The Fire & the Word: more on militant ethnography

"El fuego y la palabra": the two weapons of Chiapas' Zapatista struggling communities.

As in the two previous posts on anthropological theory [post1post2], we keep linking texts that could help us to understand the contradictions of an ethnography “within” social activism, i.e. produced inside of a direct engagement with revolutionary political movements, rejecting neutrality and the so-called ethnographic distance, toward the development of an anthropology of action.

  • Jeffrey JURIS (2007) “Practicing militant ethnography with the Movement for Global Resistance (MRG) in Barcelona”, a Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigation, Collective Theorization, Shukaitis, S., Graeber, D., ed. pp. 164-176. Oakland, Calif.: AK Press. [PDF]
  • Colin BARKER y Laurence COX, in “What have the Romans ever done for us? Academic and activist forms of Movement Theorizing [LINK] reflections on contemporary difference between “academic” and “movement” intellectuals, sequel of the classical gramscian dichotomy between traditional and organic intellectuals.
  • David GRAEBER, “Los nuevos anarquistas”, New Left Review n.13, enero-febrero 2002 [PDF]. Renaissence of classical anarchism in post-zapatista nets of global resistance, towards the construction of a new revolutionary political culture. Thanks to the comrades of La Hoguera, social library in Santa Coloma de Gramanet (Barcelona).