Reflecting on Political Performance: Introducing Critical Perspectives

Abstract

Rural Santa Catarina in sub-tropical South Brazil, and Mülheim, a pleasant German city in the post-industrial Ruhr valley. As editors, our field sites are strikingly different and hard to imagine side by side. In Brazil, you arrive along a dusty track to huge concrete gymnasia where state meetings of Latin America’s largest social movement, the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) take place. Cows stand idly in pens in adjacent fields. Coaches that have transported hundreds of people to the meeting line up in parking lots nearby. Sentries bar the gates and word of mouth communication from a leader is required before they allow you to pass. A brief exchange and they either swing open the broad wooden gates or they turn you back. Once beyond the perimeter, in this rural location outside a small town in the Brazilian interior, the meeting itself is abuzz with energy, people going hither and thither, camping down on a concrete floor in a mixture of tents, old mattresses, and dusty blankets. The meeting will last four days and there is excitement and anticipation about the programme, of which a key part will be the dramatic performances, the mística. Images line the main hall. Sebastião Salgado’s series on the Landless Workers’ Movement has pride of place, hasty photocopies of his work strung out down the full length of one wall.