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Predominantly Catholic for centuries, Latin America is still largely Catholic today, but the religious continuity in the region masks great changes that have taken place in the past five decades. In fact, it would be fair to say that Latin American Christianity has been transformed definitively in the years since the Second Vatican Council. Religious change has not been obvious because its transformation has not been the sudden and massive growth of a new religion, as in Africa and Asia. It has been rather a simultaneous revitalization and fragmentation that threatened, awakened, and ultimately brought to a greater maturity a dormant and parochial Christianity. New challenges from modernity, especially in the form of Protestantism and Marxism, ultimately brought forth new life. In The Rebirth of Latin American Christianity, Todd Hartch examines the changes that have swept across Latin America in the last fifty years, and situates them in the context of the growth of Christianity in the global South.
In the Americas, debates around issues of citizen's public safety--from debates that erupt after highly publicized events, such as the shootings of Jordan Davis and Trayvon Martin, to those that recurrently dominate the airwaves in Latin America--are dominated by members of the middle and upper-middle classes. However, a cursory count of the victims of urban violence in the Americas reveals that the people suffering the most from violence live, and die, at the lowest of the socio-symbolic order, at the margins of urban societies. The inhabitants of the urban margins are hardly ever heard in discussions about public safety. They live in danger but the discourse about violence and risk belongs...
This book is the first of three volumes of HabitusAnalysis that take the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu as a starting point to develop a methodical approach to the habitus of social actors. However, the concept of habitus and Bourdieu’s approach to language are somewhat disputed while his relationist epistemology is seldom paid tribute to. The present volume therefore in its first part deals with Bourdieu’s roots in relationist Neo-Kantian philosophy, the basic traits of his relationist sociology. The second part examines Bourdieu’s theoretical and empirical work on language before elaborating its own praxeological concept of language use that opens the road to a methodically and theoret...
Crime and violence soared in twenty-first-century Venezuela even as poverty and inequality decreased, contradicting the conventional wisdom that these are the underlying causes of violence. The Paradox of Violence in Venezuela explains the rise of violence under both Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro—leftist presidents who made considerable investment in social programs and political inclusion. Contributors argue that violence arose not from the frustration of inequality, or the needs created by poverty, but rather from the interrelated factors of a particular type of revolutionary governance, extraordinary oil revenues, a reliance on militarized policing, and the persistence of concentrated disadvantage. These factors led to dramatic but unequal economic growth, massive institutional and social change, and dysfunctional criminal justice policies that destabilized illicit markets and social networks, leading to an increase in violent conflict resolution. The Paradox of Violence in Venezuela reorients thinking about violence and its relationship to poverty, inequality, and the state.
Starting from the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, Schäfer composes a methodical approach to habitus of social actors and the logic of their praxis: Building upon the generative terms of praxeology, he focuses on identity and strategy in processes of internalization, their transformation by means of dispositional schemes, and their externalization in action. The emphasis lies on a theory of dispositions that allows a flexible understanding of identity and strategy formation in the context of social experience and the interplay with social structures. This theory is developed over the course of a three-step analysis on habitus as a network of dispositions, on the dynamics that unfold between th...
Converso and Morisco are the terms applied to those Jews and Muslims who converted to Christianity (mostly under duress) in late Medieval Spain. Converso and Moriscos Studies examines the manifold cultural implications of these mass convertions.
This book is a collection of studies of drug policies in several Latin American countries. The chapters analyze the specific histories of drug policies in each country, as well as related phenomena and case studies throughout the region. It presents conceptual reflections on the origins of prohibition and the “War on Drugs,” including the topic of human rights and cognitive freedom. Further, the collection reflects on the pioneering role of some Latin American countries in changing paradigms of international drug policy. Each case study provides an analysis of where each state is now in terms of policy reform within the context of its history and current socio-political circumstances. Concurrently, local movements, initiatives, and backlash against the reformist debate within the hemisphere are examined. The recent changes regarding the regulation of marijuana in the United States and their possible impact on Latin America are also addressed. This work is an important, up-to-date and well-researched reference for all who are interested in drug policy from a Latin American perspective.
Preface: The frailty of commodity chains -- From head to toe -- From the designer's point of view. From "the global" to "the girl" ; When is a shoe a shoe? -- Feet and fit. The world at her fit: scale-making, uniqueness, and standardization ; Cinderella on the Pearl River Delta: who has the power to translate? -- The global in the rearview mirror -- Interlude: a landscape of factories ; The ruins and rubble of Novo Hamburgo: skill and melancholia in a global shoe town -- Conclusion: what did we learn about globalization by looking at shoes? -- Coda: shoe is a gipsy business.
In an age of military neoliberalism, social movements and center-Left coalition governments have advanced across South America, sparking hope for radical change in a period otherwise characterized by regressive imperial and anti-imperial politics. Nowhere do the limits and possibilities of popular advance stand out as they do in Bolivia, the most heavily indigenous country in the Americas. Revolutionary Horizons traces the rise to power of Evo Morales's new administration, whose announced goals are to end imperial domination and internal colonialism through nationalization of the country's oil and gas reserves, and to forge a new system of political representation. In doing so, Hylton and Thomson provide an excavation of Andean revolution, whose successive layers of historical sedimentation comprise the subsoil, loam, landscape, and vistas for current political struggles in Bolivia. Revolutionary Horizons offers a unique and timely window onto the challenges faced by Morales's government and by the South American continent alike.