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Week 13 – “Towards an Uncertain Future”

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Max Cameron talked about the “democratic experimentation” that is happening in Latin America today, largely as a byproduct of the USA withdrawing from policing the region (coups are more so a thing of the Cold War at this point). One of takeaways I got from this is that the biggest threat to democracy in Latin America today isn’t autocratic regimes or coups but rather weak institutions and the power of crime and elites. One example in a source I found of “experimentation” is Sao Paulo government’s attempt at restructuring the public school system in the state. Students began to protest, and with a huge contribution from social media (#OcupaEscola, #NãoFecheMinhaEscola), the government revoked its plan. Here is the source for more details:

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/democraciaabierta/brazilian-experiments-in-latin-american-political-la/

Max Cameron also talked about the diminishing inequality in Latin America. I remember before leaving for Guatemala researching about the huge disparity between the Guatemalan indigenous population and the non-indigenous population. From my own experience, it was quite jarring to go from a rural hub near Antigua to a Starbucks in Guatemala city. That was really my first focused exposure to the region, and based off what I have read recently, the Covid pandemic threatens to exasperate the already existing poverty and inequalities. For a historically unequal region, redistribution is a common but fervent political talking point, and this pandemic is certainly looking to be a huge reshuffling of wealth in many countries.

This also pertains to the environment, which Alec Dawson also touches on (in this case the Geomorphology class I’m taking comes in handy). The year I went to Guatemala was the first year that a garbage dump (on the trip’s schedule to visit) had actually been revamped by the government. There were now many vehicles operating there, guard towers to sway children from sneaking in, and a new layout for the landfill. On this account, Cameron says:

“Democracy is not so good at addressing the needs of those who don’t vote” such as the environment, future generations, etc.

I was really interested by Bolivia’s decision to give the environment its own rights (Pacha Mama) as I had never thought of this before, but it does seem to address Cameron’s query. This also reminded me of my anthropology course, where I’ve learned about many tribes in Latin America. Their ways of live often did rub against the western paradigm of “more is better” and “getting ahead”.

My question is:

How can we find a balance between a government model of “extraction” and consumption, which is beneficial for lifting people out of poverty and boosting the economy, and a more ecologically sustainable alternative (“buena vivre”)?

Week 6: Citizenship and Rights in the New Republics

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This week’s lecture brought up that there is a gap between the abstract domain of rights and the practical integration of them. Even then, once they are incorporated, it may be for alternative motives. For example, Dawson noted how some formerly enslaved black slave owners in Haiti embraced emancipation not for the virtue of it but rather because liberated slaves could be recruited by them during the civil war that encroached upon Haiti in the 1790s (78).

What I noticed from this week is how much it relates to the anthropology course I’m taking. Through both courses I have seen how past dogmatic European beliefs can have repercussions for the present. Pseudoscience such as phrenology, eugenics, and theories such as social Darwinism were used to justify racism, sexism, and other discrimination, culminating in systems such as the “limpieza de sangre” (75). My anthropology class also touched upon this notion that race as a biological reality is fictive but remains as a social construct. I  think this history of fearing/disdaining the “other” can indeed be attributed largely to such metaphysical tenets – dogmas that exist only in our minds, but that have practical implications nonetheless.

I saw further proof of this in Judith’s work. When she boxed the role of a woman into a traditional framework, where submission and servitude to husband and children was paramount, I think her argument stemmed from a religious doctrine that really has almost no basis in reality – like race, the role of gender is socially determined, not a biological reality. This, I would think, also would apply to slavery. The act of slavery is so cruel and degrading that I think it’d only make sense for slave traders to imagine such mindless justifications for it – regardless of how warranted these justifications were. It is rather recently in human history where our beliefs shifted from degrading the ‘other’ to a more inclusive attempt to understand the ‘other’.

But the legacy of slavery and past grievances remain in the Americas nonetheless. I would say the difficulty with this is that the history of slavery and abuses are tangled up in a miasma between the practical and abstract. Dawson noted how emancipation was an intricate meld of “outside pressures, internal elite conflicts, and pressure from slaves themselves” – all contending for tangible resources and power gain (80). On the other hand, however, are the ideologies that justified these practices, which I think are much harder to eliminate, even once the process of integrating rights has already begun. It seems to me that laws often change faster than a population’s ethos, and therein lies the problem.

My question would be in what ways are we in modern times still bound by abstract dogmas that hinder change?