Ernesto Cruz Kanter

• Mexico

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2004-2008: BA in International Relations 2012-2014: MSc in Social Anthropology

From Discourse to Violence: the Role of Meanings in the Production of Violence in the Indigenous Communities of the Southeast of Chiapas, Mexico.

Historically, the indigenous have been essentialized from western epistemology giving attributes that exalt the good human nature. I.e. they are autonomics, harmonious, inter-subjective… The research looks forward to demonstrating that besides these found good characters, there can also be found “attributes” that exalt the bad human nature reflected not in harmonious indigenous communities, but in conflictive social relations produced in what Laclau and Mouffe (1987) call a field of discursivity. The Objective of the research is to explain the occurrence of conflicts in indigenous communities from the discourse theory of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. The perspective represents a shift in the understanding of the indigenous communities, but especially in the occidental construction of the entity “indigenous” or indios as harmonious, autonomic or inter-subjective beings different from the “rest”, in the opposite sense of Hall (1996). The approach pretends to stay aside from the essentialism that has characterized the indigenous studies. It analyses three cases of conflicts occurred in indigenous communities in the southeast of Chiapas, Mexico. The main question being answered is: how communitarian conflicts in the southeast of Chiapas are discursively articulated? A specific question is: what is the role of language (spoken) and meaning in the production of physical violence in these communitarian conflicts? The perspective of the research is framed in the mentioned discourse theory, but especially in the constitution of antagonism and the role of meaning in the subject´s consciousness.

Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACYT)-Gobierno de Chiapas.

Dr. Eva Youkhana

Dr. Wolfram Laube