Paper
Social reproduction, living and working spaces and collective action, The Highlands of Chiapas, Mexico
presenters
Edith Cervantes Trejo
Nationality: México
Residence: México
Center for Research and Graduate Studies in Social Antrhopology. CIESAS Southeastern Campus. MX
Presence:Online
Maria Elena Martinez-Torres
Nationality: Mexico
Residence: Mexico
Center for Research and Graduate Studies in Social Antrhopology, CIESAS Southeastern Campus
Presence:Face to Face/ On Site
Keywords:
Social reproduction, inheritance, collective action
Abstract:
The process of disanchoring that modern societies follow from nation states has detached social relations from their local contexts of interaction, and has restructured them in indefinite spatio-temporal intervals (Giddens, 1993), producing transformations at an extensional or spatial level. Where the mediation of a specific place ceases to be a condition for social interaction, so the generalized absent other makes its appearance. In other realities, the territorial anchoring of social practices in the indigenous community allows the permanence in the present of indigenous peoples, who resist the destructive movement of Eurocentric capitalist expansionism that has lasted more than 500 years (Lins, 2018). In the Mayan communities of The Highlands of Chiapas, social reproduction is linked to patrilineal inheritance practices, which transmit territorial assets that are constitutive of the headquarters (Giddens, 2011) where the localized limited patriline lives and works (term adopted from Robichaux, 2002), social unit made up of domestic groups independent of the father and married sons. These venues present uses of space configured by practices of collective action supported by meetings of all or part of the patriline, which attend to various tasks of daily life, including those of agrobiodiversified work processes and the arrangement of the word for the decision-making on community dynamics issues. The patriline has been empirically reported in The Highlands of Chiapas (Voght 1966; Collier 1976; Breton, 1984; Villa Rojas, 1992), the Mesoamerican area (Robichaux, 2002) and South America (Robichaux, 2007). Hence the importance of understanding and conceptualizing their practices, which point to a structuring collective action that sustains everyday territorialities that have been little explored. The research is based, among other concepts, on the spatiality of social action (Coraggio, 1989), headquarters and modes of regionalization (Giddens, 2011).