ANTHR 7732 - The New Latin American State

(crosslisted) LATA 7732

Spring. 4 credits. Letter grades only.

Co-meets with ANTHR 4732/LATA 4732.

C. Garces.

Latin America today is the site of multiple utopian and practical experiments in governance. This seminar will problematize the simultaneous growth of neo-liberal, neo-socialist, and para-state formations. Using ethnography, documentary film, and theories of Latin American geopolitics, we will explore how dominant paradigms for political economy and fantasies of control emerge within contests over charisma, power, and legitimate violence. Why have indigenous and ethno-racialized social movements, or the return of the traditionally repressed, figured in projects of national or counter-national revitalization? What roles have self-defense organizations played in the re-definition of civil society? What does it mean to advocate for ‘cultural diversity’ or ‘rights of nature’? Why have discourses of ‘security’ and ‘human rights’ come to be so charged in state bureaucracies and horizontalist political associations alike? This seminar will delve into a wide ranging array of texts that probe these and other questions about the new Latin American state.