maria sibylla merian centre
conviviality-inequality in latin america
maria sibylla merian centre
conviviality-inequality in latin america
Restitution and Postcolonial Justice: A Dialogical Approach
nº 83 (June 2025) | TALJA BLOKLAND
The paper questions why urban studies about conviviality in everyday social life often ignore hate, fear, and violence in cities.
It critiques the common focus on friendly, walkable neighborhoods and the idea that violence happens “somewhere else,” not in familiar public spaces.
Using the figure of the “thug” (as seen in pop culture and activism), it argues that violence and exclusion are part of urban life and must be included in how we understand social dynamics in cities.
nº 82 (May 2025) | CRISTINA T. MARINS
The essay examines how Brazilian informal workers who heavily use social media understand and talk about concepts like “precarious work” and “entrepreneurship.”
Based on over ten years of research with workers in sectors like events, beauty, transport, and food, it shows that their views differ from academic definitions.
The study suggests that these workers often frame their situations as personal success stories rather than collective struggles, influenced by the rise of digital platforms.
nº 81 (May 2025) | RÚRION MELO
The myth of racial democracy is more than a false belief—it’s a system that shapes social norms, power dynamics, and collective thinking within a history of racial domination.
Drawing on Lélia Gonzalez’s work, this text explores how everyday actions both reveal and obscure racism, and why the myth of racial democracy persists.
By examining the link between conviviality and inequality, we aim to better understand how apparent harmony can mask deep racial injustices in Brazil.
nº 80 (April 2025) | FLAVIA MEIRELLES
nº 79 (March 2025) | JAN-HENRIK WITTHAUS
Aunque muchas obras sobre el narcotráfico refuerzan estereotipos vistos en los medios y la política, este artículo muestra que la literatura también puede ayudarnos a entender mejor este fenómeno.
El texto analiza novelas sobre el narcotráfico usando herramientas del neohistoricismo y la semiótica cultural para revelar cómo funcionan las relaciones de poder del narco.
Se propone la idea de una “soberanía menor”, una forma de poder fuera de la ley, que no reemplaza al Estado, pero influye en el mismo entorno social.
nº 78 (December 2024) | ALLAN DA ROSA
O estudo analisa a arte da palavra falada, escrita ou cantada entre homens negros da Afrodiáspora, destacando seu caráter irônico, satírico e polissêmico.
Examina como essas expressões se relacionam com a branquitude e com comunidades negras, incluindo ancestrais, territórios e elementos naturais, além de desafiar discursos históricos sobre escravidão.
A pesquisa interdisciplinar conecta estética e política, explorando como humor, paródia e escárnio ajudam a moldar perspectivas de liberdade, pedagogias e compreensões sobre negritude.
nº 77 (December 2024) | CRISTINA ALARCÓN LÓPEZ
nº 76 (November 2024) | GEORG FISCHER
nº 75 (November 2024) | SÉRGIO COSTA, MARIANA CAVALCANTI, JOSÉ MAURÍCIO DOMINGUES, WOLFGANG KNÖBL
nº 74 (November 2024) | CECILIA NURIA GIL MARIÑO
nº 73 (October 2024) | MELANIE STRASSER
The paper explores the idea that hospitality and translation share similarities, as both involve welcoming and incorporating “the Other” into a host’s domain, often with inherent power dynamics.
Hospitality is inherently ambivalent, balancing welcome and imposition. Guests must adapt to the host’s rules and language, revealing an underlying tension between openness and control.
Drawing on Amerindian perspectives, the paper proposes an ethics of “translational hospitality,” viewing translation as a mutual and transformative exchange, rather than a one-sided, hierarchical process.
nº 72 (October 2024) | EUGENIA BRAGE
📜 PDF nº 72 – SPA – Tramas populares-comunitarias de convivialidad
nº 71 (September 2024) | JÖRN ETZOLD
nº 70 (September 2024) | MÁRIO AUGUSTO MEDEIROS DA SILVA
This research examines how social movements in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo are working to protect Black and Indigenous memory in key historical sites like Cais do Valongo, Cemitério dos Pretos Novos, Liberdade/Aflitos, and Saracura.
These places are sites of cultural heritage, where disputes arise between Black and Indigenous communities, the real estate market, and public/private agents over rights and recognition.
The study also explores the concept of conviviality and its role in antiracist movements, collective memory, and the ongoing struggle for rights in urban spaces.
nº 69 (September 2024) | AJAY GANDHI
nº 68 (August 2024) | GUILHERME BIANCHI
nº 67 (June 2024) | JOANNA M. MOSZCZYNSKA
nº 66 (April 2024) | BERIT CALLSEN
nº 65 (April 2024) | RAPHAEL SCHAPIRA
nº 64 (April 2024) | PATRIZIA KOLB
📜 PDF nº 64 – EN – The Impact of the Corona Crisis on the Gender Gap in Care Work And Housework
nº 63 (December 2023) | ANA CAROLINA TORQUATO
nº 62 (December 2023) | SUSANA DURÃO
📜 PDF nº 62 – EN -Conviviality in Inequality: Security in the City (São Paulo)
nº 61 (September 2023) | VANESSA MASSUCHETTO
nº 60 (August 2023) | SÉRGIO COSTA, MARIANA TEIXEIRA, AND THOMÁS MATTOS
📜 PDF nº 60 – EN – Conviviality-Inequality during the Pandemic: The Case of Berlin
nº 59 (July 2023) | ÉLODIE BRUN Y JESÚS CARRILLO
nº 58 (June 2023) | JESSICA O’LEARY
nº 57 (May 2023) | LAURA FLAMAND, CARLOS ALBA VEGA, ROSARIO APARICIO Y ERICK SERNA
nº 56 (May 2023) | JUAN I. PIOVANI, LUCAS ALZUGARAY, MARÍA LAURA PEIRÓ Y JULIANA SANTA MARÍA
nº 55 (April 2023) | SIMONE TOJI
nº 54 (March 2023) | JÖRG DÜNNE
📜 PDF nº 54 – EN – Interspecific Contact Scenes: Humans and Street Dogs in the Margins of the City
nº 53 (March 2023) | GABRIEL KESSLER, GABRIEL VOMMARO Y GONZALO ASSUSA
nº 52 (January 2023) | MARÍLIA MOSCHKOVICH
nº 51 (November 2022) | JOSÉ RICARDO CASTELLÓN OSEGUEDA
nº 50 (November 2022) | SUSANNE SCHULTZ
nº 49 (October 2022) | JERÓNIMO PINEDO
“¿Cómo se vivió aquí en la pandemia?” es la pregunta que organiza esta investigación sobre la convivialidad durante la crisis epidémica mundial de la enfermedad de la covid-19 provocada por el virus SARS COV 2. A partir de un enfoque cualitativo y microscópico basado en un trabajo de campo etnográfico en barrios populares de la ciudad de La Plata, Argentina, durante los años 2020 y 2021, propongo un doble movimiento. Por un lado, utilizar la perspectiva de la convivialidad para explorar la pandemia como experiencia espacial y temporalmente situada, y, en simultáneo, aprovechar esos trazos elaborados por mis anfitriones acerca de su experiencia pandémica para interrogar empírica y analíticamente el concepto de convivialidad abordado en su triple acepción: como formas sociales de procesar la vida juntos, como interacciones específicas entre entidades humanas y no humanas, y como repertorio de saberes acerca de la vida en común.
📜 PDF nº 49 – EN – “¿Cómo se vivió aquí en la pandemia?”: La trama convivial de la covid-19
nº 48 (September 2022) | RAQUEL ROJAS SCHEFFER
In most Latin American countries, the upper and middle classes tend to meet their care needs through the market, resorting to options such as private schools and care centres, as well as the labour of domestic workers. However, these practices were affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and its containment measures. Drawing on a series of interviews with employers of domestic workers in Paraguay, this paper analyses the changes in convivial relations and arrangements regarding the distribution of care within households that outsource domestic chores and had to adapt to lockdown measures. By doing so, I seek to highlight not only changes in the routine of family members but also the exacerbation of inequalities regarding the social organization of care, and the discourses provided for justifying and naturalising these inequalities. I argue that while at first glance, lockdown measures seemed to have contested the separation of the world of work and family, they produced a rebound effect that translated into a reinforced separation of capital and care, expressed through a deepening of the privatisation, feminisation and commodification of care.
📜 PDF nº 48 – EN – The COVID-19 Crisis and the Reinforced Separation of Capital and Care
nº 47 (July 2022) | CINTHIA WANSCHELBAUM
La reacción conservadora latinoamericana pretende cambiar y reformar la educación siguiendo preceptos neoliberales y neoconservadores fuertemente apoyados por poderosos grupos sociales. Para los gobiernos conservadores la educación es una de las herramientas más importantes para producir consenso y conformidad social. A través de la transmisión de conocimientos, valores e ideas construyen relaciones específicas de hegemonía y convivencia. Como parte de los objetivos del grupo de investigación temática de Mecila “Los proyectos educativos conservadores y sus configuraciones de convivencia-desigualdad en Argentina y Chile: los gobiernos de Macri y Piñera (2010-2020)”, este working paper examina el proyecto educativo del gobierno de Macri y los vínculos con actores privados, como empresas, fundaciones,
y Organizaciones No Gubernamentales (ONGs).
nº 46 (June 2022) | NICOLÁS SUÁREZ
Around the middle of the 20th century, various film museums and cinematheques were created in different parts of the world to preserve the cultural heritage of their respective communities. In the case of Latin America, as they were established in socially unequal and culturally diverse contexts, these institutions developed as convivial configurations in which the relationships between people and archives were affected by profound cultural differences and funding asymmetries. This article provides a comparative analysis of the history of a number of emblematic institutions in the Southern Cone that account for these relationships.
nº 45 (June 2022) | SÉRGIO COSTA
The middle class, or rather middle classes, to do justice to their heterogeneity, have been and continue to be at the centre of the long political and economic crisis that has been ravaging Brazil since 2014. Available interpretations that try to explain the positions taken by different political authors are biased by structural, ideological, or cultural determinism. To escape these determinisms, I draw on Stuart Hall’s political sociology in order to understand the link between the class situation of the middle classes and their constitution as political subjects of various shades as contingent intersectional articulations. The emphasis on contingency obviously does not imply a belief that political developments are fortuitous and detached from social structures. Nor does it ignore the existence of groups with deeply held ideological or cultural convictions who consistently adopt, over long periods of time, political attitudes compatible with these beliefs. However, taken as a whole, the middle classes have shown a very heterogeneous and changing political trajectory over time. They adhere to discourses – both right-wing or more egalitarian ones – and make political choices based on the power of these narratives to capture, in given circumstances, their anxieties, expectations, claims and aspirations.
📜 PDF nº 45 – EN – Unequal and Divided: The Middle Classes in Contemporary Brazil
nº 44 (May 2022) | MARIANA TEIXEIRA
The aim of this working paper is to foster the concept of “vulnerability” as a critical tool for social theory in general and conviviality-inequality studies in particular. First, to clarify the concept, an analytical distinction is established between vulnerability as either an experiential structure shared by all persons (constitutive vulnerability) or as historical social injustice that detrimentally impacts some more than others (contingent vulnerability). The paper then explores the contrast between approaches to epistemic injustice theory and standpoint epistemology as two opposing views with regard to the political and epistemic potential of vulnerability. From this contrast, finally, a critique of one-sided conceptions shows us that, for vulnerability to have a productive and critical use, it must be grasped as fraught with ambiguity, implying both a contingent risk of subjection and a constitutive opening to otherness. It is this ambiguity that makes vulnerability a useful conceptual tool for grasping conviviality as inextricably connected to inequality.
📜PDF nº 44 – EN – Vulnerability: A Critical Tool for Conviviality-Inequality Studies
nº 43 (April 2022) | MADALINA STEFAN
In the context of the Anthropocene, ecocriticism is gaining an increasingly important role, foregrounding the inextricability of nature and culture, on the one hand, and the postcolonial cultural representation from the Global South on the other. Against this backdrop, the present working paper will focus on the Latin American context, suggesting that conviviality signifies a crucial contribution to the discourse about the Anthropocene and serves as an ideal theoretical framework for the research project on “Postcolonial Resistance and Ecofeminism in the Latin American Jungle novel”, which is outlined at the end of the paper.
📜 PDF nº 43 – EN – Conviviality, Ecocriticism and the Anthropocene
nº 42 (February 2022) | JORGE ESTRADA
A desire to live together is perhaps a key idea in Roberto Bolaño’s narratives. His characters are constantly negotiating their involvement in diverse societies amid the historical catastrophes of the twentieth century, so this desire becomes highly differentiated. It undergoes perspectival shifts and creates “mirror games”, which express scepticism towards universalising forms and trigger reflections on history and modernity. In this working paper, I examine how, in 2666, the cosmopolitan desire of a self-legislating and self-authorizing individual is disassembled and superseded by a convivial framework and a relational subject that is crossed by diverse determining forces. This transition is correlated to Bolaño’s diagnosis of late capitalism, in which a matrix of domination that worked with the logic of potestas in the sense of the power to directly elicit determined actions is replaced by the channelling of potentia. This mutable capacity that allows creating a habit with diverse actualizations is channelled or governed with an apparatus for capturing a flow of lives whose features only come to light in forensic discourse and project the fictional city of Santa Teresa.
📜 PDF nº 42 – EN – Ruthless Desires of Living Together in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666
nº 41 (December 2021) | LÉA TOSOLD
Aiming at (re)thinking memory politics in contexts of ongoing total violence against non-white bodies, I propose, in this working paper, to engage with Maria Beatriz Nascimento’s multifaceted notion of quilombo. Once understood as alternative regimes of conviviality that entail existential (beyond material) aspects, Nascimento’s notion of quilombo enables critical access to the onto-epistemological basis on which memory politics generally takes place. After primary considerations about violence and the archives, I highlight three main aspects of Nascimento’s notion of quilombo to (re)think memory politics: (1) the introduction of a temporality that displaces underlying analytical assumptions of a linear, progressive and sequential time; (2) the idea of paz quilombola, which allows analytical space for “opacity” in the generation of knowledge; (3) the link between personal and collective intergenerational memory that, for Nascimento, requires the fostering of spaces of body encounters.
nº 40 (November 2021) | YVES COHEN
Horizontality is a salient social phenomenon of the last decade. It asserts itself against hierarchies in social movements and countless other collective practices around the world. It constitutes a characteristic of an emergent sociality that demands the attention of the social sciences. The 2010s are a moment as important as “the Sixties”, a time when Ivan Illich called for the development of tools of conviviality, and horizontality may be categorized as one of them. Today’s horizontality may be related to that of populations that have been the focus of anthropologists interested in their longstanding propensity to work against the affirmation of the authority of commanding. Public squares, roundabouts, and the courtyards of apartment buildings welcome the early symptoms of democratic experimentation that circulates also among groups, collectivities, and associations with varied purposes. In all these places, equality asserts itself and cuts across differences. The Yellow Vests and an educational cooperative in São Paulo are the empirical foundation of this study
nº 39 (September 2021) | CLEMENTE PENNA
This paper follows the enslaved woman Teofila from captivity to freedom in 19th-century Rio de Janeiro. To become a free woman, Teofila had to navigate the complex private credit networks of the West African community of the Brazilian capital city. With limited banking activity, the cariocas relied on one another for their financial needs, making for a highly convivial credit market that reflected and reinforced the vast inequalities of Brazilian slave society. While following Teofila through the courts of Rio de Janeiro, this paper will demonstrate that one of the cornerstones of the city’s credit market was the presence of an intertwined relationship between credit and private property. The commerce in human beings like Teofila produced thousands of negotiable titles, with slavery working as a propeller for credit circulation and one of its pillars – slave property was the primary collateral for unpaid debts.
📜 PDF nº 39 – EN -The Saga of Teofila: Slavery and Credit Circulation in 19th-Century Rio de Janeiro
nº 38 (July 2021) | GLORIA CHICOTE
El presente trabajo interroga un texto literario, El juguete rabioso de Roberto Arlt, publicado en Buenos Aires en 1926, entendido como un contexto de convivialidad surgido del universo de las representaciones culturales. Para ello, partimos de una constelación de conceptos procedentes de la teoría y de la crítica literaria que resultan funcionales a la hora de situar las posibles implicancias de la convivialidad en el campo de las creaciones literarias de América Latina. Los tortuosos pactos de convivialidad en la Buenos Aires de principios del siglo XX, que atañen tanto la psicología individual como las representaciones sociales, serán asediados en este artículo a partir del significado de los recorridos por el espacio urbano en transformación y de la centralidad de la literatura como instrumento de consumo y de producción.
📜 PDF nº 38 – EN – Los tortuosos pactos de convivialidad en El juguete rabioso de Roberto Arlt
nº 37 (June 2021) | JULIANA M. STREVA
This working paper approaches the current global crisis as a potential territoriality for radicalizing concepts and for learning with ongoing fugitive routes. Through nonlinear paths, I aim to examine the contours of the quilombo not only as a slavery-past event but as a continuum of anti-colonial struggle that invokes other forms of re-existence and convivial coexistence in Brazil. In doing that, this research draws attention to an Améfrica Ladina epistemology and a decolonial methodology embodied by living archives and oral histories.
📜 PDF nº 37 – EN – Aquilombar Democracy: Fugitive Routes from the End of the World
📓 Related post: “Quilombo as Metaphor and Strategy“
🎧 Podcast: “Aquilombar com o oceano“
nº 36 (May 2021) | JOÃO JOSÉ REIS
It was not uncommon in Brazil for slaves to own slaves. Slaves as masters of slaves existed in many slave societies and societies with slaves, but considering modern, chattel slavery in the Americas, Brazil seems to have been a special case where this phenomenon thrived, especially in nineteenth-century urban Bahia. The investigation is based on more than five hundred cases of enslaved slaveowners registered in ecclesiastical and manumission records in the provincial capital city of Salvador. The paper discusses the positive legal basis and common law rights that made possible this peculiar form of slave ownership. The paper relates slave ownership by slaves with the direction and volume of the slave trade, the specific contours of urban slavery, access by slaves to slave trade networks, and slave/master relations. It also discusses the web of convivial relations that involved the slaves of slaves, focusing on the ethnic and gender profiles of the enslaved master and their slaves.
PDF nº 36 – EN – Slaves Who Owned Slaves in Nineteenth-Century Bahia, Brazil
nº 35 (April 2021) | ENCARNACIÓN GUTIÉRREZ-RODRÍGUEZ
This Working Paper discusses entangled migrations as territorially and temporally entangled onto-epistemological phenomena. As a theoretical-analytical framework, it addresses the material, epistemological and ethical premises of spatial-temporal entanglements and relationality in the understanding of migration as a modern colonial phenomenon. Entangled migrations acknowledges that local migratory movements mirror global migrations in complex ways, engaging with the analysis of historical connections, territorial entrenchments, cultural confluences, and overlapping antagonistic relations across nations and continents. […]
📜 PDF nº 35 – EN – Entangled Migrations: The Coloniality of Migration and Creolizing Conviviality
nº 34 (April 2021) | GREGORY PAPPAS
In this paper, I argue that despite their different circumstances (size, location, history, demography), the Zapatistas (Chiapas, Mexico), Boggs Center (Detroit, USA), and Casa Pueblo (Adjuntas, Puerto Rico) share common lessons that are worth considering, at a time when there is so much uncertainty and disagreement about how best to address social injustices and much disillusionment with representative democracy. After a summary of the history and accomplishments of each of these American communal activist organisations, I present the common lessons and consider some challenges and possible objections. They provide an alternative between naïve optimism and
cynical passive pessimism. They practice horizontal models of conviviality and a holistic, ecological, and experimental approach to ameliorating injustices.
nº 33 (March 2021) | JAN BOESTEN
This essay aims to utilize the concept of conviviality for connecting the coexistence of seemingly contradictory phenomena in Colombia. It argues that while conviviality implies a normative content – a society in which members do not slaughter each other is better than one in which members resort to violence – the meekness of that normative claim suggests that it is better used as an analytical tool that seeks to connect the contradictions that coexist in the real lifeworld. Colombia’s history of violence and democracy is such a contradictory case. Comparativists have situated Colombia’s deficits on the “extra-institutional playing field”, lamenting that it is a “besieged” or “threatened democracy”. Conviviality helps us to specify these “extra-institutional” defects by suggesting impediments exogenous and endogenous to the state-building logic of the Colombian nation-state.
nº 32 (February 2021) | CAMILA ROCHA
This paper traces the origins of the New Brazilian Right, regarding the emergence of new leaders, new forms of expression and organization, as well as new sets of ideas, namely libertarianism and anti-globalism. Based on more than thirty in-depth interviews, conducted between 2015 and 2019 with right-wing leaders and activists; on a collection of historical data from right-wing organisations’ archives between 2015 and 2018, and on public data, I argue that this phenomenon started in the mid-2000s, after the onset of a corruption scandal related to the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) and the dissemination of the pioneering social network Orkut in Brazil. […]
📜 PDF nº 32 – EN – The New Brazilian Right and the Public Sphere
nº 31 (January 2021) | NILMA LINO GOMES
This Working Paper is a revised manuscript of the keynote lecture delivered on March 5, 2020, at the conference Living on the Edge: Studying Conviviality-Inequality in Uncertain Times (Mecila, São Paulo).
nº 30 (December 2020) | SUSANNE KLENGEL
The radical aesthetic of the historical avant-garde movements has often been explained as a reaction to the catastrophic experience of the First World War and a denouncement of the bourgeoisie’s responsibility for its horrors. This article explores a blind spot in these familiar interpretations of the international avant-garde. Not only the violence of the World War but also the experience of a worldwide deadly pandemic, the Spanish flu, have moulded the literary and artistic production of the 1920s. In this paper, I explore this hypothesis through the example of Mário de Andrade’s famous book of poetry Pauliceia desvairada (1922), which I reinterpret in the light of historical studies on the Spanish flu in São Paulo. […]
nº 29 (December 2020) | MAYA MANZI
In the context of our current planetary crises, in a world that continues to be shaped by capitalist, colonialist, androcentric and anthropocentric visions, we are faced with the urgency of reconsidering, at the deepest levels, the way we relate with other human and nonhuman beings. This working paper aims to contribute towards that end by looking at human-nonhuman relations through the concept of conviviality, understood as the everyday living together with difference, and how it intersects with inequality. […]
📜 PDF nº 29 – EN – More-Than-Human Conviviality-Inequality in Latin America
nº 28 (November 2020) | RAQUEL GIL MONTERO
Este working paper propone analizar el trabajo coactivo y la servidumbre en los Andes coloniales a partir de la reconstrucción de la convivencia en las haciendas con mano de obra de diferente origen. En particular se centra en los reclamos de personas que siendo legalmente libres se consideraban esclavizadas y/o eran consideradas así por testigos de su situación. El texto se inscribe en una sociedad que por definición era desigual, la de Charcas, y estaba obsesionada por la clasificación de las personas, ya que así se definían las condiciones sociales a las que se les reconocían privilegios, derechos y obligaciones. […]
📜 PDF nº 28 – EN – Esclavitud, servidumbre y libertad en Charcas
nº 27 (October 2020) | RAQUEL ROJAS SCHEFFER
Households that hire domestic workers are a space of compulsive encounters where people of different origins and social class meet, experiencing physical proximity that makes the social distance that prevails between them even more noticeable. Drawing on current research and scholarship on paid domestic work in Latin America, this paper explores the different ways of analysing the encounters of women from highly unequal social positions in the narrowness of the private household, arguing that the combination of physical proximity and affective ties fosters the (re)production of social inequalities and asymmetries of power. But while it is within the convivial relations of these households that inequality becomes evident, it is also there where it can be negotiated, fought, or mitigated. […]
nº 26 (September 2020) | GABRIEL FELTRAN
In sustainedly unequal societies such as the Latin American ones, conviviality is inescapably linked to the reproduction of inequalities. Are convivial situations also part of the reproduction of violence, in societies that are not only unequal but also violent? This paper explores marginal conviviality, adding empirical evidence to Costa’s argument, as well as addressing his theoretical framework from an ethnographic point of view. A life story, followed empirically from 2005-2018 in a district of São Paulo, guides my argumentation.
📜 PDF nº 26 – EN – Marginal Conviviality: On Inequalities and Violence Reproduction
nº 25 (August 2020) | FERNANDO BALDRAIA
This paper, inspired by Frantz Fanon’s thought, offers a diagnostic of our present times enacted as a “psychotic reaction” that melts together different scriptural registers to advance the notion of conviviality as a space of analytical experimentation where inequality and difference share the condition of conceptual isonomy. The particular thought experiment performed here tries to accomplish this goal by exploring the vernacular repertoire of the Brazilian junction of an afro-indigenous Atlantic. Its analytical gamble, zumbification, is the sketch of an epistemological subject-position whose labor consists in a kinesics of (at least) three movements: 1) the situatedness needed for effectively making political demands; 2) the decenteredness necessary for attenuating the harmful effects of (even strategic) essentialism as well as of the unavoidable reproduction of hegemonic exclusionary patterns; 3) the willfulness required for amplifying subalternized epistemological approaches so that they may become more pervasive.
📜 PDF nº 25 – EN – Epistemologies for Conviviality, or Zumbification
nº 24 (July 2020) | JULIA VON SIGSFELD
The government of Rafael Correa (2007-2017) embarked on an ambitious project of diversifying the national economy to transition from a primary resource exporting economy to a competitive Knowledge Society and a Knowledge-Based Bio-Economy as biodiversity was conceptualized as the country’s most significant comparative advantage. This paper traces how peoples’ and nationalities’ knowledges, so-called ancestral knowledges, were elicited in unprecedented ways in this context of bringing about a change of the productive matrix. While knowledge in general was reframed as an infinite resource, ancestral knowledges were made productive for a state-led project of capitalist modernization.
📜 PDF nº 24 – EN – Ancestral Knowledges and the Ecuadorian Knowledge Society
nº 23 (June 2020) | ALEJANDRA MAILHE
Este trabajo analiza la resignificación del legado cultural indígena en la obra de varios intelectuales argentinos vinculados al espiritualismo (Joaquín V. González, Ricardo Rojas y Ernesto Quesada) entre fines del siglo XIX y los años treinta. En contraste con perspectivas hegemónicas que devalúan la alteridad indígena — como en el caso de Estanislao Zeballos y Bartolomé Mitre —, estos autores destacan la importancia de los vínculos socio-culturales entre las elites tradicionales y los indígenas. Forjados especialmente en el noroeste argentino (NOA) desde la Conquista, estos lazos se basarían en el supuesto vínculo de los grupos indígenas con las “grandes” civilizaciones precolombinas, y en su participación en las guerras de emancipación. Al imaginar instancias de convivialidad entre actores sociales antagónicos, estos discursos tienden a ocultar asimetrías implícitas a lo largo de la historia nacional, y a negar a los indígenas como sujetos sociales activos en el presente.
nº 22 (January 2020) | BARBARA POTTHAST
This paper traces the origin of the powerful mestizaje discourse as a marker of Paraguayan identity through the lens of gender and family relations. Rules and practices of family formation and sexuality reflect not only cultural but also sociopolitical hierarchies, and they allow us to connect the micro- and macro levels. An analysis of the different regimes of conviviality in Paraguay and the role that legitimate or illegitimate birth played in the struggle over group formation and social hierarchy also shows the capacities of a peripheral colonial elite to establish their own standards of social distinction, or the ones of the old elite in early independence period to circumvent a policy directed at their destruction. Finally, we explain the rise of the nationalistic ideology of mestizaje as a uniquely Paraguayan characteristic at the beginning of the 20th century, and the reasons for its persistence in the 21st century […]
nº 21 (September 2019) | RAQUEL ROJAS SCHEFFER
Housewives and paid domestic workers perform – to a certain extent – the same kinds of tasks. They also tend to share interest in the valorisation of domestic work: If this activity were recognised as such – as work – housewives could claim retirement rights, while domestic workers should be granted the same labour rights as any other worker. But even when sharing the historical burden of house and care work, there are other social hierarchies that interrupt the common experience of these women and hinder the creation of alliances between them. This paper analyses the relationship between paid domestic workers’ and housewives’ organisations in Uruguay and Paraguay, two Latin American countries that share many similarities in terms of territorial extension, population and economy size, but show contrasts regarding the organisation of domestic workers, particularly their relation to housewives’ organisations.
nº 20 (August 2019) | CLAUDIA BRIONES
Distintas teorías políticas contemporáneas debaten maneras de reordenar un sistemamundo en que diferencias y desigualdades entre personas, colectivos y países aparecen tan densa como disparmente anudadas. Pocas de esas teorías se piensan por fuera de una modernidad que, como episteme, enmarca las jerarquías ideológicas, epistemológicas y ontológicas que naturalizan parte de tales anudamientos. Este ensayo hace foco en propuestas indígenas de Buen Vivir, para identificar qué diagnósticos y cuestionamientos esas propuestas realizan respecto de formas hegemónicas de convivialidad; qué contrapropuestas de convivencia promueven; y qué de ellas tiende a permanecer inaudible e invisible cuando distintos agentes no indígenas buscan reformularlas y universalizarlas como posible “alternativa civilizatoria”. […]
nº 19 (August 2019) | RAQUEL GIL MONTERO; SARAH ALBIEZ-WIECK
In this paper, we analyse an unusual travel account from the seventeenth century. Besides the rarity of travel accounts from this period, its singularity resides primarily in the fact that the traveller, Gregorio de Robles, self-identified as a peasant. This exceptional Spaniard travelled dominions of the Spanish, Portuguese, British, French, and Dutch empires in America and Europe, and even briefly touched Southern Africa. His travel account is rich in information, but here we focus on one specific aspect: conviviality with the people he encountered along his way, with a special emphasis on his fellow compatriots. We will argue that this conviviality allowed Robles to create new networks and accumulate social capital and that the relationship with his paisanos resignified his belonging. By moving and traveling, he could attain a more privileged position than he had apparently been enjoying in his Castilian hometown.
nº 18 (July 2019) | GUILHERMO BONZANATO
Desde el comienzo de la era digital, determinadas políticas de gestión de la ciencia han incrementado las inequidades en las condiciones de producción del conocimiento y en las posibilidades de diálogo entre los colectivos de investigadores. A fines del siglo XX y principios del XXI se inició una reacción en las más prestigiosas bibliotecas y comunidades científicas de América del Norte y Europa Occidental, y América Latina comenzó el desarrollo de sistemas de visibilidad propios, al tiempo que sucesivas declaraciones fueron definiendo al Acceso Abierto como estrategia para superar tales inequidades. En esta dirección, se han desarrollado revistas en Acceso Abierto cuya sustentabilidad está siendo puesta a prueba. Este trabajo presenta un breve estado de situación actualizado sobre algunos problemas que enfrentan los autores, evaluadores y editores latinoamericanos en la gestión y publicación de los resultados de las investigaciones.
nº 17 (July 2019) | SÉRGIO COSTA
Starting from a detailed review of recent publications oriented by the concept of conviviality and etymologically related expressions (convivialisme, Konvivenz, Konvivialität), the article explores a common analytical deficit in these different contributions: the disregard of the reciprocal constitution of conviviality and inequality. To overcome this deficiency, the essay develops an analytical framework, according to which inequalities – defined along four complementary and interdependent axes (material, power, environmental and epistemological asymmetries) – are always signified, reproduced, and negotiated within convivial interactions.
📜 PDF nº 17 – EN – The Neglected Nexus between Conviviality and Inequality
nº 16 (June 2019) | ANNA GUITERAS MOMBIOLA
In the 1930s, the Bolivian elites promoted an education policy inspired by indigenist thought which sought to solve the problems faced by indigenous people – concerning welfare, hygiene, agricultural techniques, land issues – and to value to some extent their own culture. The ideal pursued was to shape a truly conviviality of Bolivian society with its otherness, giving rise to a new type of ‘Indian’ who would contribute actively and voluntarily to the progress of the nation. This educational project also addressed the Amazonian societies through the so-called school centres for “savages”. The ‘wild nature’ and ‘primitive state’ of the ethnic groups with which these schools operated – specifically the Siriono and the Moré – however, meant that the educational actions undertaken under indigenist ideals were also impregnated with civilizing principles.
nº 15 (June 2019) | MAYA MANZI
Throughout Brazilian history, Northeastern droughts have been the context for massive rural flight and intra-national migrations. State policies and interventions have played a significant role in promoting or restraining the movements of those affected by such “natural” plights. In this paper, we examine the political ecology and moral economies that have underlined state intervention over drought and peasant migrations since the end of the 19th century. We compare two historical periods marked by contrasting regional perspectives on nature-society relations within the context of Brazilian semi-arid climate: the period known as the “fight against drought” (1915-1980) and the period of “coexistence with the semi-arid” (1990-now)
📜 PDF nº 15 – EN – Fighting against or Coexisting with Drought?
🎧 Podcast: “Lutar contra ou conviver com a seca?“
nº 14 (June 2019) | TILMANN HEIL
Current academic usages of the notion of conviviality often carry a normative connotation in which it is opposed to tension and conflict. Instead, I propose to use conviviality as an analytical term. This everyday living together is characterized by tensions, contradictions, and inconsistencies that complicate abstract theorization and the use of clearly defined concepts whose role is, as Stuart Hall once suggested, to give us a good night’s rest by feigning a stability we long for. If conviviality is, as I suggest, understood as a notion that embraces the inconsistencies, multiplicities, and complexities of new urban ways, I inquire into the emerging relationalities between recently-arrived Senegalese and their social context in Rio de Janeiro under the impact of multiple hierarchical orders, including race, origin, education, and class.
nº 13 (June 2019) | OSVALDO BARRENECHE
Como el “principio olvidado” de la Revolución Francesa, uno que de todos modos ha permanecido en el vocabulario y la praxis política latinoamericana, este trabajo argumenta que la fraternidad tiene una dimensión política. Primero, la pieza analiza algunos aspectos generales de la fraternidad política. Luego, se tratan las principales objeciones al concepto. Posteriormente, el trabajo señala la presencia histórica de la fraternidad política en el contexto latinoamericano. Finalmente, se comparan los conceptos de diversidad, convivialismo y fraternidad, señalando algunas características comunes como así también las críticas que ellos reciben. El trabajo concluye destacando la importancia de profundizar el estudio de conceptos tales como Convivialismo y fraternidad, para reconocer y aplicar ideas innovadoras en el “vivir juntos con diferencias”.
nº 12 (June 2019) | LUCIANE SCARATO
This paper analyses convivial contexts in unequal societies from a historical and comparative perspective in Brazil, Mexico, Peru, and Río de la Plata between the Conquest and the early twentieth century. It seeks to highlight how occurred on the ebb and flow of everyday life in unequal societies. In doing so, it aims to demonstrate that conviviality exists within inequality. It starts with a brief semantic cartography of the term conviviality, followed by its application on a selection of case studies about gender and family in Latin America. It explores ideals and structures of conviviality, underscoring individuals’ creativity to negotiate unequal power relations. It also looks at social movements to analyse conviviality in crisis, focusing on strategies to deal with, overcome, and subvert inequalities. In the end, it hopes to contribute to our understanding of conviviality in unequal societies.
📜 PDF nº 12 – EN – Conviviality through Time in Brazil, Mexico, Peru, and Río de la Plata
nº 11 (April 2019) | RAMIRO SEGURA
📜 PDF nº 11 – EN – Convivialidad en ciudades latinoamericanas
nº 10 (December 2018) | NICOLAS WASSER
📜 PDF nº 10 – EN – The Affects of Conviviality-Inequality in Female Domestic Labour
nº 9 (December 2018) | FELIPE CASTRO GUTIÉRREZ
📜 PDF nº 9 – EN – La violencia rutinaria y los límites de la convivencia en una sociedad colonial
nº 8 (October 2018) | KAREN GRAUBART
nº 7 (August 2018) | PETER WADE
📜 PDF nº 7 – EN – Mestizaje and Conviviality in Brazil, Colombia and Mexico
nº 6 (July 2018) | JOSÉ BENJAMÍN INUCA LECHÓN
📜 PDF nº 6 – EN – Llaktapura sumak kawsay / vida plena entre pueblos
nº 5 (July 2018) | ARJUN APPADURAI
This Working Paper is a revised manuscript of the keynote lecture delivered on July 13th, 2017 at the inaugural conference of the Maria Sibylla Merian International Centre Conviviality-Inequality in Latin America (Mecila) inaugural conference “Conviviality in Unequal Societies” (Berlin, Germany).
nº 4 (May 2018) | PAULA MONTERO
📜 PDF nº 4 – EN – Syncretism and Pluralism in the Configuration of Religious Diversity in Brazil
nº 3 (April 2018) | FRANK ADLOFF
📜 PDF nº 3 – EN – Practices of Conviviality and the Social and Political Theory of Convivialism
nº 2 (April 2018) | GESINE MÜLLER
nº 1 (November 2018) | MECILA
