This paper deploys an anthropological concept of "theopolitics" to reflect on the political work done and undone by the action of grace during a dam conflict in the Aysén region of Chilean Patagonia. ...Exploring procedural affinities between the state's instruments for regulating environmental conflict and theories of assemblage that trace relations to overcome Western ontologies, I suggest that their convergent demand for relations to be rendered visible as the condition of environmental justice violated the ethic of gratuity through which Ayseninos participate in collective life on the Patagonian frontier. Instead of arguing for a better capture of grace within accounts of sociality, I suggest that researchers accompanying anti-extractive struggles should attend to how untraceable but nonetheless highly effective forces like grace convene coalitions for environmental justice and thus to the theopolitical conditions of staging challenges to the state and capital in Latin America. Resumen: Este trabajo antropológico conceptualiza la "teopolítica" para investigar la acción de la gracia en un conflicto de represas en la región patagónica de Aysén, Chile. Yuxtaposicionando los procedimientos del estado chileno para regular los conflictos ambientales con teorías de ensamblaje que rastrean relaciones para representar ontologías alternativas a la occidental, sugiero que su convergencia en condicionar la justicia ambiental en la visibilización de las relaciones viola la ética de gratuidad con la cual participan los ayseninos en la vida colectiva de la frontera patagónica. En lugar de abogar por una mejor captura de la gracia, propongo que los investigadores que acompañan las luchas antiextractivas latinoamericanas presten más atención la participación de fuerzas no rastreables pero no obstante muy eficaces, como la gracia, en convocar movimientos para la justicia ambiental y, así mismo, a las condiciones teopolíticas de los desafíos al estado y al capital en Latinoamerica.
No One Can Hold It Back McAllister, Carlota
Social analysis,
12/2020, Letnik:
64, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The slogan “Water is Life” rallies anti-extractive movements across the Americas. Critical theorists, however, decry the circumscription of environmental politics by the vitalist attribution of ...political agency to liveliness. This article tempers that critique by juxtaposing it to the Catholic Church’s claims to sovereignty over life, deploying the resulting slippages between water and life to explore the theopolitical potencies that emerge in water’s oscillations between non-life and the divine. Exploring these oscillations in a dam conflict in Chilean Patagonia, I argue that they allowed a flooding phenomenon on a river threatened with damming to be heard as a prophetic call to action. The uprising that followed produced a rare victory for dam opponents, suggesting that a theopolitics of life has powers that exceed vitalism.
Anthropological work on political theology has been informed by Agamben's work on the state of exception and, thus, by a Schmittian account of sovereignty as analogous to that of the God who bestows ...miracles. In this review, we read gestures to this analogy's limits in recent ethnographies of the state, vital force, and the Anthropocene as also pointing to the limits of anthropology's secularity and its embedding in the colonial enterprise. In so doing, we recover a potential opening to theistic force that anthropology has long fought to foreclose. We conclude by proposing a conceptual counter to political theology, grounded in negative theology as well as critical theories drawing on the force of the negative, which we call theopolitics. Theopolitics refers to a sovereignty from below characterized by vulnerability and openness to an ever-provisional messianic force that partakes in history, including the colonial history of anthropology itself.
This introduction outlines an anthropological concept of ‘theopolitics’ emergent from ethnographic engagements with the oldest site of European colonialism—the (Latin) Americas. Defined as a query ...into the sensorial regimes enabling incarnate forms of power, theopolitics focuses on the sovereignties from below that are immanent in struggles between the universalisms of Christian imperialisms and the autochthonous forces they seek to police and unmake. The articles comprising this special issue advance this query by exploring processes of attunement to the prophetic voices of the dead and life itself, of the elasticity of incarnate forms of political charisma and crowds, and the potencies of precious matter and touch as domains for rethinking relationships among political anthropology, political economy, and political theology beyond a focus on the state.
INTRODUCTION: THE FLESH OF JUSTICE IN LATIN AMERICA Bacigalupo, Ana Mariella; Manrique, Carlos A; Mcallister, Carlota
American religion (Bloomington, Ind. : 2019),
04/2024, Letnik:
5, Številka:
2
Journal Article
This paper uses the case of a rural indigenous village in the war torn highlands of Guatemala to question the framework for using 'agriculture for development' put forth by the World Bank in its 2008 ...World Development Report. There is a significant gap between the Bank's sanguine vision of recent developments in Guatemala and the limited options available to indigenous rural agrarian producers. This gap stems from critical lacunae in the Report's framework, namely, its neglect of the non-economic forces that structure agrarian poverty, and its neglect of history.
PDF
