ‘Latin-style’ voice to the social science ‘cultural turn’. Rejecting Marxism and, implicitly, its cousin dependencia, as Eurocentric, they replace demonization of US imperialism with demonization of European colonialism, and they have shifted the stakes in the global confrontation between the peoples of the Global South and the predatory forces of world capitalism onto the cultural terrain. Colonialism still refers back to the sixteenth century, but the ethnocidal culture and the epistemicide of that period is projected forward to the present and the word is applied to almost any structural power relationship. Latin America’s social polarization is conceived in binary racialized terms, perpetuated by cultural inauthenticity and a colonialist modernity inspired by ‘Europe’.
It cannot be denied that the decolonial has captured the spirit of the times. Their disinterest in economics mirrors the abandonment of the ‘neoliberal’ free market ideas by white nationalists in the United States and illiberal democrats in Europe, and the science-denying, COVID-negating ‘anti-globalists’ surrounding the current Brazilian president. But the decolonial, lacking the radio and TV stations and the billionaire funders to confront those machines, shies away from the politics of the street or the ballot box and confines itself to the podiums of academia.
COVID has arrived as if sent by the merchants of culture war to provide the most dangerous of battlefields the region has known since the Conquest itself, which brought an epidemic that killed 90 per cent of the indigenous population. More murderous than all the twentieth century revolutions, and counter-revolutions, the pandemic has not only revealed cruel inequalities of class and race in the light of day. It has also revealed intractable cultural rifts and has shown that these do not follow ethnic, let alone racial, frontiers. Rather they divide different concepts of religion (those who claim to know God and his will from those for whom religion is tradition and an ethos) and different epistemologies (those who trust science from those who trust only what they themselves are able or willing to see and hear). Today’s denialists are as guilty as the colonial invaders and, in response to those who think that adherence to indigenous knowledge and belief systems stands in contradiction to modern science, I have yet to hear that any are to be found among indigenous peoples, their leaders, their shamans or their healers. Denialists doubt the authority of modernity in the form of science, yet in the name of a perverted notion of modernity disguised as predatory development, they attack indigenous physical and cultural survival. The decolonial denounces modernity for its destruction of indigenous knowledge and the imposition of Eurocentric science, yet today’s ‘Eurocentrics’ seek to destroy indigenous societies in the name of science-scepticism while leaders of indigenous peoples look to the science of climate change and biodiversity, and of course to vaccination, to defend themselves.
As we have known ever since the founding of development economics in the post-war period, Latin America desperately needs a redistribution of income and wealth. By now, it is widely recognized that racial exclusion and gender inequality were missing from the reformisms of that time. But gender and race are neither precisely comparable nor stable categories, as Rogers Brubaker found in his sharply insightful Trans (Brubaker 2016). Brubaker was surprised to find that the two words have, so to speak, changed places, notably in the United States: whereas it was for a long time thought that race is a ‘construct’ while gender was taken to be a stable objective category, it was increasingly being claimed that race was neither a construct nor a matter of self-assignment, whereas gender had become much more fluid and a matter to some extent of personal choice. This controversy will come to the fore when we discuss the role of judges and committees in deciding whether Brazilian university applicants qualify for quota places reserved for blacks.
My argument in the coming pages is that women are a force in indigenous and Afro-descendant movements, and the advance of their feminism should continue to spearhead the undoing of structures of racial exclusion. Movements in defence of indigenous groups and Afro-descendant populations and of women’s movements ultimately look to universal values of citizenship and human rights and thus do not offer arguments in support of the decolonial denigration of human rights or citizenship as ‘Eurocentric’ or, worse, ‘neoliberal’. Gender cuts across – intersects – the most extensive range of social cleavages and, as the more universal category, it should lead the way in conjunction with classic measures of redistribution and with vigorous punishment of racial and sexual discrimination.
LondonApril 2021
Acknowledgements
My thanks go first and foremost to Maxine Molyneux whose unfailing encouragement has guided this project from its ragged beginnings as a short polemic to its present incarnation. I dedicate this book to her, and also to the memory of Guillermo O’Donnell whose unique combination of imagination and good sense inspired me and many others, and whose loss I still feel acutely.
I am extremely grateful to Fiona Wilson who read an early draft and, apart from encouraging me to continue, has also given some very sage and welcome advice.
Jean Khalfa generously gave precious time, enabling me to draw on his unparalleled command of the life and work of Frantz Fanon. Mónica Moreno and Rachel Sieder also gave generously of their time, and their detailed comments saved me from several errors of fact and judgement.
Julie Coimbra, moving spirit of the Cambridge Centre for Latin American Studies, has been willing to help in so many ways, especially during the COVID months.
Many other people have helped me, sometimes without even realizing it, by pointing to ideas or sources or stories that found their way into the narrative. Among them I thank especially Antoinette Molinié, Carlos Bolomey, Christian Gros, Claudia Dary, Dawn Ades, Fabiola Bazo, Fernando Calderón, Joanne Rappaport, Libia Tattay, Luis Vazquez†, Mara Polgovsky, Marjo de Theije, Mónica Moreno, Raphael Lehmann, Richard Chase-Smith, Sarah Radcliffe, Sian Lazar, Simon Susen and Véronique Boyer.
At Polity Press I want to thank John Thompson and Neil de Cort for their sustained encouragement and patience.
List of Abbreviations
CDI –
Comisión para el Desarrollo de los Pueblos Indígenas (National Indigenous Peoples’ Development Commission – Mexico; formerly INI, later INPI)
CGEIB –
Coordinación General de Educación Intercultural y Bilingüe (General Coordinating Body for Intercultural and Bilingual Education – Mexico)
CIDOB –
Confederación de Pueblos Indígenas del Oriente, Chaco y Amazonía de Bolivia (Confederation of Indigenous Peoples of the Oriente, Chaco and Amazon Regions of Bolivia)
CIESAS –
Centro de Investigación y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (Advanced Research and Teaching Centre in Social Anthropology – Mexico)
CIS–INAH –
Centro de Investigaciones Superiores del Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (Advanced Research Centre of the National Institute for Anthropology and History – Mexico)
CLACSO –
Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales (Latin American Social Science Council)
CONACAMI –
Confederación Nacional de Comunidades del Perú Afectadas por la Minería (National Confederation of Peruvian Communities Affected by Mining)
CONADI –
Comisión Nacional de Desarrollo Indígena (National Indigenous Development Commission – Chile)
CONAMAQ –
Consejo Nacional de Ayllus y Markas de Qullasuyu (National Council of the Ayllus and Markas of Qullasuyu, that is, of the land and territorial councils of the Qullasuyu, or southern region of the former Inca Empire)
CRIC –
Consejo Regional Indígena del Cauca (Cauca Valley Regional Indigenous Council – Colombia)
CSUTCB –
Confederación Sindical Única de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia (United Confederation of Unions of Rural Workers of Bolivia)
EIB –
Educación Intercultural Bilingüe (Intercultural and Bilingual Education)
ENAH –
Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia (National Anthropology and History School – Mexico)
EZLN –
Ejercito Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (Zapatista National Liberation Army)
FLICA –
Festival Literário Internacional de Cachoeira (Cachoeira International Literary Festival)
FLN –
Front de Libération National (National Liberation Front – Algeria)
ICMBio –
Instituto Chico Mendes de Conservação da Biodiversidade (Chico Mendes Conservation and Biodiversity Institute – Brazil)
INAH –
Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (National Anthropology and History Institute – Mexico)
INALI –
Instituto Nacional de Lenguas Indígenas (National Indigenous Languages Institute – Mexico)
INCORA –
Instituto Colombiano de Reforma Agraria (Colombian Agrarian Reform Institute)
INCRA –
Instituto Nacional de Colonização e Reforma Agraria (National Colonization and Agrarian Reform Institute – Brazil)
INI –
Instituto Nacional Indigenista (National Indigenous Institute – Mexico – later CDI-Brazil)
INPI –
Instituto Nacional de los Pueblos Indígenas – (National Institute for Indigenous Peoples – Mexico; successor to CDI)
ISER –
Instituto Superior de Estudos da Religião (Institute of Advanced Religious Studies – Brazil)
IURD –
Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus (Universal Church of the Kingdom of God)
MAS –
Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement Towards Socialism – Bolivia)
MERCOSUR –
Mercado Común del Sur (Southern Common Market)
MPB –
Música Popular Brasileira (Brazilian Popular Music)
MST –
Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra – (Landless Rural Workers’ Movement – Brazil)
NAFTA –
North American Free Trade Agreement (later USCMA)
PRI –
Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Mexico)
PT –
Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party – Brazil)
SERVEL –
Servicio Electoral de Chile (Chilean Electoral Service)
THOA –
Taller de Historia Oral Andino (Andean Oral History Workshop)
TIPNIS –
Territorio Indígena y Parque Nacional Isiboro Secure (Isiboro Secure Indigenous Territory and National Park)
UAIIN –
Universidad Autónoma Indígena e Intercultural (Autonomous Indigenous and Intercultural University – Colombia)
UFMG –
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (Federal University of Minas Gerais – Brazil)
UNICH –
Universidad Intercultural de Chiapas (Intercultural University of Chiapas – Mexico)
USCMA –
US–Canada–Mexico Agreement
UVI –
Universidad Veracruzana Intercultural (Veracruz Intercultural University – Mexico)
Glossary
ayllu
–
autonomous communal authority overseeing land allocation among households in highland Bolivian communities
cabildo
–
council of a community or locality
caboclos
–
people of mixed race (Indian, black, white) in Amazonia; also spirits that assume innumerable forms as their presence is detected or summoned by a medium
calidad indígena
–
legally recognized indigenous status
campesino
–
peasant or small farmer
Candomblé
–
type of possession cult in the Yoruba tradition
capilaridade
–
capacity of asocial movement to penetrate deep among the interstices of a social milieu
cholas, cholos
–
persons of mixed race or intermediate social status in the Andean socio-racial hierarchy
cimarronaje
–
having features in common with escaped slaves (cimarrones)
cocaleros
–
coca growers
colonos
–
colonists who come from outside and bring ‘uncultivated’ land under the plough or who occupy territory where the state is virtually absent. Usually, these lands and territories are used and occupied by indigenous peoples
compadre
–
co-godparent
criollo
–
of mixed white and indigenous race; also means native to or bred in the Americas (but not indigenous)
despatriarcalización
–
process of removing patriarchal features from society
ejido
–
form of quasi-collective land tenure under the Mexican Agrarian Reform
estética negra
–
a politically nuanced style of dress and hair fashionable among young black people in Brazil, especially Bahia
interculturalidad
–
an approach to education and institutional arrangements that recognizes indigenous heritage and encourages indigenous participation and the learning of indigenous languages and culture
ladinos
–
elite predominantly white people constituting a quasi-caste in Guatemala
machis
–
Mapuche shamans (mostly women)
malandragem
–
roguishness
mandar obedeciendo
–
‘to lead while obeying’ (said to be a Tojolabal motto)
media luna
–
‘crescent moon’: the lowland region of Bolivia comprising the departments of Tarija, Pando, Beni and Santa Cruz
mestizo
–
light-skinned
moreno
–
brown-skinned
movimento negro
–
black movement
originario
–
founding, as in
nación originaria
, referring to indigenous ethno-linguistic groups
paramilitares
–
‘paramilitaries’, organized groups who engage in violent action against Indians and social and indigenous activists, and nominally against guerrillas, in Colombia
pardo
–
brown; used in official statistics and classification in Brazil
preto
–
literally ’black’, denoting the deepest black skin colour; a term mostly used in Brazil in official statistics and classifications, which do not use
negro
quilombo, quilombola
–
settlements of escaped slaves and the people who live in them
regiones de refugio
–
literally refuge zones, referring to isolated regions with predominantly Indian populations living outside the market economy
resguardos
–
the institutional form of indigenous ownership of land in Colombia
saudade
–
a distinctively Brazilian nostalgic sadness or sense of loss, and associated musical styles
sindicatos campesinos
–
peasant unions (Bolivia)
tercermundista
–
supporter of a nationalist, anti-imperialist worldview which opposes the countries of the global South (formerly ‘Third World ‘) to Europe and the United States
terreiros
–
sites of
Candomblé
ceremonies
usos y costumbres
–
customs and traditions of indigenous people
Introduction
In recent decades the most academically influential intelligentsia of the Latin American left have retreated behind the walls of the university, even while they denounce the social order more comprehensively than any previous Latin American ideology. In their diagnosis, Latin American society is characterized by a polarized and polarizing colonial apparatus of racialized domination that has existed unchanged for 500 years and infuses all relations of unequal power and status as well as the mindset of its populations. This diagnosis functions as an indictment of institutions, socio-economic structures and ideologies – like Marxism and liberalism – as well as of the subconscious mechanism where racial prejudice is implanted. There results a cast of mind in which ethnic identities not only have their place, as they must do, but also take precedence over other themes like class, gender, violence, institutional stagnation and collapse, public health, organized crime, corruption … the list is very long.
This reductionism discourages political activity by creating a climate of despair and negativity, and indeed this philosophy of the decolonial, or lo decolonial, as I call the Latin American branch of postcolonialism, constitutes a hemisphere-wide network whose activism is directed at the internal life of academia rather than at politics on the street, in the media, in election campaigns or in institutions of the state. It denounces the Marxist nebula, which over generations guided even the moderate Latin American left, for its denial of the racial basis of domination, and disqualifies liberalism for its complicity with colonialism and slavery. Paradoxically, then, the world of the decolonial is characterized by quietism in the public sphere of politics and shrill rhetoric within the halls and Twittersphere of academe. In this it can be contrasted with feminist tendencies that also call themselves decolonial, and in addition autonomous, and are more involved in extra-mural politics by virtue of their activist field research and their participation in women’s and LGBT movements.
This distinctively Latin American tendency is a largely self-sufficient subculture, so I will restrict myself to the output of Latin Americans and Latin Americanists – many operating out of the United States – and of particular authors whom they quote. I also take care to refer to particular writings, and readily admit that it is impossible to cover the entire output of a very prolific group of authorities. My plea is for the restoration of the pursuit of universalist social justice to its rightful place in the thought of the region’s left, and I conclude by according the pursuit of gender equality at least parity with the politics of racial and ethnic identity and racial empowerment.
By universalist social justice, I mean a primary focus on the redistribution of income and wealth based on socio-economic criteria and an understanding of social class and gender as drivers of inequality. Universalist justice also means the investigation and punishment of acts of racial discrimination. This is particularly important because whereas indigenous populations can mobilize along identity lines in support of claims to intercultural education, to restitution of usurped lands and to the re-establishment of their own institutions in the form of laws and self-government, Afro-descendant populations rarely are in a position to make such claims, yet they are also victims of racial exclusion and acts of discrimination. To free those populations of these burdens, policies must focus on universal justice and universalist equality, as must policies to change gender inequalities, and they can also include affirmative action. This distinction between identity politics and universalist justice, which are far from mutually exclusive, remains important.
The other reason for foregrounding universalism is largely practical and has little to do with the frequently drawn contrast between universalism and relativism. It is based on the observation that the frontiers of racial and ethnic populations, and thus the basis on which resources will be allocated under affirmative action or multicultural policies, are impossible to draw independently of political judgements about where those frontiers lie, or even personal judgements about whether a particular person is black, brown or white, or indio, cholo, mestizo or blanco. Distribution on the basis of socio-economic status, gender, age or region, in contrast, is in principle less likely to be challenged for its subjective character. Of course, the criteria of class belonging are subject to debate, but at least they can be established on the basis of agreed rational discussion. I have set much store by the merits of gender as a universalist basis on which to pursue equality, even though self-assignation is an ever more prominent element in gender classification, simply because the scale of the phenomenon is still small compared to the exclusive use of self-assignation in racial and ethnic classification. Although the ground is shifting under both regimes of classification, I still would maintain that for some time to come classification by gender will remain less open to politicization. I therefore advocate the restoration of a degree of balance between gender and race in discussions about inequality and rights, even while allowing plenty of room for intersectionality between them.
On this basis, universal rights are rights that belong to all human beings and should be adjudicated according to features that can be assigned to all human beings. This is the case for differentiating features such as age, gender and social class, whereas indigenous laws can apply only to people of particular indigenous groups. Indigenous rights, however – as distinct from indigenous laws – are universal in the sense that anyone claiming indigenous status should be treated in accordance with universal rights, not least the right to non-discrimination. My argument in the chapters that follow is that the systems of indigenous law advocated in decolonial debates are for the most part perfectly compatible with universal rights and should not be considered different in kind from positive law, even if they apply only within a certain population or region.
The institutional and social setting
Since about 1992 race, ethnicity and gender have become the leading topics shaping the scholarly interpretation of two of Latin America’s most distressing problems: inequality and the abuse of human rights by both state and private actors. This is the case among Latin Americanists throughout the western hemisphere and also in Europe: those subjects have set the agenda in publication, in conferences and in university teaching. The broadly left-wing or simply dissident political sensibility which has long dominated the humanities and social science departments of public universities remains, but the content has shifted from Marxism towards identity politics. By identity politics in the university context, I mean recourse to racial, ethno-linguistic, religious and gender ascription or belonging for explanations of advantage and disadvantage in society as a whole, but also in internal matters affecting the university, such as the curriculum, the profile of the student body and the professoriat. The bodies of those involved are also at stake in the less visible and less audible shaping of scholarly and pedagogical discourse and exchange. The academic business of teaching, of the exchange of research and of management, is influenced (not necessarily in a negative sense) by the physical and online presence, or absence, of people who recognize themselves and are recognized by ascription to a population defined by skin colour, by religion, by gender or by ethnic or ethno-linguistic background.
Identity politics occurs when such belonging, in and of itself, confers authority or legitimacy on a speaker or author. It comes in many shapes and forms, sometimes to include and sometimes to exclude, sometimes to break down barriers and sometimes to erect them, sometimes to facilitate exchange and sometimes to interrupt it.
The visibility and audibility of identity politics comes at a time of growth in the number and presence of students from Afro-descendant and indigenous backgrounds in Latin American universities and research institutions, but the presence of professors from those backgrounds lags far behind. Nonetheless, universities have been pioneering spaces where those groups have found a voice ahead of other institutions such as professional bodies or the judiciary.
There has also been a change in the class composition of the professoriat, which is now drawn less from the upper-middle classes than was once the case. University salaries may guarantee security to those with tenure, but they no longer guarantee an upper-middle class existence, and an ever-increasing number of highly qualified people with Masters degrees and doctorates, finding difficulty getting a full-time academic job, are making a living on short-term or hourly contracts. The proliferation of private and public universities and the concomitant growth of student numbers have also expanded the profession, contributing to refined gradations of prestige, status, income and locational differences. This structural change may have added an edge to the traditional dissident posture of academics.
The expression ‘ivory tower’ is anachronistic in a world where there are millions of undergraduates, hundreds of thousands of graduate students and tens of thousands of professors. Academia today constitutes a political arena and a market all of its own where interest groups compete for resources, for departments and centres, for publication outlets, for research funds and for the power of patronage.
A similar scenario exists in the United States where identity politics has been a standard feature of university life for longer than in Latin America and where significant numbers of students and professors teaching and following courses on Latin America are immigrants or people from immigrant families. This US-based contingent can be said to form a single constituency with Latin American humanities and social science: the distinction between a Latin American scholar and an ‘American’ scholar is blurred. They conduct their exchanges equally in English, Spanish and Portuguese, are riven by similar disagreements and are fired by similar enthusiasms. Until 2020, the more prominent figures among them have been fixtures on the same hemisphere-wide lecture, workshop and conference circuits. Decolonial scholarship is a mutation of identity politics adapted to the arena of the university and of scholarship.
Identity politics brought the question of representation into the university and now contests the content of teaching. In its Latin Americanist strand, decolonialism’s theme is not inequality of access to science but the biases and prejudices that lie at the heart of science itself and the instrumentalization of science to fashion weapons used against indigenous peoples and Afro-descendants.
Much as it may challenge the institutions of science and academia and all they stand for, decolonial advocacy depends on those institutions. This marks a difference from the radical autonomist wings like Black Power that broke away from anti-racist movements such as civil rights. Decolonials express little interest in those breakaways, or in the Latin American guerrilla forces that broke with the ‘Moscow line’ after the Cuban Revolution and went into action across the region over three decades. Yet the decolonial theoretical onslaught on today’s social order is even more radical: those Marxist revolutionaries had no issues with science or with modernity, and for the most part assumed that in a socialist society the problems of indigenous peoples and people of colour would be overcome, as would inequality between the sexes (to use the language of the time). They sought a different modernity, but a modernity nonetheless, in which the class structure and economic system would be replaced. Decolonials contest the entire culture of modernity and are dismissive of the universal values embodied, in their very different ways, in Marxism and liberalism. Yet professionally they remain within the ‘system’, and although they do profess admiration for the questionably democratic practices of Chavez-Maduro, Christina Kirschner, Evo Morales and Rafael Correa, they certainly do not advocate violence.
So much is background. I have depicted it in summary form because scholarly writing tends to sidestep the institutional context of its production, but to offer a full analysis would require another research project. We have much to learn from ethnographies and a macro sociology of academia that would test these generalizations.
Critique of the decolonial
Chapter 1 offers a genealogy of the decolonial, beginning with three precursors – Said, Fanon and Emmanuel Levinas. I show Said to be a universalist occasionally co-opted by over-binarized anti-western versions of identity politics. Fanon’s universalist values are ignored by the decolonial and his outlook on the world vulgarized by making him into an enemy of European culture and a supporter of nationalism, neither of which describes his values. Fanon’s eloquence is directed against racism, pure and simple: he fiercely opposed négritude and blackness as an identity to be valued in and of itself, and his ideal was a world without race. When he sympathizes with violence, it is in the context of the response of the peasant masses to the unspeakable violence inflicted by French colonial forces, but he does not provide a blanket endorsement of violence, as even Hannah Arendt, often quoted for her hostility to Fanon, eventually recognized. Their invocation of the notoriously impenetrable but widely admired Levinas as a precursor is the most puzzling, and setting him besides Fanon equally so, making for a very odd couple. In what I call an instance of ‘forced politicization’, they have even co-opted his Leçons Talmudiques in support of an effort to make Levinas into a tercermundista or Third World nationalist.
The decolonial in its Latin American version is further criticized for several reasons:
its trivialization of the universal in human rights, in feminism and in science;
its confection of a binary opposition of the indigenous and the European, or western, as if almost nothing has changed in 500 years and with no consideration of the heterogeneity of hundreds of ethno-linguistic groups;
the relativization of human rights in contention with collective rights;
its obliviousness in the face of the mixtures and exchanges which pervade race, religion, culture and class relations in Latin America;
the confusion of differences of culture with different ‘epistemologies’;
its obliviousness to women, to inequalities of gender and to violence against women (excluding the feminist variant of the decolonial)
its oversimplified use of the word ‘neo-liberalism’.
The leading philosopher of the decolonial, Enrique Dussel, is a difficult figure to summarize: formed in theology and an adept of liberation theology, during the 1970s he oversaw the multi-volume Historia de la Iglesia en América Latina. The 600-page first volume, despite its unorthodox organization, interspersing transcribed documents and narrative, bears witness to the depth of his Catholic learning and to his vast knowledge of the history not only of the Catholic Church but of religion in the entire region, going back to pre-conquest times (Dussel 1974, 1983–1994). Yet after that his writings bifurcate: on the one hand highly politicized and polemical interventions; and on the other complex philosophical works which he places in a phenomenological lineage quite different from his early involvement in liberation theology. Other leading decolonials (principally Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Walter Mignolo and Nelson Maldonado-Torres) write in a macho style that disqualifies all that stands in their way, proclaiming a set of ‘truths universally acknowledged’ without offering evidence when they refer to history and, when they are philosophical, name-dropping in the place of a reasoned genealogy. Their attack on western science is unsupported by an account of science itself, and their interpretations of colonialism are based on superficial generalizations or, when they do use historical sources, on misinterpretation. They write as if today’s colonial order is no different from that of the sixteenth century and do not explain why they sidestep the influence of the United States – once the whipping boy of choice for Latin American nationalist and marxisant thought. Decolonial ‘gurus’ even single out Descartes as responsible for reducing non-European peoples to the status of non-humans and describe his cogito as a banner for colonial conquest. The result is a polarization of the field between their fans and their critics or, better, between their fans and those who ignore them and are ignored by them. The field of Latin American Studies has become divided: fans and non-fans attend separate conferences, organize separate panels, publish in separate journals and thus avoid the clash of ideas – a refusal of exchange that is a common feature of contemporary scholarly life in general. I do not venture a view on whether this is to be blamed on the decolonials or on their opponents.
I do not claim that the decolonial has been built on false problems. Some decolonial writing is based on an important theme, which Boaventura de Souza Santos calls the ‘abyss’. The abyss divides society into two spaces: that which is governed by law and inhabited by people who receive the protection of the law and the state, and a vast periphery where government is in the hands of unofficial bodies (like drug traffickers and militia), where official bodies only enter to inflict repression or exactions, where business is conducted with neither regulation nor certification nor taxation, where citizens, having no effective rights, are reduced to the condition of supplicants. Although the model is simplified beyond measure, it does convey vividly the failure of many Latin American states. It also should highlight the interdependence of the two ‘worlds’, especially the dependence of politicians on traffickers and militia, and their penetration of police forces. And then, in the penultimate chapter, there is a surprise as we find evangelical churches poised on the edges of the abyss, and sometimes straddling it.
The colonial in anthropology
The next chapter approaches the decolonial in anthropology via the usages of the influential term ‘internal colonialism’ in mid-twentieth-century Mexican scholarship, and the feminist and legal anthropology which has been a salient feature of recent Mexican social science.
A close reading of this very rewarding literature shows that, despite their occasional protestations to the contrary, Mexican feminist anthropologists are universalists because, while by no means dismissing the value of cultural recognition, they prioritize the question of violence against women and effective equal opportunities for them over the cultural rights of indigenous peoples.
Those anthropologists were the first to extract a feminist message from the Zapatista phenomenon, which hit the headlines on January 1994 as an uprising more strategic in its theatrical performance than in its political effectiveness, and continues as a quasi-independent enclave in the Southern Mexican state of Chiapas. The original Zapatistas and associated organizations said little about activist women or gender, although they demonstrated their feminism by the presence of women in leading positions, including as military commanders, but in their subsequent research the anthropologists found women who infused the movement’s message with a defence of their rights and their bodies. The Zapatista leaders were the product of a Marxist and Maoist stream going back to the 1960s, and only discovered their indigenous vocation after they had found glamour in the world’s media. By returning to the literature on the background to the uprising and its setting in the Lacandonian jungle of Chiapas I have been able to recognize its originality and the context in which its ideals were forged.
The feminist anthropologists force open the issues of class and ethnicity (Hernández Castillo 2003; Sieder 2017). The most original figure among them, the Bolivian Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, defies categorization in one or another camp of identity or left-wing politics and rejects identification with one or another racial or ethnic group in a society at once predominantly indio and also marked by pervasive métissage. These feminist-ethnic intersections draw our attention to important tools in the understanding of Latin American society, and in later chapters I describe those in detail with examples, mostly from Bolivia, whose intelligentsia have generated some of the most compelling debates about race and gender.
Popular religion, culture and ethnicity
To begin to see beyond the decolonial, I explore the conceptualization and application of everyday words like indio or mestizo and the frontiers they convey in the interpretation of the region’s acute inequality. This means taking account of blurred social and racial frontiers and the frequent ambiguity of relationships across those frontiers, and avoiding assumptions about the homogeneity and uniformity of ethno-linguistic and racial populations and frontiers. I then move on to the subject of popular culture, which in Latin American is a crossroads, a meeting point and sometimes a flashpoint for socially stratified and racially differentiated streams, to show how the interpretation of cultural practices in terms of race, ethnicity, gender and religion can both take account of intersectionality and avoid binarization.
I begin with the supernatural (religion) and the pervasive presence of mixture and of borrowing, both self-conscious (‘reflexive’) and filtered through decades and centuries of the collective unconscious. Decolonial writing on indigenous knowledge or science misses out on the place of ritual and the difference between rituals of healing and the efficacy of healing. It tends to assimilate the efficacy of folk remedies and folk wisdom (for example, as applied to agricultural practices) to scientific knowledge: because it is the fruit of generations of experimentation and observation in societies based on agriculture and animal husbandry, such wisdom may well provide reliable guidance for growing plants, raising animals and treating minor ailments, but as knowledge it should not be described as scientific in the usual (Anglo-Saxon) sense1 because it is not conducted in the impersonal institutions of science. Conversely, every day there is abundant evidence of indigenous support for modern science: indigenous organizations throughout the Amazon and the Andes are constantly campaigning on climate change which is devastating their livelihoods, and during the current pandemic, when Amazon Indian groups are suffering from a higher death rate than the population as a whole, leaders have told that, although people have tried their folk medicine, they are painfully and tragically aware that they need the almost inaccessible resources of modern medicine.
The decolonial concept of indigeneity sets aside the multi-directional influences whereby, in the field of religion, popular Catholicism incorporates indigenous ritual and ceremony and indigenous ceremonies incorporate Catholic practices shaped by centuries of mixture. Outsiders are alert to the colonial or indigenous origins of the practices and symbols they observe, but those who perform them – whether they think of themselves as indios, cholos or mestizos2 – seem uninterested in such questions of authenticity. The discussion becomes even more convoluted when ethno-historians tell us that urban intellectuals in Bolivia are misinterpreting indigenous concepts like the now globalized Pachamama, or when we learn that indigenous healers in Chile, practising out of dedicated spaces in public hospitals and travelling the globe to administer their herbal remedies, are sought out by people who make no claim to an indigenous heritage at all.3
As with religion, so with race and ethnicity. The field is riven with markers of inequality, yet the frontiers are porous. Using a Bolivian case, I describe the perpetual exchanges of ethnic symbols and markers and the ways in which they serve nevertheless to solidify social inequalities and racial exclusion, something that cannot be said of art, music, dance and civic commemorations. Evo Morales solved the problem by inventing a pan-ethnic indigenism which gathered all the country’s indigenous peoples, indeed the entire population (except the lowland rancher elite) under its wing. Like the country’s nationalist 1952 revolution, which gave birth to a mestizo middle class, the new ideology disregarded the internal inequalities and fractures of the coalition, especially the lowland Amazonian Indians, and oversaw the continued development of a burguesía criolla – imperfectly translated as a ‘Creole bourgeoisie’.4 Morales made his political career as leader of the tightly organized and hierarchical coca growers’ association (the cocaleros) fighting for freedom to grow their crops. The coca leaf was a useful cultural symbol – the first of many deployed by Evo – but their demands were not cultural – they wanted freedom to grow and sell their crop and the cancellation of the government’s agreement with the United States to destroy their plantations.
Exchanges of ritual practices and ethnic markers across boundaries that have evolved over centuries can be conceptualized as a dialectic of the erudite, or elite, and the popular, in which the awareness and definition of what is one and what is the other are subjective and fluctuating. This formula sets aside issues of ethnic authenticity and heritage and subsumes fields such as religion and civic celebrations into a broader framework, which is provided by Nestor García Canclini. Canclini’s writing revolves around hybridity, stimulated by a Mexican art world at once conscious of the country’s popular heritage and attuned to global trends and fashions. The dialectic is compounded by agonizing over the artistic status of folk art and crafts such as the artefacts one buys in provincial markets, but then migrates into postmodern register when he considers the ‘kitsch’ architecture in the Americanized cities of the country’s northern border. The dominant theme is of porous frontiers.
Race, ethnicity and gender: in search of social justice
How can one think of social justice on the basis of the experience of indigenous movements? Taking as examples the Zapatistas and the less well-known but more institutionalized Colombian Consejo Regional Indígena del Cauca (Cauca Valley Indigenous Regional Council – CRIC – which celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 2021), I emphasize institution building and the advancement of women. As noted earlier, the women who have been active in the Zapatista areas of Chiapas have had to work hard to challenge generations of subordination. In the CRIC, we observe women advancing to positions of responsibility thanks especially to its initiatives in the field of intercultural education. Both movements have had to build organizations able to deal with economic necessities, with land tenure and with governance, requiring traditional institutions to be reformed substantially. The CRIC is founded on two colonial institutions – the resguardo and the cabildo; the resguardo is a territorial concept denoting land assigned to indios, in a regime of collective entitlement, and the cabildos are the institutions governing their internal affairs. Judicial procedures have had to adapt to the requirements of the national judicial system which has recognized and incorporated them. We know little of how the Zapatistas have dealt with issues of law, especially as compared to the openness of the CRIC, but sympathetic observers have received explanations of their painstaking system of consultation and feedback between local and regional decision-making bodies. We have to take their word for it, but it would appear that they are establishing procedures that are more in keeping with modern ideas of participatory democracy than indigenous concepts of authority, despite the constant reiteration of the formula mandar obedeciendo (‘taking command while obeying’), drawn from Chiapas indigenous culture.
There is an emerging pattern of judicialization of the indigenous and race questions, perhaps on the pattern of the judicialization of politics which has been much remarked upon in the region. In Colombia, the judicial system can intervene to rule on the correctness of indigenous proceedings. In Mexico, land tenure disputes involving indigenous title have long fallen within the purview of the state’s judicial system, not of indigenous customary proceedings (usos y costumbres).
The Brazilian affirmative action system for entry to universities has brought about what many would regard as a strange, even unacceptable, situation in which it is not unusual for judges to decide a person’s racial assignment, and for formally established university committees to review applications for entry via the race quota to check for ‘fraudulent’ self-assignments of skin colour. The quotas are in effect a positive discrimination system that reserves places for black, brown and indigenous people in a country whose chromatic race relations regime renders racial classification essentially contestable, so it is not surprising that disputes – even denunciations – may arise, leading to judicialization.
These examples are not evidence that universalist concepts of social justice are being implemented via the courts, but they do show that as a result of indigenous mobilizations in Colombia and of the adoption of affirmative action policies in Brazil, universalist criteria of law are being applied to the causes of indigenous or Afro-descendant justice. The road, however, can be rather rocky: judicial involvement in land tenure in Mexico and the implementation of local government in accordance with usos y costumbres in Colombia have not been immune to the influence of organized crime, guerrillas or paramilitaries. The most complete case of confluence of an indigenist rationale and the judicial system that I have found is in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, where the entire electoral system was reformed in the 1990s to allow institutional recognition of usos y costumbres. Yet this has also brought the national and state electoral authorities into an oversight role in which they have intervened to enforce legislation concerning women’s participation and gender parity in elections in the face of persistent chicanery.
Indigenous movements press governments to pass legislation and to make resources available, but it is noticeable that in order to survive and evolve over time – like the CRIC and the Zapatistas – they have to build institutions of their own, and we see how in those processes women come to the fore.
We can see contrasts by comparing the weakness or absence of indigenous movements in Mexico outside Chiapas and in Chile where indigenous claims are mobilized in fragmented ways and have not developed institutionally. The difference arises from a lack of depth which would enable them to extend their activities, in Chile, beyond the ceremonial role of shamans to, for example, governance, education, the law and land tenure. Yet the Chilean Mapuche struggles and the repression inflicted in their region by the government have made their cause emblematic for the nationwide movement to democratize the country’s democracy: in Santiago’s Plaza Dignidad (as it has been popularly re-baptized) the only flag to be seen at regular demonstrations is the Mapuche flag – no party emblems, no national flag – and a Mapuche woman was elected president of the country’s Constitutional Convention in 2021.
The goals of indigenous movements are very often the same as those of other movements, such as those fighting for housing in cities and not least those fighting for human rights. They are in the forefront of causes of universal concern, for example, contesting mining licences in vulnerable environments like the Amazon and the Andean highlands and Guatemala, and resisting illegal mining especially in the Amazon. Conflicts over mining and indigenous rights claims to territorial autonomy and over environmental defence are often one and the same.
This universalism was particular evident in the early days of the Zapatistas. In conjunction with catechists trained by the Archdiocese of San Cristobal de las Casas, they were defending people from different ethno-linguistic groups who had been forced to migrate as a result of the shift to cattle rearing in highland estates where for generations they worked in semi-feudal conditions. Those people were indios but had been living in conditions of servitude rather than in corporate communities, and their leaders were steeped in the rhetoric of liberation theology and secular revolution. They were most certainly victims of racial oppression, and the banner of indigenism served as a rallying cry, as a source of solidarity and importantly as a magnet attracting the sympathy of a certain current of international opinion, but the restoration or protection of indigenous culture formed but one part of their demands. Their movement was inspired principally by a demand for land, for the confirmation of their tenure of land they were already occupying, for socio-economic improvement, and for freedom from repression by the state and landlords. Even before the armed uprising in 1994, they were building institutions, forming cooperatives to manage land they had occupied in the Lacandón forest – but these were not indigenous community institutions.
Evo Morales played this counterpoint between indigenist and other themes like a virtuoso. He cleverly proclaimed the country’s indigenous vocation in terms which made the word ‘indigenous’ itself an ethnic category while downplaying the recognition of numerous ethno-linguistic groups within it. The Constitution drawn up under his auspices recognized formally a long list of nations with their own languages and legal systems, but the recognition remained on paper. He may well have feared the divisive effects of such multiple recognitions, and those whose livelihoods depended on the fragile ecological equilibrium in the Amazonian lowlands were an obstacle to his hydrocarbon-driven neo-developmentalist strategy.
Evangelical Christianity
Although this popular-erudite dialectic offers a neat framework, spanning the supernatural and also the world of art, music and culture in general, the epidemiological – indeed pandemic – spread of evangelical Christianity has produced a large and noisy culture area where it does not apply. The same goes for the decolonial, whose reification and exaltation of indigenous culture and knowledge loses some of its credibility in the face of the success of evangelicals among indigenous peoples. For a century, the churches have built cultural worlds where indigenous religious practices, but not indigenous identities or languages, have lost their resonance (save as channels of demonic possession), and where political demands for indigenous rights receive little encouragement. The evangelical, or Pentecostal, faithful, with their rituals of healing and baptism, consummate a rupture with both the Catholic popular culture of fiestas and commemorative processions and the affirmation of class and ethnic difference in carnivals, dance and music, while also rejecting the permissive society and, more recently, departures from traditional forms of marriage and gender roles. The ideal evangelical life requires withdrawal from civic and religious fiestas, at least in principle, renunciation of alcohol and tobacco, and embodies an aspiration to middle-class respectability. In a pattern that invites comparison with social movements, with education and with the professions, women are a driving force in their ranks, though rarely in the leadership. Participation in church life also encourages women to bring about change in their families and to strive for entrepreneurial success.
Evangelical culture seems to stand at the antipodes of what the decolonial might conceive as a politics in its image. Why have a following who could be expected to pursue liberation from colonial oppression, being predominantly drawn from low-income groups and from excluded racial and ethnic populations, joined the churches in such great numbers? How could they have placed their trust in preachers who show no interest in the structures that oppress them or in the racism that excludes them? How can they accept a doctrine that invokes divine authority in teaching self-reliance and legitimizes the neo-liberalism responsible for their oppression? How could it be that Pentecostal churches persuade not only indigenous people who live in the market economy and under the direct authority of modern state apparatuses but also others (in remote highland and lowland tropical environments), who have had but limited contact with states or with the hegemonic languages, to engage in practices that appear to glorify a divinity utterly foreign to their own traditions? How could they retain a predominantly female following while for the most part excluding women from positions of leadership? These questions become even more urgent when we come to neo-Pentecostal churches, with their highly centralized global organizations, their proclamation of material well-being as an end in itself and their disruptive intervention in electoral politics.
Pentecostalism is not a comfortable sort of dissidence, but it is a dissidence in several senses: it is a religious dissidence which stands apart from a still hegemonic Catholicism; it is a cultural dissidence that stands against the permissive society and against intellectual elites, and against those elements of popular culture that draw on tradition, on indigeneity, on African heritage and on rituals of ‘the world turned upside down’ like carnival. It cannot be dismissed merely as false consciousness, as an artefact of neo-liberalism or as a money-making machine.
