Professor Gabriela Arguedas-Ramirez, Co-Principal Investigator, Global Health Solidarity project, University of Costa Rica.
One of the discussions that emerged during the Mesoamerican Workshop on Solidarity and Global Health (you can find more information about the project here)—which I found particularly interesting (although I must say that I found all of them very interesting and inspiring)—arose from the presentations given by Dr. Carmen Cariño (Mexico) and Dr. Gladys Tzul-Tzul (Guatemala). From their presentations I gather a sense of “extrañamiento” (similar to a feeling of disconnection or distance from something) with the notion of solidarity, based on their academic and personal experiences in indigenous and campesino communities, and their critical perspectives towards hegemonic narratives. I recommend that those reading this blog consult the report so you can get a more detailed account of the ideas they discussed in the workshop. The purpose of this blog is to share with you some of the reflections I have been developing over these months after the workshop.
Both Dr. Cariño and Dr. Tzul questioned the concept of solidarity, from the perspective of their knowledge of how indigenous and peasant communities function in México, Guatemala and also, in other contexts and countries. Does the notion of solidarity make sense in societies where the social fabric is strong, vital, and deeply woven into everyday life?
In communities that have survived centuries of persecution, displacement, and attempted genocide, the only way to persevere, survive, and keep alive the memory of their ancestral wisdom and knowledge, food production practices, governance, and labour, is through unwavering mutual recognition. Reciprocity derives from recognising interdependence as an undeniable fact of human existence. The individual cannot be without the community. And this, in turn, implies understanding that there is a duty that binds all members of a community together, it runs through all the interconnections of a particular people. Of course, there will always be individuals who fail in honoring that duty to participate actively in building community, in contributing to the flourishing of their people. There will always be individuals whose conduct can put the community at risk. But their communitarian systems of governance and socialisation have provided mechanisms for sanctioning reproachable behaviors.
As Dr. Tzul-Tzul explained, celebrations, communal festivities, the shared joy embodied in the different holidays and special occasions that bring people together to dance, sing, eat, and drink, are ways of keeping the social fabric vibrant and strong. The community is not only connected through principles of duty, but by practices of shared joy and belonging.
From this point of view, it seems understandable that a concept like solidarity may not even be easy to translate into some of the languages of indigenous communities in Mesoamerica. This is not merely a linguistic issue. It is ethical, political, historical and cultural. To think about a concept like solidarity, one must inhabit a different kind of human community—one in which the social bonds that connect people do not necessarily stem from the fundamental principle of recognising mutual interdependence, which in turn implies accepting one’s own vulnerability as reflected in the vulnerability of the other.
I consider that one of the most provocative contributions—and one that truly helps us connect with the concept of pluriversality, that is fundamental for this project—is precisely this idea of solidarity as a notion that arises from certain types of social fabric that are not as strong as the ones we can find in indigenous and campesino communities in many different places (communities that have faced, resisted and survived extreme violence, dispossession and persecution for centuries).
Since the workshop, I have been thinking (slowly) about the concept of solidarity as something that speaks about how societies and social relations take form in time. It might be that the need for a notion like solidarity emerges precisely from the awareness that something is missing in the relationship between individuals and that it is necessary to act, to actively intervene in order to recuperate what’s missing. If nothing is done, then the social fabric will become weaker and eventually it will break. Individuals then need to make an effort to intervene and reinforce the threads that give form to the social fabric.
For solidarity to be genuinely distinct from an act of mere charity (a distinction that came up as necessary several times during the workshop, and that has been mentioned as well in other workshops in this project), we need to pay more attention to the conditions that make solidarity an act of mending a fundamental social bond. In other words, based on the discussions in the Mesoamerican workshop, I see that solidarity is closely connected to an attitude of humility, that is required in order for us to remember that we need each other. To be able to exist as individuals, we need a community. That’s something that sociological and anthropological evidence have once and again demonstrated, but that dominant economic, ideological and political forces keep trying to deny. The field of global health research and interventions is not immune to such forces, therefore, it’s not immune to reproducing individualistic frameworks that mistake solidarity for charity and paternalism.
We will see where this project takes us, but I hope that these dialogues we have organised will continue after the project ends, encouraging and multiplying different conversations, fostering cross-pollination of ideas, emotions and political actions. Opening up conversations between different people, different worldviews and different regions and languages is fundamental to making fruitful contributions in the endeavor of repairing the global health ecosystem and correcting the practices and institutional habits that have reduced the concept of solidarity into a superficially soothing narrative for times of collective desperation.
Watch the Mesoamerica Global Health Solidarity Webinar here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56FufYL8EHI&t