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Review Article

Re-visioning Cultures of Politics

An essay on social movements, citizenship and
culture
Sonia E. Alvarez, Evelina Dagnino and Arturo Escobar (eds)
Cultures of Politics, Politics of Cultures: Re-visioning Latin American
Social Movements, 1998, Boulder, CO/Oxford: Westview Press,
459 pp., ISBN 0-8133-3072-6

Willem Assies
El Colegio de Michoacán, Mexico
Ton Salman
PIEB, Bolivia

Introduction

Minerva’s owl, as the saying goes, only takes off at dusk. A book, building
on some 25 years of study of social movements in Latin America, starting
with a reference to the approaching end of the millennium (p. 1) and sub-
titled ‘re-visioning Latin American social movements’ may, therefore, be
expected to provide new insights regarding the social movements of yester-
year and today, and to provide a bridge to the dawning new age. It seeks to
do so by shifting the focus to the interface of culture and politics. The aim
is to retheorize the cultural dimension of politics and thereby contest the often-
made claim that the ‘political’ significance of social movements has receded
with the return of formal, electoral democracy to much of Latin America.
On the other hand, in underscoring how the ‘cultural’ struggles of social
movements over meanings and representations are deeply entangled with
their struggles for rights and economic and political-institutional power,
the book is intended to stimulate theoretical reflection on the political
dimensions of the cultural (p. xi).
The volume contains 18 essays, preceded by an introduction. The essays
are arranged into four parts, the first addressing ‘The Cultural Politics of
Citizenship, Democracy and the State’, the second focusing on ‘The Cul-
tural Politics of Ethnicity, Race and Gender’, followed by a part on ‘Global-
ization, Transnationalism and Civil Society’. The final part is dedicated to
Vol 20(3) 289–307 [0308-275X(200009)20:3; 289–307;013845]
Copyright 2000 © SAGE Publications
(London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)

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‘Theoretical and Methodological Reflections on the Cultural and the Politi-

cal in Latin American Social Movements’ and mainly consists of comments
on the main body of the book in which some issues in the theorization of
contemporary social movements are taken up again.
We begin this article with a summary outline of the main features of
the introductory chapter to the volume which presents the theoretical basis
of the project, followed by a discussion of the subsequent chapters and an
assessment of their success in re-visioning Latin American social move-
ments, and a review of the main issues tackled; issues that are the stuff of
which current debate on social movements is constituted.

Going cultural

After an earlier anthology which focused on ‘strategy, identity, and democ-

racy’ (Escobar and Alvarez, 1992) the editors of the volume under review
have chosen to join the ‘cultural turn’ in social studies and make ‘cultures
of politics and politics of cultures’ into a central concern. The intention is
to examine the relationship between culture and politics by ‘delving into
the nature of the cultural politics enacted – with more or less clarity and to
a greater or lesser extent – by all social movements and examining the
potential of this cultural politics for fostering social change’ (p. 2). Though
cultural studies provides a source of inspiration for this endeavor, the
editors argue that it has not given sufficient importance to social move-
ments as a vital aspect of cultural production (p. 3). Cultural studies has
remained heavily oriented toward the textual, it is argued, and thus has
failed to address the political stakes for concrete social actors in struggles
over meanings and representations.
The reintroduction of politics, or the shift from culture to cultural poli-
tics, is a first item on the agenda presented in the introductory chapter.
Cultural politics, then, is defined as ‘the process enacted when sets of actors
shaped by, and embodying, different cultural meanings and practices come
into conflict with each other (. . .) when movements deploy alternative con-
ceptions of woman, nature, race, economy, democracy, or citizenship that
unsettle dominant cultural meaning, they enact a cultural politics’ (p. 7).
Developing this idea the editors argue that perhaps the most important
angle from which to analyze the cultural politics of social movements is in
relation to its effects on political culture(s), that is the particular social con-
struction in every society of what counts as ‘political’. This alludes to the
extent that the objectives of contemporary social movements sometimes
reach beyond perceived material and institutional gains or simple inclusion
but seek to transform the dominant political culture. Latin American social
movements have developed plural versions of a cultural politics that go well
beyond the (re)establishment of formal liberal democracy and ‘confront
the dominant authoritarian culture through a resignifying of notions of

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rights, public and private spaces, forms of sociability, ethics, equality and
difference, and so on’ (p. 10).1
Such an approach, it is argued, involves an expanded concept of poli-
tics and a decentered view of power and politics that transgresses reduc-
tionist conceptions of politics, political culture, citizenship and democracy
that prevail in mainstream political science and in some versions of
resource mobilization and political process approaches to social move-
ments (p. 11). In contrast to the narrow institutional approach adopted by
most ‘transitologists’ it directs the attention to nongovernmental or extra-
institutional public arenas – principally inspired or constructed by social
movements – which may be as essential as the institutions of the new civil-
ian regimes to the consolidation of meaningful democratic citizenship for
subaltern social groups and classes (p. 14).
The less measurable and sometimes less visible or submerged dimen-
sions of collective action thus become an important terrain for research,
among them social movement networks or webs. Both the interpersonal
networks of daily life and inter-organizational and politico-cultural linkages
with other movements, as well as with a multiplicity of cultural and insti-
tutional actors and spaces, should be taken into account (p. 15).
The revitalization of civil society obviously is a further theme touched
upon in the introduction and here some cautionary notes are made about
the widespread celebration of civil society in its local, national, regional or
global manifestations. Civil society, it is pointed out, is also a terrain of
struggle mined by sometimes undemocratic power relations and various
forms of exclusion. Civil society, therefore, is both the ‘terrain’ of struggle
of social movements and a privileged ‘target’. In this context, mention is
made of political and theoretical issues thrown up by the changing role of
nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), which in many cases have become
more like ‘neo-’ or ‘para-’ governmental organizations. And, furthermore,
it is argued that the relation between state and civil society cannot be con-
ceptualized in terms of clear boundaries. Attention should be given to the
links between the two that make the idea of a confrontation, or even clear
delimitation between them as fully fledged autonomous entities, illusory.
Such a conceptualization also brings into view public spheres other
than official policy arenas, that is the alternative public spaces where coun-
terdiscourses concerning identities, demands and needs are shaped and
circulate. These range from family courtyards and local markets to new
public arenas of representation, negotiation and interlocution that involve
a redefinition of the political system and a rethinking and expansion of the
parameters of existing democracy that may contribute to the (trans)for-
mation of public policies.
Finally, the ways globalization and neoliberalism affect the cultural poli-
tics of social movements are mentioned as a research issue. On the one
hand, globalization has opened up new opportunities and facilitated a non-
territorial democratization of global issues. On the other hand, however,

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globalization and neoliberalism have enhanced inequalities and appear to

have weakened and unsettled existing forms of organization and languages
of protest (Stark, 1998). In this context the politico-cultural project of
neoliberalism, as expressed in the notion of ‘social adjustment’, is a power-
ful contender in the dispute over the meanings of citizenship, civil society
and democracy. Quite a few previously progressive movements and NGOs
have come to participate in social adjustment programs. This leads to the
question of whether the new conditions dictated by neoliberal globalization
might transform the very meaning of ‘social movement’ itself and if we
should not ask ourselves whether what counts as a social movement is being
reconfigured.
This, in short, seems to be the research and theoretical agenda outlined
for the volume and it surely presents quite a challenge.

Not what they used to be: new challenges in new settings

The issue of the transformation of social movements as a result of inter-

action between a changing environment and inner dynamics is pervasively
present throughout the volume. For one thing, the heroic days of opposi-
tion to authoritarian rule are over and, partly as a result of movement activ-
ity, the political agenda has changed with the return to electoral politics
and the revival, and disputes over conceptualizations, of civil society and
citizenship. At the same time the neoliberal onslaught, the process of
globalization and transnationalization as well as the dramatic changes in
communication technology have contributed to a redefinition of the
politico-cultural terrain in which social movements must today undertake
their struggles.
The democratization process, to begin with, has done much more than
– and in many cases something completely different from – merely easing
social movements’ potential for obtaining concessions and results. It was
accompanied by changes in the perception of strategic objectives and the
meaning of the actions of the movements themselves as well as of students
and intellectuals, whether concerned, committed or both. Evelina
Dagnino, for instance, firmly locates her contribution (Chapter 2) on
culture, citizenship and democracy in the context of the changing dis-
courses and practices of the Latin American and Brazilian left and traces
the impact of Gramsci’s work in rethinking the relationship between poli-
tics and culture as well as a re-visioning of political strategy by which the
received concepts of revolutionary transformation were replaced with
notions of hegemony, civil society and democracy and citizenship. Democ-
racy and citizenship have become strategic concepts in a project that would
include a transformation, rather than a refusal, of political institutionality
and the state. In the process of forging and adjusting to democratic ins-
titutionality, the political culture of the left and of many social movements

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has come to embrace the promotion of a culture of rights, among them the
right to coparticipate in governmental decision-making.
The question of coparticipation and the changing relation between
social movements and institutional politics in Brazil is further elaborated in
Chapter 3 by Maria Celia Paoli and Vera da Silva Telles who discuss experi-
ments in local participatory democracy and new forms of negotiation by
the labor movement, and in Sergio Baierle’s study (Chapter 5) of partici-
patory budgeting in the municipality of Porto Alegre. They discuss experi-
ments with the construction of public arenas at the interface of state and
society. These are the sites, it is argued, where conflicts are made visible,
the legitimacy of conflicting interests can be recognized and negotiated
over. The modes of confrontation characteristic of the 1980s have given way
to negotiation through which new parameters for public policies are being
constructed and rights are being recognized. After a brief review of the
experience with ‘sectoral councils’ in which the business sector, workers
and government participated, the automobile industry being the most out-
standing case, Paoli and Telles argue that the experience benefited busi-
ness owners, workers and government alike. A third path between the
extremes of deregulation of workers’ rights and traditional legalistic and
authoritarian regulation of the state has appeared on the horizon. These
contributions are quite optimistic about the emergence of a new culture of
rights and citizenship or the creation of new public spaces for the recog-
nition of the legitimacy and the processing of conflicting interests accord-
ing to a new ethical-political principle.
Nevertheless, it remains unclear how such experiments relate to the
view that depoliticization is the most established task of politics and the con-
ception of politics as the pacification of the political, as put forward by David
Slater (Chapter 15), or what to think of Baierle’s allusion to the ‘pedagogi-
cal’ aspects of participatory budgeting by which the subaltern classes learn
to view the public interest more globally. His discussion of the experience
in Porto Alegre reads very much like a success story. However, without
denying this aspect, more analysis of the role of NGOs or the municipal
administrators – who in part were recruited from the NGO circuit – in
shaping the process would have been useful. Reference to the success or
failure of other experiments of this kind, such as the Workers’ Party adminis-
tration of the city of São Paulo and a number of other large and small cities,
is virtually absent. Neither is the question of the relation between accumula-
tion and legitimation addressed; a concern that informed the early studies
of urban social movements and is surely of some importance for a city like
Porto Alegre that has to compete with other harbor-towns. In Paoli and
Telles’ discussion of the sectoral council experience no mention is made of
the huge reduction of the labor force in the automobile industry – some 40
percent between 1987 and 1996 – nor of the fact that, while significant
increases in productivity translated into somewhat better wages for those
employed, after the agreements the number of employed remained fairly

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stable and modes of labor organization and discipline were profoundly

modified with the introduction of flexible employment arrangements. Also
remarkable is the absence of a serious discussion of the debate over ‘neo-
corporatism’ that was triggered by the new forms of negotiation.
Whereas the Brazilian contributions on the emergence of an active
citizenship seem to express an ‘optimism of the will’, Veronica Schild’s
account of the fate of the Chilean women’s movement under neoliberal
democracy rather reflects a ‘realism of the intellect’. She presents a rather
sobering account of the often neglected cultural dimension of the neolib-
eral project and the ways Chile’s neoliberal democratic state actually draws
on civil society and social movement resources in the pursuit of a new
citizenship model. She shows how emancipatory efforts of feminist activists
and professionals are being transformed into resources for the construc-
tion of new state forms and how the quest for autonomy and meaningful
participation of the feminist movement, for example, is tapped as a
resource for a neoliberal redefinition of citizenship. Feminist-inspired
activities that made a link between economic necessity and empowerment
are being subtly appropriated and transformed into activities that aim to
empower women as economic subjects within the market framework. This
process goes together with the incorporation of feminist professionals and
experts capable of handling vital information into state agencies and a
professionalization of NGO activities whereby poor and working-class
women are losing their earlier public visibility. The initial alliances among
women in their struggle for an inclusive conception of democracy are
coming undone with the return to ‘normal’ politics as the political inte-
gration of some women occurs at the cost of marginalization of others. The
lesson taught by these recent years, Schild comments (p. 107), ‘is that class
does matter as far as women and their struggles are concerned’.

Common citizens?

If the first section of the volume under review highlights the transformation
of some social movements and the redefinition of strategies, in Part 2 the
cultural politics of ethnicity, race and gender and issues of ‘identity poli-
tics’ hold center stage. The contributions to this section raise a series of
issues regarding the heterogeneity of social movements and the ambiguity
and contradictions that mark the movements and which unsettle the simple
assimilation of social movements to ‘progressiveness’. Furthermore, while
the earlier contributions showed that dimensions of citizenship are a matter
of dispute, the contributions to this section call into question the very
notion of a common paradigm of citizenship as classically expressed in
triads like ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’ or Marshall’s civil, political and
social rights (Marshall, 1950).
In Chapter 6, Jeffrey Rubin addresses the story of COCEI (Coalition of

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Workers, Peasants and Students of the Isthmus), a radical grassroots move-

ment in the Zapotec city of Juchitán, in southern Mexico. In contrast to the
tendency in most other contributions, his article disproves any simple rela-
tion between progressive politics and countervailing cultural effects. To the
contrary, he illustrates how a radical movement that complies with the pre-
requisites of relying on a well motivated and easily mobilizable social base,
being both identity-formative and politically effective, and autonomous
from party guidance, is also characterized by cultural traits that have
unpleasant echoes. Caudillismo, violence and threats of violence, a return to
the racist image of the fierce and indomitable Indian, vanguard images of
leadership, backward-looking rhetoric on economics and anything but
gender-equal practices, were inherent hallmarks of COCEI’s organizational
style. But, going beyond mere denunciation or explanation of these charac-
teristics as part of many ‘popular cultures’, Rubin argues that these features
might help explain COCEI’s success: they were part of the raw material that
COCEI deployed to create a contradictory, ambiguous and ‘decentered’
movement, in which there was a place for, for instance, both nuanced and
carefully orchestrated relations with the ‘despised’ official PRI-politicians, as
well as for fierce rhetoric condemning all outsiders who aimed to contami-
nate and penetrate the Juchitán community. Rubin’s own main conclusion
is that the mix of militancy and accommodation produces precisely the coex-
istence of differences that provides ‘new spaces for the production of
meaning’ (p. 160) and thus form part of the explanation for COCEI’s
success. He also portrays culture as an obstinate and unruly dimension, pro-
viding for far more intricate and knotty vicissitudes than are suggested by
phrases that primarily focus on social movements’ ability to ‘challenge or
unsettle dominant political cultures’ (p. 8). Culture, as Rubin illustrates, also
unsettles the very idea of social movements’ inherent progressive or demo-
cratic nature. In emphasizing this unmanageable, refractory and strategi-
cally ungovernable side of culture, however, Rubin practically stands alone.
As Rubin remarks, essentialist class and ethnic discourses, when com-
bined in ambiguous ways with other forms of belief and action, can simul-
taneously reflect people’s experiences and be of considerable strategic use
(p. 161). And incidentally he points to the tensions this implies in relation
to accustomed notions of citizenship (pp. 151, 155). Dimensions of this
issue also emerge in further contributions on the cultural politics of eth-
nicity, race and gender. Kay Warren addresses the tensions between the
ethnic-based goals of the Pan-Mayan movement in Guatemala and the
organizational paradigm of the popular left and, more generally, the hostile
reactions to the reaffirmation of Mayan cultural and collective rights and
the imagery of a Mayan nation. She points to the possibilities for dialogue
that might mitigate continuing ethnic polarization and open a perspective
of plural democracy. Libia Grueso, Carlos Rosero and Arturo Escobar
discuss the emergence of black community organizations in the southern
Pacific Coast Region of Colombia in the wake of the 1991 constitutional

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reform that included the recognition of the pluri-ethnicity and multicul-

turality of Colombian society. They seek to highlight innovative practices
and theoretical formulations concerning the relation between territory,
biodiversity, culture and development and argue that the movements’
definition of ‘biodiversity’ as ‘territory plus culture’ embodies an entire
political ecology which underpins a cultural struggle for autonomy and self-
determination. The movement seeks to formulate an ethno-cultural project
that challenges the clientelist practices of conventional black politicians
and constitutes a rupture with previous attempts at black organizing that
called for integration as a way to overcome racial discrimination and
oppression. It is presented as a carrier of a post-development message and
a defense of ‘life’. For many people of the Pacific, it is argued, loss of terri-
tory would amount to a return to slavery or, worse perhaps, to becoming
‘common citizens’ (p. 211). For her part Olivia Maria Gomes da Cunha
explores the development of black ‘identity policies’ in Brazil. She discusses
various discursive strategies deployed by movement intellectuals in delinea-
ting the relations between the ‘cultural’ and the ‘political’ and the unease
eventually caused by essentializing and polarizing positions. She points to
the ways in which ‘community’ reifies differences and creates boundaries
between ‘us’ and ‘them’ and may effectively contribute to the consolidation
of ‘communities’ which are, in the classical philosophical tradition, in
opposition to citizenship. The embarrassment this caused prompted a
redirection of discourse in which to speak of citizenship becomes a recourse
to escape the ‘logic of identity’ and to address issues of discrimination in
new ways within a broader framework.
A dimension present in the discussion of black identity politics, the
interaction between individual biography and movement activism, is dis-
cussed more elaborately in Miguel Díaz-Barriga’s article on Colonas partici-
pation in urban movements in Mexico City. By way of a review of three
personal accounts of participation he examines some of the conceptual
tools often used in the analysis of women’s activism, such as the practi-
cal/strategic needs, the private/public, the social/political dichotomies.
He argues that such categorizations are overly rigid and hardly capture the
ways in which such opposites are navigated and reworked in day-to-day prac-
tices and discourses. He thus draws attention to the ‘borderlands’ of
hybridization, improvisation, ambiguity and irony and their role in trans-
forming cultural meanings and social relations and in doing so rejoins some
of the themes highlighted by Jeffrey Rubin.
A last contribution to this part of the book is an article by Jean Franco
on the Vatican’s offensive against the use of the notion of ‘gender’ during
the Beijing Conference, and its impact on some of the Latin American
official delegations.
The various contributions on the politics of ethnicity and race in this
part of the volume raise important questions. These are not taken up,
however, in the introduction or the concluding section of the book. In the

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first place, indigenous peoples’ mobilizations in particular call into ques-

tion the notion of citizenship in rather fundamental ways. In response to
these movements a series of Latin American states have modified their
constitutions and recognized the multi-ethnic and pluricultural make-up of
the societies over which they rule. As such, this marks a significant rupture
with the homogenizing project that originated with independence. ‘Post-
nationalist constitutionalism’ goes some way toward the recognition of col-
lective rights of indigenous peoples.2 Since the issue of collective rights is
hotly debated among liberal political theorists, and, as Kay Warren notes,
meets with suspicion on the part of radical democracy theorists like Chantal
Mouffe, further discussion would have been appropriate. Indigenous
peoples’ claims to ‘autonomy’ and ‘self-determination’ and the consti-
tutional recognition of collective rights sit uneasily with the repertoire of
citizenship. It is not merely a matter of ‘lifestyle’ since these collective rights
include the right to maintain indigenous political institutions and jurisdic-
tion. In the case of Colombia, for example, this has generated considerable
debate over the relation between indigenous jurisdiction and human rights.
More generally, the tension between the recognition of the rights of
indigenous peoples and the rights of indigenous women is a matter of
debate. And in the case of Mexico the government’s unwillingness to
comply with the agreements reached with the Zapatistas in San Andrés
(1996) is ideologically enveloped in an universalist discourse that rejects
‘privileges’ for indigenous peoples.
In the second place, the recognition of multi-ethnicity and pluri-
culturalism also throws up questions relating to the culture concept out-
lined by the editors in their introduction. We will return to this question
later. The point to be made here is that the recognition of indigenous
peoples’ collective rights implies the recognition of a plurality of political
cultures – with the attending institutions – and, more generally, a plurality
of cultures tout court understood as virtually coterminous with ‘societies’ or
‘peoples’. The understanding that tacitly underlies the introduction and
most of the contributions to the volume, on the other hand, is that culture
provides a common ground. In other words: culture binds the contesting
parties while simultaneously being at stake, as in Laclau and Mouffe’s
(1985) imagery of a ‘field of discursivity’ where ‘floating signifiers’ may be
articulated into different chains of equivalence. Pluriculturalism, however,
implies the existence of different ‘fields of discursivity’3 and of very differ-
ent ‘political cultures’, such as that of the stateless and segmentary society
of the Wayuu people in Colombia, to mention just one example. And when
Colombia’s 1991 Constitution was to be translated into indigenous lan-
guages to instruct the indigenous on their new-won indigenous citizens’
rights, the word Law was translated into the Iku language as ‘that which
encompasses goodness’ (cf. Padilla, 1995).
In our view, a book that focuses on social movements, democracy and
citizenship in Latin America and which contains contributions that state

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that becoming ‘common citizens’ might be a fate worse than slavery cannot
omit addressing issues of ‘pluricultural citizenship’ and the ways it might
subvert the familiar paradigm of citizenship. The absence of any systematic
discussion of such issues in the introduction, which pretends to provide a
theoretical framework, is curious to say the least.

Globalization, cyberculture and the new civil society

In Part 3 globalization and the new communication technologies and their

effects on a possible ‘new civil society’ are drawn into the picture. Rather
than focusing on the exploits of movements at the grassroots, the contri-
butions to this section reveal other aspects of movement activity. Thus, in
Alvarez’s contribution (Chapter 12) on the Latin American feminists’ pres-
ence in Beijing and on its alternative counterpart, the NGO-forum that took
place outside Beijing, it is not the vicissitudes of the women moving in the
realm of organizations and movements – and, for that matter, the politico-
cultural issues at stake there – but the characteristics of their representatives’
positions and the frictions they generate are the subject of reflection. The
link between culture and collective action politics is thus transcribed to a
realm in which the actions and positions of movement-professionals and
spokespersons who are in politics or public functions take centre stage. In
that context, Alvarez addresses some of the questions thrown up by the emer-
gence of what some have dubbed a ‘gender technocracy’ constituted by the
more professionalized, policy-oriented actors in the feminist field who have
become the privileged interlocutors of public officials, the media, and bilat-
eral and multilateral aid and development agencies. In Alvarez’s view the
advances into a vast range of institutional and extra-institutional spaces are
a consequence of a decentering of the movement which reflects relatively
successful incursions into hitherto male-dominated realms and a dissemi-
nation of feminist discourse. It has, however, been accompanied by power
imbalances within the movement. Devising effective mechanisms and proce-
dures for democratization within the feminist field constitutes a challenge
for the region’s feminisms, she argues.
Nevertheless, in the professionalization and institutionalization of
movement sectors much more may be at stake than a rift between ethical-
cultural and structural-institutional dimensions of movements, or mere
‘power imbalances’ as Alvarez suggests. Schild asserts that ‘class matters’
should be taken to heart and be rethought within the framework of theor-
izations about an information society (cf. Bader et al., 1998). As Melucci
argues in his contribution to the concluding section of the volume
(Chapter 18), issues of cultural power and cultural difference have become
a central theoretical issue in the analysis of information-based society. Over
the past 25 years committed professionals and a layer of movement
spokespersons have managed to make their commitment into a career. This

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involves an appropriation of the symbolic capital generated by the social

movements they helped to construct and this inevitably impacts on move-
ment dynamics as professionals gradually evolve from radical movement
promoters to mediators with specific knowledge and information regard-
ing movements which provides a basis for power over client groups while
being simultaneously related to interests associated with career opportu-
nities. In other words, the emergence of a ‘gender technocracy’ in the
context of a society where domination is rooted in the manipulation of
information and symbols requires much more systematic scrutiny.
Gustavo Lins Ribeiro, in Chapter 13, addresses another aspect of the
emergence of new communication technologies and poignantly argues that
there is a difference between the imagined communities of print capitalism
and the virtual communities of ‘internauts’. The virtual community is more
than a symbolically and politically constructed abstraction: it is a reality of
a different kind, an intermediate, parallel state between reality and abstrac-
tion where simulation and simulacra have lives of their own (p. 330). This
introduces a sobering perspective on the often exalted expectations about
the liberating force of the new technologies. Ribeiro seeks to take into con-
sideration issues of power, the hyperbolic opinions held by members of the
transnational communities about their power, the presumed liberating
qualities of the new technology and the stratification produced by com-
puter literacy. He ends with a discussion of the empowerment of local actors
through the virtual communities that networks create and which are power-
ful weapons for generating transnational solidarity on many ‘pressing
issues’ but also signals some of the limitations of ‘activism at a distance’ and
concludes that computer networks do not represent a true libertarian
panacea since, in the last instance, conflicts are played out in the ‘real
world’. This analysis draws attention to the limitations of activism at a dis-
tance and, among other things, reminds us that such activism is strongly
related to the news-value of events also hinted at in Yúdice’s contribution
(p. 366). One issue here is the virtual reality relayed by networks in order
to generate maximum impact and which often fails to convey the often
much more sordid complexity of daily life situations on the ground. The
other, related, issue is the fleeting character of international soli-
darity prompted by the fascination with the hooded Zapatista or a roman-
ticized imagery of rubber tappers in the Amazonian rainforest. They move
into the limelight but move out again as soon as the thrill is gone.
In Chapter 14, George Yúdice deals with the globalization of culture
and the new civil society. He argues that although most leftist views of
globalization are pessimistic, the turn to civil society in the context of
neoliberal policies, and the new technologies on which globalization relies,
have opened up new forms of progressive struggle in which the cultural is
an arena of conflict (p. 357). He ends up, in our view, with rather inflated
speculations on how the Zapatista movement attempts to contribute to new
practices of debate and criticism in civil society, allegedly visible especially

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in its critique of neoliberalism. His search for a decentered countervailing

tendency in the midst of a stabilizing and controlling effort on the part of
the state remains unpalpable, especially because the magnitude of both
processes lacks more systematic exploration.
Issues related to globalization are also touched upon in David Slater’s
reflections on the spatialities of social movements, where he asserts that
such developments supplement and challenge structures of territorialized
democracy with a politics of nonterritorial democratization of global issues
(p. 382), qualifying the point with the argument that nonterritorial
democratization lacks a secure regional base and is less firmly anchored in
terms of its accountability. Slater, for the rest, explores the explanatory
value of integrating the spatial dimension in social movements studies.
While a worthwhile series of reflections on approaches and concepts and
their revealing and concealing effects, in the end his explanation of social
movements’ actions in ‘spatial’ metaphors does not always convince as a
new view on cultural politics.

Retheorizing movements

Undertaking the effort to recapitulate the volume’s importance and omis-

sions, one surprisingly finds that the job has, as least partially, already been
done in the final section of the volume entitled ‘Theoretical and Methodo-
logical Reflections on the Cultural and the Political in Latin American
Social Movements’. The contributions to this part, however, do not all
elaborate on what they throw up, nor strengthen or complement each
other, and some tend to take the status of a sort of postscript, anticipating
the reception-history of the book and the role it might play in future
research and debate.
Elizabeth Jelin, in Chapter 16, discusses the relation between political
democratization and the exclusionary economics of neoliberalism which
through its marginalizing effects in fact undermines the strengthening of
civil society and a culture of citizenship. She furthermore discusses the
changing role of NGOs or the ‘third sector’ which, in neoliberal discourse,
tends to be conflated with civil society as such. On the one hand, she points
to the relative absence of institutional and societal accountability of NGOs
that are only accountable to the providers of funds and, on the other hand,
she argues that the state cannot and should not renounce its function and
obligation to promote citizenship.
In a comment on the contributions to the volume Paulo Krischke
(Chapter 17) draws attention to the nonlinear cultural process of social and
political change and the aspects of ‘ambiguity’ which are highlighted
throughout the volume. While this cultural approach certainly allows for a
critical distance from previous approaches and a new understanding of the
‘public sphere’, Krischke argues that a further step should be taken which

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entails the adoption of a comparative scale to gage ‘political development’.

He thus draws attention to the need to assess processes of social learning
of democratic rights and of ‘moral/cognitive development’; aspects that
tend to fall beyond the horizon of post-structuralist approaches.
Alberto Melucci (Chapter 18), in his comment, goes back to the emer-
gence of the concept of ‘new social movements’, for which he was partly
responsible, and signals his alarm over the fundamentally misconceived
debate that grew up around the concept. This debate, he argues, largely
ignored the truly important question, namely whether in contemporary
society there are relations and social structures that can be explained within
the framework of industrial capitalist society as defined by the classical
models of sociology. The emergence of the information society has created
new resources for autonomy as well as new forms of power and control. This
gives rise to new forms of collective action and conflict that are eminently
cultural as they invest the sphere of meaning formation, but they are also
structural in character, affecting the forms of domination of a society based
on information.
In a final chapter Mary Louise Pratt draws attention to the pragmatic,
anti-idealist and anti-prescriptive undertone of most contributions to the
volume. In her view, this reflects an attempt to reposition the metropolitan
intellectual with respect to the field of the social, and particularly with
respect to its traditional hinterlands and peripheries. A ‘deflated rhetoric’
is observable in the refusal to judge the movements discussed by presumed
standards of progressiveness or other political criteria that might be taken
for granted by metropolitan intellectuals or their readers, she argues.
Instead, an effort is made to shift the center of gravity of knowledge, under-
standing and judgment to the participants. The new approach, in her view,
furthermore entails resolute localization of analyses and a turn to the cul-
tural that enables reflection on democracy, everydayness, experiment and
consciousness. In contrast to orthodox theorizing, which relies on binary
classifications and homogenization and which resists heterogeneization,
the cultural studies approach shows that what is viewed as ‘fragmentation’
and ‘disintegration’ perhaps reflects structures of exclusion and willful
ignorance. She thus claims, somewhat exaltedly in our view, that ‘the study
of “new social movements” has involved important confrontations with the
homogenizing habits of mind social theory has traditionally fostered’
(p. 431).

A new vision?

In this article we have chosen to give an extensive review of the contri-

butions to a volume that certainly will reach a wide public. Whereas the
volume provides important insights, and by themselves the contributions
are often very worthwhile, we also feel that it does not live up to its claim

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of being a very innovative contribution to the study of social movements

and the fruit of ‘genuinely . . . transdisciplinary dialogue and collaboration’
(p. xi). In the following, we will discuss the strengths and limitations of
some of the book’s major theoretical claims.

Grounding the ‘cultural turn’

From the late 1970s onward increasing attention has been given to issues
of identity and the social and discursive construction of movements, socio-
political actors and interests. Drawing inspiration from cultural studies, the
introductory chapter could have provided a step beyond the culturalist-
autonomist conceptualizations that tended to inspire these efforts. But in
its elaborations, culture remains the largely elusive concept of anthropo-
logical bickering. Although the editors criticize the overly ‘textual and artis-
tic’ emphasis often found in cultural studies, they fail to come up with a
theoretical guideline that escapes from the circular argument that culture
is something ‘beyond the so-called material’ which has to do with rep-
resentation, meaning and textuality, narratives and discourse, whereas
there is also always ‘something else’ beyond culture, ‘something nasty down
below’, the groundings, practices, social actors and power. Stating that ‘in
Latin America today all social movements enact a cultural politics’ (p. 6) is
a truism and we might add that any social movement, contemporary or not,
enacts a cultural politics as has been abundantly demonstrated in the cul-
tural studies of ‘old’ social movements. The framework proposed fails to
provide a grounding for the ‘cultural turn’. It should be recalled that the
whole debate over the ‘new social movements’ was strongly related to the
issue of culture and the feeling that a new societal logic produced a change
in social movement activity. The idea was that the development of com-
modity production coupled with information technology had led to a
‘triumph of signifying culture’ which then reverses the direction of deter-
minism (cf. Featherstone, 1988). As Melucci argues in his contribution, the
new types of conflicts are eminently cultural because they invest the sphere
of meaning formation; but they are nevertheless structural in character in
that they affect the forms of domination of a society based on information.
The book’s theoretical premises tend to overstate and ‘exclusify’ the inno-
vations of the ‘cultural look’ and to understate the persisting relevance of
the ‘something nasty down below’, and even fail to make an advance on
convincing equilibriums accomplished in the past (e.g. Arturo, 1994;
Raschke, 1987; Vélez-Ibañez, 1991; Warren, 1998).
This also opens a different perspective on the emergence of a ‘gender
technocracy’ as signalled by Sonia Alvarez. It makes one suspect that more
is at stake than mere ‘power imbalances among women acting at different
levels and occupying different spaces’ within a heterogeneous, spatially and
organizationally dispersed, and polycentric Latin American feminist field.
While this surely has contributed to the incursions into the discursive
terrain of male-dominant organizations and institutions we think that

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Veronica Schild’s remark that ‘class does matter’ deserves serious consider-
ation. This does not mean that the ancient teleological imagery of class
should be part of the bargain, but it does mean that rethinking ‘class’ in
the context of the power relations, domination, governmentality and exclu-
sions of ‘information society’ may provide a powerful analytical tool that
can provide insight into the stakes of democratization and democracy in
the present context (Benschop et al., 1998: 25).

Politics and ‘the political’

Focusing on how culture and politics interact is no doubt a valuable way
into the study of social movements, and the focus on the cultural politics of
social movements as – deliberate or not – attempts to unsettle dominant
political cultures proves very fruitful – though at times it tends to be over-
stated – throughout the volume. However, it is difficult to avoid the sus-
picion that the cultural focus as presented in the introduction is intended
to produce a finer-meshed net to dredge up feats of the movements after
the euphoria has gone. At the same time, it seems that, with the claim to
‘transgress the narrow, reductionist conceptions of politics, political cultu-
re, citizenship, and democracy that prevail in both mainstream political
science and in some versions of resource mobilization and political-process
approaches to social movements’ (p. 11), the baby is being thrown out with
the bathwater.
The central question, also addressed in David Slater’s contribution in
Chapter 15, seems to come to revolve around the relation between ‘poli-
tics’ and ‘the political’ and the definition of what counts as ‘political’. Thus,
Slater elaborates on the distinction between ‘the political’ and ‘politics’ and
argues that ‘[T]he political then is a living movement, a kind of “magma of
conflicting wills” or antagonisms; it is mobile and ubiquitous, going beyond
but also subverting the institutional settings and moorings of politics’ (p.
388). Politics, by contrast, can be viewed as the attempted pacification of
the political, or the installation and embodiment of order and sedimented
practices in a given society, and depoliticization is the most established task
of politics (p. 386). Nonetheless, Slater notes that the imbrication between
the political and politics relates to the ongoing debate about the relations
between state and civil society and then goes along with Ernesto Laclau’s
recent admonition of views that equate the radicalization of democracy with
the deepening of the division between civil society and the state since, the
argument goes, in many instances the advance of democracy requires pro-
gressive legislation that goes against deep-seated interests anchored in civil
society itself. Democratic policies then require many complex and strategic
moves that merge and dissolve the civil society–state distinction.
The theoretical, and practical, problem is that, in Slater’s account at
least, ‘politics’ is viewed as inherently repressive and regulative – eliciting
resistance, of course. Such a view, in the end, makes it difficult to con-
ceptualize something like ‘progressive politics’ or empowerment through

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the use of state power and legislation. Such questions make clear that issues
of ‘the long march through the institutions’ and the politics of reframing
and democratizing institutions require critical theorization. Instead of
simply dismissing resource mobilization and political-process approaches
or Foweraker’s (1995) work as reductionist and narrow mainstream theor-
izing, it might be more fruitful to engage in a critical debate that opens a
perspective for ‘progressive politics’.

Progessiveness
The notion of ‘progressive’ is mostly taken for granted throughout the
book, though Kay Warren notes that the notion of what is progressive is
highly contested, Jeffrey Rubin highlights ‘ambiguity and contradiction’
and Paulo Krischke argues that the interpretation of social and political
democratization entails the adoption of a comparative scale to gage ‘poli-
tical development’ and the social learning of democratic rights (p. 417).
But nowhere else in the compilation is this issue methodically taken up and
Mary Louise Pratt seeks to turn this into a virtue when she contends that
the authors in the volume willfully refuse to judge the movements they dis-
cuss by presumed standards of progressiveness entertained by metropolitan
intellectuals and their readers. In her view, the authors do assert judgments
expressed by other actors in the situation under study, without taking sides
themselves.
We think that such neo-populist relativism is not very helpful and that
in fact it only conceals standpoints, avoids critical debate and obstructs
elaboration of a ‘progressive’ social movement theory. It is remarkable, for
instance, that in the introductory chapter the editors observe that cultural
politics also exists in ‘social movements of the right’ (p. 8). The point,
however, is not elaborated although it might have important theoretical
implications for the conceptualization of social movements.4 Later, the
editors simply state that ‘democratizing cultural and social relations –
whether at the micro level of the household, the neighborhood, and the
community association or the macro level of relations between women and
men, blacks and whites, rich and poor – is an express goal of Latin Ameri-
can social movements’ (p. 18). This reveals a determinate conceptualiz-
ation of social movements which is biased toward somehow sympathetic
movements, and which hardly allows serious consideration and theorization
of ‘social movements of the right’ or ‘non-democratic features of civil
society’.

Citizenship
Similarly, the book contains plenty of references to ‘citizenship’ which in
many cases seem to take it as a promise to be fulfilled and to be comple-
mented with some more participatory features, particularly in some of the
contributions to Part 1. However, a further reframing of the debate over
citizenship, its dimensions and meanings in a context of globalization is

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wanting. Citizenship needs historical-anthropological discussion and cul-

tural qualification, just as urgently as political advocacy. Missing in the book
is this discussion of the public-cultural visibility and legitimacy of citizen-
ship, and, probably even more importantly, an effort to understand former
cultural learning processes, often leading to a renouncing of citizenship as
a strategy because it robs the subaltern of precisely the few mechanisms at
their disposal to avoid rudeness and abuse by state officials (Salman, in
press). Another omission we already pointed to is a discussion of the
implications of identity politics or indigenous movements’ demands – the
subject of Part 2 – for the prevailing universalist notions of citizenship, a
highly contentious issue in various Latin American countries.

Concluding remarks

The volume, finally, is not as balanced, nor does it pay equal attention to
major currents in the theoretical debate, as it suggests. Its emphasis on the
culture/politics interpenetration is not only not always convincing or as
innovative as presaged, it also precludes a more systematic discussion of the
contributions of, for example, the resource mobilization/political process
approach. Although that tradition’s vocabulary might not seem the most
appropriate when imagining the link between culture and politics, its more
recent theoretical contributions ( Johnston and Klandermans, 1995;
McAdam et al., 1996) not only explicitly include ‘cultural resources’ and
‘cultural framing’ as a component of their models of analysis, but also have
something to say about political opportunity structures, micro mobilization
contexts and mobilizing structures. Dismissing this tradition altogether
meant, in the case of this volume, that the down-to-earth processes of
organization, movement building and formation were left out altogether in
the efforts to ‘culturalize’ the political and material topics many movements
are built around.
Not a few of the contributions reflect the difficulty of effectively relat-
ing to the given central theme, resulting in somewhat awkward insertions
of the term ‘culture’ into otherwise lucid analyses of contemporary social
movements in Latin America. The common question, hence, was not as pas-
sionately shared by all contributors. At the same time, some of the theor-
etical elaborations seem to restate concerns about the relation between
state and society or between politics and social movements in ever more
opaque terms, meant to convey a sense of ‘deep theorization’. While rightly
drawing attention to – or, worse, even exacerbating – ambiguity, hetero-
geneity, multiplicity, plurality, borderlands and the precariousness of exist-
ing arrangements and concepts, the theoretical contributions hardly take
us beyond a sense of vertigo (Slater, p. 386) when facing the task of rethink-
ing, re-visioning, and re-imagining our increasingly precarious conceptual

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apparatus. We are not sure, however, that explorations of twilight zones and
borderlands take us beyond a mere recording of hybridity and ambiguities.
One last critical remark is related to the suggestion, implicit in the
book, that it takes up and carries forward basically every item of import-
ance in the social movement debates, and makes a qualitative leap in insert-
ing the culture-concept as deployed in cultural studies. This does injustice
to, for instance, important recent contributions such as Joe Foweraker’s
Theorizing Social Movements (1995), and old contributions such as Barring-
ton Moore’s Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt (1978).
The book should, undoubtedly, be read by all those who still study
social movements in Latin America, and even more urgently by those who
have ceased to do so in the light of the ‘disappointing’ results. This book
should be on the shelf of everyone working on the subject – but there is no
need to do away with the ones you already had stacked there.

Notes
1 Social movements thus are regarded as challenging both neoliberalism and its
minimalist conceptions of the state and democracy and the dominant political
culture which historically has combined in contradictory ways characteristics of
European and North American political cultures (rationalism, universalism
and individualism) with other principles aimed at ensuring social and political
exclusion and even the control of what counts as political in extremely
inequitable and hierarchical societies (p. 9).
2 For an extensive discussion of the new pluricultural constitutionalism in Latin
America and its implementation in Bolivia and Colombia, see Van Cott (2000).
On indigenous peoples and reform of the Latin American state, see Assies et
al. (2000).
3 Kay Warren goes some way in explicating this aspect.
4 Castells (1997) attempts to take such ‘movements of the right’ into account.

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 Willem Assies works at the Colegio de Michoacán, Centro de Estudios Rurales, in

Zamora, Mexico. Address: El Colegio de Michoacán, Centro de Estudios Rurales,
Martinez de Navarrete 505, Fracc. Las Fuentes, Zamora, Michoacán 59690, Mexico.
[email: assies@colmich.edu.mx]
 Ton Salman works at the Programa de Investigación Estratégica de Bolivia (PIEB),
based in La Paz. Address: Casilla 1395, Correo Central, La Paz, Bolivia. [email:
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