Modern meetings: Participation, democracy, and language ideology in Brazil's MST landless movement

Abstract

In the democratic cosmology of Brazil's MST landless movement, a meeting must occur before a decision can be reached—even if the decision was set before the meeting. I examine MST speech habits in an effort to understand the meeting as a symptomatically modern method for producing authoritative discourse. I identify four properties of MST meeting speech: (1) a lexicon that highlights verbs of speech, (2) the enforcement of tight semantic linkages between utterances, (3) the equal availability of one speech act to all participants, and (4) the generation of a distinctive species of collective voicing. By virtue of these properties, the meeting becomes a crucial site for the construction of equality and participation as political values. It is these values that are ultimately in play when a speaker mobilizes other people's words to make—or prevent—a decision.

“No One is Poor in Himachal”: Cultivating Stateless Agency in an Indian Village Assembly

“…A growing number of studies has delved into the interactional realm of bureaucratic practices—the way that meetings, speeches, audits, trainings, and everyday conversations are central to the social life of governmental, developmental, and activist institutions (Brown, Reed, and Yarrow 2017; Sandler and Thedvall 2017; Morton 2014). While the meeting “form” has been examined for its formal logics, rules, and capacity to generate (rather than solve) problems (Schwartzman 1987; 1989), this study aims to deepen our understanding of the “technologies of talk” (Gal, Kowalski, and Moore 2015, 611) that enable the emergence of a collectivized democratic will in the meetings underpinning panchayat governance.…”

A politics of respect: Reconfiguring democracy in Afro‐Brazilian religious activism in Salvador, Brazil

“…Moreover, as the Workers’ Party rose into power in the early 2000s, the government's arsenal of democratic technologies aimed at creating and cultivating an active citizenry also came to include deliberative participatory meetings (Avritzer ; Baiocchi ; cf. Morton ).…”

Introduction: towards an ethnography of meeting

“…The subsequent global spread of these standardized forms has been linked to colonialism and more recently to the actions of postcolonial governments and non‐governmental organizations. This includes the prominence since the Second World War of meeting forms connected to the significant importation of models of ‘good governance’ and democratic speech technologies (see Hull ; Morton ). These historical factors are significant, as contributors variously demonstrate, but do not in any straightforward sense exhaust the complexity of meanings, actions, and relations now animated by this pervasive social form.…”

“…In various ways these literatures provide useful conceptual tools. And yet, notwithstanding some notable and significant exceptions (Abram ; Harper ; Moore ; Morton ; Richards & Kuper ; Sandler & Thedvall ; Schwartzman ), for all the many ways in which meetings figure in accounts orientated by other concerns, they have rarely been the subject of sustained ethnographic attention in their own right. Even within recent work on bureaucracy (e.g.…”