Robin Rodd
Duke Kunshan University | 昆山杜克大学, Division of Social Sciences, Faculty Member
- Argentina, Uruguay, New Models Of Participatory And Direct Democracy, Shamanism, Democracy, Citizenship, and 17 moreHuman Rights, Latin American Studies, Latin America, Transitional Justice, Human Rights Violations, Political Philosophy, Political Theory, Civil Society and the Public Sphere, Ernesto Laclau, Radical Democracy, Democracia, Populismo, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Jacques Rancière, Populism, Venezuelan Politics, and Anthropologyedit
Research Interests:
Traditional Amazonian medicine, and in particular the psychoactive substance ayahuasca, has generated significant research interest along with the recent revival of psychedelic medicine. Previously we published within-treatment... more
Traditional Amazonian medicine, and in particular the psychoactive substance ayahuasca, has generated significant research interest along with the recent revival of psychedelic medicine. Previously we published within-treatment quantitative results from a residential addiction treatment centre that predominately employs Peruvian traditional Amazonian medicine, and here we follow up that work with a qualitative study of within-treatment patient experiences. Open-ended interviews with 9 inpatients were conducted from 2014–2015, and later analysed using thematic analysis. Our findings support the possibility of therapeutic effects from Amazonian medicine, but also highlight the complexity of Amazonian medical practices, suggesting that the richness of such traditions should not be reduced to the use of ayahuasca only.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Traditional Amazonian medicine, and in particular the psychoactive substance ayahuasca, has generated significant research interest along with the recent revival of psychedelic medicine. Previously we published within-treatment... more
Traditional Amazonian medicine, and in particular the psychoactive substance ayahuasca, has generated significant research interest along with the recent revival of psychedelic medicine. Previously we published within-treatment quantitative results from a residential addiction treatment centre that predominately employs Peruvian traditional Amazonian medicine, and here we follow up that work with a qualitative study of within-treatment patient experiences. Open-ended interviews with 9 inpatients were conducted from 2014–2015, and later analysed using thematic analysis. Our findings support the possibility of therapeutic effects from Amazonian medicine, but also highlight the complexity of Amazonian medical practices, suggesting that the richness of such traditions should not be reduced to the use of ayahuasca only.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
ABSTRACT The ambiguous relations and subjectivities associated with the banality of evil are peripheral to a dominant human rights discourse oriented around the binary logics of perpetrators and victims and dictatorship and democracy. The... more
ABSTRACT The ambiguous relations and subjectivities associated with the banality of evil are peripheral to a dominant human rights discourse oriented around the binary logics of perpetrators and victims and dictatorship and democracy. The absence of non-binary subjectivities reflects a conceptual gap relating to questions of shared responsibility posed by Hannah Arendt more than half a century ago. Despite its ongoing relevance for reflecting on the production of systematic suffering, the banality of evil remains an incomplete theoretical project. Here, I bring recent elaborations on Arendt’s notion of the banality of evil, particularly Michael Rothberg’s Implicated Subjects, to bear on Argentine memory politics. I highlight the potential for the notion of the implicated subject to expand Argentine memory studies beyond the perpetrator-victim binary of the Nunca Más human rights discourse. Conceptual art and artistic approaches to memory may provide fruitful avenues for future exploration of implicated subjectivities and horizons of responsibility.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Memorials to state violence can be read as cultural ledgers of what constitutes legitimate citizenship practice and acceptable citizen–state relations. This chapter explores the significance of Argentinian and Australian memorials for... more
Memorials to state violence can be read as cultural ledgers of what constitutes legitimate citizenship practice and acceptable citizen–state relations. This chapter explores the significance of Argentinian and Australian memorials for understanding how past political action shapes a horizon of political possibility. First, it examines how ANZAC memorials celebrate empire, obedience and the status quo. ANZAC exists in a field of other memorials and cultural texts in Australia that negate politics and possibility for emancipation. Next, it discusses several Argentinian memorials that reflect the diversity of Argentina’s politics of memory. While questions of popular complicity in the state violence of the 1970s have yet to be memorialized, Argentine memorials nonetheless recognize the legitimacy of dissent as a basis of democratic citizenship. Drawing out the significance of the comparison by discussing memorials in relation to theories of citizen agency, this chapter problematizes the northwest-centric view of democracy as end, and reveals the importance of remembering challenges to power as a basis for ongoing democratization. Based on a comparison of memorials in relation to theories of democratic citizenship, the chapter contends that Australia’s political subjectivity is amenable to dedemocratization while Argentina’s reflects the possibility of open-ended democratization.
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Ayahuasca, a psychoactive plant decoction, has spread from indigenous communities in South America to urban areas in the Americas, Europe, and Australia where it is used in neoshamanic rituals. This paper draws on ethnography of... more
Ayahuasca, a psychoactive plant decoction, has spread from indigenous communities in South America to urban areas in the Americas, Europe, and Australia where it is used in neoshamanic rituals. This paper draws on ethnography of Australian ayahuasca ceremonies to examine the ways that individualism shapes the structure of ayahuasca rituals, the interpretation of visionary experiences, and notions of spiritual development. I show how the metaphors that Australian drinkers involved in this study use to understand their ayahuasca experiences and spiritual development reflect a form of immunitary individualism, which is premised on the negation of difference and relationality. Secular disenchantment and a culture of narcissism may drive people to seek ayahuasca, but transcendence is interpreted in terms of an expansive, non-relational self. In this sense, neoshamanic ayahuasca culture may be an escape from and reproduction of the culture of narcissism associated with the malaise of mode...
Research Interests:
In a global context of narrowing civil liberties and intensifying state repression, it is critical to have adequately nuanced theories to account for the conditions of the emergence of democratic subjectivities. Guillermo O’Donnell’s... more
In a global context of narrowing civil liberties and intensifying state repression, it is critical to have adequately nuanced theories to account for the conditions of the emergence of democratic subjectivities. Guillermo O’Donnell’s theory of citizen agency, in which citizens are rights-bearing moral agents and the ‘vectors of democratization’, bridges democratic and citizenship theory, normative and empirical approaches. In O’Donnell’s rendering, the significance of rights lies in their capacity to legitimise rights claiming and other performances of citizenship. Australia is unique among democracies insofar as it does not recognise the rights of the citizens constitutionally or in a bill of rights. I use O’Donnell’s Democracy, Agency, and the State as a focus for reflecting on the meanings and symbolism of Australian citizenship, and the symbolic significance of not grounding citizenship in rights. My discussion combines ethnographic analysis of citizenship ceremonies with critical discussion of recent laws. I argue that the absenting of rights in constitutional and ceremonial evocations of citizenship has created a vague and contradictory figure of the citizen that straddles authoritarian and democratic values and symbols. This empty and contradictory mythology unhinges citizenship from democracy in Australian political culture, leaving it susceptible to authoritarian creep. Nonetheless, democracy’s symbolic openness offers hope for the emergence of new democratic subjectivities, even amidst conditions of narrowing civic possibility. O’Donnell’s study of citizen agency hones attention to the importance of the cultural conditions amenable to democratic subjectivity and warrants further comparative exploration.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Amidst a global turn towards authoritarianism and populism, there are few contemporary examples of state-led democratization. This article discusses how Uruguay’s Frente Amplio (FA) party has drawn on a unique national democratic cultural... more
Amidst a global turn towards authoritarianism and populism, there are few contemporary examples of state-led democratization. This article discusses how Uruguay’s Frente Amplio (FA) party has drawn on a unique national democratic cultural heritage to encourage a coupling of participatory and representative institutions in “a politics of closeness.” The FA has reinvigorated Batllismo, a discourse associated with social justice, civic republicanism, and the rise of Uruguayan social democracy in the early twentieth century. At the same time, the FA’s emphasis on egalitarian participation is inspired by the thought of Uruguay’s independence hero José Artigas. I argue that the cross-weave of party and movement, and of democratic citizenship and national heritage, encourages the emergence of new figures of the citizen and new permutations for connecting citizens with representative institutions. The FA’s “politics of closeness” is an example of how state-driven democratization remains pos...
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Research Interests:
Aims: The therapeutic use of psychedelics is regaining scientific momentum, but similarly psychoactive ethnobotanical substances have a long history of medical (and other) uses in indigenous contexts. Here we aimed to evaluate patient... more
Aims: The therapeutic use of psychedelics is regaining scientific momentum, but similarly psychoactive ethnobotanical substances have a long history of medical (and other) uses in indigenous contexts. Here we aimed to evaluate patient outcomes in a residential addiction treatment center that employs a novel combination of Western and traditional Amazonian methods. Methods: The study was observational, with repeated measures applied throughout treatment. All tests were administered in the center, which is located in Tarapoto, Peru. Data were collected between 2014 and 2015, and the study sample consisted of 36 male inpatients who were motivated to seek treatment and who entered into treatment voluntarily. Around 58% of the sample was from South America, 28% from Europe, and the remaining 14% from North America. We primarily employed repeated measures on a psychological test battery administered throughout treatment, measuring perceived stress, craving frequency, mental illness sympto...
Research Interests:
... It is argued that Piaroa shamanic practices involve conditioning the mind to achieve optimal perceptive capacities that, in association with sensitive biopsychosocial study, facilitate accurate prediction and successful psychosocial... more
... It is argued that Piaroa shamanic practices involve conditioning the mind to achieve optimal perceptive capacities that, in association with sensitive biopsychosocial study, facilitate accurate prediction and successful psychosocial prescription. A cultural neurophenomenological ...
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[Extract] Fifty years after the crushing of Nazism, the same socio-economic trends that once made fascism palatable to Western Europeans are again simmering under the surface of liberal democratic societies. Understanding the nature or... more
[Extract] Fifty years after the crushing of Nazism, the same socio-economic trends that once made fascism palatable to Western Europeans are again simmering under the surface of liberal democratic societies. Understanding the nature or essence of fascism is as pertinent now as ever. As neo-liberal solutions to state debt problems only exacerbate socio-economic contradictions, fewer individualist, materialistic dreams are met and the temptation to find solidarity in a community becomes stronger. The isolating tendencies of liberal societies leave very few outlets for channeling communitarian dynamism beyond, that is, politically mobilizable fascist myths of community rebirth. The surface manifestations of fascist movements are socio-historically specific. Different characteristics integral to each nation's history and socio-politico-cultural environment allow for different manifestations of fascism. This does not, however, preclude the existence of a core set of fascist elements: of a generic fascism. The psycho-social impact of economic developments which allowed for fascist myths of communitarian rebirth to emerge are not geo-historically specific. There is an integral relationship between fascism's mythic core (which is susceptible to a number of permutations at the surface level) and the socio-economic environment which allowed for fascism's development.
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[Extract] Interview conducted in May 2011 with Jose Diaz-LuIs, shaman Piaroa 57 years in the region of Parguaza (Venezuela). In shamanism Piaroa the dada tree (species Malouetia) plays a role central ritual like the other two substances... more
[Extract] Interview conducted in May 2011 with Jose Diaz-LuIs, shaman Piaroa 57 years in the region of Parguaza (Venezuela). In shamanism Piaroa the dada tree (species Malouetia) plays a role central ritual like the other two substances that are hallucinogemes tuhuipa (Banisteriopsis caapi) and yopo (Anadenanthera peregrina). Ingested in the form of a prepared drink from its bark, dada allows access the invisible world, the eyes of insiders, it gives access to the conveyed by myths and ritual songs and pictures, and as such, it proves to be the source of all knowledge.
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This article gives an overview of key components of the Piaroa shamanic training and initiation complex. While anthropologists have given accounts of how Piaroa people describe the initiatory rites undertaken by shamans, the ongoing... more
This article gives an overview of key components of the Piaroa shamanic training and initiation complex. While anthropologists have given accounts of how Piaroa people describe the initiatory rites undertaken by shamans, the ongoing training involved in preparing for initiation has received comparatively little attention. Piaroa shamanic training is ongoing, and punctuated by three painful initiatory ordeals. Piaroa shamans specialise in the use of plant hallucinogens to attain visions interpreted according to a dynamic matrix of psycho-social forces and mytho-historical templates. Direct experience of the parameters and technologies of consciousness employed by Piaroa shamans can lead to ethnographic locutions of the functional, experiential and ideological dynamics of Piaroa shamanism. While cultural loading conditions what one sees during visions, the neurobiological bases of shamanic practices are cross-culturally accessible, and allow for participatory understanding of an inner...
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Research Interests:
Page 1. 35 Anthropology of Consciousness, Vol. 17, Issue 1, pp. 3564. ISSN1053-4202, © 2006 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permissions to photocopy or reproduce ...
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Research Interests: Psychology, Cultural Heritage, Addiction, Traditional Medicine, Shamanism, and 12 moreVenezuela, Traditional Chinese Medicine, Humans, South American Indians, Psychoactive Drugs, Classification, Drug Addiction, Alkaloids, Hallucinogens, South, Plant extracts, and Public health systems and services research
Most Orinocoan ethnic groups, including the Cuiva and the Piaroa, use yopo, a hallucinogenic snuff derived from the seeds of the Anadenanthera peregrina tree. This study contrasts Piaroa and Cuiva attitudes toward and uses of yopo in... more
Most Orinocoan ethnic groups, including the Cuiva and the Piaroa, use yopo, a hallucinogenic snuff derived from the seeds of the Anadenanthera peregrina tree. This study contrasts Piaroa and Cuiva attitudes toward and uses of yopo in light of ongoing processes of social change. We do not believe that these sociocultural forces will lead to a phasing out of yopo in Piaroa and Cuiva life. However, we demonstrate how, in nearby communities, a combination of historical and ethical contingencies lead to very different patterns and understanding of drug use. Yopo is strongly associated with the performance of narratives central to each ethnic group's cosmology and identity. Cuiva yopo consumption is also a means of resisting persecution and asserting the right to a just reality. Piaroa attitudes towards yopo are affected by the interplay of shamanic ethical principles and missionary activity, and are sometimes paradoxical: yopo is the reason for harm and the means of salvation; required by shamans to create the future and yet regarded by many laypeople as a relic of the past. We identify persecution, local responses to missionary activity, and shamanic ethics as key factors affecting the evolution of hallucinogen use by Amazonian ethnic groups.
Research Interests: Religion, Christianity, Social Change, Psychology, Addiction, and 15 moreColombia, Shamanism, Colonialism, Culture, Venezuela, Comparative Study, Humans, South American Indians, Psychoactive Drugs, Drug Addiction, Comparative Analysis, Hallucinogens, Ethnic Groups, Public health systems and services research, and Ethnic Group
Most Orinocoan ethnic groups, including the Cuiva and the Piaroa, use yopo, a hallucinogenic snuff derived from the seeds of the Anadenanthera peregrina tree. This study contrasts Piaroa and Cuiva attitudes toward and uses of yopo in... more
Most Orinocoan ethnic groups, including the Cuiva and the Piaroa, use yopo, a hallucinogenic snuff derived from the seeds of the Anadenanthera peregrina tree. This study contrasts Piaroa and Cuiva attitudes toward and uses of yopo in light of ongoing processes of social change. We do not believe that these sociocultural forces will lead to a phasing out of yopo in Piaroa and Cuiva life. However, we demonstrate how, in nearby communities, a combination of historical and ethical contingencies lead to very different patterns and understanding of drug use. Yopo is strongly associated with the performance of narratives central to each ethnic group's cosmology and identity. Cuiva yopo consumption is also a means of resisting persecution and asserting the right to a just reality. Piaroa attitudes towards yopo are affected by the interplay of shamanic ethical principles and missionary activity, and are sometimes paradoxical: yopo is the reason for harm and the means of salvation; required by shamans to create the future and yet regarded by many laypeople as a relic of the past. We identify persecution, local responses to missionary activity, and shamanic ethics as key factors affecting the evolution of hallucinogen use by Amazonian ethnic groups.
Research Interests: Religion, Christianity, Psychology, Addiction, Colombia, and 15 moreColonialism, Culture, Comparative Study, Drug Use, Anthropology of Hallucinogens, Humans, Psychoactive Drugs, Piaroa, Drug Addiction, Comparative Analysis, Hallucinogens, Ethnic Groups, Public health systems and services research, Ethnic Group, and Guahibo
Page 1. 35 Anthropology of Consciousness, Vol. 17, Issue 1, pp. 3564. ISSN1053-4202, © 2006 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permissions to photocopy or reproduce ...
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Page 1. 35 Anthropology of Consciousness, Vol. 17, Issue 1, pp. 3564. ISSN1053-4202, © 2006 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permissions to photocopy or reproduce ...
Research Interests:
Page 1. 35 Anthropology of Consciousness, Vol. 17, Issue 1, pp. 3564. ISSN1053-4202, © 2006 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permissions to photocopy or reproduce ...
Research Interests:
The ambiguous relations and subjectivities associated with the banality of evil are peripheral to a dominant human rights discourse oriented around the binary logics of perpetrators and victims and dictatorship and democracy. The absence... more
The ambiguous relations and subjectivities associated with the banality of evil are peripheral to a dominant human rights discourse oriented around the binary logics of perpetrators and victims and dictatorship and democracy. The absence of non-binary subjectivities reflects a conceptual gap relating to questions of shared responsibility posed by Hannah Arendt more than half a century ago. The banality of evil remains an incomplete theoretical project, despite its ongoing relevance for reflecting on the production of systematic suffering. Here, I bring recent elaborations on Arendt's notion of the banality of evil, particularly Michael Rothberg's Implicated Subjects, to bear on Argentine memory politics. I highlight the potential for the notion of the implicated subject to expand Argentine memory studies beyond the perpetrator victim binary of the Nunca Más human rights discourse. Conceptual art and artistic approaches to memory may provide fruitful avenues for future exploration of implicated subjectivities and horizons of responsibility.
Research Interests:
Aims: The therapeutic use of psychedelics is regaining scientific momentum, but similarly psychoactive ethnobotanical substances have a long history of medical (and other) uses in indigenous contexts. Here we aimed to evaluate patient... more
Aims:
The therapeutic use of psychedelics is regaining scientific momentum, but similarly psychoactive ethnobotanical substances have a long history of medical (and other) uses in indigenous contexts. Here we aimed to evaluate patient outcomes in a residential addiction
treatment center that employs a novel combination of Western and traditional Amazonian methods.
Methods:
The study was observational, with repeated measures applied throughout treatment. All tests were administered in the center, which is located in Tarapoto, Peru. Data were collected between 2014 and 2015, and the study sample consisted of 36 male inpatients who were motivated to seek treatment and who entered into treatment voluntarily. Around 58% of the sample was from South America, 28% from Europe, and the remaining 14% from North America. We primarily employed repeated measures on a psychological test battery administered throughout treatment, measuring perceived stress, craving frequency, mental illness symptoms, spiritual well-being, and physical and emotional health. Addiction severity was measured on intake, and neuropsychological performance was assessed in a subsample
from intake to at least 2 months into treatment.
Results:
Statistically significant and clinically positive changes were found across all repeated measures. These changes appeared early in the treatment and were maintained over time. Significant improvements were also found for neuropsychological functioning.
Conclusion: These results provide evidence for treatment safety in a highly novel addiction treatment setting, while also suggesting positive therapeutic effects.
The therapeutic use of psychedelics is regaining scientific momentum, but similarly psychoactive ethnobotanical substances have a long history of medical (and other) uses in indigenous contexts. Here we aimed to evaluate patient outcomes in a residential addiction
treatment center that employs a novel combination of Western and traditional Amazonian methods.
Methods:
The study was observational, with repeated measures applied throughout treatment. All tests were administered in the center, which is located in Tarapoto, Peru. Data were collected between 2014 and 2015, and the study sample consisted of 36 male inpatients who were motivated to seek treatment and who entered into treatment voluntarily. Around 58% of the sample was from South America, 28% from Europe, and the remaining 14% from North America. We primarily employed repeated measures on a psychological test battery administered throughout treatment, measuring perceived stress, craving frequency, mental illness symptoms, spiritual well-being, and physical and emotional health. Addiction severity was measured on intake, and neuropsychological performance was assessed in a subsample
from intake to at least 2 months into treatment.
Results:
Statistically significant and clinically positive changes were found across all repeated measures. These changes appeared early in the treatment and were maintained over time. Significant improvements were also found for neuropsychological functioning.
Conclusion: These results provide evidence for treatment safety in a highly novel addiction treatment setting, while also suggesting positive therapeutic effects.
Research Interests:
In a global context of narrowing civil liberties and intensifying state repression, it is critical to have adequately nuanced theories to account for the conditions of the emergence of democratic subjectivities. Guillermo O’Donnell’s... more
In a global context of narrowing civil liberties and intensifying state repression, it is critical to have adequately nuanced theories to account for the conditions of the emergence of democratic subjectivities. Guillermo O’Donnell’s theory of citizen agency, in which citizens are rights bearing moral agents and the ‘vectors of democratization’, bridges democratic and citizenship theory, normative and empirical approaches. In O’Donnell’s rendering, the significance of rights lies in their capacity to legitimise rights claiming and other performances of citizenship. Australia is unique among democracies insofar as it does not recognise the rights of the citizen constitutionally or in a bill of rights. I use O’Donnell’s Democracy, Agency, and the State as a focus for reflecting on the meanings and symbolism of Australian citizenship, and the symbolic significance of not grounding citizenship in rights. My discussion combines ethnographic analysis of citizenship ceremonies with critical discussion of recent laws. I argue that the absenting of rights in constitutional and ceremonial evocations of citizenship has created a vague and contradictory figure of the citizen that straddles authoritarian and democratic values and symbols. This empty and contradictory mythology unhinges citizenship from democracy in Australian political culture, leaving it susceptible to authoritarian creep. Nonetheless, democracy’s symbolic openness offers hope for the emergence of new democratic subjectivities, even amidst conditions of narrowing civic possibility. O’Donnell’s study of citizen agency hones attention to the importance of the cultural conditions amenable to democratic subjectivity and warrants further comparative exploration.
Research Interests:
Today Is Not Tomorrow emphasises the centrality of temporal subjectivity to PTSD. The second portion of the title, PTSD Understories, indicates that there is a plurality of everyday experiences, relationships, situations, and... more
Today Is Not Tomorrow emphasises the centrality of temporal subjectivity to PTSD. The second portion of the title, PTSD Understories, indicates that there is a plurality of everyday experiences, relationships, situations, and sensitivities associated with PTSD that continues to be under-recognised. The potency of post-trauma art is not in any claim to own experience but to open in unique ways the politics of testimony and the affective valences of post-traumatic social life. What can art as a visual language tell us about the diversity and textures of post-traumatic experience?
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Research Interests:
The Amazonian cosmos is a battlefield where beauty is possible but violent chaos rules. As a result, the Piaroa world is characterised by an ongoing battle between shamans who uphold, on behalf of all Piaroa, the ideal of ethical living,... more
The Amazonian cosmos is a battlefield where beauty is possible but violent chaos rules. As a result, the Piaroa world is characterised by an ongoing battle between shamans who uphold, on behalf of all Piaroa, the ideal of ethical living, and forces of chaos and destruction, epitomised by malevolent spirits (märi) and dangerous sorcerers. This essay draws on ethnographic research involving shamanic apprenticeship conducted between 1999 and 2002 to explore the ethics of Piaroa shamanic practice. Given the ambivalent nature of the Amazonian shaman as healer and sorcerer, what constitutes ethical shamanic practice? How is good defined relative to the potential for social and self-harm? I argue that the Piaroa notions of ‘living by the law’ and ‘the good life of tranquillity’ amount to a theory of shamanic ethics and an ethos in the sense of a culturally entrained system of moral and emotional sensibilities. This ethos turns on the importance of guiding pro-social, cooperative and peaceful behaviour in the context of a cosmos marked by violent chaos. Shamanic ethics also pivots around the ever-present possibility that visionary power dissolves into self- and social destruction. Ethical shamanic practice is contingent on shamans turning their own mastery of the social ecology of emotions into a communitarian reality.
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Amidst a global turn towards authoritarianism and populism, there are few contemporary examples of state-led democratisation. This paper discusses how Uruguay’s Frente Amplio (FA) party has drawn on a unique national democratic cultural... more
Amidst a global turn towards authoritarianism and populism, there are few contemporary examples of state-led democratisation. This paper discusses how Uruguay’s Frente Amplio (FA) party has drawn on a unique national democratic cultural heritage to encourage a coupling of participatory and representative institutions in ‘a politics of closeness’. The FA has reinvigorated Battlismo, a discourse associated with social justice, civic republicanism and the rise of Uruguayan social democracy in the early twentieth century. At the same time, the FA’s emphasis on egalitarian participation is inspired by the thought of Uruguay’s independence hero José Artigas. I argue that the cross-weave of party and movement, and of democratic citizenship and national heritage, encourages the emergence of new figures of the citizen and new permutations for connecting citizens with representative institutions. The FA’s “politics of closeness” is an example of how state-driven democratisation remains possible in an age described by some as ‘post-democratic’.
Research Interests:
This comparison explores how memorials reflect and shape possibilities for citizenship and democratization in Argentina and Australia. I argue that Australian memorials reflect a notion of democracy as end rather than process that... more
This comparison explores how memorials reflect and shape possibilities for citizenship and democratization in Argentina and Australia. I argue that Australian memorials reflect a notion of democracy as end rather than process that devalues emancipatory struggle and the right to dissent. By contrast, Argentinian memorials legitimise dissent as a pillar of democratic citizenship while recognising the contingent nature of citizenship and democracy. Firstly, I discuss theories of democracy in relation to political memory and citizen agency. This is followed by an analysis of Australian memorial practices, including ANZAC, that celebrate obedience rather than dissent. Finally, I critically examine the politics of memory and citizenship in relation to several Argentinian memorials to state violence, including Memory Park and the ex-ESMA site in Buenos Aires, and state and non-state run memory museums in Rosario. While ANZAC and Argentinian memorial practices encourage the remembering of very different events – international war and state violence respectively - they are comparable insofar as each shapes the legitimacy of political action and the bounds of citizen-state relations.
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Les chamanes piaroa — appelés meyeruwae ou yuhuähuäruhuae, res- pectivement « maîtres des chants » et « maîtres du yopo », ces derniers étant situés plus haut dans la hiérarchie chamanique — se distinguent de tout un chacun par leur... more
Les chamanes piaroa — appelés meyeruwae ou yuhuähuäruhuae, res- pectivement « maîtres des chants » et « maîtres du yopo », ces derniers étant situés plus haut dans la hiérarchie chamanique — se distinguent de tout un chacun par leur habilité à utiliser quatre plantes psychoactives à des fins divinatoires, thérapeutiques ou de sorcellerie. Ce sont : le yopo (yuhuä), un tabac à priser préparé à partir des graines réduites en poudre d’Anadenanthera peregrina ; le capi (tuhuipä, Banisteriopsis caapi) ; le tabac (jätte, Nicotiana tabacum) ; et le dädä (Malouetia sp.). Les cha- manes piaroa développent au cours de leur apprentissage, puis de leur pratique quotidienne, une connaissance fine des subtilités de l’expé- rience psychotrope, des dosages, des possibilités et des effets de la com- binaison de ces substances. Leur prédilection à consommer de façon conjointe le yopo et le capi, à même de produire une expérience syner- gique puissante, est considérée dans la littérature américaniste comme peu commune, voire contradictoire avec l’idée selon laquelle les Piaroa ne connaissent, ni ne préparent l’ayahuasca, plus précisément le mélange.
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Research Interests:
Despite drawing on different historical traditions and philosophical sources, Sheldon Wolin and Étienne Balibar have come to see citizenship and democracy in fundamentally similar ways. However, the work of one has not been considered... more
Despite drawing on different historical traditions and philosophical
sources, Sheldon Wolin and Étienne Balibar have come to see
citizenship and democracy in fundamentally similar ways. However,
the work of one has not been considered alongside that of the other. In
this paper, I examine some of their key texts and draw out three areas of
common concern: the historical specificity of the political, citizenship
as a dialectical process and dedemocratization. The significance of
Wolin and Balibar’s writing on citizenship and democracy lies in a set
of proposals for the eternal rebirth of the citizen as democratic agent
between action and institution, hierarchy and equality, individual
and community, difference and the universal. Their open-ended
frameworks can be seen as an antidote to contemporary pessimism
about the fate of democracy as either political order or normative
ideal. I conclude by suggesting that contemporary Ecuadorean and
Bolivian debates about how to combine relational ontologies and
liberalism has opened a fertile domain for re-imagining the I and We
of citizenship.
sources, Sheldon Wolin and Étienne Balibar have come to see
citizenship and democracy in fundamentally similar ways. However,
the work of one has not been considered alongside that of the other. In
this paper, I examine some of their key texts and draw out three areas of
common concern: the historical specificity of the political, citizenship
as a dialectical process and dedemocratization. The significance of
Wolin and Balibar’s writing on citizenship and democracy lies in a set
of proposals for the eternal rebirth of the citizen as democratic agent
between action and institution, hierarchy and equality, individual
and community, difference and the universal. Their open-ended
frameworks can be seen as an antidote to contemporary pessimism
about the fate of democracy as either political order or normative
ideal. I conclude by suggesting that contemporary Ecuadorean and
Bolivian debates about how to combine relational ontologies and
liberalism has opened a fertile domain for re-imagining the I and We
of citizenship.
Research Interests:
Ayahuasca, a psychoactive plant decoction, has spread from indigenous communities in South America to urban areas in the Americas, Europe and Australia where it is used in neoshamanic rituals. This paper draws on ethnography of Australian... more
Ayahuasca, a psychoactive plant decoction, has spread from indigenous communities in South America to urban areas in the Americas, Europe and Australia where it is used in neoshamanic rituals. This paper draws on ethnography of Australian ayahuasca ceremonies to examine the ways that individualism shapes the structure of ayahuasca rituals, the interpretation of visionary experiences, and notions of spiritual development. I show how the metaphors that Australian drinkers involved in this study use to understand their ayahuasca experiences and spiritual development reflect a form of immunitary individualism, which is premised on the negation of difference and relationality. Secular disenchantment and a culture of narcissism may drive people to seek ayahuasca, but transcendence is interpreted in terms of an expansive, non-relational self. In this sense, neoshamanic ayahuasca culture may be an escape from and reproduction of the culture of narcissism associated with the malaise of modernity.
Research Interests:
An argument for the perduring utility of the concept of fascism beyond inter-war Europe
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Page 1. 35 Anthropology of Consciousness, Vol. 17, Issue 1, pp. 3564. ISSN1053-4202, © 2006 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permissions to photocopy or reproduce ...
Research Interests:
No one owns the past, but this has never stopped people from trying to shape or foreclose our relationships with it. The stakes in forging certain relations with the past are always consequential whether or not they appear to be, and... more
No one owns the past, but this has never stopped people from trying to shape or foreclose our relationships with it. The stakes in forging certain relations with the past are always consequential whether or not they appear to be, and despite a lack of consensus surrounding the ends of remembering and forgetting. The terms of the debate about memory evolve as the past becomes institutionalized, branded, cultivated by social movements, courted by elites or the downtrodden, integrated into national(ist) mythologies or displaced by corporate aesthetics that disappear time and the terms of the political altogether. For Manuel Cruz, history and memory can never be understood outside of the political conditions that shape them. By this he means that we are under constant and shifting pressure to forget or remember in very specific ways, which are never reducible to remembering or forgetting. 1 Cruz advocates "'a more shaded perspective'" that acknowledges there are pathological ways of remembering and healthy forms of forgetting". 2 Cruz's "more shaded perspective" complements P.J. Brendese's argument in favour of an agonistic approach to memory. Extending approaches to democracy that emphasise the imperative of pluralism, Brendese argues that "democratization… requires an agonistic engagement with multiple, often deeply conflicting, relationships to memory and time." 3 An agonistic approach to memory replaces the false dichotomy of forgetting or remembering, and the naïve assumption that memory is useful in order to not repeat the horrors of the past with an open-ended dialectic of ambiguity and multiplicity. After examining a range of (mis)uses of history, including that it can tell us something about the present or how not to repeat the past, Cruz reflects on the possibility that it could help us to live well.
Research Interests:
The rise of racist nationalism, the demise of liberal democracy and citizen rights, the expulsion of growing numbers of people from the ranks of legitimate life, the cultural and technological legitimation of inequality, and the gloomy... more
The rise of racist nationalism, the demise of liberal democracy and citizen rights, the expulsion of growing numbers of people from the ranks of legitimate life, the cultural and technological legitimation of inequality, and the gloomy subjectivity of ecologically assured destruction hark back to the dark times that gave rise to the Frankfurt School of critical theory, and to Arendt's appeal to critical thought as our primary defense against the banality of evil. In the context of the entrepreneurial university, meanwhile, thinking (and reading) is increasingly an externality. This seminar aims to foster citizenship through critical thought and discussion of the contemporary moment, and relations among culture, politics and technology. This year's topic addresses the question 'what ideas are good to think with in our current dark times'? Critical theory seeks to identify the contradictions, crisis tendencies and lines of actual or potential conflict in contemporary society, and to demarcate and politicize possibilities for more progressive, socially just, emancipatory and sustainable forms of life. All staff and students welcome. Abstract Following a line of exploration running from exchanges with Guattari (see 'Guattari and anthropology' in Guattari's effect: (https://selforganizedseminar.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/guattari-effect_alliez.pdf), it is proposed to test the concept of crystallization as used by him and Deleuze, that is a threshold that leaks back from actual to the virtual, a ritournelle (refrain) that turns around issues of life and death. The hypothesis is that crystal-becoming offers not only one key to grasp something of the transformation of multiplicities which are " virtualized " in ritual (such as Totemic becomings in Australia or Orixa embodiments in Brazil), but also a way to address the debate about affirmation of existential territories in living places, moving bodies and various practices. Ethnography and cosmopolitics will be " filtered " through the Guattarian ecosophical proposal of an aesthetic paradigm.
Research Interests:
Amidst a global turn towards authoritarianism and populism, there are few contemporary examples of state-led democratisation. This paper discusses how Uruguay's Frente Amplio (FA) party has drawn on a unique national democratic cultural... more
Amidst a global turn towards authoritarianism and populism, there are few contemporary examples of state-led democratisation. This paper discusses how Uruguay's Frente Amplio (FA) party has drawn on a unique national democratic cultural heritage to encourage a coupling of participatory and representative institutions in 'a politics of closeness'. The FA has reinvigorated Battlismo, a discourse associated with social justice, civic republicanism and the rise of Uruguayan social democracy in the early twentieth century. At the same time, the FA's emphasis on egalitarian participation is inspired by the thought of Uruguay's independence hero José Artigas. I argue that the cross-weave of party and movement, and of democratic citizenship and national heritage, encourages the emergence of new figures of the citizen and new permutations for connecting citizens with representative institutions. The FA's " politics of closeness " is an example of how state-driven democratisation remains possible in an age described by some as 'post-democratic'.
Research Interests:
Australia has yet to articulate, narrate, enact, or mythologise the rights of its citizens because, since federation, rights claims do not reflect the spirit of Australian laws. This paper contrasts Arendt’s argument that the democratic... more
Australia has yet to articulate, narrate, enact, or mythologise the rights of its citizens because, since federation, rights claims do not reflect the spirit of Australian laws. This paper contrasts Arendt’s argument that the democratic spirit of U.S. law motivated participation in public life and periodic civil disobedience with an analysis of the Austrlaian constitution and recent legislation to argue that the Australian spirit of the law discourages participation in public life, dissent and the practice of rights. I review recent counter-terrorism, anti-protest, anti-association and secrecy legislation that collectively delegitimise dissent and civic engagement while diminishing citizens’ capacity to hold government accountable. I conclude by situating the Australian spirit of the law in relation to citizen driven theories of democracy that emphasise the symbolic significance of rights and rights claims. With neither rights, nor a spirit of the law that encourages the claiming of rights, Australia remains a democracy without citizens.
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What is critical theory? What is culture? What sort of culture are we cultivating in Australia? How is insecurity reproduced and normalised? On the axis of bowing to and resisting power, and the thoughtlessness of and banality of culture.
Research Interests:
What is ayahuasca? How is it used and can it induce delusional or homicidal thoughts?
Research Interests:
Inadequate recognition of either rights or the struggles that lead to the recognition of rights has reduced the figure of the citizen to a ghost in the Australian political machine. This paper uses Balibar’s dialectic of citizenship and... more
Inadequate recognition of either rights or the struggles that lead to the recognition of rights has reduced the figure of the citizen to a ghost in the Australian political machine. This paper uses Balibar’s dialectic of citizenship and Arendt’s study of civil disobedience to consider limitations to democratic citizenship in Australia. Balibar’s theory of democracy hinges on a dialectical approach to citizenship whereby rights and liberties must continually be won through struggle (Balibar 2014; 2015). Democracy either expands and is refounded through successful struggles for equality and liberty or recedes through their failure and acquiescence to institutional norms. Institutional and cultural change can engender either democratisation or dedemocratisation by legitimising or criminalising dissent and associational life. Beyond democratization or dedemocratization, however, Balibar proposes a third possibility that he refers to as ‘ademocracy’. Ademocracy results when the dialectic of insurrection and institution is arrested, and struggles for equality and liberty are policed out of politics. I argue that the dialectic of citizenship in Australia is now paused, and that our drift to ademocracy is reflected in the spirit of our laws.
Research Interests:
Since the opening of Latin America’s first memory museum in Rosario, Argentina in 1998 to the inauguration of Chile’s Museum of Memory and Human Rights in 2010, and those in Peru, Mexico and Colombia, Latin America has witnessed a boom in... more
Since the opening of Latin America’s first memory museum in Rosario, Argentina in 1998 to the inauguration of Chile’s Museum of Memory and Human Rights in 2010, and those in Peru, Mexico and Colombia, Latin America has witnessed a boom in memory museums. These have become sites of intense political contestation over the meanings of state violence, human rights, citizenship, and the political. Memory museums have also been at the forefront of efforts to balance the materiality of curated collections with the sociality of education and arts practices. The diversity of memory museums and of debates around the aesthetics and politics of memory in Latin America speak to a recognition of the importance of maintaining questions of rights, citizenship, and the political in the public sphere, and to the evolving place of art in the museum and the museum in society.
This panel asks how the politics and aesthetics of memory in Latin America engage with global debates on human rights, democracy and the museum. How are local struggles around political memory, citizenship, and human rights represented and enacted in public spaces including memory museums? What sorts of artistic practices and notions of time and citizenship find expression in memory museums? Papers that examine the role of artists in museums, community engaged curatorial practice, connections between social movements and museums and between Latin American memory museums and global artistic, museum and human rights practices are welcomed.
This panel asks how the politics and aesthetics of memory in Latin America engage with global debates on human rights, democracy and the museum. How are local struggles around political memory, citizenship, and human rights represented and enacted in public spaces including memory museums? What sorts of artistic practices and notions of time and citizenship find expression in memory museums? Papers that examine the role of artists in museums, community engaged curatorial practice, connections between social movements and museums and between Latin American memory museums and global artistic, museum and human rights practices are welcomed.