[Xmca-l] Re: USA & Chile social revolts

[Greg Thompson]

David P,

Glad to hear about your research (I have been wanting to do an ethnography
of police officers for a while now but haven’t been able to fit it in).

It will be important to bring the full power of a cultural historical
approach to get beyond the very thin analyses I see all around me (by very
well intentioned people, I might add) that reduce the issue to a simple
concern with biases in the heads of individuals or, worse still, just a few
bad apples in the police force.

One needs to study the whole of life as found in history and baked into
culture, including our politico-economic systems and institutions. That’s a
tough row to hoe but anything short of that will land us right back in the
land of race riots in another 30 years or so (and maybe if we recognized
these as “protests” or “revolts” (cf. Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s work on the
broad failure of humanity to recognize the REVOLUTION happening on the
island of Haiti in 1791 because people couldn’t imagine that “slaves” could
mount a revolution so it was simply called a “slave rebellion”)).

Anyway, I’m very much looking forward to seeing what comes of your work!

Very best,
Greg


On Sun, May 31, 2020 at 1:33 AM David Preiss <preiss.xmca@gmail.com> wrote:

> Dear colleagues and friends of XMCA living int he USA,
>
> The images from the unrest in the USA are strikingly similar to those we
> experienced during our own "estallido social" since last October. Our
> social revolt was literally quarantined with the arrival of COVID19, and
> yours started during it. These are very complex days everywhere without any
> doubt.
>
> The main issue we experienced here (previous to COVID19) was how to
> understand institutional and social violence and how to protect our
> democracy. Although the unrest in the USA was triggered by a new event of
> police brutality, the same underlying issues seem to foster the social
> protest.
>
> There are many themes that I see there that are strikingly similar to our
> situation, including the widespread crisis of legitimacy of the police
> forces, which relate to issues of race, social and gender
> inequality. Democracy is not working for a large majority of the
> population, and is neglecting many vulnerable communities while the rich
> get unethically richer. That a private company sent a rocket to the
> international space station the same day that 25 cities in the USA were
> under curfew summarizes all. In Chile, however, the social unrest
> was channeled in a wider social movement for social reform and ended up in
> an agreement to change our constitution, which was about to be voted but
> COVID19 happened.
>
> I have started to work on a project on human rights and the police (not a
> topic that was in my mainstream area of research but to whom I arrived as a
> part of a social concern) and will certainly be very attentive to your
> thoughts on the matter as events unfold. The images of police brutality
> that are in social media are very similar to those we experienced here as
> well as those of opportunistic civil violence by infiltrators, looting and
> so on. I really hope the social protest there achieves some substantive
> change and it is not just marginalized or reduced to mere chaos.
>
> But first of all, besides entering an academic discussion, I just wanted
> to share with you all my full solidarity. These are very painful moments.
> We went through them. I understand how painful they are. I share your pain
> and grief.
>
>
> David
>
>
> --
Gregory A. Thompson, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Anthropology
880 Spencer W. Kimball Tower
Brigham Young University
Provo, UT 84602
WEBSITE: https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://anthropology.byu.edu/greg-thompson__;!!Mih3wA!QxmUxAYvk6CQVBjEjsW4Qt76ZE3soFXVZqkkNivFE4kQFkKzYkEBxKZ0gkzfFS5nbIg8lw$ 
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