Chocolate, Politics and Peace-Building

This book looks at the Peace Community of San Jose de Apartado from the perspective of critical, post-modern politics and anthropology and tells the story of an emblematic grassroots social movement whose history reveals unseen economic and social dimensions of national political struggles. The book proposes a methodology called ethnographic con-textualization to analyse the Peace Community. It reveals two narratives which co-exist in their collective identity. The radical narrative is the frame according to which the Community interprets politics, constituted via the genealogy of the 'rupture' with the state and the creation of an internal logic. The organic narrative is the way in which the Community perceives their relationship to the environment and to their organisational process, associated with a concept of alternative community. In placing cacao and the Community's economic project at the centre, this study presents an innovative way of looking at any grassroots social movement. It follows research agendas traced by anthropologists such as Michael Taussig, George Marcus and Arjun Appadurai who propose the focus on the social life or cultural biography of things. In the Peace Community, the story of cacao reveals the profound historical and cultural dimensions of the politics of the Community, which has largely been left out of the human rights perspective, which has seen only the tip of the iceberg of the Community's political experience.