Duke University Press Log

Duke Press Authors on the Venezuelan Elections

The Venezuelan elections were held yesterday, April 14, and it now appears that Nicolás Maduro, Hugo Chávez’s handpicked political heir, has won. Duke Univerisity Press authors blanketed the media this weekend talking about the elections and the future of Venezuela.

George Ciccariello-Maher's We Created Chávez: A People’s History of the Venezuelan Revolution is just out and he is burning up Twitter and the airwaves. He appeared on Al-Jazeera, Russia Today, and on BBC Radio 5. In an op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer, he debunks five common myths about Venezuela. In Counterpunch, he compared reactions to the deaths of Chávez and Margaret Thatcher. He was quoted in the Wall Street Journal, the Miami Herald, and Brazil's InterJournal. 

Sujatha Fernandes, author of Who Can Stop the Drums? Urban Social Movements in Chávez’s Venezuela is quoted in the Christian Science Monitor, discussing the importance of women in Venezuelan politics. “Chávez made popular women central protagonists in his politics,” she says. "It was really important in giving women a sense of what they could achieve in life." She also appeared on NY1.

Miguel Tinker Salas, author of The Enduring Legacy: Oil, Culture, and Society in Venezuela, appeared on a panel with filmmaker Oliver Stone at a special screening of his film on Hugo Chávez. Salas commented on the importance of this election and the future of Venezuela: “What’s at stake is really two different visions of Venezuela, two different visions of Latin America, and two different visions of how the north and the south should relate to each other. Fundamentally what’s at stake here is control over the largest oil reserve in the world,” he said. Tinker Salas also appared on the PBS News Hour, Russia Today, Al-Jazeera, Telemundo, Pacifica, Telesur, and CCTV.

David Smilde, co-editor of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Democracy: Participation, Politics, and Culture under Chávez, liveblogged the elections yesterday, calling the results "a devastating victory" for Maduro. "It leaves him weakened within his own coalition and facing an emboldened opposition," he writes. Smilde appeared on BBC Radio 5, Latin Pulse at Link TV, and on Al-Jazeera discussing the elections.

And don't forget, these books and all in-stock books are on sale for 50% off until May 15, 2013!

 

 

Mexico's Religious Question: Ben Fallaw on Catholicism and the State

As millions of Catholics in Latin American prepare to celebrate Easter under a new Pope, we're pleased to present a guest post by Ben Fallaw, Colby College professor of Latin American Studies and author of the new book Religion and State Formation in Postrevolutionary Mexico and Cárdenas Compromised: The Failure of Reform in Postrevolutionary Yucatán. 

Eleven years ago, I went to Mexico City to research Mexico’s “religious question” of the 1930s:  the political role of the Church after an anticlerical revolution in a Catholic country. Not long after I arrived, the city virtually shut down as millions flocked to greet Pope John Paul II.  He came to canonize Juan Diego, the Nahua
shepherd who witnessed the Virgin of Guadalupe’s apparition in 1531. A few weeks later, my archival work uncovered why the campaign to make Juan Diego a saint was championed by Bishop José de Jesús Manríquez beginning in 1939. Manríquez and his priests had just beaten back attempts by federal teachers to turn his diocese of Huejutla (Hidalgo state) into a revolutionary laboratory for land reform and indigenous empowerment. For them, Juan Diego symbolized the pure “Indian Church” menaced by “the Beast” of the state. This was but one of many historical connections between Mexico’s postrevolutionary religious question and Church-state tensions today. 

Two months after the publication of Religion and State Formation in Postrevolutionary Mexico, Jorge Mario Bergoglio became the first Latin American pope. North Americans (non-Catholics among them) celebrated the choice, lauding the Argentine’s simplicity, devotion to the poor, and New World origins. The latter was hard to miss: the backdrop for an early public appearance as Francis I featured a large image of la Guadalupuana. Reaction to Francis I in Latin America was much more divided. 

While some North Americans see Bergoglio as a fierce critic of what John Paul II famously called savage capitalism, many Latin Americans see in him a bitter foe of the new left. Argentine president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner is a nemesis of the IMF, but she also championed birth control and marriage equality. Bergoglio denounced the latter as “a destructive attack on God’s plan.” They and their supporters often view each other through the lens of history: Fernández remembered the silence of the Argentine Church’s hierarchy during the Cold War dictatorship, Conservative Catholics charged Fernández was prejudiced by leftist anti-Catholicism dating back to the nineteenth century. The conflict has underscored the Latin American Church’s paradoxical position as an institution both non-partisan and politicized, both very influential yet feeling persecuted by the postcolonial state.   In Mexico, I chronicle how the postrevolutionary state’s consolidation created many lingering historical grievances among Catholics. For instance, Bishop Manríquez’s counterrevolutionary jeremiads were provoked in part by federal teachers’ destruction of hundreds of sacred images in Huejutla on 3 June 1935.

Of course, Mexico in the 1930s and Argentina today are profoundly different. Among other things, Argentine Catholics never rebelled against a revolutionary state as did Mexico’s cristeros in the late 1920s. Nevertheless, the election of Francis I has reopened wounds in Mexico, too. Some are quite recent. As I was writing the conclusion to Religion and State Formation in August 2010, the mayor of Mexico City sued the Archbishop of Guadalajara for libel after the prelate denounced legalization of same-sex marriage in the capital, and the press was reporting on the jailing of six young women charged with seeking abortions in the conservative Catholic state of Guanajuato. Just last year, the PRI, the party that claims to have institutionalized the revolution, returned to the presidency a dozen years after its presumed demise in part by courting important bishops. At the moment, new president Enrique Peña Nieto is negotiating with the Vatican, reportedly offering the return of Church influence over public schools in return for a visit by Francis I.

The PRI’s willingness to abandon its heritage of revolutionary secularization in return for political advantage reflects one of Religion and State Formation’s main concerns: the ability of Catholics and Catholicism to impede the revolutionary transformation of society in the 1930s. The Church refused to allow a political party or insurgency to act in its name. However its organizational matrix, its ideology, and its lay (and in a few cases clerical) leadership galvanized grassroots-level resistance to postrevolutionary state-making. The Vatican endorsed this “radial strategy” which successfully turned much of Mexican civil society against the revolutionary state, but it was in many ways a strategy that emerged from the base. In Campeche, caciques led syncretic gremios (confraternities) to oppose peasant cooperatives and elect sympathetic candidates. In Guerrero, Catholic women mobilized male voters, and catechists and priests convinced peasants to reject federal teachers and land reform. Some even supported the sporadic attacks against schools and ejidos (land grants) termed the Second Cristero War (c.1932-38). In Guanajuato, congressman and army reserve officer Salvador Azaña collaborated with cristero insurgents, catechists and allied politics to block agrarian reform.  Again and again, the Church’s radial strategy stymied revolutionary change.

  Historians long assumed that President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-40) put to rest Mexico’s vexing
religious question though negotiation and compromise with Catholics, ending anticlerical regulations in return for Catholic support. I found that the clergy and much of the laity saw Cárdenas’s détente as the opportunity for a strategic shift rather than acquiescence to the postrevolutionary regime’s hegemony.   After 1940, Catholic leaders formed the right-of-center opposition party known as the PAN that eventually ousted the PRI from the presidency in 2000. The Church also “rechristianized” Mexican society in part by encouraging Catholics to marry sacramentally, zealously defending its social teachings from a state still seen as anti-Catholic. Indeed, Catholics opposed federal schooling because it was coeducational and allegedly mandated sexual education.

Seen in this light, contemporary Church-state tensions in Argentina and in Mexico result not just from national traumas like the Dirty War and the Mexican Revolution but also from deeper conflicts over the definition of marriage and human  sexuality. The direction and outcome of these conflicts has profoundly shaped and will continue to profoundly shape everyday life and politics in the region. In many ways the Church in Latin America prevailed for close to two centuries.  Under Francis I it confronts an uncertain future, one clouded by the same problems that beset the Church in Europe and North America as well as the region’s unresolved religious questions.

 

Duke Authors on the Death of Hugo Chávez

Several Duke authors have been active in the media since the death of Hugo Chávez on March 5. 

George Ciccariello-Maher, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Drexel University, is the author of We Created Chávez: A People’s History of the Venezuelan Revolution, which will be out next month. He appeared on Al Jazzeera yesterday, and on RT's Crosstalk today. He is quoted in the French paper Libération. In a new review in The New Republic, Dorothy Kronick calls Ciccariello-Maher's book "essential to understanding the Chávez era." Read his piece "Preparing for a post-Chávez Venezuela" on Counterpunch. Follow him on Twitter @ciccmaher.

Miguel Tinker Salas is the author of The Enduring Legacy: Oil, Culture, and Society in Venezuela. Born in a Venezuelan oil camp, Tinker Salas is now Professor of History at Pomona College. This week he has appeared on PRI's The World and Democracy Now!. He is quoted in the Los Angeles Times, the Christian Science Monitor, and Business Insider.  

 

Sujatha Fernandes, Associate Professor of Sociology at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center, is the author of Who Can Stop the Drums?: Urban Social Movements in Chávez’s Venezuela. She is also quoted in the Los Angeles Times and was interviewed on KPFK's "Hiphop and Politics." Catch her this weekend on MSNBC's Up with Chris Hayes. 

 

 

Greg Grandin, Professor of History at NYU, is author of The Blood of Guatemala: A History of Race and Nation and co-editor of The Guatemala Reader and A Century of Revolution. His article in The Nation "On the Legacy of Hugo Chávez," has been much-circulated and discussed. And, he very kindly calls out the work of the above authors!

Books on Chávez and Venezuela

What lies ahead for Venezuela after the death of president Hugo Chávez? To understand Venezuela's history, culture, and politics at this crucial crossroads, check out these books.

We Created Chávez: A People’s History of the Venezuelan Revolution by George Ciccariello-Maher will be out this May. It provides a broad, nuanced account of Chávez’s rise to power and the years of activism that preceded it. Based on interviews with grassroots organizers, former guerrillas, members of neighborhood militias, and government officials, Ciccariello-Maherpresents a new history of Venezuelan political activism, one told from below.

In Who Can Stop the Drums?: Urban Social Movements in Chávez’s Venezuela, Sujatha Fernandes also looks at Chávez’s poor supporters in the barrios of Caracas. Her widely-praised book portrays everyday life and politics in the shantytowns of Caracas through accounts of community-based radio, barrio
assemblies, and popular fiestas, and the many interviews she conducted with activists and government officials. Listen here to a recent interview with Fernandes and Miguel Tinker Salas on KALW's "Your Call."

In The Enduring Legacy: Oil, Culture, and Society in Venezuela, historian Miguel Tinker Salas examines the role of oil in Venezuela's economy. He traces the historyof the oil industry’s rise in Venezuela from the beginning of the twentieth century, paying particular attention to the experiences and perceptions of industry employees, both foreign and Venezuelan. His interest in how oil suffused the consciousness of Venezuela is personal: Tinker Salas was born and raised in one of its oil camps.

Venezuela’s Bolivarian Democracy, edited by David Smilde, Daniel Hellinger, brings together a variety of perspectives on participation and democracy in Venezuela. An interdisciplinary group of contributors focuses on the everyday lives of Venezuelans, examining the forms of participation that have emerged in communal councils, cultural activities, blogs, community media, and several other forums.

Looking much further back at Venezuela's history is a special issue of the journal Ethnohistory, Colonial Transformations in Venezuela: Anthropology, Archaeology, and History, edited by Berta E. Pérez. Contributors employ the tools of history, anthropology and ethnology to address the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized in Venezuela. It examines various aspects of the Venezuelan oral-based cultures—including religion, gender, and trade—and argue that the
indigenous and black populations were never "cultural islands"—neither before nor after European penetration.

Looking to the Past to Explain the South African Mining Murders

Today in South Africa a judicial inquiry into the killings of 34 platinum miners by police at the Marikana mines begins. Retired judge Ian Farlam toured the site of the killings and has four months to uncover his final findings. The massacre of striking mine workers at Marikana is being hailed as something like the infamous shootings at Sharpeville—a moment in which perceptions of the nation are fundamentally transformed.  But if so, the underlying social realities go much deeper. In Violence in a Time of Liberation, a historical ethnography of a South African gold mine, Donald L. Donham has argued that black nationalism has obscured the political transition of 1994.  Donham says, "Unions like the NUM are not just organizations from below; they are, in some real sense, the creation of South African capitalists.  The pact between the ANC and international capitalism has produced continuing and extreme inequality, and this pattern forms the backdrop to events like Marikana." Violence in a Time of Liberation was reviewed in South Africa's Mail and Guardian last week. Reviewer Matthew Willhelm-Solomon writes that the book "offers a prescient narrative of mine violence. Based on a study of a mine called Cinderella, it provides a piercing and lucid exposition of the path to this violence in a post-1994 moment." He concludes, "Violence in a Time of Liberation offers an exemplary example of how historical ethnography can be used to study violence. It probes us to give time and labour to understand better what has happened, even if its meanings remain elusive. For violence, too, is a way of remembering our disappointed hope." The book contains photographs by Santu Mofokeng, some of which can be viewed on our Tumblr blog.

Academics and the Occupy Movement

It's May Day, also known as International Workers Day. May Day is a holiday in more than 80 countries and the occasion for marches and protests in many others. This year, May Day celebrations in the U.S. are also linked to the Occupy Wall Street movement. A large rally is planned in New York City's Union Square that hopes to harness some of the energy of that movement and link it to unions and immigrant solidarity groups. As Jennifer Scheussler of the New York Times reports, another group that will be out in force on May Day are academics, "notebook-wielding social scientists hoping to get a more precise understanding of the nebulously organized individuals marching under the banner 'We are the 99 percent.'" Scheussler interviews Jeffrey Juris, author of Networking Futures: The Movement against Corporate Globalization. Juris helped set up Occupy Reserach, an online clearinghouse for academics to share data and tools. Juris tells the Times that he worries that the Occupy movement is too focused on gathering large numbers of people in prominent locales. "It’s critical to broaden tactics,” he says. "But how do you do that when the movement is called Occupy?" Juris and other scholars will examine how academics can use ethnography to study movements like Occupy in a new book coming out in 2013: Insurgent Encounters: Transnational Activism, Ethnography, and the Political. 

Another Duke Press author active in the Occupy movement is Nicholas Mirzoeff, author of The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. Mirzoeff writes daily in a blog called Occupy 2012, musing on history, aesthetics, and the movement's future, among many other topics. His Twitter feed (@nickmirzoeff) is also a lively place to follow the movement. Mirzoeff will be at the Union Square rally today. Happy May Day to workers and scholars around the world!

Veiled Constellations

Almost exactly a year after France’s controversial ban of the niquab, and weeks after the attacks committed by French-born Muslim, Mohammed Merah, Muslim women who wear veils in France are in the news again for the public scorn they are receiving, and are afraid they will continue to receive, as a backlash to the attacks. 

 A special section in the most recent issue of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, called “Veiled Constellations: The Veil, Critical Theory, Politics and Contemporary Society,” dedicates attention to the complex and very public politics of the veil.  Contributors look at veiling and feminism in both Europe and the Middle East, through lenses of politics, art, literature, and philosophy.  Read the introduction to the section for free, here. 

Karen Ho Discusses the Culture of Wall Street on MSNBC

Watch anthropologist Karen Ho, author of Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street, on this great segment of MSNBC's "Up with Chris Hayes." Ho clearly lays out how Wall Street's "culture of smart" and "I'll be gone, you'll be gone" attitude is partly to blame for the financial collapse.

Eben Kirksey Calls on Obama to Do the Right Thing in West Papua

Guest post by Eben Kirksey, author of Freedom in Entangled Worlds: West Papua and the Architecture of Global Power.

Barack Obama meeting with President Yudhoyono of Indonesia.

Today five indigenous leaders in West Papua, the half of New Guinea under Indonesian rule, were charged with “treason.”  Hours ago they were each sentenced to three years in prison for peacefully protesting the government.  Barack Obama raised the issue of human rights in West Papua last November when he met with President Yudhoyono of Indonesia.  It is time for the President to once again raise his voice to support human rights in this seemingly remote territory.    

    

Obama’s interest West Papua stems, in part, from personal experiences growing up in Indonesia with his mother, Ann Dunham Soetoro, a cultural anthropologist.  In his autobiography,Dreams from My Father, he recalls a conversation with his step-father, Lolo Soetoro, who had just returned home after a tour of duty with the Indonesian military in West Papua.  Obama asked his step-father: “Have you ever seen a man killed?” Lolo responded affirmatively, recounting the bloody death of “weak” men.  West Papuan intellectuals and political activists, kin of the “weak” men killed by Lolo Soetoro, have read Obama’s autobiography with keen interest.  Even as many Americans have lost hope in their President, many West Papuans still embrace the message from the 2008 campaign, “Yes We Can.”  

Taking inspiration from the people of Tunisia who rose up to depose President Ben Ali last year, and the populist spirit that spread out from Tunisia with the Arab Spring, West Papuans are harboring seemingly impossible dreams.  After 50 years of living under a brutal Indonesian military occupation, West Papuans are hoping to reach a peaceful political solution to this conflict.  

 

 

    Forkorus  Yaboisembut moments before he was arrested.

One West Papuan leader, Forkorus Yaboisembut, remains hopeful against all odds.  He was detained last October, moments after being elected President during the Papuan People’s Congress, and is among the men who were convicted today for “treason.” Thousands rallied behind him, demanding independence from Indonesia, at this event that was peaceful by all accounts. As the Congress was concluding, the delegates were surrounded by some 500 Indonesian police and military personnel with a cordon of armored cars.  Scores of my friends, people who I know from working as a cultural anthropologist in West Papua, were in the crowd.  I had a sleepless night as I monitored Facebook and text messages from the other side of the world, following the developments in real time.  Markus Haluk, the leader of a Papuan youth group, sent a text message saying “in these next few moments we might see a massacre and a bloodbath.”

Videos circulating on YouTube show Indonesian troops firing assault rifles into a crowd from armored personnel carriers, while others pistol whip and kick delegates.  Unarmed civilians desperately tried to clamber into their cars while uniformed police officers and plain clothes thugs beat them.   In 1998 I witnessed a massacre in West Papua that killed upwards of 150 civilians, so I feared the worst. 

When the dead were counted from the violent crackdown at the Papuan People’s Congress, I was relieved to learn that the carnage was minor by local standards.  Human Rights Watch concluded that three civilians were shot dead by Indonesian police on October 19th, 2011. Over 300 delegates to the Papuan People’s Congress were initially detained by Indonesian security forces.  On the heels of these arbitrary detentions, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton voiced alarm. She said that the United States has “very directly raised our concerns about the violence and the abuse of human rights” in West Papua. 

Most of the delegates to the Papuan People’s Congress were quickly released, except for five leaders who were charged with inciting rebellion.  Forkorus Yaboisembut is among these five, along with Edison Waromi, the newly elected Prime Minister.  Today they joined upwards of 90 West Papuans in Indonesian jails who have been identified by Amnesty International as prisoners of conscience. Indonesia is the fourth largest country in the world.  The United States regards Indonesia as a “Strategic Partner” and has considerable influence in the country’s political, economic, and strategic affairs.

Clearly tales of Indonesia’s ongoing war in West Papua troubled Barack Obama as a young man.  Now, as an adult, he is in a position to support the “weak” power of non-violent resistance with a few carefully chosen words.  President Obama should join Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch in calling for the unconditional release of West Papuan political prisoners.

This is cross-posted on Eben Kirksey's blog, where you can read more about his work and experiences in West Papua.

 

Reflections on the Madison Uprising

Last week marked the one-year anniversary of the 2011 Wisconsin protests, which made national news when as many as 100,000 protestors (many of whom were public servants) rallied to oppose the Wisconsin Budget Repair Bill. These protests are being hailed a year later as a predecessor to the Occupy movement, as well as being considered the future of the labor movement.

The Winter 2012 issue of SAQ’s “Against the Day” section reflects on these protests and asks questions about their implications for the future.  Read Stanley Aronowitz’s “Reflections on the Madison Uprising,” for free here.