Communitarian Practices Research Articles

The Heralds of the Gospel: Catholic anti-modernity as new right utopia in Brazil

ABSTRACT The ‘Heralds of the Gospel’ are a Brazilian ultra-Catholic group with a long history of far-right lobbying and activism. Recognized in 2001 by the Vatican as ‘International Private Association of Christ’s Faithfull’, they are also ‘of Pontifical right’ and since 2005 allowed to ordinate their own priests. As ”soldiers of Christ” they are inspired by the Templars and pursue a utopian mission to subvert, transform and ultimately overturn the modern, secular state through their apostolate. The Heralds have also created an international education network and media imperium, underpinned by a robust business model, and are starting to reach out to the US and Europe. The article argues that this kind of exotic, Catholic far-right utopianism matters if we are to understand the diversity of the global new right today, in particular because the Brazilian tradition, which the Heralds refer to, anticipated some of the by now recurrent elements of this strand of the right such as metapolitics and antimodernism. The article explores the century long (neo)integrist tradition that the Heralds grow out of and through their own publications, PR and leaked evidence, show how this tradition is brought to life in the 21st century as communitarian practices and material artifacts.

World Order Transformation from the Grassroots: Global South Social Movements and the Transcendence of Established Approaches to International Change

Abstract In contrast to traditional top-down perspectives, this article aims to shed alternative light on the prospects for change in global order through evaluating how perspectives offered among social movements located in the Global South consider how change can take place beyond established approaches. With reference to perspectives offered among the Global Tapestry of Alternatives, the article elucidates a model of global political change that transcends reformist and revolutionary dynamics, and which bypasses dominant state and intergovernmental institutions. The analysis highlights the ontological divide between these approaches and reformist and revolutionary perspectives, given their pluriversality drawing on concepts that to date have received inadequate attention in the study of international relations. The article further considers how these approaches—given their deep roots in long-established communitarian practices and their pluriversality—may be addressing today's crisis of global order from the bottom-up in ways that may avoid limitations of previous change agendas.

Weaving the Spiderweb: Mujeres Amazónicas and the Design of Anti-Extractive Politics in Ecuador

This article examines the strategic politics of an Indigenous network called las Mujeres Amazónicas (the Amazonian Women) that is resisting the expansion of extractive projects in Ecuador’s Amazon rainforest. It asks, what are the Mujeres Amazónicas’ political strategies to resist extractive occupation and how do they develop and deploy these strategies in their territorial struggle? To answer this question, I analyze how their organizing is characterized by a political design that merges public expressions of resistance – such as mobilizations, protest marches, and other public actions – with communitarian practices that reproduce human and more-than-human life in the Amazon. To illustrate this strategic fusion, the article turns to an image that the Kichwa leader Elvia Dagua wove into an artesanía (handicraft) called la Araña Tejedora (the Weaving Spider). By analyzing Dagua’s artesanía and other self-descriptions of the Mujeres Amazónicas, the article shows how practices of communitarian reproduction are used and transformed by the Amazonian Women, thus enabling their political work and sustaining their lives at the same time. The strategic deployment of reproductive practices reveals how Indigenous women’s cultural and social identities are neither static nor unchangeable. It also illustrates that the Mujeres Amazónicas’ organizing should not be interpreted as a simple example of local politics responding to extractive occupation. By contrast, the article shows how the Mujeres Amazónicas are historical and political subjects with the power to shape the lines of political confrontation vis-à-vis the state and extractive capital, and to build global connections between Indigenous and non-Indigenous ways of living.

Indian Time: Temporality, Gender, Mobility

Indian Time: Temporality, Gender, Mobility

Liturgy as Essentially Poietic

The Christian liturgy is far more than a simple mobilization of a diverse range of artistic expressions in service of its ordinary performance; in fact, the liturgy is in essence a poiesis of the faith. Nor does this poiesis function as a system in harmony with Christian dogma and ethics, because in many regards it transcends these other two approaches. In the midst of the contemporary questioning concerning faith and life, believing and living, the centuries-old poiesis represents an invaluable resource. Truth alone cannot be imposed, nor should it be. More than ever, the symbolic translation of the faith, or to put it in other words, its aesthetic mediation, as expressed in its communitarian practice, will prove itself worthy of faith.

Chicha-Coronavirus: 1-0. On trust, natural disasters, and pandemics in the Ecuadorian Amazon

Sarayaku is an Amazonian Kichwa community on the shores of Río Bobonaza, Ecuador. There is no road connecting it to the rest of the country no electricity and no telephone network. I happened to be there on fieldwork during the times of a double disaster: the COVID19 crisis, and the biggest flood in the community’s living memory. This short article explores how the community managed both the flood and the COVID19 crisis, according to communitarian practices, as well as how relations of trust are built during sad “everyday life” events in the life of an Amazonian community, as well in not-so-everyday-life emergency situations that are more rare, yet more intense when they occur. While trust-building is crucial in any anthropological or sociological research that involves fieldwork, in the relevant bibliography trust-building during everyday life “insignificant” actions has only recently been attributed the value it deserves. At the same time, trust-building during emergencies has also gone largely unnoticed, maybe due to the rarity of events of disaster/emergency in the lifetime of an Amazonian community.

The Nevada Water Law of 1913: A Populist Response to Progressivism

AbstractDuring the latter half of the 19th century, Americans who settled the arid West needed to compromise with their populist notions of individualism derived from the Jeffersonian ethic of the early 19th century and adopt progressive communitarian practices in order to provide water by means of irrigation. The struggle to deal with water rights in Nevada, culminating in passage of the Nevada Water Law of 1913, particularly illustrated this conflict between individualism and communitarianism.

Prácticas y representaciones de estudiantes de enfermería en torno al rol enfermero

Objectives: Describe the practices and representations regarding the role of the nurse in a group of students. Material and Methods: This work was done from a qualitative approach with a group of nursing students from a private university located in Rosario (Argentina) during 2018. Semi-structurated interviews were conducted. Results: It was observed that a significant group of students had a partial look about the nurse role before entering the university, their perception were centered around care tasks – fundamentally – hygiene, comfort, vital signs control and little complex techniques. The perception of all the students related to the nurse role became more wide and complex since the first days at the university. A high valuation of the pre-professional practices is observed and, in the case of the communitarian practices, the role of educator that a nurse must built emerges with significant force. Conclusions: The practices made since the first year of the career are considered fundamentals as training spaces, incorporating since the first formative instances the relevance in the link nurse-patient. For the students it is very enriching what it’s learned in the practices in relation to other students, patients, nurses and teachers recognizing that the experience of what was lived is associated with the changes in the attitudes and a growth in the development of the professional profile.

Marxism and Anarchism: Their Contradictions

The defeat of the revolutions of 1848 marked the replacement of radical republicanism with Marxism and anarchism, which became the two great streams of the left. Seemingly, the ensuing titanic struggle between anarchism and socialism had been resolved by the Russian Revolution. Since the early 1990s and the implosion of the Soviet Union, anarchist thought, as exemplified by the Occupy Movement, has regained widespread currency. Anarchism offers no potential of overcoming capitalism. Marxism is essentially incompatible with anarchism, with few possibilities of collaboration. A strategic vision of a renewed left, informed by Marxism, would benefit from incorporating some practices identified with anarchism—such as more systematic democratic processes and the fostering of communities evidencing genuine concern for their members' cultural and material needs. The scarcity of these communitarian practices in Communist countries and Communist parties outside of the socialist bloc contributed to their failure in the 20th century. Read More: https://guilfordjournals.com/doi/abs/10.1521/siso.2018.82.3.360

Mapuche education and situated learning in a community school in Chile

The article analyses the Mapuche language and culture teaching practices of a rural school in the Chilean Araucanía region run by Mapuche teachers, aimed at reinforcing the language, culture and identity of children. Based on a comparative study of two school ethnographies, the article shows and discusses the ways children learn to be Mapuche by participating of social and communitarian practices reproduced in school. While teaching of traditional core subjects is conducted in standard ways, Mapuche language and culture are taught through the recreation of modes of living, producing and reproducing indigenous traditional knowledge that normally occur in family and community. The maintenance of this ‘bicultural pedagogy’ is grounded on an epistemological claim on the indivisibility of contents from its forms of transmission.

Teaching critical thinking: Cultural challenges and strategies in Singapore

Among the challenges faced by educators in promoting critical thinking is that of cultural compatibility. Using Singapore as an illustrative case study, this paper explores the cultural challenges and recommended strategies for the teaching of critical thinking in schools. The research for this study is based on a theoretical framework that focuses on two dominant practices of critical thinking: confrontational and individualistic on the one hand, and collegial and communal on the other. Research data shows that the main cultural challenges are the social expectations of teachers as knowledge transmitters and a perception that critical thinking is essentially adversarial. The recommended strategies are the utilisation of cooperative learning strategies and the provision of a safe learning environment. There are two major implications arising from this research study. The first is a need for policymakers and educators to be cognisant of cultural constraints in the teaching of critical thinking. The second is the significance of teacher efficacy to engender student engagement and successful learning within socio‐cultural constraints. The Singapore experience adds to the existing literature by highlighting the existence and significance of communitarian practices of critical thinking in an Asian context.

Deep Politics: Community Adaptations to Political Clientelism in Twenty-First-Century Mexico

The specific contribution of this study is to explore how a communitarian lifeworld prepares the ground for practices of political clientelism without requiring the “foundational favor” noted in other contexts. Based on the encounter between ethnographies from two different communities of the Mesoamerican tradition in Mexico, the article argues that this lifeworld is forged by the habitual ways in which most collective tasks are carried out, that is, by forming and participating in networks. First, we offer a concrete description of the operation of two problem-solving networks of political clientelism in these communities. These networks are considered legitimate since they appear to be part of the communitarian practices. Second, we observe that the state often fails to reach out to the citizens with many social benefits, and we maintain that the problem-solving networks bridge the gap between the citizens and the state. Third, we argue that the ethnographic approach has been of paramount importance in reaching these findings, which are hardly attainable without this method. We consider that the workings of the clientelist networks represent a deep expression of people’s communitarian lifeworlds.

Skillful Striving: Holism and the Cultivation of Excellence in Sports and Performative Endeavors

Skillful Striving investigates the nature of the cultivation of excellence, the conditions that render it possible, and its potential for inspiration from the perspective of enactive wisdom—one that by enacting lays down a way or path. Performative endeavors whose telos centrally involves physical performance—sports, martial and performing arts, crafts–—are the focus of this inquiry. These are privileged ways for a holistic cultivation of our talents and limitations. The main philosophical thrust can be summarized as a “thick holism” where naturalism and normativity combine. Skillful Striving is concerned with an integrative bodymind and its ways of knowing and experiencing that issue forth from active engagements with the world, and whose goal is defined by certain standards of qualitative performance that ultimately aim at excellence. The process of cultivation relies on a rich epistemic landscape where skills are coupled to virtues in pragmatic contexts. These contexts are ecologically broad in the sense that our environment, broadly construed, constitutes these. Ultimately, this process results in admirable performances by, and exemplary character for, the enactors. Endowed with unique gifts, it is argued that they should become exemplary in the full sense of their lives. Laudable character is built on discipline, responsibility, and a social framework that provides personal paradigms and standards of excellence. A key element is that this cultivation happens in and through our moving and acting as holistic, integrative bodyminds. Eastern ways or paths, and especially Japanese do, are modes of self-cultivation that are prominent in this regard. They enable working within the framework of this bodymind where its unity is gradually achieved through performance. Importantly for this study, these active endeavors are performer-centered yet deeply communitarian practices. In the end, Skillful Striving is an exploration of how we may flourish as members of practice communities that encourage open, responsible exploration, and the cultivation of our abilities as lifelong quests for human excellence.

Unpacking race, party and class from below: Surveying citizenship in the Msunduzi municipality

On the basis of a 2008 survey conducted in the Msunduzi municipality in the KwaZulu-Natal province, the paper begins an exploration of the character of popular politics and citizenship in South Africa. Embracing a ‘citizen-centred’ methodology informed by participation literatures, and sensibilities to the ‘work in progress’ character of African cities from urban studies debates, the paper interrogates the mainstream liberal-participatory model of citizenship in South Africa, and the critiques of current South African politics informed by these notions, specifically the ‘racial census’ and ‘dominant party syndrome’ analyses. Taken together these views can be read as characterising South African politics as a game for individual citizens governed by liberal rules, but played by racial and/or partisan groups in exclusionary ways, thus distorting liberal democratic mechanisms of representation and accountability. The paper also examines evidence for an alternative class-based analysis of one aspect of citizenship, namely, protest against poor local governance.The paper looks to unpack this ‘liberal model versus racialised communitarian practice’ imaginary by, on the one hand, demonstrating the ways in which citizenship is not racialised, or is asymmetrically racialised. Indeed, other than party allegiances and trust in key offices, very little by way of what citizens do, believe or think of themselves follows discrete racial lines. Similar points hold for partisanship too. On the other hand, the paper does not redeem the liberal-democratic model as there is also evidence of trust in government when it is not deserved based on performance, but more importantly, evidence that citizens embrace ‘informal’ means to secure their rights. A good example of this is protestors who are also more likely to vote than non-protestors. Taken together, these findings affirm both the way in which the racial and partisan legacy of the past is being undone by new institutions and practices, and suggest the complex intersection of these with networks of personal relations which characterise the local politics of most African cities.

Elections in the Context of Everyday Practices: Views from a Pueblo Originario in Mexico City 2006

Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork this article discusses the 2006 elections in Mexico as they transpired in a pueblo originario (native town) in Mexico City. The main topic of the article is to explore people’s motivation for voting, given that the ethnographic material demonstrates massive distrust in politicians and elections, whereas electoral statistics reveal high rates of participation. The article thus explores the meaning of voting for the subjects, using a lifeworld approach. Notions of electoral fraud and vote‐buying are paradoxically found to contribute towards electoral participation; these notions are embedded in a widespread trickster culture which is explored in the article. A survey of electoral participation in the village testifies to a higher participation rate among the natives than the non‐natives, especially among the native women. The article suggests that this difference may be understood in the context of the lifeworld of participation and reciprocation which is created through the communitarian practices in the native community. These practices are first and foremost ritual, constituting the exercise of a communitarian religion in which masses of natives participate on an everyday basis. The elections may be seen as an extension of these ritual practices. At another level, the article also makes a methodological point; in the study of politics, elections and democracy the author argues the importance of reaching beyond the conventional approaches, researching the perspectives, meanings and experiences of the subjects themselves, which may be achieved by the lifeworld approach.

From Colonial Pluralism to Postcolonial Multiculturalism: Race, State Formation and the Question of Cultural Diversity in Malaysia and Singapore

AbstractIn postcolonial societies, multiculturalism is a historical problem conditioned by colonial racial knowledge and state formation on the one hand, and by the ethnic conflicts of decolonization on the other. The reality and legacy of colonial racisms in colonized societies were not straightforward affairs. Anthropological knowledge was crucial for the construction of colonial state institutions, where racial ethnography determined the way each native ethnic group was ruled. In turn, nationalist consciousness developed along communitarian ethnic lines. The inheritance of the colonial racial state by nationalists created the conditions for postcolonial ethnic conflict. Drawing on the acclaimed Malaysia and Singapore cases of successful postcolonial management of ethnic conflict, I show the transition from colonial pluralism to postcolonial multiculturalism, in which nationalist leaders tapped into communitarian practices, scripted cultural identities and transformed themselves into a transcultural elite to maintain authoritarian rule through state multiracialism. However, globalization today is creating a new pluralism that threatens this multiracialism and presenting opportunities for democratization.

Risk, trust and knowledge networks in farmers’ learning

This study reports on New Zealand dairy farmers’ access to and use of information as mediated through conditions of risk and trust within the context of their interpersonal social networks. We located participants’ reports of their information use within their perceived environments of trust and risk, following Giddens's [1990. The consequences of modernity. Polity Press, Stanford, CA] typology of trust and risk in pre-modernity and modernity. The research participants were constant users of interpersonal and print information from numerous sources, and monitored their incoming data in the light of strategic needs, reflecting their roles as both farming practitioners and business owners. Socio-spatial knowledge networks (SSKNs) combine individuals’ explanatory cognitive models of information acquisition and use with a micro-geographical analysis of their interpersonal networks. The participants showed characteristics of pre-modern, modern and even post-modern society in respect of their use of complex interactional forms, as well as a blending of individualistic and communitarian practices and concerns in their professional and personal lives.

Factores de riesgo sobre la morbimortalidad materna y en menores de 5 años en el Centro de Salud Borbón de la ciudad de Esmeraldas-Ecuador, durante el año 1994

A retrospective, analytical study was made, during the year 1994. Our objectives were those to know and to identify the factors of risk more significant and establishing if the communitarian practices and beliefs implied probability of maternal and infantile morbimortalidad. The study was made it in the areas of health of Borbon community in the city of Emerald-Ecuador, designed a survey directed to the pregnant women, another one to the mothers of children alive or died in the last year, validated through a test pilot. The survey was applied on a random sample of 200 children smaller of 5 years, 83 embarrassed and a group of 7 mothers with children died by hypothetical causes.

Criminological ideas and the South African transition

The struggles surrounding apartheid and the quest for democracy have had an important impact on the development of criminological thought in South Africa. This paper describes the three major tendencies in South African criminological thought: the formerly dominant Afrikaner nationalist criminology, legal reformism and a critical criminology with a commitment to democratic and communitarian practice. It traces the opportunities for development that the immediate transition to democracy offered to the latter two tendencies in particular. It then sketches the extent to which the ideals of the various tendencies have been met since the first democratic election in 1994 and outlines the obstacles to their implementation that have emerged. In conclusion, the paper considers the prognoses for the various tendencies and warns that, notwithstanding the undoubted achievements of South African critical criminology, an undiscriminating reliance on the communitarian ideals of the transition may make it difficult for the South African criminal justice system to meet the challenges it now faces.