ABSTRACT

This article analyses the multivocal meanings of the concept ‘the community’ as embedded and employed in everyday- and political discourses in working class and shantytown neighbourhoods (barrios) in the capital city of Caracas, Venezuela. Set in the context of the late Hugo Chávez’ presidency (1999–2013), I explore how ‘community’ variously referred to socio-territorial space or to emerging and contested notions of political community, and how the different meanings were imbricated. I focus on how experiments with bottom-up democracy foregrounded popular sector communities as essential to the construction of ‘Bolivarian’ Venezuela, and trace contemporary notions of ‘community’ back to the Venezuelan state’s earlier nation building projects, particularly in the latter half of the twentieth century. Through engaging with anthropological debates about the challenges attached to the term ‘community’, I argue that valuable ethnographic insights can be gained through unpacking how ‘community’ is invoked in different contexts and by different actors.

摘要

本文分析了“社区”概念在工人阶级和棚户区（巴里奥斯）的日常和政治话语中嵌入和使用的多重含义。）位于委内瑞拉首都加拉加斯。以乌戈·查韦斯已故总统任期（1999-2013）为背景，我探讨了“社区”如何以不同的方式指代社会领土空间或新兴的和有争议的政治社区概念，以及不同的含义是如何叠加的。我重点关注自下而上的民主实验如何将大众部门社区视为建设“玻利瓦尔”委内瑞拉的关键，并将“社区”的当代概念追溯到委内瑞拉国家早期的国家建设项目，特别是在20世纪90年代后期。二十世纪。通过参与关于“社区”一词所带来的挑战的人类学辩论，