Shapes in Revolution: The Political Morphology of Cuban Life

By: Martin Holbraad

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Synopsis: Revolutions are cosmogonic. More than any other modern political form, their deliberate goal is to precipitate change as a total, all-embracing project: not just a radically new political order but one that reaches deep into the fabric of social relationships, seeking to transform people at their very core, recasting the horizons that give their lives shape and meaning. Combining ethnographic and historiographic research, Shapes in Revolution tells the story of this radical process of life-formation, with all of its rugged contradictions and ambiguities, as it has unfolded in Cuba. As well as a novel anthropological perspective on revolutions, the upshot is a fresh approach to the study of political forms and their power to format people and their relationships into particular shapes. Articulating politics through the shapes it gives to people and their lives, the work proposes relational morphology as a new departure for political anthropology.