Out of Necessity: The Conceptual Potential of Central American Studies

• In Event: Optimisms of the Will: Central America Beyond the Image of Crisis

Abstract

Central America harbors a multitude of inchoate experiments, everyday efforts at dignified living often expressed through local forms of gifting, gleaning, trading, gathering, as well as theft and criminality. Based on kinship and solidarity, the former connections signal the possibility of prosocial forms of living, a conceptual potential latent within the practices of an everyday life-making born out of necessity, out of the will to live. This paper sketches an ethics of thinking emergent in Central America, specifically in El Salvador, that might offer us—the field of Central American Studies—a way to peer beyond the image of crisis, to lend credibility to those socialities that propose novel forms of community and belonging. The examples offered here are not social experiments or cultural texts in the formal sense but rather discrete moments of human interaction, small interventions that evidence the relational knowledge needed to navigate a social world characterized by violence and atomizing fear. If, as Frantz Fanon reminds us, humanity is a “self-revising act,” then, I argue, the routine life-making strategies aimed at preserving life and avoiding violence in the region are themselves examples of an everyday politics that exceed the dehumanizing bounds of the Central American quagmire, acts that might provide us with the necessary metaphors to perceive an isthmus beyond ruin.

Author

• Jorge E Cuéllar, Dartmouth College