Chocolate, Politics and Peace-Building: An Ethnography of the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó, Colombia

Description

This book tells the story of the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó, an emblematic grassroots social movement of peasant farmers, who unusually declared themselves ‘neutral’ to Colombia’s internal armed conflict, in the north-west region of Urabá. It reveals two core narratives in the Community’s collective identity, which Burnyeat calls the ‘radical’ and the ‘organic’ narratives. These refer to the historically-constituted interpretative frameworks according to which they perceive respectively the Colombian state, and their relationship with their natural and social environments. Together, these two narratives form an ‘Alternative Community’ collective identity, comprising a distinctive conception of grassroots peace-building. This study, centered on the Community’s socio-economic cacao-farming project, offers an innovative way of approaching victims’ organizations and social movements through critical, post-modern politics and anthropology. It will become essential reading to Latin American ethnographers and historians, and all interested in conflict resolution and transitional justice. Front Matter ....Pages i-xxviii Introduction: The Chocolate-Politics Continuum (Gwen Burnyeat)....Pages 1-35 Front Matter ....Pages 37-37 The Roots: Of Cooperatives and Conflict (Gwen Burnyeat)....Pages 39-65 The Founding of the Peace Community (Gwen Burnyeat)....Pages 67-94 The Cultural Change of ‘Organisation’ (Gwen Burnyeat)....Pages 95-109 Front Matter ....Pages 111-112 The Genealogy of the Rupture 1997–2005 (Gwen Burnyeat)....Pages 113-148 Differentiating Between Santos and Uribe (Gwen Burnyeat)....Pages 149-172 Front Matter ....Pages 173-175 Practices of Production (Gwen Burnyeat)....Pages 177-200 The Elements of the Organic Narrative (Gwen Burnyeat)....Pages 201-229 Conclusion: An ‘Alternative Community’ as Positive Peace-Building? (Gwen Burnyeat)....Pages 231-244 Back Matter ....Pages 245-263