One working group of the Research Networks, located in Bielefeld, investigates how ethnically charged discourses become
an item of societal concepts of social order and their negotiations in the cultural and political space of communication
and how they are thereby outlined by the respectively chosen forms of representation (Büschges, Pfaff-Czarnecka 2007). The
starting point for these deliberations is the detection that in many parts of the world, amongst others in Latin America,
since approximately 20 years there is a constant boom of the "ethnic paradigm", which reached its culmination with the change
in the situation of political representation in Bolivia under the first indigenous president Evo Morales. But it is by no
means only a contemporary phenomenon. Rather, the "ethnic paradigm" is a phenomenon of the process of the closing of in-groups,
based on culturalist criteria and of societal forms of exclusion, which initiated at the latest with the emergence of the
nation state entities (Kaschuba) and which have been translated not only into processes of cultural homogenization, but
also in certain constructions of a (supposedly) proto-national past.
On the basis of a wide conception of politics, the enforcement and development of the "ethnic paradigm" and its cultural
and political representations as well as its emotive charging and instrumentalization in socio-political negotiations shall
be studied. Thereby the public inclusion and exclusion of topics (agenda-setting) and the admittance or marginalization of
players shall be examined; whereas players can be persons or groups engaged in the cultural sector as well as activists and
such personalities, movements or groups which try to oppose ethnicization or propose alternative political discourses.
Furthermore shall be studied the symbolic forms, cultural practices and the media, by whose choice in many cases players
are positioned or position themselves.
Thus, the discourses, symbols, semantic fields, political identities and argumentation figures as well as the
judicial-institutional conceptualization and ? where required ? its implementation (institution, structures) shall be traced
(Ghai 2002; Pfaff-Czarnecka 2004). This requires an interdisciplinary approach, which deals with the respective cultural and
political production of discourses as well as with their medialization and reception. A case study to be investigated could be
for example the CONAIE in Ecuador as a national umbrella organization of indigenous groups.
Another revealing example is the conflictive relationship between inclusion and exclusion in the discourse of the "indigenism",
which in the Andes and in Mesoamerica has coined the negotiation of culture-political concepts of order from education
to the public sponsoring of arts, literature, museums etc. since the beginning of the 20th century.
Further factors such as religious orientations play a growing role for the social positioning of individuals and groups.
An especially interesting field in the Latin-American case is the diffusion of new religious movements which can be observed
since several decades. The question is, to what extent these movements, as for example Pentecostal churches, but also the
expansion of religions with African origins, create new forms of belonging and what impacts they have on the national or
regional social and political structures (Bizeul 1995, Blancarte 2007).
"Mobilizing Ethnicity"
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