maria sibylla merian centre
conviviality-inequality in latin america
maria sibylla merian centre
conviviality-inequality in latin america
Panel I
09.11, Tue, 11:30-13:00 (CET, UTC +1)
Mecila Senior Fellow 2020
Yves Cohen was a Mecila Senior Fellow in 2020 and is Directeur d’Études (Professor) at École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. He was a visiting scholar at the Center of European Studies of Harvard University in 2018-2019 as well as several Brazilian Universities, including the USP, and the Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora (UFJF), Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), and Universidade Federal de São Paulo (Unifesp).
He has devoted his work to the historical and analytical study of practices. His current interests are the history and present state of influencing practices (advertising, marketing, propaganda, public relations, communication, fake news, etc.) and the comparative study of horizontality in social life and social movements.
For the past ten years or so, I have studied movements in the world from the point of view of their experimentation with horizontality as the source of a new practice of politics and desirable life. In the “movements of the squares” of the 2010s and up to the roundabouts of Yellow Vests in France, through the demonstrations of June 2013 in Brazil, the assemblies of Chile, the courtyards of buildings in Belarus, in many collective practices of everyday life, we note the strength of the meal taken together, of the care administered to all, of the sharing of knowledge, of possibly self-defense organized on the spot, and of other egalitarian practices. Without these ways of being, without this conviviality, the experience of democratic and horizontal deliberation would not develop. Using the notion of conviviality proposed by Ivan Illich in 1973 makes it possible to relaunch the reflection. With it, phenomena that we attend to from one place to another, from one continent to another, take on meaning. These spaces are the site of a reconfiguration of the social: in order to collaborate in emancipation, these encounters intersect multiple differences: of sex, gender, social status, religion, ethnicity, age, knowledge. Places are socially redefined by their deliberate overcoming of inequality. The social bond is questioned just as much as the social sciences for which it was endowed with a hierarchical dimension naturalized in a thousand ways.
Mecila Senior Fellow 2021
Georg Fischer is a Mecila Senior Fellow in 2021 and an Associate Professor at Aarhus University. He was a teaching and research assistant in Latin American history at the Institute for Latin American Studies (LAI) of FU Berlin (2007-2014) and a Fox International Fellow at Yale University (2010-2011). His research interests include nature-society relations, science and knowledge, and North-South inequalities, with a regional focus in Latin America and its connections to the wider world. His work places a particular emphasis on Brazil in the nineteenth and twentieth century.
His ongoing research deals with agriculture, migration, and environmental change in South American savanna landscapes. Using comparative, transnational, and global history approaches, he studies agricultural colonisation and rural development projects in several South American countries since the Second World War.
With the rise of the extreme right in Brazil, history is being re-written from the margins. New memory actors have entered the scene, challenging the fragile consensus regarding past violence and historical injustice and calling for a new national history imbued with heroism, purpose and pathos. In my presentation, I examine selected historical narratives put forward by memory actors stemming from the broad spectrum of Bolsonarismo. This group includes citizen historians and conservative publicists relying on transnational networks who have garnered unprecedented visibility through social media and within growing digital and real-life communities. In a revisionist twist, the emerging narratives emphasize the Portuguese-Catholic origin of the Brazilian nation and place Brazil at the center of an imagined “deep West”.
Another theme I consider is the justification of political violence in revisionist accounts of Brazil’s role in the global Cold War. Although these narratives are in many ways adaptations of earlier historiographical traditions, such as nineteenth-century national history, twentieth-century modernism or the military’s account of 1964, I argue that they pose a significant challenge to the ways in which historical knowledge is produced and distributed.
Mecila Senior Fellow 2021
Ajay Gandhi an Assistant Professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands. His interests are in urban, political, and economic anthropology, with a focus on South Asia. He was a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity (MPI-MMG) in Göttingen (2011-2017), and received his PhD in Anthropology from Yale University in 2010. He has published on transactional and material forms, postcolonial jurisdiction, human-animal relations, urban friction, and social aesthetics and concepts.
This paper draws on ethnographic work on urban India and discusses “residual” spaces such as streets and slums. I consider their relationship to aspects of conviviality and inequality, noting that most theories dwell on the planner’s gaze and bohemian’s wandering: Parisian avenues and Manhattan sidewalks are standard templates. Yet when one confronts the evolution, form, and dynamics of postcolonial cities, such ideas are limited. This paper focuses on the plasticity, the porosity, and possibility incubated in residual spaces.
Mecila Principal Investigator
Bianca Tavolari is a professor of law at Insper, a researcher at CEBRAP, and a visiting professor at the University of St.Gallen. She holds a doctoral and a master’s degree from the USP Faculty of Law, specialising in critical legal theory and democracy in the Weimar Republic, as well as the theoretical intersections between law and urban studies. She obtained her bachelor’s degrees in law and philosophy, both from the USP.
She is the coordinator of the project cluster on urban issues Núcleo de Questões Urbanas and co-coordinator of the São Paulo Master Plan Review Observatory at Insper, as well as a former researcher of the project laboratory LabCidade of the FAUUSP.
Her academic publications and public interventions reflect her interest in urban conflicts and the intersections between law, democracy, and critical theory. As a collaborating editor at Quatro Cinco Um, she reviews books on cities from a multidisciplinary perspective. She has translated several books and articles, including The Divided West (O ocidente dividido) by Jürgen Habermas (Editora Unesp, 2019).
The Covid-19 pandemic has deepened several existing structural inequalities. The crisis has brought unequal urban spatial patterns and housing conditions to the forefront when staying at home becomes the main health recommendation worldwide. Having a place to stay put becomes a matter of public health and the surrounding urban conditions are crucial for the access to food and water provisions, but also to job opportunities and public facilities and infrastructure.
The crisis has not only hit the homeless, favela dwellers and those who live in informal settlements. It has had a severe impact on rental housing. “Cancel the rent” and eviction moratorium have become slogans for tenement movements and associations in several cities in the world. Those struggles are in the center of my research agenda. With data on rent and evictions for Brazil and specifically for São Paulo, I am going to explore how the legitimacy of evictions during the pandemic is being negotiated in the Brazilian legislative and judiciary branches. I will also draw parallels with the case of the United States, that has adopted an eviction moratorium since the beginning of the crisis, through CARES Act, and has now extended the moratorium after a mass mobilization led by Congresswomen Cori Bush and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Panel 2
Multinormative and Legal-Pluralist Affinities to Conviviality-Inequality
09.11, Tue, 11:30-13:00 (CET, UTC +1)
Mecila Associate Investigator
Osvaldo Barreneche es Doctor en Historia por la Universidad de Arizona (Tucson, EE.UU). Es investigador independiente del CONICET en el Instituto de Investigaciones en Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales (IdHICS), de la Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación, Universidad Nacional de La Plata, donde es Profesor Titular Ordinario de Historia Americana. Su investigación se centra en la Historia de la Justicia Criminal y las Instituciones de Seguridad en Argentina y América Latina en los siglos XIX y XX, sobre lo cual ha publicado libros, capítulos de libros y artículos en varios países.
El concepto de pluralismo jurídico ha sido utilizado por la historiografía rioplatense del periodo colonial tardío e independiente temprano, para analizar un escenario muy cambiante a nivel normativo y de las prácticas vinculadas a la administración de justicia. Actualmente, este concepto es objeto de debate historiográfico ¿Para qué introducir la multinormatividad? ¿Es que esta aporta algo novedoso o superador? ¿Cómo podría pensarse la multinormatividad en dialogo con los estudios de convivialidad?
A partir del análisis de algunos aspectos de la administración de justicia criminal en la ciudad de Buenos Aires durante las primeras décadas del siglo XIX, este trabajo intenta responder a tales interrogantes. En primer lugar, se recorren las circunstancias “experimentales” en la conformación de la justicia penal. Seguidamente se aborda el tema del sumario, como instancia judicial inicial de la administración de justicia penal. Luego, se estudian algunos aspectos vinculados a la búsqueda de un orden social y político en aquellos años. Finalmente, el caso presentado permite, según se concluye, ir más allá de la comprobación de un pluralismo normativo que posibilitó un cierto desarrollo histórico, para analizar, en términos de multinormatividad, la articulación de modalidades que sentaron las bases de la constelación normativa actual.
Mecila Associate Investigator
Es doctora en Derecho por la UNAM y en Historia por el Colegio de México, maestra en Historia por la UNAM y por El Colegio de México, licenciada en Historia por la UNAM. Es directora e investigadora del Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas de la UNAM, miembro del Sistema Nacional de Investigadores (nivel III), miembro de número de la Academia Mexicana de Ciencias Penales y de la Academia Mexicana de la Historia. Fue secretaria general académica y directora general encargada del Instituto Nacional de Ciencias penales (2015 – 2017). Se ha especializado en la historia sociocultural de los siglos XIX y XX y, específicamente, en la historia del derecho penal, la cultura jurídica y la impartición de justicia.
Es autora de cuatro libros: Justicia penal, homicidios célebres y opinión pública (México, siglo XX / IIH-Tirant lo Blanch); Nydia Camargo, su crimen y su juicio (Colmex); Del Tigre de Santa Julia, la princesa italiana y otras historias (IIH-INACIPE); Legislación penal, interpretaciones de la criminalidad y administración de justicia (Ciudad de México, 1872-1910) (IIH-Colmex).
El trabajo parte de una propuesta: la multinormatividad (coexistencia de diferentes conjuntos normativos), subsistió después de las revoluciones liberales y la codificación, en el periodo del “absolutismo jurídico” o cuando la ley se convirtió en sinónimo de derecho. Sustento esta idea a partir de tres ejemplos, tomados del caso mexicano.
Primero, la etapa de transición imperante durante las cinco décadas que siguieron a la Independencia, cuando la multinormatividad o pluralismo normativo se sustituyó formalmente por un pluralismo legislativo, pues no sólo de facto, sino con la sanción de los legisladores mexicanos, convivían leyes hispanas con leyes nacionales, ambas emanadas de diferentes lógicas y sin que entre ellas existiera un orden de prelación.
Segundo, dos ejemplos tomados de un pluralismo normativo posterior a la codificación, propio de las últimas dos décadas del siglo XIX y de las primeras del XX, y caracterizado por la coexistencia, más o menos conflictiva, de la legislación estatal con conjuntos normativos no estatales: por una parte, la convivencia del código del honor defendido por las elites, con las leyes que regulaban a la defensa legítima del honor y el duelo, así como el impacto de los dos códigos en prácticas sociales y judiciales; por último, las contrastantes concepciones sobre los grupos de malvivientes o “peligrosos” (delincuentes en potencia) y, a partir de ello, su diferente tratamiento en leyes, sentencias y acciones gubernamentales.
Mecila Associate Investigator
Possui graduação em Direito pela Universidade de São Paulo (1995), mestrado em Direito pela Universidade de São Paulo (2001) e Doutorado em Filosofia (linha Teoria do Direito e do Estado) pela Universidade Estadual de Campinas (2006). Atualmente, é Professor do PPG (Mestrado e Doutorado) da UNISINOS e Pesquisador Permanente do CEBRAP ligado ao Núcleo Direito e Democracia. Tem experiência na área de Direito e Filosofia, com ênfase em Teoria do Direito e Direito Privado, atuando principalmente nos seguintes temas: Dogmática Jurídica, Hermenêutica Jurídica, Teoria Crítica do Direito (Franz Neumann e Otto Kirchheimer), Teoria Geral do Direito Privado e Direito do Trabalho.
This text is inspired by the work of Robert Cover, Brian Z. Tamanaha, Paul Schiff Berman and Klaus Gunther to propose a multi-normative vision of the Philosophy of Law. The text argues that these three authors and the tradition of legal pluralism present important ideas for the Western legal tradition to be able to deal with the problems of globalization and the problems of the global South, for example, the demands of original communities, unlike the analytical tradition, increasingly influential in Brazil. Based on the impact of Brazilian law on the life experience of the author’s grandmother, Yolanda Pedro, an Italian immigrant from the Tyrol region, the text shows how a multi-normative view of law can contribute to the construction of an increasingly democratic rule of law for being able to include the demands of the most diverse agents and social groups and avoid violence linked to projects of legal centralization marked by the creation of abstract normative standards that do not communicate with social conflicts. The text argues that the concept of formalism, by denaturalizing legal categories and allowing them to be defined by social struggles, when combined with the democratic tradition and the constitutionalist tradition, is still an important concept to reflect on all these problems.
Panel 3
Intersectional Convivialities
10.11, Wed, 14:30-16:00 (CET, UTC +1)
Mecila Principal Investigator
Marta Machado is Full Professor of Law at the Escola de Direito de São Paulo of the Fundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV) where she coordinates the Centre of Studies on Crime and Punishment. Furthermore, she is a permanent researcher of the Centro Brasileiro de Análise e Planejamento (CEBRAP) and a Global Fellow at the Centre on Law & Social Transformation (CMI/ Univ. of Bergen). She earned her Master’s degree and PhD at the Faculdade de Direito of the Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Recently, she has been Visiting Professor at the University of Toronto and Columbia Law School. Her research areas include criminal law, general theory of law and sociology of law. Her most recent research is located in the interdisciplinary field of law, political science and sociology of law and focuses on the relations between social movements and law. She has developed studies applied to the fields of racism, gender, human rights and the right to protest.
Aggravation of gender inequality as a consequence of the Covid crisis was acutely felt in Brazil, a country with prevailing structural inequalities. Moreover, during the crisis the Government accelerated the process of hollowing out of access to contraception and legal abortion in the public health system. Ordinance N. 2282 made mandatory for health professionals who attend to patients in cases of rape to notify the police and bureaucratized the access to the procedure.
We will use the case of the Ordinance as an entry-point to our analysis. Two lawsuits challenging its constitutionality were proposed before the Brazilian Supreme Court. Equality had no role in the constitutional claims, nor in the public debate. Consequentially, the Covid crisis context also does not appear in the court cases, not even to flag the increase of sexual violence in the period.
This paper aims to bring to the forefront the equality dimensions of the intensification of attacks on abortion rights in Brazil during the pandemics. It shows how the combination of the crisis with the antiabortion offensive exponentiates gender inequalities, vastly affecting black women. Based on that, we unearth the equality dimensions of the denial of sexual and reproductive rights during the pandemic, analysing it through lenses of intersectionality and the Reproductive Justice framework.
Mecila Senior Fellow 2021
Susanne Schultz is a sociologist and political scientist. She has taught at the Goethe University Frankfurt and the University of Vienna, and has conducted various research projects on biopolitics, human genetics, reproductive medicine, and demographic policies. She has always been crossing borders: between academic research and teaching, engaging with social feminist and antiracist movements, and working in internationalist foundations and NGOs. Her main areas of research are bio- and necropolitics, relations of reproduction, population policies, human genetics, state theory, racism and migration regimes, queerfeminist theory, production networks, and social movements, with a special interest in Latin American countries. She lives in Berlin and is involved with Respect, the organisation for the rights of undocumented migrants, as well as the Berlin Network for Reproductive Justice, among others.
The concept of reproductive justice was introduced by Black feminists in the USA in the 1990s with the claim to address structural inequalities related to abortion, contraception, pregnancy, birth and mother/parenthood. More recently, it has been increasingly taken up by feminist intersectional politics in various global contexts. In the input, Susanne Schultz will discuss some challenges of this intersectional feminist framework. She will look at perspectives of movements that interpret intersectionality as a concept that allows for reflecting on processual, convivial practices. She will do so by referring to some preliminary results of her ongoing research on reproductive justice in feminist activism in Brazil.
Mecila Fellow – Thematic Research Group 2021
Jacqueline Teixeira has a doctoral title in Social Anthropology from the USP, where she also obtained a Master’s degree and a further degree in Sociology, in addition to a degree in Theology from the Mackenzie Presbyterian Institute. As a researcher at CEBRAP, she investigates the areas of gender, sexuality, and religion. She is also a researcher at NUMAS, USP’s centre for social markers of difference. Her main activities and research interests are in the areas of urban anthropology, anthropology of religion, and social markers of difference. She is currently a substitute professor in the Department of Philosophy of Education and Educational Sciences of the Faculty of Education at USP, an accredited professor in the university’s Postgraduate Program in Education (PPGE-USP) and a postdoctoral researcher in its Graduate Program in Social Anthropology (PPGAS-USP).
English
This presentation aims to discuss the distinct approaches between the concept of intersectionality and the notion of articulation categories from the works of Anne McClintock (2010) and Bhah (2006), considering how such approaches tackle the concept of power – that, in turn, is sometimes understood from the perspective of subordination and sometimes from the perspective of relationality. Bearing this comparative study in mind, I propose that religion be understood as a social marker of difference in certain analytical contexts, therefore moving away from theoretical references that point to the phenomenological potential of religious events. By acknowledging religion as a category of action and social interaction, it is possible to analyze its articulation with social markers such as race, gender, class, and generation. In order to exemplify the approach proposed, I will introduce a case study on how religion, race and gender intertwine in certain projects – developed by Pentecostal churches – whose focus is on the primary assistance to women who suffered domestic violence in Brazil.
Portuguese
Trata-se esta apresentação de pensar as diferenças de abordagem entre o conceito de interseccionalidade e a noção de categorias de articulação a partir dos trabalhos de Anne McClintock (2010) e Avtar Bhah (2006) considerando o modo como tais abordagens lidam com o conceito de poder que ora é visto sob a perspectiva da subordinação, ora é pensando na chave da relacionalidade. Meu objetivo ao partir do estudo comparativo em questão consiste em compreender como em determinados contextos analíticos a religião precisa ser tratada como um marcador social da diferença portanto, se distanciar de referenciais teóricos que apontem para o potencial fenomenológico dos acontecimentos religiosos, entendendo religião como uma categoria de ação e de interação social cuja análise deve estar articulada aos marcadores sociais raça, gênero, classe e geração. Para exemplificar a abordagem aqui proposta irei trazer como estudo de caso o modo como religião, raça e gênero aparecem articuladas em alguns projetos desenvolvidos por igrejas pentecostais para a assistência primária a mulheres que sofreram violência doméstica no Brasil.
Panel 4
Ethno-Racial Asymmetries and Solidarities
10.11, Wed, 14:30-16:00 (CET, UTC +1)
Mecila Junior Fellow 2020
Clemente Penna holds a PhD in Social History from Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ, Brazil), earned in 2019, with a fellowship stay at the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice at Brown University (USA). He also earned an MA in Cultural History from Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (UFSC) in 2005 and a BA in History from Universidade do Estado de Santa Catarina in 2001 (UDESC). He was an Assistant Professor in the Department of E-Learning Education at the Universidade do Estado de Santa Catarina from 2001 to 2005 and has been teaching history in the Public Youth and Adult Education Program (EJA) in the city of Palhoça, Santa Catarina, for the past years.
Between 1829 and 1839, Rio de Janeiro did not have any banks in operation, and a relevant banking structure would only appear in the early 1860s. Before that, borrowing and lending money in the city was mainly a private enterprise carried away between individuals and commercial firms. These private and informal credit transactions were responsible for putting in circulation high volumes of capital that flowed through a multitude of credit networks. Rio’s inhabitants usually paid for goods and services using various credit instruments, such as pawnshop tickets, bills of exchange, mortgages deeds, and promissory notes. In other words – people from all classes, colors, and legal statutes relied on one another for their financial needs.
One of the cornerstones of such a credit market rested in a direct relationship between credit and private property – all loans needed collateral. In that context, slavery was pivotal for credit circulation. Enslaved men, women, and children not only served as the primary security for credit transactions, but the trading in humans beings also generated thousands of credit titles. This presentation will show how such intertwined relationship of Rio’s convivial credit market with the commodification of African human beings are critical elements for the understating of the Brazilian financial and banking boom in the second half of the 19th century.
Mecila Senior Fellow 2020
Seth Racusen holds a PhD in Political Science from the Massachussets Institute of Technology (MIT, USA). He is Associate Professor of Political Science and Criminal Justice at Anna Maria College, Paxton (USA). Formerly, he was a Visiting Professor at the Institute for Political and Social Studies at the Universidade Estadual do Rio de Janeiro (UERJ, Brazil) and Fellow at the Dubois Institute of Harvard University (USA). He has secured grants from the American Political Science Association, the US Fulbright Commission, and the Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro.
Dr. Racusen is a recognized source on Brazilian racial discrimination law and affirmative action. His research interests include Brazilian national ideology, racial identity, racism, everyday citizenship and resistance, transitional justice, and comparative racisms.
This paper draws from a longer manuscript in progress that studies Afro Brazilian resistance to racial domination. This paper examines how the reproduction of racial domination and the contestation of that domination are mutually constituted and how the nature of domination shapes the possibilities for resistance. The title characterizes Brazilian everyday racism as a “gray zone” because of its resemblances to Primo Levi’s “gray zone”, which disembodied all who inhabited it. As Levi, Mbembe and others have insisted, domination is not simply manifest between “perpetrators” and “victims” but a “spectacle” in which many others perform varying, intermediary roles, and the actions of all reinscribe the spectacle.
Insisting on her rights offers a counterpoint to those who claim Afro Brazilians are too conciliatory in response to racism. This work argues that Brazilian racial domination is especially durable and anticipatory of challenge, that resistance can only be understood in direct relation to domination, and that this resistance is highly interwoven with domination. Acts of resistance are encruzilhadas of encounter and exchange with domination, which moves between different forms and can appear within daily convivial behaviors such as humor. Resistance also moves between different modes from accommodation and multiple repertoires of resistance. This paper shows that a hesitant resister can insist on her dignity and her rights.
Mecila Junior Fellow 2020
Léa Tosold holds an MA in Literature, Philosophy and Political Science (Universität Wien, Austria), as well as in Political Philosophy (University of York), and a PhD in Political Science (USP). She was the co-founder of the Gender and Politics Studies Group (Gepô-USP) and is a member of the Anti-Racist and Anti-Colonial Studies Intervention Collective (Gira), a researcher of the Nexos Research Network (Universidade Federal do ABC, Brazil) and the Political Theory Study Group (Getepol/Universidade Estadual de Londrina). Her main interest lies in feminist anti-racist epistemologies. Currently, she is working on memory politics and its global-local connections through intimate ethnographies and collective territorialities.
Instead of focusing on a specific alternative regime of conviviality — such as the quilombo — in order to trace an onto-epistemological critique to hegemonic regimes of conviviality, this paper aims at paying attention to how different — overlapping and conflicting — counter-hegemonic modes of conviviality relate to each other in a very same territoriality historically characterized by ongoing violence and multiple struggles. I focus on the relation between the Munduruku people and the riverside populations in the Middle Tapajós River Region, Amazonia, where continuous forms of violent expropriation of land and “resources” take place: besides the exploitation mainly of gold and timber, the local traditional populations also struggle against the project of construction of mega-dams in their territories.
More specifically, I engage with some recent literature that celebrates a historical unprecedented solidarity between the Munduruku and the riverside populations as a result of their common struggle against the construction of dams in their territories. Though agreeing with this argument, I claim for a mode of apprehending forms of solidarity that are not exclusively derived from a reactive position to the hegemonic norms. By doing so, beyond envisaging unforeseen coalitions, I argue that it becomes also possible to analytically apprehend how they may also be entangled with continuous and/or new forms of conflicts and asymmetries.
