May be of interest...
Julia
From: Andrew Carey < [log in to unmask] >

A panel proposal:

GRASSROOTS COMMUNICATION, POWER AND POLITICAL CULTURE IN LATIN AMERICA AND
THE CARIBBEAN

For the American Anthropological Association Meeting, San Jose, CA, 11/15/06-11/19/06

We want to build a panel of presentations on communication and political culture change in Latin America. We are especially interested in research on community media projects (radio, television, theater, etc.). However, we are also interested in papers on grassroots transformation projects that focus their analysis on the connection between communication and political culture in a local setting.

In his recent review article on the study of political culture in Latin America, Barry Levitt starts out with a quote from Geertz:

"One of the things that everyone knows, but no one can quite think how to demonstrate is that a country's politics reflect the design of its
culture. Above all, what the attempt to link politics and culture needs is a less breathless view of the former and a less aesthetic view of the latter. The two being thus reframed, determining the connection between them
becomes a practicable enterprise, though hardly a modest one."

(Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 1973; 311-312. In "Political Culture and the Science of Politics," Latin American Research
Review, vol. 40, No. 3, Oct. 2005, 365-376.)

Levitt's conclusion in this article, however, is that recent attempts by political scientists to make this link are not quite successful. He also
notes that while anthropologists are doing among the most interesting work on political culture in Latin America, "culturalist" work is often dismissed by political scientists, "for being vague about the object of study and the units of analysis; for blurring the line between culture and other categories such as behavior and institutions; and for failing to explain political change. What is more, causal mechanisms-how and why a given cultural attribute leads to one political outcome and not another-are often indiscernible" (Levitt 366).

While dominant modes of analysis in political science may be preserving conceptual boundaries at the cost of insight, we recognize the validity of the overall critique: cultural anthropologists' penchant for portraiture and
the gestalt may limit the cross-disciplinary usefulness of our work.

We also feel that one of the crucial missing links in both political science approaches and anthropological approaches to political culture-and political culture change-is communication. Indeed, in Latin America, this link has been crucial in the past half-century. Generations of promotors were persuaded by Freirean theories that communication dynamics were at the heart
of political culture, and that, moreover, macro political cultures could be changed, one micro-dynamic at a time.

However, the significance of teniendo la palabra is much deeper than that; its resonance as an indicator of power in both sacred and civil realms in cultures throughout Latin America suggests that patterns of communication
may map (albeit indirectly) onto patterns of political culture, in very specific ways according to ethnicity, region, nation, time frame, etc.
Likewise, changes in communication patterns among group members may indicate shifts in how power operates in a given cultural setting; we might be inclined to ask whether cultural rules and institutions have changed as well, and what caused the changes.

Please submit abstracts of no more than 250 words to BOTH Leslie López ([log in to unmask]) and Diana Agosta ( [log in to unmask]), no later than March 28, 2006. Papers submitted as part of the panel must be accompanied by meeting registration fees; see AAA's website ( aaanet.org) for details.

(Below is the paragraph from the AAA's general CFP for this year's meeting.)

"Anthropology has reached a critical intersection in its history and heritage as a discipline. This year's theme, 'Critical
Intersections/Dangerous Issues' provides opportunities to explore and evaluate both new and established links among increasingly specialized areas within the field. Two standard definitions of the term 'critical' are particularly apt: 'characterized by careful analysis' and 'designating a point at which change occurs'. We invite papers that showcase collaborative
efforts to analyze pressing issues of archaeological, biological, cultural, bio-cultural, medical and linguistic concern by producing new intersections of knowledge. We also invite explicit critiques of such collaborations by
those who are familiar with the potential dangers of crossing conceptual, institutional, pedagogical and political boundaries."

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