Escobar, Arturo

PROVIDE A GENERAL DESCRIPTION OF THE AIM AND SCOPE OF YOUR MEETING IN PLAIN ENGLISH (UNFORMATTED -- WITHOUT BULLETS OR NUMBERED LISTS -- 200 WORD MAXIMUM).
Our aim with this workshop is to explore the reconfiguration of politics that is currently going on in Latin America, most saliently in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Chiapas (Mexico), but also in Chile, Paraguay, Peru, and Argentina. Visibly articulated by indigenous-popular social mobilizations, the new grassroots politics ostensibly implements relational notions of humans and non-humans that eschew modern distinctions between nature and culture, to the point of even inscribing such notions in State Constitutions--as in the case of Ecuador and Bolivia. Emerging at the crossroads of the crises of coloniality and neo-liberalism, this political re-configuration may also constitute a conceptual epochal moment as it exceeds theoretical tool kits so far used in political analyses, even ethnographic ones. Answering to the challenge this excess represents, we draw from current developments in Anthropology (mainly the work of M. Strathern, P. Descola and T. Ingold), from contributions by Science and Technology Studies (D. Haraway, B. Latour, and I.Stengers) and from our own work. We are convinced anthropology is in a unique position to respond to the theoretical challenge offered by current political developments in Latin America, and to contribute historical insights that shed light on the magnitude of the transformation currently going on in the region. Our aim with this workshop goes in this direction. We will convene Latin American scholars (residents of both South and North America) to collaboratively explore the conceptual and political possibilities opened by indigenous political practices that exceed multiculturalism and aim at pluralizing politics; we are particularly interested in those practices that rather than proposing inclusion on the grounds of gender, culture, race or sexuality, they do so by implementing a politics that considers Nature as a subject of rights, thus articulating an ethics of life different from current bio-political notions of improvement that, not infrequently, disregard humans and non-humans alike.