An intimate account of Latin America between revolutionary promise and populist authoritarianism.

What is the relationship between a writer’s life, milieu, and thought? In this daring and intellectually expansive text, part memoir and part political philosophy, the anthropologist Rafael Sánchez explores the forces and events that shaped him and the nations through which he moved.

Reconocimientos is a book of both personal and political reckoning, from the thrillingly emancipatory possibilities of Venezuela’s plazas to the political promise and disappointments of revolution. Written in the final year of his life, Reconocimientos moves from scenes of Sánchez’s youth in Cuba to fieldwork on the cult of Maria Lionza in Venezuela to confront the terrifying and alluring forces of patriarchal privilege at the base of monumentalist authoritarianism.

Sánchez’s intimate prose speaks with the urgency both of his own mortality and of the political crises of our moment. Amid the resurgence of patriarchy, hierarchy, and the valorization of inequality that have become pillars of populist movements in Latin America and beyond, Sánchez finds a residual radical possibility in ‘horizontal’ spaces, where the forces of mimesis permit manifold transformations.