The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Latin America

by David Lehmann (Editor)

Overview

This book presents a challenging view of the adoption and co-option of multiculturalism in Latin America from six scholars with extensive experience of grassroots movements and intellectual debates. It raises serious questions of theory, method, and interpretation for both social scientists and policymakers on the basis of cases in Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, and Ecuador. Multicultural policies have enabled people to recover the land of their ancestors, administer justice in accordance with their traditions, provide recognition as full citizens of the nation, and promote affirmative action to enable them to take the place in society which is theirs by right. The message of this book is that while the multicultural response has done much to raise the symbolic recognition of indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples nationally and internationally, its application calls for a profound reappraisal in spheres such as land, gender, institutional design, and equal opportunities. Written by scholars with long-term and in-depth engagement in Latin America, the chapters show that multicultural theories and policies, which assume racial and cultural boundaries to be clear-cut, overlook the pervasive reality of racial and cultural mixture and place excessive confidence in identity politics.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781137509574
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan US
Publication date:	09/20/2016
Series:	Studies of the Americas
Edition description:	1st ed. 2016
Pages:	230
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x (d)

About the Author

David Lehmann, Emeritus, University of Cambridge, UK, is a former Director of the Centre for Latin American Studies and Reader in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge, UK. His research and publications span the fields of development, religion, and ethnicity, especially in Chile, Ecuador, Mexico, and Brazil. He is the author of Democracy and Development in Latin America (1990), Struggle for the Spirit: Religious transformation and Popular Culture in Brazil and Latin America (1996), and editor, with Humeira Iqtidar, of Fundamentalist and Charismatic Movements (4 volumes, 2011).

Table of Contents

Introduction; David Lehmann .- 1. Multiculturalism as a juridical weapon: The use and abuse of the concept of ‘pueblo originario’ in agrarian conflicts in Michoacán, Mexico; Luis Vázquez .- 2. Paradoxes of Multiculturalism in Bolivia; Andrew Canessa .- 3. The ethnicisation of agrarian conflicts: an Argentine case; Maité Boullosa-Joly .- 4. Inventing rights of our own: women transcending the opposition between the indigenous and the universal; Manuela Picq .- 5. The demand for recognition and access to citizenship: ethnic labelling and territorial restructuring in Brazil; Véronique Boyer .- 6. The politics of naming; David Lehmann

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Students of Latin American societies—particularly Latin Americans themselves, but also those from the global North—are beginning to realize that those categories and ideas we have always employed are not an easy fit with the realities we encounter on the ground across the continent. Polarized notions of “race,” facile definitions of who is “indigenous,” and shallow applications of the notion of “multiculturalism” hinder us from capturing the complexities of late-modern Latin America. The Crisis of Multiculturalism proves a bird’s-eye view across Latin America, with in-depth examinations of Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, and Mexico, which goes a ways toward disabusing us of these assumptions. This richly documented and enormously detailed collection of case studies that are astutely analyzed within broader national contexts, makes evident the fact that the categories and concepts we are accustomed to apply to Latin America do not help us to make adequate sense of what we see before us: expansive and contradictory uses of the term “indigenous” that at first appear to us as time-worn rights but later are proven to drive internal conflict and promote exclusion; people who carry with them their ethnic identifications when they move into new spaces, their rhetoric evolving into facsimiles of colonial discourses; others who, despite being fitted into the “indigenous” category, prefer to employ other modes of self-identification; enormous chasms between the rights promulgated in new constitutions and the lack of benefits accruing to groups on the ground, whose own forms of identification are overshadowed by those of more powerful sectors; government policies promoting racial inclusion that fetter the grassroots engagement of identity politics. It is as though our northern notions of multiculturalism were inapplicable in Latin America, as, indeed, they seem to be, according to the authors of this intense and probing volume.” (Joanne Rappaport, Professor of Anthropology, Georgetown University, US)