For the last century rural subjects in Latin America, have constantly reconfigured their ways of life, along with their household, kinship and community arrangements. These transformations have forced us to rethink the categories and analysis tools in our research, as well as to reassess the meaning of what rurality means today. This reassessment implies the analysis of the construction and articulation of new and old relationships, namely gender, age, class, identity, environmental and multispecies; of the transformation and formation of particular subjectivities; and, of the historical, material and ideological conditions that have made them possible.
This panel aims to engage in the reflection and analysis of anthropological categories and conceptual tools emanated from ethnographic data, to understand and explain these transformations and the multiplicity of rural forms. In order to do this, we suggest four interrelated lines of inquiry:
- The local expression of the narratives and discourses of "entrepreneurship" as well as "empowerment" and self-employment as mechanisms of obscuring class inequalities, poverty and marginalization.
- The politics of care inside households, between humans and non-humans (conservation, "care of nature", etc.) or as a means of commodification.
- Expressions of the transformation of human and non-human entanglements
- Ways in which violence and "illegal" or "extra-legal" activities (cannabis or poppy farming, production and distribution of counterfeit goods, clandestine logging, huachicoleo, among others) reconfigure and are reconfigured by household, community and / or regional dynamics.
Drawing from a social anthropology toolset and ethnographic data, we invite panelists to engage with one or more of these lines of inquiry in order to account for and explain the multiplicity of individual and/or collective strategies deployed by rural subjects, as well as the social reconfigurations produced by this processes that intertwine gender, age, class, identity and the socioenvironment
