Analiese Richard

The Unsettled Sector

NGOs and the Cultivation of Democratic Citizenship in Rural Mexico

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Analiese Richard is Associate Professor of Anthropology and International Studies at University of the Pacific.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 240
• Erscheinungstermin: 4. Mai 2016
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 231mm x 155mm x 18mm
• Gewicht: 422g
• ISBN-13: 9780804797986
• ISBN-10: 0804797986
• Artikelnr.: 44382593

Autorenporträt

Analiese Richard is Associate Professor of Anthropology and International Studies at University of the Pacific.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
Introduction:
chapter abstract
Since NGOs organize social action at multiple scales and across multiple
contexts simultaneously, many times as intermediaries, the study of the NGO
form aids in understanding the intersections of political, economic, and
cultural transformation, and the emergence of new forms of citizenship.
While NGOs constitute a novel form of organization, the modes of engagement
they foster are ultimately articulated to much older philanthropic,
religious, and civic traditions rooted in the historical and cultural
terrains of specific regions. This chapter introduces the main theoretical
concepts, describes the primary field site for the study (the Tulancingo
Valley of Mexico during and after Mexico's "democratic transition") and
discusses the ethnographic methodology employed.
1Developing Rural Citizens: Old and New Liberalisms
chapter abstract
Mexico is considered part of a larger "Third Wave" of democratic
transitions beginning in the late twentieth century. The growth of a "third
sector" comprised of non-governmental organizations was promoted by both
Mexican intellectuals and international observers as a laboratory for
producing active democratic citizens. This chapter traces the historical
development of the citizenship question in post-Independence Mexico, with
particular attention to the ways in which rural denizens have been
conceptualized as dependent subjects incapable of full participation in
public life. It analyzes the ideal role of development NGOs in developing
the capacity of marginalized groups to claim their rights as citizens and
to participate in formal political processes, highlighting the complex
relationships that develop in practice between these new organizational
forms and earlier historical models of civic action and public morality.
2The Birth of Tulancingo's "Third Sector"
chapter abstract
This chapter examines the growth of Tulancingo's "third sector," from its
origins in the late 1970's until the end of the Fox administration, through
a case study of "Hidalgo Development" (HD). Founded in 1978, the
organization's history is representative of the far-reaching changes that
the country has experienced during the last three decades of neoliberal
reforms. HD was initially allowed to carry out select development projects
that were seen by some factions of the PRI and officials in the national
and state governments to be in their own interests, as those projects were
aimed at ameliorating the rural poverty that had led to violent land
invasions in other regions of Hidalgo. The historical development of
Tulancingo's NGO sector reveals important insights into the relationships
between NGOs and the political class with whom they must remain intimately
but uncomfortably engaged.
3Withered Milpas: Rural Development after Neoliberalism
chapter abstract
In the 1990s, Mexican campesinos came to be regarded as iconic victims of
structural adjustment and free trade policies under the Washington
Consensus. In Hidalgo the synergistic effects of North American economic
integration, the privatization and corporatization of Mexican agriculture,
and global climate change created new forms of political, economic, and
social risk. This chapter examines the way climatic anomalies and
anthropogenic hazards intersected with newly generated forms of social
vulnerability to create a governmental disaster that served to foreclose
traditional collective forms of political agency. The disaster was
interpreted locally through discourse of desiccation, which diagnosed the
premature death of the countryside as a result of human failures to
maintain systems of reciprocity. The erosion of collective rural
institutions ultimately created new challenges for NGOs seeking to
cultivate rural citizens.
4Mediating Dilemmas: Compromising NGO Work
chapter abstract
NGOs are accorded an important role in transforming the relationships
between state and society, ostensibly producing new forms of citizenship
distinct from traditional corporatism and clientelism. However, the way
rural development NGOs operate-indeed, the role they attempt to create for
themselves as existing somehow "in between" state, society, and
market-remains closely tied to earlier historical forms of mediation. This
chapter examines the relationship of Tulancingo NGOs to more traditional
models of mediation associated with the clientelistic culture of the PRI,
as well as newer entrepreneurial models promoted by global shifts in NGO
management and international funding agendas. This chapter shows how
Tulancingo NGO workers struggle to reconcile external pressures to act as
self-interested entrepreneurs with an older moral order based on solidarity
and reciprocity. Examining this complex relationship to past cultural forms
reveals the limits that civil society institutions face in the neoliberal
era.
5"Bridges of Love": Building North-South NGO Networks
chapter abstract
Relationships with international partners have become increasingly crucial
to the survival of many Southern NGOs in a difficult political and economic
climate. The chapter reconsiders some unexamined assumptions embedded in
the network metaphors that animate contemporary social theory, elucidating
how transnational networks are enacted by situated social subjects as they
rework extant cultural forms for use in new contexts, in turn imbuing
institutional relationships with new meaning and value. I examine how
Hidalgan NGO workers perform the cultural work necessary to conceptualize,
fix, and maintain the relationships between these disparate groups of
campesinos, activists, and professionals, by reworking local notions of
solidarity and reciprocity to produce a sense of transnational kinship. The
quality and configuration of intersubjective ties matters deeply to how
people experience and enact structural transformations. The difficulty and
indeterminacy of this work contradicts theories of globalization that
assume spontaneously self-generating networks.
Conclusion
chapter abstract
Over the last decade and a half, the once-radical notion of civil society
"participation" as a tool for deepening democratic citizenship in Mexico
has been re-appropriated to further the neoliberal aims of reducing the
social role of the state. The growth of the sector that has come to be
known as "organized civil society" has produced deep tensions between an
assistential mode of civic action and more radical transformative projects.
This tension is marked by contrasting the frames of citizenship and
philanthropy through which NGO personnel interpret and articulate their
experiences. This final chapter discusses the broader implications of these
developments for understanding how the NGO form acts as a quasi-object and
what role NGOs play in the cultivation of citizenship practices in
neoliberal democracies.