For me, indians are all of those large minorities who are, in some way, on the outside of this capitalist mega-machine, of consumption, of production, of 24 hour a day labour, seven days a week. These planetary indians teach us to dispense with the giant machines of transcendence that are the State on the one hand, and the speculative system on the other, the market transformed into image.
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Dialogues on the end of the world (El país 29/09/2014)
On the 30th of April, dozens of armed thugs, in the pay of landowners, attacked a community of native peoples, Gamelas, in the village of Bahias, in the municipality of Viana, Maranhão (MA). With sticks, knives and guns, over a dozen were wounded with cuts, severed hands, and bullets. The prize, as is so often in Brazil’s centuries long war against the country’s “indians”, is land. (Brasil de fato 02/05/2017) And this latest violence is but one more episode in the narrative of usurpation, slavery, exploitation, and death that the Brazilian State, in all of its historical forms, has inflicted upon the many indigenous peoples of this country. (For a recent study of State violence against natives peoples in Brazil, see the 2015 Report on Violence Against Indigenous People of CIMI, in Portuguese).
This history of violence is of course not only Brazil’s, as is not the resistance of native peoples to their forced dispossession (recent examples include Standing Rock, Idle No More and so many other native protests-movements throughout the Americas). For the Brazilian anthropologist, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, the resistance of the indigenous peoples of Brazil must be understood as a radical form of anti-capitalism and anti-statism, the kind of resistance that can serve as a model for all such movements.
We share below a text by Viveiros de Castro that reads this resistance historically and theoretically. Originally presented as a conference on the 20th of April, 2016, in Rio de Janeiro (and published with raiz.org 26/07/2016), the text was again presented in public, this time in Lisbon, on the 5th of May of this year.
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Jacques Rancière: The anarchy of democracy
During the French presidential campaign, the candidates and the media saturated the environment with references to the “people”. Before the final results, on the 7th of May, the journal Ballast conducted an interview with Jacques Rancière on the use and misuse of the term. We share the text, in translation, for its intrinsic interest – Rancière, over the course of his work, has developed an essentially anarchist interpretation of “democracy”, a concept also much criticised within the anarchist tradition – as well as, as a kind of unintentional commentary on Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s essay, “The involuteers of the fatherland”, posted earlier.
For Viveiros de Castro, a “people” are necessarily tied to a place, to land; there is even an ethnic dimension to the concept, with all of the risks that this carries, ethnocentrism being the most obvious. For Rancière however, the concept “people” is fundamentally ambiguous, always a “subject” in the making, constructed in the very heart of political struggle. As such, there is nothing intrinsically radical or revolutionary in it, nothing that renders it “natural” in any way. The difference here may in the end be semantic, but Rancière’s reading of the concept renders it much more politically fragile.
What both authors however share, for different reasons, is the idea that politics is impossible without a “people”. And this may generate a further set of question: is not the insistence on the need for a “people” a perpetuation of the (illusory?) need for a revolutionary subject, for a sovereign agent of political change? And if so, does it not carry with it all of the ambiguities and dangers of sovereignty? Perhaps it is the very idea of government that must be challenged; a challenge that remains stillborn with the demand for a “people united”.
A debate to be continued …
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