Countering Modernity: Communal and Cooperative Models from Indigenous Peoples

This volume highlights and examines how Indigenous Peoples continue to inhabit the world in counter-modern ways. It illustrates how communalist practices and cooperative priorities of many Indigenous communities are simultaneously key to their cultural survival while being most vulnerable to post-colonial erasure. Chapters contributed by community collectives, elders, lawyers, scholars, multi-generational collaboratives, and others are brought together to highlight the communal and cooperative strategies that counter the modernizing tropes of capitalist, industrialist, and representational hegemonies. Furthermore, the authors of the book explicitly interrogate the roles of witness, collaborator, advocate, and community leader as they consider ethical relations in contexts of financialized global markets, ongoing land grabbing and displacement, epistemic violence, and post-colonial erasures.

Lucid and topical, the book will be indispensable for students and scholars of anthropology, modernity, capitalism, history, sociology, human rights, minority studies, Indigenous studies, Asian studies, and Latin American studies.

Carolyn Smith-Morris is a medical anthropologist and professor at The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, O’Donnell School of Public Health. Her research documents the experience of chronic disease, particularly diabetes, among Indigenous and Mexican immigrant communities and contributes to theories of chronicity and decolonization of healthcare. Her books include two monographs (Diabetes Among the Pima: Stories of Survival and Indigenous Communalism: Belonging, Healthy Communities, and Decolonizing the Collective) and two edited volumes on medical anthropology. She is also a contributing researcher and author with Cultural Survival in support of Indigenous rights.

César Abadia is a Colombian activist and scholar. He is an associate professor of anthropology and human rights at the University of Connecticut. He integrates different critical perspectives in the study of how for-profit interests transform access, continuity, and quality of health care. He has conducted activist-oriented research in Brazil and Colombia, focusing on health care policies and programs, human rights judicialization and advocacy, and social movements in health. His current collaborative research supports community-based proposals in health and wellbeing after Colombia’s 2016 peace accord. He is the author and editor of several books including I Have AIDS but I am Happy: Children’s Subjectivities, AIDS, and Social Responses in Brazil and Health in Ruins: the Capitalist Destruction of Medical Care at a Colombian Maternity Hospital.