Dialectical Anthropology

The practices of gang members, often depicted as responses to degrading local and structural conditions, have not been sufficiently appreciated as expressions of agency. The concept of edgework, which explains the modern compulsion to manage dangerous circumstances through finely honed skills, provides a means to recognize both the alienating circumstances out of which gang-banging arises, as well as the agency involved in the thrills members pursue. This article examines the alienation experienced by gang members in school and on the streets, which gives rise to the compulsion, for some, to skillfully manage the risks involved in molding a hard, masculine identity.

This study questions the multicultural policy in Mexico. We confront a case study on the intercultural university as an instrument devised with a dual purpose: to give young indigenous people access to higher education and to boost development in indigenous regions. Based on fieldwork in the Sierra of Zongolica in central Veracruz, we found that the intercultural university is, above all, an establishment that spreads ideas on cultural difference and that is rising up as the “New Prince” among civil societies. Aware of the limitations of the multicultural project, we expose its contradictions. We therefore propose a critique of the predominant ideas that do not view social class as a substantial element for the education of indigenous professionals.

This article seeks to document the vernacular perceptions of ‘globalization’ in rural Bengal (India) and, in that connection, seeks to rethink some long-held western notions concerning commodity, consumption, representation, the nature of sociality and the politics of democratic empowerment in the third-world. In the subaltern imaginary, images seem to play a crucial role conductive to empowerment. Also, far from resisting globalization and consumption, the rural poor seems to have assimilated these into their vernacular cosmology.

The principle of self-determination is one of the basic principles of international law but as a right, it is only granted to peoples, defined as whole populations of internationally recognized territories. Thus, the claims to self-determination voiced by national minorities are not seen as legitimate by international legal standards. This article examines the underlying assumptions of the principle of self-determination and by combining legal and moral arguments, tries to show that withholding this right from national minorities is unjustified. If one of the reasons why minorities are not granted the right is that they are entitled to collective rights, one would have to maintain that peoples have the relevant characteristics for the possessing group rights while minorities do not, and this view cannot be sustained. The right to self-determination should be understood as abroad notion and the restrictive view according to which the right only applies to colonial peoples and its implementation amounts to independent statehood, should be rejected. Furthermore, it should be noted that although the internal dimension of self-determination can ground a right to freedom from external interference, this freedom is a matter of degree; therefore, minorities can exercise the right to self-determination without this leading to secession or break-up of the state.

Since the late 1980s, indigenous Mixtecos of the Montaña region, in the southern state of Guerrero, Mexico, have become new members of the Mexican migrant working class in New York City (NYC). This article examines the contemporary history of proletarianization via migration of the Mixtecos of the Montaña. It shows to what extent the region became a supplier of migrant labor, and how its inhabitants transitioned from peasants and semi-proletarians of Mexico’s northwest agribusinesses to transnational migrant proletarians, as a result of major regional transformations related to state violence and drug cartel penetration. Indigenous Mixtecos have endured social inequality, racism, and state violence from post-revolutionary to contemporary neoliberal governments in Guerrero. Before their migration to NYC, they have gone through different rounds of proletarianization which differ from the Mexican mestizo migrant flow. The article aims to contribute to unravel such particularities, which have been subsumed as part of a homogeneous pattern in the history of Mexican migration and proletarianization in NYC. Based on ethnographic research conducted for my doctoral dissertation (2014) and using oral history, the article traces, through the life story of a Mixteco migrant worker, the different rounds of dispossession in the history of proletarianization of Mixteco indigenous migrants from the Montaña.