abstract seeking panel: Murderous Plants and Symbolic Violence

[Autumn Zellers]

Hello everyone,

For those organizing panels, please consider my paper, which is a critical
discourse analysis of a Colombian anti-drug media campaign.

My paper fits the following themes:

* drug policy
* Latin American indigenous communities
* social movements
* critical discourse analysis

The abstract is pasted below.  Thank you very much!

*Autumn
*
Murderous Plants and Symbolic Violence: A Critical Discourse Analysis of a
Colombian Anti-Drug Media Campaign*

In 2008, the Colombian government launched a highly controversial anti-drug
media campaign called “La Mata Que Mata,” or “the plant that kills.” This
campaign consisted of two radio and television ads, “No trafiques” and “No
cultives,” ostensibly geared toward two target audiences: urban drug
traffickers and rural cultivators of illicit crops (cocaleros).  Both
commercials featured a child’s voice that implored these groups to not
traffic or cultivate illicit plants, listed as coca, marijuana, and poppy.
“La Mata Que Mata” set off a wave of social protest in which people rallied
to challenge the representation of the country’s social problems in these
commercials.

“La Mata Que Mata” was the first anti-drug campaign to target the plant
sources of narcotics rather than the drugs themselves. Much of the protest
against these commercials was founded on the defense of the traditional use
of sacred plants, especially coca, in Colombia’s indigenous communities.
The claim that coca, marijuana, and poppy kill was interpreted as an attack
on these communities and their culture. Protesting groups fixed their
counter-claim that “Ninguna mata mata,” or “no plant kills” in a broader
counter-contextualization of the drug trade in Colombia’s social problems,
in which they reiterated the systemic causes of death in Colombia, such as
corruption, unemployment, and forced displacement.

In this paper I focus on how these structural problems are erased, and
substituted with an interpretation that re-casts the relationship between
individuals and their life conditions. Using critical discourse analysis, I
discuss how “La Mata Que Mata” enacts symbolic violence through a discourse
of blame that legitimates the exclusion of vulnerable groups in Colombian
society.  I contend that this relationship, as it is presented in the
commercials, indicates an audience of “ideal interpreters” (Fairclough
1995) that is distinct from traffickers and cultivators of illicit crops.
Finally, I relate the indigenous protest that eventually led to the
discontinuation of the campaign to Bourdieu’s discussion of heretical
subversion.

-- 
Autumn Zellers
Department of Anthropology
Temple University
Philadelphia, PA

TUGSA member and steward
www.tugsa.org