Claudio Lomnitz

Modes of Citizenship in Mexico

O ne of the first cultural accounts of citizenship in Latin America was Roberto da Matta’s (1979) effort to understand the specificity of Brazilian national culture. Da Matta identified the coexistence of two broad discourses in Brazilian urban society, calling them the discourse of the home and the discourse of the street.1 He described “of the home” discourse as a hierarchical and familial register, where the subjects are “persons” in the Maussian sense—that is, they assume specific, differentiated, and complementary social roles. The discourse “of the street,” by contrast, is the discourse of liberal citizenship: Subjects are individuals who are meant to be equal to one another and equal before the law. The interesting twist in da Matta’s analysis regards the relationship between these two discourses, a relationship that he synthesizes with the Brazilian adage that says “for my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.”2 For da Matta, Brazilian society can be described as having “citizenship” as a degraded baseline, or zero degree, of relationship, a fact that is visible in the day-to-day management of social relations. Specifically, da Matta focuses on an urban ritual that he called the Voçe sabe com quem esta falando? (Do you know who you are talking to?), a phrase used to

Narrating the Neoliberal Moment: History, Journalism, Historicity

History, it has been said, is a sign of the modern, and subsistence “without history” or “on the margins of history” was long a metonymic sign of backwardness and a pretext and justification for colonial occupation.1 A somewhat less noted fact is that an excess of historical invocation — or a historical obsession — is a diagnostic sign of failed modernities, and especially of what Wolfgang Schivelbusch has called “the culture of defeat,” that is, the process of mourning and recovery that follows national trauma. To the extent that it is attributed to external forces, economic collapse such as that suffered in Mexico in 1982 and again in 1995, or in Argentina in 2002, can also be assimilated as national trauma and has spurred this kind of historical excess.2 In such contexts, the present all too frequently exposes the wounds of the past and thereby prompts the sort of historical stance that Walter Benjamin favored when he wrote: “The historical materialist approaches a historical object solely and alone where he encounters it as a monad. In this structure he cognizes the sign of a messianic zero-hour of events, or put differently, a revolutionary chance in the struggle for the suppressed past.”3 Indeed, the messianic historical approach

The Public Life of History

In September 2005, Bain Attwood and Dipesh Chakrabarty convened a group of historians at the Australian National University to discuss the productive effects of the contemporary politics of recognition on historical practice. The essays in this collection are a selection of the work that began at that meeting and that matured in a collective discussion eighteen months later at Columbia University.1 Central to the project was Dipesh Chakrabarty’s formulation of the concept of a “historical wound,” a notion that grows out of Charles Taylor’s discussion of the politics of recognition in multicultural societies.2 Within the perspective of this politics, wrote Taylor, “misrecognition shows not just a lack of due respect. It can inflict a grievous wound, saddling its victims with a crippling self-hatred.”3 The notion of the “historical wound” extends this idea to the sphere of public representation and debate by reflecting on the fact that the “wounds of misrecognition” invoke the past as the site of the original slight and as the site that calls for redress in the present. “Historical wounds” are thus a feature of a politics of recognition that is quite recent — a rhetoric that received considerable impetus from the processes of decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as from the civil rights struggles of the same period. Moreover, this politics of recognition has intensified noticeably

In Conversation with Marit Melhuus and Benedicte Bull About Life and Death in Mexico. House of Literature, September 26, 2013

In this conversation between Prof. Marit Melhuus and Prof. Benedicte Bull (University of Oslo), Columbia University professor Claudio Lomnitz reflects on his long-standing work on ‘life and death’ in his native Mexico. Lomnitz offers his views on the vexed relationship between history and anthropology, on his role as a well-known public intellectual in Mexico, and on Mexican intellectual traditions and Mexican nationalism.

Indigenous peoples boxed in by Brazil’s political crisis

Agribusiness has unprecedented leverage over highly unpopular Brazilian president Michel Temer, who is faced with several corruption charges and is struggling for political survival. In a little over one year, the agribusiness lobby and its allies have managed to erode thirty years of human rights and conservation laws. Indigenous peoples and their territorial rights are among the main targets of such policies, and there is no resolution to the situation in sight. With the insight of several scholars, the following forum assesses the consequences of losing the protection the Citizens’ Constitution of 1988 once afforded indigenous peoples in Brazil.