at://rude1.blacksky.team/app.bsky.feed.post/3lxqa5iuj2225

Back to Collection

Record JSON

{
  "$type": "app.bsky.feed.post",
  "createdAt": "2025-08-31T23:22:22.447Z",
  "embed": {
    "$type": "app.bsky.embed.images",
    "images": [
      {
        "alt": "Autonomy is in our hearts : Zapatista autonomous government through the lens of the Tsotsil language\nby Fitzwater, Dylan Eldredge\n\ninterrelation between such spheres.\nOne of the most personally, communally, and politically significant concepts that illustrates how these dimensions intersect is \"ichbail ta muk\"\" This Tsotsil phrase is defined by Fitzwater as \"to bring (ichil) one another (ba) to largeness or greatness (ta muk) and implies the coming together of a big collective heart.\" The reader may be surprised when Fitzwater reveals that the phrase can also be translated simply as \"democracy.\" Obviously, the\nZapatistas impart a much fuller and deeper meaning to this term than that found in the impoverished conception of democracy inherited from the Western liberal tradition. The Zapatista concept is a profoundly social-ecological one, since it implies \"respect\" for and \"recognition\" of all beings in both the natural and social worlds, which are really seen as one continuous world. It combines aspects of the ethics and politics of care with an ethics and politics of social and ecological flourishing. In this sense, it is one of the most radical and far-reaching conceptions of democracy yet to appear.\nThe process of ichbail ta muk, or \"carrying one another to greatness\" through the creation of \"a big collective heart,\" aims at the achievement of a non-dominating unity in diversity. This process presupposes the existence of a communal subjectivity, \"the inclusive we (koontik) that does not subsume the different exclusive 'our hearts' (koonkutik) that compose it.\" Such an analysis refutes typical anti-communitarian arguments, which assume that communal institutions must entail a regression to reactionary and repressive, if not explicitly fascistic, concepts of homogeneity and identity.",
        "aspectRatio": {
          "height": 1218,
          "width": 1078
        },
        "image": {
          "$type": "blob",
          "ref": {
            "$link": "bafkreih2b664rbvzuflohsqycnjlnslmupfhu2p5mk4xexga3bvkiq42fq"
          },
          "mimeType": "image/jpeg",
          "size": 982710
        }
      }
    ]
  },
  "langs": [
    "en"
  ],
  "text": "[A significant concept] … is \"ichbail ta muk\" This Tsotsil phrase is defined by Fitzwater as \"to bring (ichil) one another (ba) to largeness or greatness (ta muk) and implies the coming together of a big collective heart.\" …Fitzwater reveals that the phrase can also be translated simply as democracy"
}