Productive Articulations

This one-day workshop will focus on understanding how states and markets provide key sources of vitality, productivity, and abundance that, in turn, are central to the organisation of local societies in Latin America.  Although ethnographic descriptions concerning the production, consumption, circulation and distribution of material resources are widespread in the anthropology of Latin America, the extent to which local political economies currently articulate with broader, regional – often global – relations of production and power remains underexplored and undertheorised.   Moreover, while recent scholarship has begun to pay attention to the ways in which wealth, wellbeing and vitality are central organising notions for many of the region’s Amerindian and rural societies, the intractable forms of inequality that accompany 21st century capitalism are rarely taken into account.  The papers to be presented will constitute ethnographic explorations that shed light on the processes of articulation through which local populations are able to generate their lives.  Participants will therefore aim to highlight ethnographic accounts that illustrate the multifaceted ways in which economy, politics and ideology shape and are shaped by their articulations with local households, communities and settlement economies.   
Over the course of the day we will explore questions that strike at the heart of ongoing debates in anthropology:  What sorts of political collectivity are possible when productivity must be elicited from the state?  What role does labour play in people’s attempt to generate valuable lives?  How do societies organise when acts of production (and reproduction) meld with economistic notions of productivity?  And how do local notions of abundance, vitality, and generativity intertwine with the production of material plenty within capitalism at different scales? What happens to households when local ideas about autonomy and dependency revolve around the ability to establish relations with frontier economies and state institutions? 
In attempting to answer these kinds of questions we hope to blur the boundaries between traditional models that have centred on descriptions concerning the control of scarce resources to pay attention to alternative conceptualisations of political economy.  
The workshop aims to provide a platform for the development of new ethnographic and analytical frameworks that will further our understanding of local political economies.  To do so, we will bring together scholars that work in different regions of Latin America, including the Lowlands, Highlands and Mesoamerica.  While the workshop will focus on cases from different Latin American regions, we expect to generate discussions that will make for cross-cultural comparisons regarding the ways in which subaltern populations conceive of productivity and generate livelihoods in the 21st century.  To this effect the final panel will provide a space for scholars working in other parts of the world to comment on the differences and similarities they have observed over the course of their own research.

Seligman Library (OLD 6.05) - Old Building

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Productive Articulations

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