Más allá de Babel. Mitos de la comunidad y políticas de la identidad entre filosofía y acción política en Europa y en América Latina

Abstract

This research article proposes a confrontation between two founding narratives of different ideas or «models» of community: on the one hand, the Gemeinschaft thought by Tönnies and reworked by Schmitt and, on the other, the Community to which the Latin American indigenous peoples refer. The article focuses on how the elements of cultural identity and belonging can be used to motivate policies and norms of an opposite sign, oriented both to exclusion and inclusion, to discrimination or to the emancipation of certain individuals or social groups. Two parallel paths that go from political language to normative production are reconstructed using a qualitative methodology: on the one hand, the individual that identifies the central element of the generative rhetoric of European closure policies in the conception of the «community-lineage» identity, and especially that which in Italy is known as «period of discriminatory ordinances»; on the other hand, the path that, starting from the narrative of the «original multiplicity of the diverse», has led the Latin American indigenous to the claim and recognition, international and state, of a new category of human rights, the collective rights of the indigenous peoples, and that has led some Latin American states to adopt policies for the difference and constitutional reforms of a pluralistic and intercultural type.