Paper short abstract:

This paper takes various analyses of modernity, exploring two novel frameworks for the critical analysis of modernity: actor-network theory (ANT), and the Latin American Modernity/Coloniality/Decoloniality perspective (MCD).

Paper long abstract:

This paper takes various analyses of modernity as a point of departure in order to explore what could be called "decolonizing ethnographies of social movements' decolonizing practices." To this end, the paper seeks to establish a conversation between two novel frameworks for the critical analysis of modernity: actor-network theory (ANT), and the Latin American Modernity/Coloniality/Decoloniality perspective (MCD). While the first one is well known to anthropology, the latter is still largely unknown in the North American academy, despite the fact that its contributions, as I hope to show, offer a very constructive and useful set of insights for anthropology. My contentions are, first, that both ANT and MCD contribute in specific ways to de-colonial thinking and practice; second, that despite differences and tensions between the two frameworks they are largely complementary and have much to offer each other; and third, that the set of inquiries broached by these frameworks, when mutually reconfigured as ANT/MCD, offer a set of enabling, concrete, and perhaps unique contributions to thinking about modernity, ethnography, and the relation between academic knowledge and political practice. The paper is also written in the context of the growing field of the anthropology of social movements, although this will remain largely in the background and will not be discussed as such in the paper. Finally, this inquiry also attempts to envision, in a very preliminary way, the ways in which ANT/MCD could be used to frame the ethnography of encounters between movements in Latin America and the Arab World; this will be done in two particular locations where this encounter seems to be taking place: Chiapas in Mexico, and the Triple Frontier region in South America.