Tag: neoliberalism

Cosmovision and Justice

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For Bolivia, the 1990s neoliberal reforms brought privatization of resources such as water, electricity and transportation.  As neoliberalism caused growing inequality and exploitation of those resources and the people who used them, tensions surrounding privatization grew.  This culminated in two large movements: the Water Wars of 2000, and the Gas Wars of 2003. The motivation behind the movements was the indigenous people who were losing their land and cultural practices due to the extraction of resources.  In the article “Good living for whom? Bolivia’s climate justice movement and the limitations of indigenous cosmovisions,” Fabricant explains that this brought up the important question of how indigenous ways of life were supposed to be protected.
As a result of the surge in indigenous activism, Evo Morales rose to popular eye and was elected president on the platforms of revitalising Bolivia through social movements.  The election of Morales made the Bolivian left very hopeful that his indigenous perspective was going to be the ideology that saved Bolivia from a climate crisis and be an example for the world.  In practice, Morales ended up ignoring the consulta previa Fabricant argues that independent of the fact that Morales lost sight of the indigenous activism he promised, it is not possible to apply indigenous cosmovisions or societal structures to national or global platforms.  Speaking specifically of the Aymara organization of labor, the ayllu, Fabricant points out that these systems were developed in the Andes, for the Andes. The ayllu system works to keep stability within communities, ensures that no one group suffers more in a drought year or in a bad livestock year, and upholds respect for nature.  While this is a great model, it is not up to indigenous groups to educate about, and implement solutions for problems that colonialism, neoliberalism, and globalization caused.
Fabricant describes the economic and social structure of the ayllu in relationship to the exploitative extraction policies of the Bolivian government that indigenous communities throughout Bolivia were opposing in order to preserve their relationship with the land.  This structure brings up the larger theme of the indigenous cosmovisions, or worldviews, that define indigenous cultures separate from western ideology. Cosmovision is extremely important concept for the indigenous activists as they take on the burden of educating the elite and general public to further their cultural needs.  This concept is the justification for all political demands because their worldview impacts the way they move through spaces and interact with structures of power. Indigenous language, values, upbringing, and beliefs all shape a person differently than western culture.
Different communities, experiencing different cultural and political contexts, advocate for different demands based on their specific needs. During Bolivia’s climate wars, multiple groups had conflicting demands based on the differences in their communities position within the economic and social structures.  The systems of power, when negotiating with indigenous groups, are quick to try and generalize the demands of indigenous people but their cosmovisions are not the same. Decolonization can not begin without the acknowledgement that each indigenous group has a unique cosmovision that must be respected and taken into account when dismantling hegemonic institutions.

Theme: Neoliberalism

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Neoliberalism has been a central theme that we have examined throughout our course.

This term has been brought up throughout many of the readings both about Bolivia and Columbia.We have discussed how neoliberal ideologies promoted the privatization of services (water, gas, etc.) in Bolivia in the 1960’s and 70’s. The essay by McNeish, “Extraction, Protest and Indigeneity in Bolivia: The TIPNIS Effect” discusses a modern effort in Bolivia to “forge together a new socialist alternative to neoliberalism through the ALBA (McNeish, 222). The article discusses the influence of the neoliberal era in Bolivia on modern day politics and policies. In order to properly understand criticisms to this capitalist notion of progress we must understand what neoliberalism ideology promotes and how it functioned in Latin America.
Further, it is important to understand neoliberalism and its effects on land conflicts and reform in Bolivia and elsewhere in Latin America. Neoliberal ideals spurred many land reforms with the goals of pursuing a profitable extractive economy. In Yashar’s article “Contesting Citizenship,” she discusses how Latin American indigenous communities commonly voiced opposition to state reforms that had neoliberalism as the “symbolic target” (Yashar, 36). In addition, she discusses how neoliberalism “has become synonymous with the culpable state and has enabled indigenous movements to target the state for retribution, justice, and guarantees” (Yashar, 36).
In summary, we should define neoliberalism to understand its influence on the history of political and economic state goals in Latin America throughout the 1900’s. Neoliberalism could operate also as a theme and so it should be up for debate whether to define neoliberalism as a key term or key theme in our syllabus.

Contextualizing the Progress of Indigenous’ Struggles in the 21st century

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In the course that set the foundation for this collective project to be made, we critically analyzed contemporary issues unfolding today with real consequences on the lives of many peoples. As a class, we aimed to engage with the literature in a critical way while being conscious of our subjectivity and positionality to these issues. We apply this understanding of our own work to our critical analysis of the literature we have engaged with in this course as their personal temporality and own biases influenced the works they created and the conclusions they reached. In the first week of our course, we explored three texts that contextualize the hopes, successes, and failures of indigenous struggles in Latin America. In 1998, Deborah J. Yashar was hopeful about the radical changes that could be achieved through the new indigenous mobilizations in the last two decades of the twentieth century. She understood these new waves of increasing political organization by indigenous communities as the radical continuation of previous mobilizations to achieve material survival. In her narrative, these new indigenous mobilizations would fulfill the incomplete political liberalization and state reforms that previous mobilizations began but were unable to complete. Specifically, Yashar understood these mobilizations as new phenomena of contestation for the practice and terms of citizenship in Latin American democracies. Yashar is representative of an optimistic group of scholars in the late 20th century encouraged by the emerging democracies throughout Latin America, and the radical social organization that sought to define these different democracies. However, this optimism would be stifled by the rise of neoliberalism in the region.
In the 21st century, the consequences of the indigenous movements of the late 20th century were beginning to unfold and their successes as well as failures had lessons for new radical groups continuing the struggle against systems of oppression for marginalized groups in Latin America. To clarify the struggle these groups were engaged in, Nancy Grey Postero and Leon Zamosc’s essay label what Yashar understood as an indigenous contestation over citizenship as the Indian question. Postero and Zamoc ask through the Indian question “what kinds of rights indigenous people should be granted as citizens of democratic nation-states” (Postero, 2006: 5). While Yashar was mostly hopeful about the change that indigenous organization could achieve, the authors of this paper hold the opinion that the effect of these movements is dependent on the context of the state in which they form and they highlight the importance of plurality, history, and state relations in the claims and goals of indigenous movements. The diversity of conditions across Latin America makes it impossible to draw universal conclusions on the success and failures of the wave of indigenous social movements in the late twentieth century throughout the region.
Charles R. Hale’s article offers a more a critical assessment of the impact of the indigenous mobilizations of the late 20th century. In his article, he reassesses the effect of these mobilizations nine years later as incomplete. He argues that the new indigenous mobilizations at the end of the 20th century did not create a new citizenship, as Yashar predicted, but rather ended up opening spaces for some forms of indigeneity but continuing to exclude the majority. He critiques Yashar’s work for not accounting for neoliberalism’s cultural project and its violent relations with indigenous culture. While Portero and Zamosc’s article recognizes neoliberalism as a factor to take into account in the Indian question, they concentrate more on the political and economic dimensions of neoliberalism and similarly fail to fully recognize the importance of the cultural dimension of the neoliberal project. Hale uses the term “Indio permitido” to describe the way indigenous movements are being domesticated and divided by the granting of cultural rights by state’s with neoliberal projects. These articles summarize how the recent organization of indigenous groups around their indigeneity has opened promising conversations and some amount of progress in the granting of rights, but there are still questions about the progress that can be achieved when working through the colonizing states whose neoliberal projects demand the cultural erasure of indigenous culture and peoples or assimilated versions of who they are.
References
Hale, Charles. “Rethinking indigenous politics in the era of the “indio permitido”.” NACLA Report on the Americas 38.2 (2004): 16-21.
Postero, Nancy Grey, and Leon Zamosc. “The struggle for indigenous rights in Latin America.” Journal of Latin American Anthropology 11.1 (2006): 208-210.
Yashar, Deborah J. “Contesting citizenship: Indigenous movements and democracy in Latin America.” Comparative politics (1998): 23-42.