Publications

Dilemas de las Universidades Interculturales en México

A la diferencia de lo que puede suceder con temas como la democracia o el concepto de etnicidad, la interculturalidad y su pariente el multiculturalismo, más que conceptos, son términos descriptivos. En ellas se cruzan las categorías de cultura, religión, patrimonio y lenguaje, y las esferas normativas de reconocimiento, justicia e igualdad. La mera idea de distinguir entre culturas o de trazar…

Shifting-frontiers of Secularism: Europe, Brazil and the USA

This article seeks to construct the basis for an answer to the question why, despite the evidence of a decline in religious observance throughout Europe and (even) in the USA, religion is, perhaps increasingly, a source or a motive or maybe a pretext for social conflict and sharp political rhetoric. The question is often answered in terms of religious freedom construed as…

Convergencias y Divergencias en la Educación Superior Intercultural en México

El propósito de este trabajo es explorar el ethos de la interculturalidad en las Universidades Interculturales (ui) en México. Sobre la base de documentos y entrevistas realizadas en cinco universidades entre 2006 y 2009, se observa que la institucionalización de la educación intercultural al interior del sector estatal ha creado un espacio de encuentro y debate entre la política de reconocimiento y…

Two Paths of Agrarian Capitalism, or a Critique of Chayanovian Marxism

In the ideology of “dependency” and the “world system” the preservation of a comprador bourgeoisie highly dependent on its control of the state apparatus perpetuates the condition of underdevelopment to the benefit not only of that class but also of the world capitalist system, and obviously to the detriment of the remainder of the population of poor countries (Wallerstein 1984). According to…

Something is happening

Something is happening in the world of evangelical Christianity which may herald further ruptures in the boundaries dividing great religious traditions – and as usual the change is coming from below, is undermining even quite recently established academic classifications, and cuts across geographic and cultural divides in unforeseen ways.

Sharecropping and the Capitalist Transition in Agriculture

Sharecropping has been the subject of much debate among economists concerned with static efficiency and, to some extent, with equity. This paper shifts the focus to the dynamics of structural change. The research reported adds to the discussion a detailed account of a large number of sharecropping contracts and why they vary, and offers a theory of the relationship between sharecropping as…

Remaking Israel Judaism

This book is about Israel, about Judaism and about contemporary religion. Its purpose is both descriptive and analytic. As a case study, it shows there is much in common between certain trends in Judaism and broader trends in world religion, but it also aims to elucidate Israeli Jewish society, especially its many cross-cutting ethnic and religious frontiers, the very distinctive patterns of…

The Religious Field in Latin America: Autonomy and Fragmentation

When we talk of modernity we refer to many things, of which one is secularization and another is the use of rational, impersonal criteria to decide, allocate, adjudicate and evaluate. One sense of secularization is the application of these criteria to the religious field: modern culture does not necessarily encourage disbelief, but it is said to encourage rational Writing on Latin American…