Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Cristian Alvarado Leyton
Eliane Fernandes Ferreira (Philipps-Universität Marburg)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Workshops
- Location:
- 532
- Sessions:
- Thursday 28 August, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Ljubljana
Short Abstract:
The workshop invites contributions that address the experience and practice of identities/differences in Latin America and its connections to power arrangements from empirical, methodological and theoretical perspectives, superseding separations of materialist and idealist interpretations of experience.
Long Abstract:
Identity and alterity are constantly important but ever changing topics in the anthropology of Latin America as well as for native intellectuals since the Conquista. While anthropological studies have been traditionally limited to indigenous and peasant groups, they have more recently experienced a great widening of studied groups and themes, including the study of: nationalist ideologies and their transformations by indigenous groups, dominant groups and statuses as being white, Afro-Latin and other groups, media, violence, memory, neoliberal transformations and transnational connections. Though the field prospered in many ways, it seems to us that all these differentiating studies still make vital reference to identity and difference. This leads to a better understanding of its plural power-ridden forms within any group, transcending situationally any social boundaries.
In this workshop we want to reflect on the relationship of power, identities and differences, particularly in their interdependence with idealist-discursive and materialist practices. Due to formerly polarised interpretive and political economy approaches, both were commonly investigated as disconnected or uneven domains of life, respectively determining the other. These, however, have increasingly been combined in the last decades, taking into account anthropologists' own self-positioning processes.
This workshop invites contributions that explore subjective and collective experiences of identities/differences in relation to power, the manifold arenas of interaction and relationships in which they unfold from empirical, methodological and theoretical perspectives.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 28 August, 2008, -Cristian Alvarado Leyton
Paper short abstract:
Based on an ethnography of the particular, this paper addresses the significance of German identity and being white for German-Argentinians in Buenos Aires focussing on terms designating both physical appearance and class position.
Paper long abstract:
The paper addresses the significance of "German" identity and being "white" for descendants of German-speaking immigrants in contemporary Buenos Aires. In my fieldwork, designed as an "ethnography of the particular" by a native anthropologist, I am concentrating on three individuals who were born in Argentina. Living in a deeply racialized society, being white hints at a superior social position. The historically reified cultural equation of being German and white and its contemporary ambiguous significance for Argentinians of German descent is analyzed interpretatively. The contradictory social interplay of identifying and differentiating practices of Argentinians of German descent is discussed in discursive as well as materialist realms of their life-worlds. Within the context of porteño culture in the aftermath of the economic and societal crisis of 2001, special reference will be given to terms designating both physical appearance and a person's class position.
Cédric Masse (Research Centre on Political Action - University of Lausanne)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the idealist discourses and materialist practices of inhabitants of an Argentinean slum situated in Buenos Aires, their relationships with the making of local identities and differences, and their connections to institutions of power like the State and external actors.
Paper long abstract:
Based on ethnographic fieldwork realized in an Argentinean slum located in Buenos Aires - among its inhabitants, their organizations and social movements in 2005 - this paper analyses the local and ideological representations, the concrete actions of everyday life, their links with the formation of specific identities and differences, and their interactions with power like the State, international NGOs and the capitalist system in general. So, it studies both real and ideal experiences and their association with identities, differences and power.
The development of the slums in Argentina was the result of a fast process of urbanization and industrialization which started for this country in the 1930s. The capital, Buenos Aires, was converted in the surroundings as the main focus of concentration of the new factories and consequently attracted several waves of migrants from the interior who installed themselves close to them in the abandoned countryside to form the slums. Throughout their history until now, the Argentinean slums were a typical space of alterity. They and their inhabitants were continuously in confrontation against power and excluded from the rest of the Argentinean society. They were the scenery of the constant formation of alternative identities and differences throughout the local discourses and the real practices. I propose to examine these issues in more detail in my paper.
Astrid Stensrud (University of Agder)
Paper short abstract:
I will discuss the negotiation of life and emerging identity formations through economic and ritual activities among bilingual rural urban migrants in the city of Cusco, where indigenous animistic beliefs and rituals are constantly being recreated.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper I will use ethnographic material from my fieldwork in the city of Cusco, Peru, among first and second generation of bilingual rural urban migrants, to discuss how life is negotiated through economic and ritual activities. By focusing on the cultural and ritual practices that take place in a precarious urban economy, in households and in the pilgrimage of Qoyllur Rit'i, I will explore how they interplay with economic and power relations. Through the case study of a beauty salon, I intend to pin down the ways in which everyday practices in the margins of the state and the neoliberal economy, can show us how people negotiate with powers of different spheres - economic competition, state demands, the banks, social obligations, moral values and a powerful animated landscape - in order to make a living. By focusing on how life is lived, I will try to overcome the dichotomizing classifications and the essentializing identity discourses which exist in Peruvian society. Economy, religion (rituals) and language (Quechua - Spanish) are three aspects of the negotiation of emerging identity formations in Cusco. The Catholic Church and the Spanish language still have hegemonic power in the Peruvian society. In the Andean popular Catholicism, however, indigenous animistic beliefs and rituals are blended in or are practiced in addition to catholic rituals. This is not just remnants from an ancient past, it is an active process of constant recreation, and the meanings are constantly changing according to gender, class, cultural background and generation.
Eliane Fernandes Ferreira (Philipps-Universität Marburg)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the cultural processes that the indigenous peoples in Brazil are experiencing, and their endeavour to be accepted within the realities of their own lives and within their own identity. The debate around the discourse of "authenticity" will also be brought up for discussion.
Paper long abstract:
In order to exist under the growing pressure of the dominant society indigenous groups in Brazil increasingly adopt western cultural means and strategies as courses of action, and modern communication technologies to empower and protect their groups and cultures. This often leads to critical reaction from the non-indigenous society, which objects to cultural variations, and questions or observes these changes with irony. My research on the utilization of the Internet by the Brazilian indigenous peoples is strongly linked to the subject of "indigenous identity". In my paper I will discuss the cultural processes that the indigenous societies in Brazil are experiencing, the difficulty of the Brazilian indigenous peoples to stand up to the dominant society and their endeavour to be accepted within the realities of their own lives and within their own identity. The debate around the discourse of "authenticity" will also be brought up for discussion.
Theodora Lefkaditou (Independent Scholar)
Paper short abstract:
In this paper I discuss how the Afro Brazilian capoeira teachers negotiate their identity and experience difference as they display and disport themselves through body performances in a transnational context.
Paper long abstract:
To fully understand the questions of identity formation in Brazil we have to reflect on the processes that take place outside the national borders, in new public spheres and more transnational contexts. Based on fieldwork research among capoeira groups in Barcelona, I argue that the rediscovery and re -invention of the Afro Brazilian culture in Europe is not only interrelated with the processes of a 'new black identity' formation in Bahía but also emerges as a new field where these processes can be carried on and reassessed.
Afro Brazilian capoeiras carry along an important cultural baggage. It consists of practices and ideas that serve as means of empowerment and help them reaffirm their collective identities.
I focus on the narratives concerning the art's past and on the materiality and power of self representation through performance. Both are at the core of Capoeira and are related to struggles over ethnic and national identities in Brazil. In Barcelona they are also related to the expectations and the imagery of the European apprentices. As the art reaches wider cultural arenas it receives new meanings that affect the ways it is remembered, passed on and re invented.
By reflecting on'who embodies the essence of Capoeira', on the reappraisal of the black body and the use of aesthetic elements that are related to the African Diaspora or have strong Afro Brazilian connotations and can be at the same time 'modern' and 'traditional', I explore how essentialist discourses interplay with more cosmopolitan ones forging in the formation of more multifaceted and ambiguous identities.