Socio-centered democratic experiments in the decolonization of participation practices: the case of the Pataxó Youth Council of Bahia

Abstract

The participatory cycle inaugurated by the 1988 Federal Constitution paved the way for movements that believed in institutionalized action, but it proved incapable of capturing the instances and demands of vast segments of historically excluded population. In this work, we aim to understand insurgent practices that, by not orbiting around the State, remain invisible or undertheorized in their potential for democratic expansion. This is the case of the Pataxó Youth Council of Bahia, analyzed from a militant ethnography, with due theoretical-conceptual support. Theoretically, we use decolonizing perspectives for an onto-epistemic expansion of politics, to reconstruct, on this basis, a theoretical and analytical framework centered on the category of “sociocentric democratic experimentation (SDE)”. We conclude that SDEs simultaneously create, restore and reinvent practices and knowledge of a substantively lived democracy, revealing political powers and public innovations for the decolonization of participatory practices. The CONJUPAB invites us to open ourselves to the revolutionary capacity of socio-biocentric movements and traditional political cultures to seek solutions to public problems, with/in spite of/against/beyond the State.