Society Against the State and Market? The Zapatistas' Praxis of Peasant Autonomy

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Almost 30 years on from their initial uprising, the autonomous Zapatistacommunities in Chiapas, Mexico remain a crucial, unique, and under-studiedsite for ethnographic investigation. Whilst much has been written on theirongoing political experiment in anticapitalist participatory democracy (Holloway& Peláez, 1998; Harvey, 1998; Holloway, 2002; Mentinis, 2006; Khasnabish,2010; Vergara-Camus, 2014; Gahman et al, 2022), fewer studies have beenexplicitly grounded in anthropological participant-observation (Nash, 2001; Vander Haar, 2001; Earle & Simonelli, 2005; Barmeyer, 2009; Khasnabish, 2008)and of this, less still from a perspective that is concerned with deepening thetheoretical premises of political anthropology and rooted in the potential ofethnographic praxis itself (Shah, 2017, 2021).Thus, the proposed research will seek to encounter and understand theZapatista communities in a theoretically productive manner, analysing theirresistance to dispossession - led by the Mexican state and (inter)nationalmarket forces - at the level of their praxis of peasant autonomy. Living withZapatista communities and conducting long-term immersive fieldwork, I willseek to shed light on the socially reproductive internal workings of theautonomous communities in Chiapas, which, beneath the iconoclastic imagesof masked militants or colourful murals, form the foundation for their ongoingstruggle. Alongside exploring the role of conviction, doubt, hope, suspicion(Pelkmans, 2013, 2017, 2018), and secrecy in the constitution of Zapatistasubjectivity, I will refract this ethnography through an interdisciplinary dialogueconcerning Marxian and anarchist debates within and between politicalanthropology and political philosophy, in order to pursue a meta-disciplinarianfocus on both the potential of ethnographic praxis (Shah, 2017) and thepossibility of an 'anthropological theory of praxis' (Shah, 2021).Yet beyond this, in a contemporary world characterised by economic crisis,environmental catastrophe and escalating state violence, anthropologists - sohistorically defined by their concern with alterity - are in a unique position toattend to political experiments such as the Zapatistas' that seek to constructalternatives to such processes