Interpretive anthropology taken as a goal in itself tends to preclude the concrete, historically situated analyses that are the core of ethnographic studies. However, attention to specific aspects of action and discourse in the various moments of a social movement's unfolding may enhance our understanding of that movement. This article analyzes a protest against conditions imposed by the International Monetary Fund for the payment of Bolivia's national debt, seeking to show how the various participants interpreted the events in which they were involved. In trying to assess the movement's impact on the nation, the author interviewed leaders and followers and consulted numerous media reports during the three weeks of crisis. She concludes that textual interpretation is useful only when employed along with traditional methods of participant observation and the eliciting of informants' own interpretations. The analysis of complex social movements, that is, requires a description of people's responses at different moments in time, a situating of the participant observer in the events, and the inclusion of interpretations by the media. By eliciting a reflexive, multivocalic array of texts, the anthropologist can make new interpretations and build on past constructions as the historical context changes. [interpretive ethnology, social movements, Bolivian mining communities]
Global integration heightens the cyclical crises of capitalism by incorporating the subsistence sectors of advanced and peripheral economies. World trends show a contraction in industrial production; the rise of unemployment, an increase in military spending and decline in social welfare, a reversal of capital flows from developing countries to developed economies, and a worldwide drop in real wages. The impact of these trends on communities in Mexico, Bolivia, and the United States where the author has done fieldwork is assessed in relation to current economic crises and the social movements that respond to them. The author shows that collective action to oppose the devastating effect on subsistence is more prevalent in marginal economies that are just beginning to experience the effect of capital penetration than in the industrial wastelands of developed countries. Theories of the crisis neglect those arenas where resistance and protest are most active: the urban barrios struggling for food and water, the rural laborers forced off of their land base, and the hunters and cultivators of the jungle. Luxemburg's thesis asserting the importance of the subsistence sector in capital accumulation acquires increasing significance at a time when those economies are threatened with extinction. Expanding the notion of subsistence production to include nonwage work allows us to theorize the significance of social reproduction in crisis conditions.
As they assert their rights to land, political participation, and their distinctive cultures, Mayas of Chiapas are redefining the modernist ideals of justice, liberty, and democracy for a postmodern age. Accustomed to cultural diversity, they have learned to live without attempting to eradicate or dominate the others in their midst. Their vision of progress still contains the communal values found in mythopoetic traditions from the preconquest period. But far from being primordial remnants of the past, these values have been enacted continually in everyday life since the conquest and may offer a model for pluriethnic and pluripolitical institutions as we enter the third millennium.
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