Latin American countries regularly experience turbulent political alternations, which are both part of and influence the social dynamics underway on the continent. A collective work which has just been published by the Presses de l’Université de Rennes, “Critical alternations and ordinary dominations in Latin America”strives to shed light on the intertwining between the political and the social, through nine surveys combining “top-down” and “bottom-up” approaches. We offer here an extract from the introduction, where the four specialists who edited this publication explain the questions at the origin of the book and the methods used to provide answers.
Since the Cuban Revolution of 1959, Latin America is often thought of through the most spectacular events and feats of arms that mark its political history. Vast protest mobilizations and insurrections, guerrillas and revolutions, coups d’état and military dictatorships have punctuated the last decades.
In Europe, partly due to a relationship with the region steeped in “familiar exoticism” (that is to say where linguistic and more generally cultural proximity tends to give the illusion of a better grip on the realities on the ground), the most ordinary representations of Latin American politics are often much more clear-cut than in other regions of the world. Between the weight of certainties and the strength of emotions, the regular upheavals in political scenes across the Atlantic unleash passions and polarize political-media, activist and academic discourses.
From the mid-1990s, in a context of struggles against neoliberal governments, this dialectic of fascination-repulsion intensified. These struggles took multiple faces : from Central American indigenous resistance to that of the Andean countries, including the Brazilian landless peasants, the struggles of the unemployed (piqueteros) and Argentine workers; from the founding of Zapatista communities in Chiapas (Mexico) to the constituent processes and “revolutions” claiming to be “socialism of the 21ste century” (Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador), through participatory democracy in Porto Alegre (Brazil). Populist if not authoritarian for some, democratic and emancipatory for others, the movements associated with “turn left” of the 2000s thus aroused of the reactions contrasted. From 2015, we witnessed a “right turn” which led to its share of symmetrically opposite reactions.
Finally, in recent years, immense feminist mobilizations (Argentina, Chile) and multifaceted anti-government protests have punctuated the region (Venezuela, Nicaragua, Chile, Ecuador, Bolivia, Colombia). This context of polarization has renewed European politicians and media’s tendency to romanticize or denigrate current Latin American political actors.
Moreover, it is clear that despite the frequency of partisan reconfigurations and charismatic companies claiming to ward off chronic economic and political instability, the region remains one of the most unequal and violent in the world. Class injustices, racial tensions and patriarchal violence are perpetuated. Thus, beyond the multiple forms that politics takes, the social structures of domination remain relatively stable. This is the paradoxical observation which is the basis of our reflections.
Identify and think together about critical alternations and ordinary dominations
If social science research is not always impervious to the polarization caused by Latin American politics, it has been able to follow two main analytical trends to interpret regional developments in recent decades.
The first gives a central place to the characterization of the nature of political regimes. Since the 1980s, “democratic transitions” and “conflict exits” have been the subject of work on the transformations of the institutions that host them, the quality or stability of their “performance” and the adaptations of populations to the role of citizen. active in new democracies, more or less liberal.
From the 2000s, a series of “top-down” analyzes looked at the crises and alternations experienced in different countries, the social frameworks produced by the neoliberal reforms of the 1980s and 1990s, the arrival of progressive governments in power following a wave of social movements, “populism”. The study of “progressive” modes of governance which have become less and less pluralistic – even authoritarian – was followed by that of the return of the right in certain countries and their very great heterogeneity, its more classic liberal variants to more conservative or reactionary forms, otherwise fascist. If this work provides information on the macrosociological variables and trends that run through these societies, they can crush, under the weight of general categories (and in particular those of classification of regimes), the complexity of phenomena whose logic goes beyond those of cyclical political upheavals.
A second research perspective instead explores the different political, economic and social developments in Latin American societies from the observation of non-institutional actors and using a “bottom-up” approach. If these analyzes do not claim to do without the study of the political field and its influence on society and its future, they are above all concerned with closely observing the dynamics constructed by other actors, generally under the angles of “participation” and collective protest mobilizations. This is a broad and plural range of work which seeks to grasp the government of the social, its resilience and mutations, based on its heterogeneous expressions in the concrete experience of mostly dominated groups. However, these analyzes tend not to take sides – or only implicitly – regarding the theorization of the evolution of structures of domination. The rise to generality is all the more difficult as so-called “subaltern” fields are often confined to monographic productions. All in all, we often witness a tacit validation of pre-existing macrosocial analytical frameworks in terms of regime classification and, by extension, their overlap with left/right divides and the biases they tend to reproduce.
Thus, if it seems necessary to us to draw on these research traditions, it is with the objective of questioning and deepening them jointly. In fact, we see that societies in the region regularly experience changes in government that can be described as critical. Critical, first of all, in the sense that these are commonly assimilated to more or less radical breaks with the past, whether they take the form of “refoundations” or “hardening of the regime”, “revolutions” or “against -revolutions”. Critical, then, because these alternations very often take place following moments of more or less intense political crisis, when newly elected leaders and governments claim to translate, adapt or, on the contrary, ward off the protest demands that emerged during the crises. Critical, finally, because in certain cases they lead quite quickly to new open crises.
However, whatever forms they have taken, these critical alternations have only marginally affected the ordinary logics of exploitation and domination in the region. Although in different ways and with different temporalities from one country to another, we note the reproduction of profoundly unequal economic and social structures, in which the accumulation of wealth by some produces the exclusion of others. Also, these continuities were able to take place within less and less pluralistic juridicopolitical frameworks. This is a dynamic that largely transcends partisan divisions between leaders of countries in the region.
Editions of Rennes University Presses
For a multidisciplinary and ethnographic approach to alternations and dominations
To understand critical alternations and their relationships to ordinary dominations, a multidisciplinary and empirical-inductive approach based on ethnographic field research is essential. Different research traditions in the social sciences can be mobilized to achieve this end: work relating to the analysis of political regimesof the crises and institutional transformationsTHE research on the state and the public policiesTHE works on the political organizations And collective action in his various expressions unions and protesters, research on inequalities and their daily consequences on individualsTHE social groups and the spaces.
Several disciplines, whose boundaries diverge depending on the country and over time, have a significant contribution on several of these themes in Latin American areas. For some, these themes renew their research, like anthropology, history, economics, law through very similar research questions, even sometimes through interdisciplinary approaches which decompartmentalize knowledge and skills. The meeting point between these different disciplines, which allows us to offer a multidisciplinary look at critical alternations and ordinary dominations in Latin America, is the practice of ethnography as a research method.
Indeed, the various works brought together in this work are constructed from field surveys in which the various researchers observed and sometimes participated in constructing the social dynamics that they set out to study. If the relationship to the field is a central questionit is also the way in which it influences the choice of categories of analysis and the definition of research problems which nourishes collective reflection. Thus arises the question of traffic of methodologies and knowledge. Ways of entering and existing on the ground on both sides of the Atlantic dialogue with each other to understand what politics does to society.
Finally, our particular attention to ordinary dominations is partly nourished by the intersectional approach. Aware of the intersections of various forms of domination, and of the specificities of each form of possible hybridization of minoritization by class, race and gender, we conceive of ordinary dominations as acting in a system, while being dependent on specific contexts. In this sense, the various expectations specific to periods of crisis and political alternation are an important variable for the understanding the evolution of these phenomena of domination, otherization and ministration.
