Table of Contents

Foreword; John Gledhill .- Introduction; David Lehmann .- 1. Multiculturalism as a juridical weapon: The use and abuse of the concept of ‘pueblo originario’ in agrarian conflicts in Michoacán, Mexico; Luis Vázquez .- 2. Paradoxes of Multiculturalism in Bolivia; Andrew Canessa .- 3. The ethnicisation of agrarian conflicts: an Argentine case; Maité Boullosa-Joly .- 4. Inventing rights of our own: women transcending the opposition between the indigenous and the universal; Manuela Picq .- 5. The demand for recognition and access to citizenship: ethnic labelling and territorial restructuring in Brazil; Véronique Boyer .- 6. The politics of naming; David Lehmann            

Promotional Information

"Students of Latin American societies-particularly Latin Americans themselves, but also those from the global North-are beginning to realize that those categories and ideas we have always employed are not an easy fit with the realities we encounter on the ground across the continent. Polarized notions of "race," facile definitions of who is "indigenous," and shallow applications of the notion of "multiculturalism" hinder us from capturing the complexities of late-modern Latin America. The Crisis of Multiculturalism proves a bird's-eye view across Latin America, with in-depth examinations of Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, and Mexico, which goes a ways toward disabusing us of these assumptions. This richly documented and enormously detailed collection of case studies that are astutely analyzed within broader national contexts, makes evident the fact that the categories and concepts we are accustomed to apply to Latin America do not help us to make adequate sense of what we see before us: expansive and contradictory uses of the term "indigenous" that at first appear to us as time-worn rights but later are proven to drive internal conflict and promote exclusion; people who carry with them their ethnic identifications when they move into new spaces, their rhetoric evolving into facsimiles of colonial discourses; others who, despite being fitted into the "indigenous" category, prefer to employ other modes of self-identification; enormous chasms between the rights promulgated in new constitutions and the lack of benefits accruing to groups on the ground, whose own forms of identification are overshadowed by those of more powerful sectors; government policies promoting racial inclusion that fetter the grassroots engagement of identity politics. It is as though our northern notions of multiculturalism were inapplicable in Latin America, as, indeed, they seem to be, according to the authors of this intense and probing volume." (Joanne Rappaport, Professor of Anthropology, Georgetown University, US)

About the Author

David Lehmann, Emeritus, University of Cambridge, UK, is a former Director of the Centre for Latin American Studies and Reader in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge, UK. His research and publications span the fields of development, religion, and ethnicity, especially in Chile, Ecuador, Mexico, and Brazil. He is the author of Democracy and Development in Latin America (1990), Struggle for the Spirit: Religious transformation and Popular Culture in Brazil and Latin America (1996), and editor, with Humeira Iqtidar, of Fundamentalist and Charismatic Movements (4 volumes, 2011).