Basques' Right to Decide: Ethnographying 'democra(c)tic praxis' and political imagination

GAZTAÑAGA JULIETA

Cambridge

Conferencia; CUSAS Cambridge Special Conference; 2018

CUSAS, Cambridge University Social Anthropology Society,

Gure Esku Dago? -in English ?It?s in our hands?- is a Basque civil society organization that has made the Right to Decide the core of its agenda. Looking forward to achieve a peaceful and democratic scenario related with sovereignty issues, the promoters of the initiative consider that much of the political conflict in the Basque society has to do with the lack of a pre-political right to decide, which in turn caused a great deal of suffering, miscommunication, fear, mistrust, and suspicion. Gure Esku Dadgo has been working continuously for the last five years in order to knock down those material and symbolic walls by bolstering, nurturing, and widening certain understanding of democracy based on the people?s will. With this purpose along with improving the Basque social agenda, they organized at least 180 consultations in small villages and cities of Euskal Herria during 2016 and 2017. These non-referendum consultations have been locally and self-organized thanks to thousands of voluntaries committed with socializing the scope of political rights. In this talk I introduce some preliminary advances of my current ethnography about the everyday works of Gure Esku Gado. In particular I?d like to focus on the social production of the Right to Decide and how this process elicits certain relations between democracy, politics and imagination.