{"id":4645,"date":"2010-01-20T20:36:42","date_gmt":"2010-01-20T20:36:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=4645"},"modified":"2015-01-09T20:25:48","modified_gmt":"2015-01-09T20:25:48","slug":"rethinking-mestizaje-ideology-and-lived-experience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=4645","title":{"rendered":"Rethinking Mestizaje: Ideology and Lived Experience"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rethinking Mestizaje: Ideology and Lived Experience<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Journal of Latin American Studies<\/a>
\n2005
\nNumber 37, Issue 2<\/a>
\nPages 239\u2013257
\nDOI: 10.1017\/S0022216X05008990<\/a><\/p>\n

Peter Wade<\/a><\/strong>, Professor of Social Anthropology
\nUniversity of Manchester<\/em><\/p>\n

The ideology of mestizaje<\/a><\/em> (mixture) in Latin America<\/a> has frequently been seen as involving a process of national homogenisation and of hiding a reality of racist exclusion behind a mask of inclusiveness. This view is challenged here through the argument that mestizaje<\/em> inherently implies a permanent dimension of national differentiation and that, while exclusion undoubtedly exists in practice, inclusion is more than simply a mask. Case studies drawn from Colombian popular music, Venezuelan popular religion and Brazilian popular Christianity are used to illustrate these arguments, wherein inclusion is understood as a process linked to embodied identities and kinship relations. In a coda, approaches to hybridity that highlight its potential for destabilising essentialisms are analysed.<\/p>\n

Rethinking mestizaje as embodied experience<\/em><\/p>\n

This article explores a key concept in the complex of ideas around race, nation and multiculturalism in Latin America, that of mestizaje<\/em> \u2013 essentially the notion of racial and cultural mixture. I address mestizaje<\/em> not just as a nation-building ideology \u2013 which has been the principal focus of scholarship on the issue, but also as a lived process that operates within the embodied person and within networks of family and kinship relationships. I consider how people live the process of racial-cultural mixture through musical change, as racially identified styles of popular music enter into their performing bodies, awakening or engendering potentialities in them; through religious practice, as racialised deities possess them and energise a dynamic and productive embodied diversity ; and through family relationships, as people enter into sexual and procreative relations with others identified as racially-culturally different, to produce \u2018mixed\u2019 children.<\/strong><\/p>\n

This approach emphasises the ways in which mestizaje<\/em> as a lived process, which encompasses, but is not limited to, ideology, involves the maintenance of enduring spaces for racial-cultural difference alongside spaces of sameness and homogeneity. Scholars have recognised that mestizaje<\/em> does not have a single meaning within the Latin American context, and contains within it tensions between sameness and difference, and between inclusion and exclusion. \u00a0Yet a scholarly concern with mestizaje<\/em> as ideology has tended to privilege two assumptions: first, that nationalist ideologies of mestizaje <\/em>are essentially about the creation of a homogeneous mestizo (mixed) future, which are then opposed to subaltern constructions of the nation as racially culturally diverse ; and second, that mestizaje<\/em> as a nationalist ideology appears to be an inclusive process, in that everyone is eligible to become a mestizo, but in reality it is exclusive because it marginalises blackness and indigenousness, while valuing whiteness…<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read the\u00a0entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rethinking Mestizaje: Ideology and Lived Experience Journal of Latin American Studies 2005 Number 37, Issue 2 Pages 239\u2013257 DOI: 10.1017\/S0022216X05008990 Peter Wade, Professor of Social Anthropology University of Manchester The ideology of mestizaje (mixture) in Latin America has frequently been seen as involving a process of national homogenisation and of hiding a reality of racist […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,24,83,21,414,459,125,8,820,394],"tags":[1865,1479,1392,1864,1661],"class_list":["post-4645","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-arts","category-brazil","category-latincarib","category-family","category-history","category-identitydevelopment","category-media-archive","category-religion","category-socialscience","tag-colombia","tag-journal-of-latin-american-studies","tag-music","tag-peter-wade","tag-venezuela"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4645","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4645"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4645\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}