Anthropological Association December 2-6, 2009 Philadelphia, PA
(To be reviewed by
The Association for Political and Legal Anthropology APLA)
AAA 2009
The End of Citizenship in Latin America ?
The Body as a New Site of Political Struggle
Karine Vanthuyne (EHESS/IRIS) and Paula Vasquez Lezama (Université
Paris Descartes/EHESS-IRIS)
In Latin America today, the different dimensions of citizenship, and
the dispute among its various appropriations and definitions largely
constitute the grounds of political struggle. Such a dispute reflects
the trajectory followed by the confrontation between a democratizing,
participatory project of extension of citizenship, in the post Cold
war context, and the neoliberal offensive to curtail the possibilities
that extension announced. How is this dual movement embodied? To what
extent has the body body proper – the biological body – become the
central stage of a contentious process of "post-authoritarian
neoliberal democratization"?
In post-Cold War Latin America, the 1980s have been characterised by
the emergence of new social movements, and the consequent broadening
of the meaning that had traditionally been assigned to "citizenship".
From the environmentalists' movement to the Indigenous Peoples'
movement, all found, in the very idea of being "citizens", not only a
new tool for their specific struggles, but also an unprecedented
platform for solidarity between their battles. Increasingly perceiving
themselves as "co-rulers of the polis", an rising number of
individuals thus began struggling for the establishment and
recognition of new rights to equality and difference.
Opposition groups in Latin America were not alone, however, in
re-signifying the concept of "citizenship". Over the past two decades,
the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, as well as
foreign and local investors, have also appropriated this notion to
reaffirm their political leadership in the region. But in the eyes of
these players, or at least in the way they concretely give shape to
their understanding of citizenship as a political institution,
citizens are not perceived as new social subjects actively identifying
what they consider to be their rights and struggling for their
recognition. In the context of an almost entirely liberalized
capitalist economy, the market is offered as a surrogate instance of
citizenship, and "to be a citizen" thus becomes an individual's
integration into the market as a consumer or a producer, and "to
exercise one's citizenship", to take over the responsibility for the
maintenance of one's community, family or one's self. Hence the
emergence, alongside a more and more exclusive group of "citizen
entrepreneurs", of a more and more inclusive group of "non-citizens",
that is, people who, when they prove unable to maintain themselves,
are characterised as "'needy' human beings to be cared for by private
charity".
By analysing the various ways into which citizenship is represented,
and practiced, in Latin America, this panel intends to grasp the
extent to which the biological body has become the central site of a
dual movement of extension and curtailment of "citizenship". In an
array of contexts of extreme social and political violence, the
physical body is increasingly used as an instrument of political
struggle: "blood strikes" in prisons to request due process,
crucifixions of disaster victims to claim promised dwellings, or
people chaining themselves to the bars of their government's houses,
are examples of what could be qualified as a "biologization" of the
registers of political action. Has the biological body become the new
site of political struggles in contemporary Latin America? Is
physicality used as a new instrument for the recovery of one's
dignity, i.e., the dignity of the political subject claiming for the
fulfilment of his sovereign's political engagements? By analysing the
moral economy that is subjacent to this process of "biologization" of
political action, we will argue that the end of "citizenship" as a
political institution in Latin America has not meant the end of
anthropological studies on "citizens'" action in the region. Quite the
contrary.
We welcome abstracts that address these or similar topics related to
the struggles for citizenship, the sovereignty and the body in Latin
America.
Please send an abstract of no more than 250 words as soon as possible,
but not after February 27, to Karine Vanthuyne
karine.vanthuyne@mail.mcgill.ca<mailto:karine.vanthuyne@mail.mcgill.ca> or
Paula Vasquez: paula75015@gmail.com<mailto:paula75015@gmail.com>
