Forging Ahead Irish Studies in Brazil

Special Issue Introduction Les Field (bio) and Joanne Rappaport (bio) Collaborative research methods have a long history in Latin America, one that is particularly oriented toward explicit, specific, and wide-ranging projects aimed at the decolonization of knowledge. In pursuit of that end, the various Latin American authors whose work is showcased in this special issue of Collaborative Anthropologies develop and deploy collaborative research methods, epistemologies, and ontologies that to some degree resemble those of North American scholars and, to an important degree, break new ground in refashioning collaborative research as a decolonizing methodology. In order to comprehend what they are doing, we must begin with a consideration of the notions of colonialism, coloniality, and colonial difference. Coloniality, a concept recently developed by postcolonial scholar Walter Mignolo (2002: 61), drawing on the work of Aníbal Quijano (1997, 2000) and Enrique Dussel (1994, 1995, 1996, 1998, 1999), can be understood as the entire ensemble of conditions created by colonialism, itself the aggregate phenomenon of the consolidation of colonial regimes over the past five hundred years. In those areas of the world that experienced colonial regimes in the wake of European conquest, coloniality is an outcome that is coterminous with the nature of modernity: coloniality creates sharply perceptible divergences between modernities in those countries that were the colonizing powers and modernities in colonized areas of the world. Mignolo calls this "colonial difference" and argues that it has structured and shaped the creation, understanding, interpretation, and representation of knowledge about modernity worldwide (2002: 61-62). In a planetary geography shaped [End Page 3] by colonialism, in which coloniality is pervasive, Mignolo discerns a "geopolitics of knowledge" that is always already unequal, because it is the outcome of colonialism and the condition of coloniality. Mignolo observes that just as the geopolitics of knowledge is the outcome of colonialism and coloniality, projects aimed at the decolonization of knowledge are also enmeshed in large-scale processes of political, economic, and social change. For example, he cites dependency theory's central role in defining national policies in Latin America in the aftermath of World War II up until the late 1970s and the corollary impact of dependency theory on the decolonization of knowledge during and following those decades (2002: 63-65). While each of the authors in this issue elaborates a particular concept of decolonization, drawing upon different literatures, they all acknowledge a common intellectual genealogy that ultimately goes back, at least in part, to the work of Colombian sociologist Orlando Fals Borda. In 1970 Fals Borda published an important volume titled Ciencia propia y colonialismo intelectual (Our Science and Intellectual Colonialism), which echoes a widespread and ongoing critique of the colonizing countries' monopoly control over the production of scientific knowledge among Asian, African, and Latin American scholars, and which ultimately inspired the methodology of participatory action research. The scenario Fals Borda lays out is simple: Western expansion takes place not only in the economic and political spheres but in the educational and intellectual arenas as well. The task of Latin American intellectuals, then, is to reframe theory and methodology so that they emanate from the colonial world, converting social research into a tool for liberation. In 1971, together with other politically committed Colombian scholars, Fals Borda made concrete proposals toward such ends in Causa popular, ciencia popular (Popular Cause, Popular Science), published by La Rosca de Investigación y Acción Social (Circle of Social Research and Action), a network of Colombian social scientists and journalists advocating activist research alongside popular movements (Bonilla et al. 1971). La Rosca proposed inserting themselves as researcher-activists into local and regional struggles, in order to establish research priorities in conjunction with local activists. Their collaborative work would focus on the identification of local cultural, social, and political forms that could prove useful in supporting organizations with whom La Rosca worked closely in indigenous regions of southwestern [End Page 4] highland Colombia and among peasants of Colombia's Atlantic coast. In other words, Fals Borda and his associates developed a critique of the Eurocentric geopolitics of knowledge that would lead to its decolonization through an alliance of scholars and grassroots activists. Since the 1970s, Latin American scholars writing both...

Reviewed by: The Language of Gender, Power and Agency in Celtic Studies eds. by Amber Handy and Brian Ó Conchubhair Lisabeth C. Buchelt The Language of Gender, Power and Agency in Celtic Studies, edited by Amber Handy and Brian Ó Conchubhair, pp. 290. Dublin: Arlen House, 2014. $39.95 (paper). Since its establishment as an academic discipline in the late eighteenth century, Celtic Studies has been conceived of as the study of the six designated cultures’ pre-Christian to late medieval pasts. The discipline has always been interdisciplinary, encompassing philology, linguistics, archeology, art history, history, and literature, but for the most part has remained a highly specialized area of the more broadly conceived disciplines of ancient and medieval European culture. Part of this conception has been driven, most likely, in a European intellectual history that perceived the Celtic as only archaic. The Bretons, the Irish, the Welsh, the Scottish, the Manx, and the Cornish were anachronisms to the modernity of the French and the English. Even within medieval European studies, “Celtic” sometimes becomes a convenient classification for motifs that have no readily identifiable (Classical) sources—a sort of box marked “Other”—and Celticists, and what they study, are often seen as radically different from their other medievalist colleagues. It is as if modern medievalists feel that in the twelfth century those Celtic cultures were already existing behind a curtain of mist, in their own Otherworld and separated from the broader cultural developments happening in the Middle Ages. Within Irish Studies, scholars working in the Irish medieval time period—the Celticists—seem to have no place at the table, a point made clear when the [End Page 141] post for the Celtic Studies representative was recently abolished by the American Conference for Irish Studies. In the last decade or so, the Celtic Studies Association of North America, along with the MLA Celtic languages and literatures discussion group, has been working to rend the curtain, as it were, and has been doing so with success. The association’s 2010 conference held at the University of Notre Dame, “Saints, Sinners, and Scribes in the Celtic World,” from which this collection of essays is drawn, purposefully created an intellectual community that brought together scholars working in every possible area of Celtic Studies. The conference presentations, in the words of the editors, represented “literary, historical, and linguistic studies on topics from the seventh through twenty-first centuries.” In the introduction, Joseph Falaky Nagy asks the questions and concerns that link these essays covering over nineteen centuries’ worth of Irish texts: whose voice, and which languages deserve to be heard? What constitutes authorized speech? How does speech or language confer agency, or protect those in danger of exploitation? The essays that explore these questions are grouped into two broad categories: medieval and early modern, and modern and contemporary. In the first section, there are comparative essays, such as Theresa O’Byrne’s work on St Patrick’s Purgatory as it appears in Irish and late medieval Hungarian texts; Hannah Zdansky’s on the character of Dido in the medieval Irish vernacular translation of Virigl’s Aeneid; or Lawrence Eson’s examination of the motif of Merlin’s mixed-race heritage across several Arthurian texts. There are also textual interpretations in various theoretical frameworks, mostly based in cultural studies: Kristen Lee Over’s discussion of the notion of sovereignty in the Arthurian Welsh text Culhwch ac Olwen; or Marina Smyth’s continuing insightful work on the relationship between early medieval scientific thought and the Hiberno-Latin text De mirabilibus sacrae scripturae by a writer known as “the Irish Augustine.” Two of the best essays here examine relationships between texts and material culture. Catherine McKenna traces—through textual sources, archeological records, and maps—the proliferation of holy wells in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Ireland and suggests that many, if not most, of these sites had not been in existence since the “age of Tírechán [one of St. Patrick’s medieval biographers] and beyond into the pre-Christian era.” Rather, the radical altering of the landscape because of the new economics of land tenure led to a communal re-creation of sacred sites and their accompanying dinnseanchas, or stories...

In the last two decades, the media and technology have been at the center of political and cultural conflicts in Latin America. Major battles over media power between the government and media corporations (Artz 2017; Follari 2014) have generated extensive public debate and media reforms in the region (Martens, Vivares, and McChesney 2014; Waisbord 2010). Community media organizations in Latin America and beyond have been at the forefront, challenging configurations of power and legislation related to media and technology. Latin America has a long history of community media organization and activism; in fact, the foundations of community radio go back to the early twentieth century in Colombia and Bolivia (Rodríguez 2001; Santiago García Gago, this volume). Community media have also played a fundamental role as alternative sources for the preservation of language and traditions (Beltrán 1983). In the 1970s and 1980s, Latin American scholars and activists focused their studies on the analysis of power and hegemony in the media (Beltrán and de Cardona 1980; Dorfman and Mattelart 1972), while in other parts of the world they focused on the study of the effects of the media.

In the last two decades, the media and technology have been at the center of political and cultural conflicts in Latin America. Major battles over media power between the government and media corporations (Artz 2017; Follari 2014) have generated extensive public debate and media reforms in the region (Martens, Vivares, and McChesney 2014; Waisbord 2010). Community media organizations in Latin America and beyond have been at the forefront, challenging configurations of power and legislation related to media and technology. Latin America has a long history of community media organization and activism; in fact, the foundations of community radio go back to the early twentieth century in Colombia and Bolivia (Rodríguez 2001; Santiago García Gago, this volume). Community media have also played a fundamental role as alternative sources for the preservation of language and traditions (Beltrán 1983). In the 1970s and 1980s, Latin American scholars and activists focused their studies on the analysis of power and hegemony in the media (Beltrán and de Cardona 1980; Dorfman and Mattelart 1972), while in other parts of the world they focused on the study of the effects of the media.

The Catholic Church in Latin America was until the mid-1960s one of the most ignored topics of research in a neglected continent. It was not only overlooked by North Americans and Europeans; stranger still, it received only cursory attention from Latin American scholars. The meagre consideration it did attract was overwhelmingly historical in nature and frequently came from authors promoting or attacking particular religious beliefs and institutions. The controversy in Colombia over the persecution of the Protestants (Goff, 1965), and the dramatic events caused by the reactions of the Church to the Mexican revolution (Brown, 1964), stimulated a literature that was at times extremely biased.Yet, it is not easy to explain the neglect of the Church in the literature since, unlike peasant leagues or guerrilla movements, it is not a novelty in the region. The Church was founded simultaneously with the Iberian societies; much of the culture of Latin America derives from within the Church and has evolved in relationship to it; social fields such as education and charity have always been heavily influenced by Church doctrine and organizations; and the vast majority of the population are declared Catholics. In addition the Church is a highly structured organization in a region of low organizational development; in all countries Catholic groups have been politically active and in some cases assumed the form of Christian Democratic parties (Williams, 1967) which have held power; and the political models currently being formulated in Brazil and Peru would appear to owe much of their content to traditional Catholic principles of hierarchy, paternalism, and corporate identity.

In 1975 the Trilateral Commission published Crozier, Huntington, and Wantanuki'sCrisis of Democracy, which questioned the compatibility of stable capitalist development and traditional democratic freedoms in the advanced capitalist nations, a theme echoed in Lindblom (1977), Lindberg et al. (1975), Nisbet (1975), and Huntington (1981). Living in capitalist societies whose recent experience is strikingly nondemocratic, Latin American scholars have felt most urgently the need to assess critically this contradiction and its implications for general political tendencies within the process of capitalist development. In the 1970s, directly in response to events in the major industrialized Latin American nations (especially Brazil, Argentina, and Chile), theoretical and empirical research has reformulated the terrain of debate regarding the relationship of political, economic, and social relations in peripheral capitalist nations. This new vocabulary and new set of hypotheses about state structure and state intervention suggest explanations for the nondemocratic political structure and the increasingly expansive and intensive role of the state in the process of capital accumulation in Latin America.

Euroamerican scholars mark Latin America as a site of utopian revolutions, foreign intervention, troubled economies, military repression, and a failed modernist paradigm of development. Four recent books critically assess this construction by addressing its source in the international imaginary. They advocate a subaltern perspective on colonial difference and argue that postmodernity as promulgated by Euroamerican scholars may become yet another intellectual trend ignorant of Latin America's particularities and complexities. Latin American scholars have embraced postmodernity far longer than their Euroamerican counterparts, whose relatively recent applications remain problematic. TIMOTHY J. SMITH is Associate Director, Institute for the Study of Latin America and the Caribbean at the University of South Florida. His research covers the anthropology of politics, ethnicity, democracy, and social movements in Guatemala and Mexico. He is co-editor of The Guatemala Reader and Kaqchikel Maya Authority and Government in Sololá. He has published in Ancient Mesoamerica and The Oxford Encyclopedia of Mesoamerican Cultures.

In this article I examine current discussions about the governance of agro-biotechnology in Latin America, Europe, and the USA, based on a comparative reading of critical scholarship about the topic (Bravo, Toro, and Vélez 2014; Parthasarathy 2017; Oliveira and Hecht 2018). In the first section I explain how agro-biotechnology has become a salient issue for international agencies, nation-states, corporations, and communities. I then show that, for the authors, intellectual property regimes are a key part of the process of governance and should be understood as much more than mere techno-legal tools. In the second section I focus on the critical approach to biosecurity taken by Latin American scholars. In the third section I explore how soy expansion has radically transformed South American territories. I close with a reflection on how the STS community can expand and sharpen its intellectual insights and practical value by pairing up with critical community-based studies that decentralize the discussion about public governance of agro-biotechnology from the nation-state and move it to more locally situated spaces.

In Olympismo: The Olympic Movement in the Making of Latin America and the Caribbean (2020), editors Sotomayor and Torres suggest that studying the Olympic Movement in Latin America is a way to explore the creation of their societies. but there are few publications examining how Latin American scholars consider their Olympic experience. Reviewing the growth of Olympic sports in Colombia provides a good test of this thesis. This study traces the development of Colombia’s involvement in sport from 1930 to 2022. We see that by competing in national and other western-hemisphere events, Colombian athletes have improved their performances; that the national government, supported by programs offered by the United Nations and the US Peace Corps, has encouraged sport development in education; that grassroots activities, such as boxing and cycling, have produced world-class athletes; and that women and Afro-Colombians have become celebrated competitors. From the vantage point of 2023, there is evidence that the desire to win Olympic medals has inspired positive social change and elevated and diversified athletic participation in Colombia.

The Global Administrative Law Project: A Review from Brazil

During the last decades, the issue of technological and productive catch-up has been raised by several Latin American scholars under the field of development and innovation studies (e.g. Cimoli et ...

Argentina's return to constitutional democracy in 1983 initiated a cultural renaissance as the new government instituted a widespread collective effort to recover from a decade of military dictatorship. For a five-year period, until severe financial emergencies forced the cancellation of subsidies, film-making flourished. Cinematographers took the opportunity to articulate their pent-up frustrations regarding the suppression of political dissent as well as to address social attitudes towards violence, Nazism, homosexuality and incest. In this book, David Foster discusses 10 major films of this time and examines the transformation of social topics into motion pictures and the relationship between commercial film-making strategies and Argentine redemocratisation. Foster analyses internationally recognised films such as Kiss of the Spider Woman, The Offical Story and Man Facing Southeast as structural features - how action is framed, the transition between scenes, the relationships among characters, the use of highlighting and foregrounding - as a key to ech film's interpretation of Argentine social topics. General readers, students of film theory and Latin American scholars should welcome Foster's analysis of the most important films made during Argentina's period of cultural renewal.

Reviewed by: The Politics of Necessity: community organizing and democracy in South Africa by Elke Zuern Carin Runciman (bio) Elke Zuern (2011) The Politics of Necessity: community organizing and democracy in South Africa. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press Elke Zuern’s The Politics of Necessity: community organizing and democracy in South Africa engages in an ambitious contemporary, historical and comparative analysis of community politics in South Africa. The main thrust of Zuern’s analysis is to examine South Africa’s democracy, not from the perspective of institutions and legal norms, but from that of ordinary working class people. This volume therefore examines the everyday meanings of democracy and its influence in shaping popular struggles of the last 30 years contributing to similar debates advanced by Latin American scholars in expanding the study of democracy (see O’Donnell et al 2004, Holston 2008). The book covers three phases of popular struggle in South Africa: the civics in the 1980s, the civics during the political transition of the 1990s and an analysis of new social movements and popular struggles post-2000. Employing the comparative method, Zuern also offers an analysis of similar struggles in Mexico, Nigeria, Botswana and Argentina. Through the course of the analysis offered Zuern advances four central arguments about community-based politics. The first and perhaps most insightful argument is that, the politics of necessity is not only about material needs. Those who frame their demands in protest often begin with and emphasis basic material necessities, but their demands also include the right to be heard, to have a voice, to be consulted and to become full members of the political community. (15) [End Page 137] In recent times, there has been considerable debate over the meaning of recent protests. The ANC has argued, as in Jacob Zuma’s 2014 State of the Nation address, that protests are the result, paradoxically, of good service delivery, while myself and others (see Alexander et al 2014) have argued that such protests are illustrative of a much wider crisis in post-apartheid democracy. Zuern’s volume helps to ground these arguments historically by demonstrating how struggles over the last 30 years have concerned themselves not just with fighting against apartheid or poor service delivery but have contained much broader claims and critiques about the society in which we live. The second important contribution Zuern makes is to the under-studied and under-researched area of demobilisation. Through an analysis of the civics and SANCO during the transitional period, Zuern documents how various civic organisations became increasingly drawn into mechanisms of local government and became spaces which were less participatory. Thirdly, she argues that processes of mobilisation which encourage people to critique and debate the current order of things enhance democracy. Finally, our understanding of democracy needs to be broadened and strengthened through an analysis of the role community-based organisations have in shaping and challenging ideas about democracy. The historical account which Zuern provides on the civic movement provides a much needed caution against the ANC’s attempt to appropriate this period of struggle history. As Zuern notes, while its politics and its members played a significant role, the ANC did not control or lead this struggle movement. By providing an account of the influence of Black Consciousness politics in the formation of the Port Elizabeth Black Civic Organisation (PEBCO) Zuern provides a nuanced analysis of the differing and conflicting political views of the period which is often missed in other analysis. Furthermore, Zuern discusses the important class dynamics within the mobilisation of the Soweto Civic Association (SCA). Through interviews with civic leaders Zuern provides an important insight into an area of South African history which is still relatively under-researched. Although Zuern’s analysis of the transitional period and the role of SANCO has appeared elsewhere (see Zuern 2001, 2006), by grounding it within a historical analysis these sections provide an important link in understanding the civics and current forms of community mobilisation. Furthermore, by examining this period of history Zuern provides some much needed analysis of the processes of demobilisation. [End Page 138] In addition, the volume provides some analysis of the movement organisations that have emerged post-2000...

This essay examines young Venezuelans’ experiences of daily insecurities and critical situations and their responses using the framework of ontological security. The study uses the concept of ‘multiple youths,’ proposed by Latin American scholars, to link the ideas of security and identity, to explore the different intersubjective understandings of these notions in the lives of university students, and to explain their choice of conflict as part of the ordinary. Empirical analysis shows how routinization of conflict has a strong psychological impact on Venezuelan youth’s intersubjective identity formation and interpretation of events as ordinary or threatening. The routinization of conflict is a response to maintaining ontological security, providing a sense of constancy and continuity since it has become part of the routines of university students in Venezuela. In addition, conflict helps eliminate and/or delegitimize the ‘other,’ hence hindering dialogue and a negotiated solution to the current political impasse.

This study starts by presenting the main lines that accompanied the evolution of short story theory in general, with special attention on the thought of Edgar Allan Poe. Afterwards, it shows an overview of the theoretical and critical study of the short story in Portugal, which began in the seventeenth century with Corte na Aldeia, by Francisco Rodrigues Lobo, the first attempt to present a set of guidelines on the art of the short story and the novella. We can say that, in general, studies on the short story in Portugal show a direct or indirect influence of Poe’ ideas, whether through North American theorists or through Latin American scholars, all of whom discussed the aspects that characterize the short story as a narrative genre and as a reflection of modern and postmodern condition.