Traditional Amazonian medicine, and in particular the psychoactive substance ayahuasca, has gener... more Traditional Amazonian medicine, and in particular the psychoactive substance ayahuasca, has generated significant research interest along with the recent revival of psychedelic medicine. Previously we published within-treatment quantitative results from a residential addiction treatment centre that predominately employs Peruvian traditional Amazonian medicine, and here we follow up that work with a qualitative study of within-treatment patient experiences. Open-ended interviews with 9 inpatients were conducted from 2014–2015, and later analysed using thematic analysis. Our findings support the possibility of therapeutic effects from Amazonian medicine, but also highlight the complexity of Amazonian medical practices, suggesting that the richness of such traditions should not be reduced to the use of ayahuasca only.
Traditional Amazonian medicine, and in particular the psychoactive substance ayahuasca, has gener... more Traditional Amazonian medicine, and in particular the psychoactive substance ayahuasca, has generated significant research interest along with the recent revival of psychedelic medicine. Previously we published within-treatment quantitative results from a residential addiction treatment centre that predominately employs Peruvian traditional Amazonian medicine, and here we follow up that work with a qualitative study of within-treatment patient experiences. Open-ended interviews with 9 inpatients were conducted from 2014–2015, and later analysed using thematic analysis. Our findings support the possibility of therapeutic effects from Amazonian medicine, but also highlight the complexity of Amazonian medical practices, suggesting that the richness of such traditions should not be reduced to the use of ayahuasca only.
Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research, 2021
ABSTRACT The ambiguous relations and subjectivities associated with the banality of evil are peri... more ABSTRACT The ambiguous relations and subjectivities associated with the banality of evil are peripheral to a dominant human rights discourse oriented around the binary logics of perpetrators and victims and dictatorship and democracy. The absence of non-binary subjectivities reflects a conceptual gap relating to questions of shared responsibility posed by Hannah Arendt more than half a century ago. Despite its ongoing relevance for reflecting on the production of systematic suffering, the banality of evil remains an incomplete theoretical project. Here, I bring recent elaborations on Arendt’s notion of the banality of evil, particularly Michael Rothberg’s Implicated Subjects, to bear on Argentine memory politics. I highlight the potential for the notion of the implicated subject to expand Argentine memory studies beyond the perpetrator-victim binary of the Nunca Más human rights discourse. Conceptual art and artistic approaches to memory may provide fruitful avenues for future exploration of implicated subjectivities and horizons of responsibility.
Memorials to state violence can be read as cultural ledgers of what constitutes legitimate citize... more Memorials to state violence can be read as cultural ledgers of what constitutes legitimate citizenship practice and acceptable citizen–state relations. This chapter explores the significance of Argentinian and Australian memorials for understanding how past political action shapes a horizon of political possibility. First, it examines how ANZAC memorials celebrate empire, obedience and the status quo. ANZAC exists in a field of other memorials and cultural texts in Australia that negate politics and possibility for emancipation. Next, it discusses several Argentinian memorials that reflect the diversity of Argentina’s politics of memory. While questions of popular complicity in the state violence of the 1970s have yet to be memorialized, Argentine memorials nonetheless recognize the legitimacy of dissent as a basis of democratic citizenship. Drawing out the significance of the comparison by discussing memorials in relation to theories of citizen agency, this chapter problematizes the northwest-centric view of democracy as end, and reveals the importance of remembering challenges to power as a basis for ongoing democratization. Based on a comparison of memorials in relation to theories of democratic citizenship, the chapter contends that Australia’s political subjectivity is amenable to dedemocratization while Argentina’s reflects the possibility of open-ended democratization.
Ayahuasca, a psychoactive plant decoction, has spread from indigenous communities in South Americ... more Ayahuasca, a psychoactive plant decoction, has spread from indigenous communities in South America to urban areas in the Americas, Europe, and Australia where it is used in neoshamanic rituals. This paper draws on ethnography of Australian ayahuasca ceremonies to examine the ways that individualism shapes the structure of ayahuasca rituals, the interpretation of visionary experiences, and notions of spiritual development. I show how the metaphors that Australian drinkers involved in this study use to understand their ayahuasca experiences and spiritual development reflect a form of immunitary individualism, which is premised on the negation of difference and relationality. Secular disenchantment and a culture of narcissism may drive people to seek ayahuasca, but transcendence is interpreted in terms of an expansive, non-relational self. In this sense, neoshamanic ayahuasca culture may be an escape from and reproduction of the culture of narcissism associated with the malaise of mode...
International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 2020
In a global context of narrowing civil liberties and intensifying state repression, it is critica... more In a global context of narrowing civil liberties and intensifying state repression, it is critical to have adequately nuanced theories to account for the conditions of the emergence of democratic subjectivities. Guillermo O’Donnell’s theory of citizen agency, in which citizens are rights-bearing moral agents and the ‘vectors of democratization’, bridges democratic and citizenship theory, normative and empirical approaches. In O’Donnell’s rendering, the significance of rights lies in their capacity to legitimise rights claiming and other performances of citizenship. Australia is unique among democracies insofar as it does not recognise the rights of the citizens constitutionally or in a bill of rights. I use O’Donnell’s Democracy, Agency, and the State as a focus for reflecting on the meanings and symbolism of Australian citizenship, and the symbolic significance of not grounding citizenship in rights. My discussion combines ethnographic analysis of citizenship ceremonies with critical discussion of recent laws. I argue that the absenting of rights in constitutional and ceremonial evocations of citizenship has created a vague and contradictory figure of the citizen that straddles authoritarian and democratic values and symbols. This empty and contradictory mythology unhinges citizenship from democracy in Australian political culture, leaving it susceptible to authoritarian creep. Nonetheless, democracy’s symbolic openness offers hope for the emergence of new democratic subjectivities, even amidst conditions of narrowing civic possibility. O’Donnell’s study of citizen agency hones attention to the importance of the cultural conditions amenable to democratic subjectivity and warrants further comparative exploration.
Amidst a global turn towards authoritarianism and populism, there are few contemporary examples o... more Amidst a global turn towards authoritarianism and populism, there are few contemporary examples of state-led democratization. This article discusses how Uruguay’s Frente Amplio (FA) party has drawn on a unique national democratic cultural heritage to encourage a coupling of participatory and representative institutions in “a politics of closeness.” The FA has reinvigorated Batllismo, a discourse associated with social justice, civic republicanism, and the rise of Uruguayan social democracy in the early twentieth century. At the same time, the FA’s emphasis on egalitarian participation is inspired by the thought of Uruguay’s independence hero José Artigas. I argue that the cross-weave of party and movement, and of democratic citizenship and national heritage, encourages the emergence of new figures of the citizen and new permutations for connecting citizens with representative institutions. The FA’s “politics of closeness” is an example of how state-driven democratization remains pos...
Aims: The therapeutic use of psychedelics is regaining scientific momentum, but similarly psychoa... more Aims: The therapeutic use of psychedelics is regaining scientific momentum, but similarly psychoactive ethnobotanical substances have a long history of medical (and other) uses in indigenous contexts. Here we aimed to evaluate patient outcomes in a residential addiction treatment center that employs a novel combination of Western and traditional Amazonian methods. Methods: The study was observational, with repeated measures applied throughout treatment. All tests were administered in the center, which is located in Tarapoto, Peru. Data were collected between 2014 and 2015, and the study sample consisted of 36 male inpatients who were motivated to seek treatment and who entered into treatment voluntarily. Around 58% of the sample was from South America, 28% from Europe, and the remaining 14% from North America. We primarily employed repeated measures on a psychological test battery administered throughout treatment, measuring perceived stress, craving frequency, mental illness sympto...
... It is argued that Piaroa shamanic practices involve conditioning the mind to achieve optimal ... more ... It is argued that Piaroa shamanic practices involve conditioning the mind to achieve optimal perceptive capacities that, in association with sensitive biopsychosocial study, facilitate accurate prediction and successful psychosocial prescription. A cultural neurophenomenological ...
[Extract] Fifty years after the crushing of Nazism, the same socio-economic trends that once made... more [Extract] Fifty years after the crushing of Nazism, the same socio-economic trends that once made fascism palatable to Western Europeans are again simmering under the surface of liberal democratic societies. Understanding the nature or essence of fascism is as pertinent now as ever. As neo-liberal solutions to state debt problems only exacerbate socio-economic contradictions, fewer individualist, materialistic dreams are met and the temptation to find solidarity in a community becomes stronger. The isolating tendencies of liberal societies leave very few outlets for channeling communitarian dynamism beyond, that is, politically mobilizable fascist myths of community rebirth. The surface manifestations of fascist movements are socio-historically specific. Different characteristics integral to each nation's history and socio-politico-cultural environment allow for different manifestations of fascism. This does not, however, preclude the existence of a core set of fascist elements: of a generic fascism. The psycho-social impact of economic developments which allowed for fascist myths of communitarian rebirth to emerge are not geo-historically specific. There is an integral relationship between fascism's mythic core (which is susceptible to a number of permutations at the surface level) and the socio-economic environment which allowed for fascism's development.
[Extract] Interview conducted in May 2011 with Jose Diaz-LuIs, shaman Piaroa 57 years in the regi... more [Extract] Interview conducted in May 2011 with Jose Diaz-LuIs, shaman Piaroa 57 years in the region of Parguaza (Venezuela). In shamanism Piaroa the dada tree (species Malouetia) plays a role central ritual like the other two substances that are hallucinogemes tuhuipa (Banisteriopsis caapi) and yopo (Anadenanthera peregrina). Ingested in the form of a prepared drink from its bark, dada allows access the invisible world, the eyes of insiders, it gives access to the conveyed by myths and ritual songs and pictures, and as such, it proves to be the source of all knowledge.
This article gives an overview of key components of the Piaroa shamanic training and initiation c... more This article gives an overview of key components of the Piaroa shamanic training and initiation complex. While anthropologists have given accounts of how Piaroa people describe the initiatory rites undertaken by shamans, the ongoing training involved in preparing for initiation has received comparatively little attention. Piaroa shamanic training is ongoing, and punctuated by three painful initiatory ordeals. Piaroa shamans specialise in the use of plant hallucinogens to attain visions interpreted according to a dynamic matrix of psycho-social forces and mytho-historical templates. Direct experience of the parameters and technologies of consciousness employed by Piaroa shamans can lead to ethnographic locutions of the functional, experiential and ideological dynamics of Piaroa shamanism. While cultural loading conditions what one sees during visions, the neurobiological bases of shamanic practices are cross-culturally accessible, and allow for participatory understanding of an inner...
Traditional Amazonian medicine, and in particular the psychoactive substance ayahuasca, has gener... more Traditional Amazonian medicine, and in particular the psychoactive substance ayahuasca, has generated significant research interest along with the recent revival of psychedelic medicine. Previously we published within-treatment quantitative results from a residential addiction treatment centre that predominately employs Peruvian traditional Amazonian medicine, and here we follow up that work with a qualitative study of within-treatment patient experiences. Open-ended interviews with 9 inpatients were conducted from 2014–2015, and later analysed using thematic analysis. Our findings support the possibility of therapeutic effects from Amazonian medicine, but also highlight the complexity of Amazonian medical practices, suggesting that the richness of such traditions should not be reduced to the use of ayahuasca only.
Traditional Amazonian medicine, and in particular the psychoactive substance ayahuasca, has gener... more Traditional Amazonian medicine, and in particular the psychoactive substance ayahuasca, has generated significant research interest along with the recent revival of psychedelic medicine. Previously we published within-treatment quantitative results from a residential addiction treatment centre that predominately employs Peruvian traditional Amazonian medicine, and here we follow up that work with a qualitative study of within-treatment patient experiences. Open-ended interviews with 9 inpatients were conducted from 2014–2015, and later analysed using thematic analysis. Our findings support the possibility of therapeutic effects from Amazonian medicine, but also highlight the complexity of Amazonian medical practices, suggesting that the richness of such traditions should not be reduced to the use of ayahuasca only.
Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research, 2021
ABSTRACT The ambiguous relations and subjectivities associated with the banality of evil are peri... more ABSTRACT The ambiguous relations and subjectivities associated with the banality of evil are peripheral to a dominant human rights discourse oriented around the binary logics of perpetrators and victims and dictatorship and democracy. The absence of non-binary subjectivities reflects a conceptual gap relating to questions of shared responsibility posed by Hannah Arendt more than half a century ago. Despite its ongoing relevance for reflecting on the production of systematic suffering, the banality of evil remains an incomplete theoretical project. Here, I bring recent elaborations on Arendt’s notion of the banality of evil, particularly Michael Rothberg’s Implicated Subjects, to bear on Argentine memory politics. I highlight the potential for the notion of the implicated subject to expand Argentine memory studies beyond the perpetrator-victim binary of the Nunca Más human rights discourse. Conceptual art and artistic approaches to memory may provide fruitful avenues for future exploration of implicated subjectivities and horizons of responsibility.
Memorials to state violence can be read as cultural ledgers of what constitutes legitimate citize... more Memorials to state violence can be read as cultural ledgers of what constitutes legitimate citizenship practice and acceptable citizen–state relations. This chapter explores the significance of Argentinian and Australian memorials for understanding how past political action shapes a horizon of political possibility. First, it examines how ANZAC memorials celebrate empire, obedience and the status quo. ANZAC exists in a field of other memorials and cultural texts in Australia that negate politics and possibility for emancipation. Next, it discusses several Argentinian memorials that reflect the diversity of Argentina’s politics of memory. While questions of popular complicity in the state violence of the 1970s have yet to be memorialized, Argentine memorials nonetheless recognize the legitimacy of dissent as a basis of democratic citizenship. Drawing out the significance of the comparison by discussing memorials in relation to theories of citizen agency, this chapter problematizes the northwest-centric view of democracy as end, and reveals the importance of remembering challenges to power as a basis for ongoing democratization. Based on a comparison of memorials in relation to theories of democratic citizenship, the chapter contends that Australia’s political subjectivity is amenable to dedemocratization while Argentina’s reflects the possibility of open-ended democratization.
Ayahuasca, a psychoactive plant decoction, has spread from indigenous communities in South Americ... more Ayahuasca, a psychoactive plant decoction, has spread from indigenous communities in South America to urban areas in the Americas, Europe, and Australia where it is used in neoshamanic rituals. This paper draws on ethnography of Australian ayahuasca ceremonies to examine the ways that individualism shapes the structure of ayahuasca rituals, the interpretation of visionary experiences, and notions of spiritual development. I show how the metaphors that Australian drinkers involved in this study use to understand their ayahuasca experiences and spiritual development reflect a form of immunitary individualism, which is premised on the negation of difference and relationality. Secular disenchantment and a culture of narcissism may drive people to seek ayahuasca, but transcendence is interpreted in terms of an expansive, non-relational self. In this sense, neoshamanic ayahuasca culture may be an escape from and reproduction of the culture of narcissism associated with the malaise of mode...
International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 2020
In a global context of narrowing civil liberties and intensifying state repression, it is critica... more In a global context of narrowing civil liberties and intensifying state repression, it is critical to have adequately nuanced theories to account for the conditions of the emergence of democratic subjectivities. Guillermo O’Donnell’s theory of citizen agency, in which citizens are rights-bearing moral agents and the ‘vectors of democratization’, bridges democratic and citizenship theory, normative and empirical approaches. In O’Donnell’s rendering, the significance of rights lies in their capacity to legitimise rights claiming and other performances of citizenship. Australia is unique among democracies insofar as it does not recognise the rights of the citizens constitutionally or in a bill of rights. I use O’Donnell’s Democracy, Agency, and the State as a focus for reflecting on the meanings and symbolism of Australian citizenship, and the symbolic significance of not grounding citizenship in rights. My discussion combines ethnographic analysis of citizenship ceremonies with critical discussion of recent laws. I argue that the absenting of rights in constitutional and ceremonial evocations of citizenship has created a vague and contradictory figure of the citizen that straddles authoritarian and democratic values and symbols. This empty and contradictory mythology unhinges citizenship from democracy in Australian political culture, leaving it susceptible to authoritarian creep. Nonetheless, democracy’s symbolic openness offers hope for the emergence of new democratic subjectivities, even amidst conditions of narrowing civic possibility. O’Donnell’s study of citizen agency hones attention to the importance of the cultural conditions amenable to democratic subjectivity and warrants further comparative exploration.
Amidst a global turn towards authoritarianism and populism, there are few contemporary examples o... more Amidst a global turn towards authoritarianism and populism, there are few contemporary examples of state-led democratization. This article discusses how Uruguay’s Frente Amplio (FA) party has drawn on a unique national democratic cultural heritage to encourage a coupling of participatory and representative institutions in “a politics of closeness.” The FA has reinvigorated Batllismo, a discourse associated with social justice, civic republicanism, and the rise of Uruguayan social democracy in the early twentieth century. At the same time, the FA’s emphasis on egalitarian participation is inspired by the thought of Uruguay’s independence hero José Artigas. I argue that the cross-weave of party and movement, and of democratic citizenship and national heritage, encourages the emergence of new figures of the citizen and new permutations for connecting citizens with representative institutions. The FA’s “politics of closeness” is an example of how state-driven democratization remains pos...
Aims: The therapeutic use of psychedelics is regaining scientific momentum, but similarly psychoa... more Aims: The therapeutic use of psychedelics is regaining scientific momentum, but similarly psychoactive ethnobotanical substances have a long history of medical (and other) uses in indigenous contexts. Here we aimed to evaluate patient outcomes in a residential addiction treatment center that employs a novel combination of Western and traditional Amazonian methods. Methods: The study was observational, with repeated measures applied throughout treatment. All tests were administered in the center, which is located in Tarapoto, Peru. Data were collected between 2014 and 2015, and the study sample consisted of 36 male inpatients who were motivated to seek treatment and who entered into treatment voluntarily. Around 58% of the sample was from South America, 28% from Europe, and the remaining 14% from North America. We primarily employed repeated measures on a psychological test battery administered throughout treatment, measuring perceived stress, craving frequency, mental illness sympto...
... It is argued that Piaroa shamanic practices involve conditioning the mind to achieve optimal ... more ... It is argued that Piaroa shamanic practices involve conditioning the mind to achieve optimal perceptive capacities that, in association with sensitive biopsychosocial study, facilitate accurate prediction and successful psychosocial prescription. A cultural neurophenomenological ...
[Extract] Fifty years after the crushing of Nazism, the same socio-economic trends that once made... more [Extract] Fifty years after the crushing of Nazism, the same socio-economic trends that once made fascism palatable to Western Europeans are again simmering under the surface of liberal democratic societies. Understanding the nature or essence of fascism is as pertinent now as ever. As neo-liberal solutions to state debt problems only exacerbate socio-economic contradictions, fewer individualist, materialistic dreams are met and the temptation to find solidarity in a community becomes stronger. The isolating tendencies of liberal societies leave very few outlets for channeling communitarian dynamism beyond, that is, politically mobilizable fascist myths of community rebirth. The surface manifestations of fascist movements are socio-historically specific. Different characteristics integral to each nation's history and socio-politico-cultural environment allow for different manifestations of fascism. This does not, however, preclude the existence of a core set of fascist elements: of a generic fascism. The psycho-social impact of economic developments which allowed for fascist myths of communitarian rebirth to emerge are not geo-historically specific. There is an integral relationship between fascism's mythic core (which is susceptible to a number of permutations at the surface level) and the socio-economic environment which allowed for fascism's development.
[Extract] Interview conducted in May 2011 with Jose Diaz-LuIs, shaman Piaroa 57 years in the regi... more [Extract] Interview conducted in May 2011 with Jose Diaz-LuIs, shaman Piaroa 57 years in the region of Parguaza (Venezuela). In shamanism Piaroa the dada tree (species Malouetia) plays a role central ritual like the other two substances that are hallucinogemes tuhuipa (Banisteriopsis caapi) and yopo (Anadenanthera peregrina). Ingested in the form of a prepared drink from its bark, dada allows access the invisible world, the eyes of insiders, it gives access to the conveyed by myths and ritual songs and pictures, and as such, it proves to be the source of all knowledge.
This article gives an overview of key components of the Piaroa shamanic training and initiation c... more This article gives an overview of key components of the Piaroa shamanic training and initiation complex. While anthropologists have given accounts of how Piaroa people describe the initiatory rites undertaken by shamans, the ongoing training involved in preparing for initiation has received comparatively little attention. Piaroa shamanic training is ongoing, and punctuated by three painful initiatory ordeals. Piaroa shamans specialise in the use of plant hallucinogens to attain visions interpreted according to a dynamic matrix of psycho-social forces and mytho-historical templates. Direct experience of the parameters and technologies of consciousness employed by Piaroa shamans can lead to ethnographic locutions of the functional, experiential and ideological dynamics of Piaroa shamanism. While cultural loading conditions what one sees during visions, the neurobiological bases of shamanic practices are cross-culturally accessible, and allow for participatory understanding of an inner...
Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research, 2021
No one owns the past, but this has never stopped people from trying to shape or foreclose our rel... more No one owns the past, but this has never stopped people from trying to shape or foreclose our relationships with it. The stakes in forging certain relations with the past are always consequential whether or not they appear to be, and despite a lack of consensus surrounding the ends of remembering and forgetting. The terms of the debate about memory evolve as the past becomes institutionalized, branded, cultivated by social movements, courted by elites or the downtrodden, integrated into national(ist) mythologies or displaced by corporate aesthetics that disappear time and the terms of the political altogether. For Manuel Cruz, history and memory can never be understood outside of the political conditions that shape them. By this he means that we are under constant and shifting pressure to forget or remember in very specific ways, which are never reducible to remembering or forgetting. 1 Cruz advocates "'a more shaded perspective'" that acknowledges there are pathological ways of remembering and healthy forms of forgetting". 2 Cruz's "more shaded perspective" complements P.J. Brendese's argument in favour of an agonistic approach to memory. Extending approaches to democracy that emphasise the imperative of pluralism, Brendese argues that "democratization… requires an agonistic engagement with multiple, often deeply conflicting, relationships to memory and time." 3 An agonistic approach to memory replaces the false dichotomy of forgetting or remembering, and the naïve assumption that memory is useful in order to not repeat the horrors of the past with an open-ended dialectic of ambiguity and multiplicity. After examining a range of (mis)uses of history, including that it can tell us something about the present or how not to repeat the past, Cruz reflects on the possibility that it could help us to live well.
The rise of racist nationalism, the demise of liberal democracy and citizen rights, the expulsion... more The rise of racist nationalism, the demise of liberal democracy and citizen rights, the expulsion of growing numbers of people from the ranks of legitimate life, the cultural and technological legitimation of inequality, and the gloomy subjectivity of ecologically assured destruction hark back to the dark times that gave rise to the Frankfurt School of critical theory, and to Arendt's appeal to critical thought as our primary defense against the banality of evil. In the context of the entrepreneurial university, meanwhile, thinking (and reading) is increasingly an externality. This seminar aims to foster citizenship through critical thought and discussion of the contemporary moment, and relations among culture, politics and technology. This year's topic addresses the question 'what ideas are good to think with in our current dark times'? Critical theory seeks to identify the contradictions, crisis tendencies and lines of actual or potential conflict in contemporary society, and to demarcate and politicize possibilities for more progressive, socially just, emancipatory and sustainable forms of life. All staff and students welcome. Abstract Following a line of exploration running from exchanges with Guattari (see 'Guattari and anthropology' in Guattari's effect: (https://selforganizedseminar.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/guattari-effect_alliez.pdf), it is proposed to test the concept of crystallization as used by him and Deleuze, that is a threshold that leaks back from actual to the virtual, a ritournelle (refrain) that turns around issues of life and death. The hypothesis is that crystal-becoming offers not only one key to grasp something of the transformation of multiplicities which are " virtualized " in ritual (such as Totemic becomings in Australia or Orixa embodiments in Brazil), but also a way to address the debate about affirmation of existential territories in living places, moving bodies and various practices. Ethnography and cosmopolitics will be " filtered " through the Guattarian ecosophical proposal of an aesthetic paradigm.
Amidst a global turn towards authoritarianism and populism, there are few contemporary examples o... more Amidst a global turn towards authoritarianism and populism, there are few contemporary examples of state-led democratisation. This paper discusses how Uruguay's Frente Amplio (FA) party has drawn on a unique national democratic cultural heritage to encourage a coupling of participatory and representative institutions in 'a politics of closeness'. The FA has reinvigorated Battlismo, a discourse associated with social justice, civic republicanism and the rise of Uruguayan social democracy in the early twentieth century. At the same time, the FA's emphasis on egalitarian participation is inspired by the thought of Uruguay's independence hero José Artigas. I argue that the cross-weave of party and movement, and of democratic citizenship and national heritage, encourages the emergence of new figures of the citizen and new permutations for connecting citizens with representative institutions. The FA's " politics of closeness " is an example of how state-driven democratisation remains possible in an age described by some as 'post-democratic'.
Australia has yet to articulate, narrate, enact, or mythologise the rights of its citizens becaus... more Australia has yet to articulate, narrate, enact, or mythologise the rights of its citizens because, since federation, rights claims do not reflect the spirit of Australian laws. This paper contrasts Arendt’s argument that the democratic spirit of U.S. law motivated participation in public life and periodic civil disobedience with an analysis of the Austrlaian constitution and recent legislation to argue that the Australian spirit of the law discourages participation in public life, dissent and the practice of rights. I review recent counter-terrorism, anti-protest, anti-association and secrecy legislation that collectively delegitimise dissent and civic engagement while diminishing citizens’ capacity to hold government accountable. I conclude by situating the Australian spirit of the law in relation to citizen driven theories of democracy that emphasise the symbolic significance of rights and rights claims. With neither rights, nor a spirit of the law that encourages the claiming of rights, Australia remains a democracy without citizens.
What is critical theory? What is culture? What sort of culture are we cultivating in Australia? H... more What is critical theory? What is culture? What sort of culture are we cultivating in Australia? How is insecurity reproduced and normalised? On the axis of bowing to and resisting power, and the thoughtlessness of and banality of culture.
Inadequate recognition of either rights or the struggles that lead to the recognition of rights h... more Inadequate recognition of either rights or the struggles that lead to the recognition of rights has reduced the figure of the citizen to a ghost in the Australian political machine. This paper uses Balibar’s dialectic of citizenship and Arendt’s study of civil disobedience to consider limitations to democratic citizenship in Australia. Balibar’s theory of democracy hinges on a dialectical approach to citizenship whereby rights and liberties must continually be won through struggle (Balibar 2014; 2015). Democracy either expands and is refounded through successful struggles for equality and liberty or recedes through their failure and acquiescence to institutional norms. Institutional and cultural change can engender either democratisation or dedemocratisation by legitimising or criminalising dissent and associational life. Beyond democratization or dedemocratization, however, Balibar proposes a third possibility that he refers to as ‘ademocracy’. Ademocracy results when the dialectic of insurrection and institution is arrested, and struggles for equality and liberty are policed out of politics. I argue that the dialectic of citizenship in Australia is now paused, and that our drift to ademocracy is reflected in the spirit of our laws.
Since the opening of Latin America’s first memory museum in Rosario, Argentina in 1998 to the ina... more Since the opening of Latin America’s first memory museum in Rosario, Argentina in 1998 to the inauguration of Chile’s Museum of Memory and Human Rights in 2010, and those in Peru, Mexico and Colombia, Latin America has witnessed a boom in memory museums. These have become sites of intense political contestation over the meanings of state violence, human rights, citizenship, and the political. Memory museums have also been at the forefront of efforts to balance the materiality of curated collections with the sociality of education and arts practices. The diversity of memory museums and of debates around the aesthetics and politics of memory in Latin America speak to a recognition of the importance of maintaining questions of rights, citizenship, and the political in the public sphere, and to the evolving place of art in the museum and the museum in society.
This panel asks how the politics and aesthetics of memory in Latin America engage with global debates on human rights, democracy and the museum. How are local struggles around political memory, citizenship, and human rights represented and enacted in public spaces including memory museums? What sorts of artistic practices and notions of time and citizenship find expression in memory museums? Papers that examine the role of artists in museums, community engaged curatorial practice, connections between social movements and museums and between Latin American memory museums and global artistic, museum and human rights practices are welcomed.
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Papers by Robin Rodd
This panel asks how the politics and aesthetics of memory in Latin America engage with global debates on human rights, democracy and the museum. How are local struggles around political memory, citizenship, and human rights represented and enacted in public spaces including memory museums? What sorts of artistic practices and notions of time and citizenship find expression in memory museums? Papers that examine the role of artists in museums, community engaged curatorial practice, connections between social movements and museums and between Latin American memory museums and global artistic, museum and human rights practices are welcomed.