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Call for Papers: "Forms of Autonomy: Assembly Practices and Collective Decision-Making on the Margins of the State"
Special Issue of the Swiss Journal of Sociocultural Anthropology (Tsantsa)
Over the last twenty years, many liberal democracies have seen the emergence of new forms of organization that seek to emancipate themselves from the “State form” by using decentralized decision-making tools and practices. However, often explicitly and with the aim of drawing on material likely to feed their own political experiments, these social movements do not hesitate to mobilize the work of anthropologists describing Indigenous societies said to be “against the State”, “anarchic” or “who have the art of not being governed”. David Graeber's work of anarchist anthropology, for example, based among other things on ethnographies of Amazonian societies, fed the Occupy Wall Street movement in which the anthropologist participated.
This special issue aims to gather ethnographies that highlight the diversity of aspirations and modalities of implementing this double autonomy. How do groups attempt to resolve the tension between individual autonomy and the desire to organize collectively in order to confront States? To lay the foundation for this comparative work the contributions to this special issue will thus examine the diversity of assembly practices as a tool for collective decision-making, both in the Indigenous context and in social movements that are seeking autonomy from nation-states.
Deadline: 30 September 2022.
