Seminar Hosted by the
Unit for the Humanities at Rhodes University
Speaker: Raquel Gutiérrez
Aguilar
Title: The community
reproduction of life: Thinking of social trans-formation in the present
(co-authored with Huáscar Salazar Lohman)
Date: Wednesday 23
September 2015
Time: 3:00 – 4:30
We approach with a
critical eye the question “Is social transformation possible?” and maintain
that the starting point for an answer lies in the set of specific collective
and/or community activities that aim at guaranteeing the material and symbolic
reproduction of social life. We argue that transformation does not, only nor
mainly, have to do with sketching out an abstract future horizon; it is rather
about a systematic flow of actions of resistance and struggle in the present,
which defends and expands the specific possibilities for the reproduction of
life as a whole, be it human or non-human. This is the starting point for our
analysis of the tensions and contradictions that exist between said
possibilities for the reproduction of life and the structuring logic of capital
in its continuous cycles of accumulation. From this standpoint, we look into
the popular-communitarian aspects of certain theoretical difficulties that
emerged during recent struggles in Latin America. More specifically, the
obstacles for the social deployment of concrete labour beyond the mediation of
value and in the polymorphic forms of collective political decision-making.
Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar
is professor of sociology at the Autonomous University of Puebla. In 1992 she
was accused, together with Alvaro Garcia, her then husband and now
vice-president of Bolivia, of being a member of the Tupac Katari guerrilla
army, and was imprisoned. The charges were later dropped. After being released
she was active in the war of water in Cochabamba in 2000, which started the
cycle of struggles leading to the change of government in 2005. She is the
author of the acclaimed new book Rhythms of the Pachakuti: Indigenous Uprising
and State Power in Bolivia.
She is currently a
visiting professor in Sociology at Rhodes University.
For more information on
Rhythms of the Pachakuti visit:
https://www.dukeupress.edu/Rhythms-of-the-Pachakuti/
