Rupture, repair, and reconciliation: attempts to create a future in contemporary siloism

Abstract

The growth of polarization in the contemporary world, associated with the rise of new far-right movements and the isolating effects of social media, has led the social sciences in recent years to emphasize, with increasing concern, ongoing processes of fragmentation and decomposition. A “thick” description of these landscapes must also take into account experiences that seek to work on these fissures in the opposite direction, attempting to create common worlds and less somber futures. Such fractures do not only produce rupture, but also precarious yet persistent attempts at recomposition. This article examines how contemporary Siloism—a humanist movement that emerged in the 1960s in Argentina and later expanded transnationally—both coexists with and acts upon these fractures. Drawing on a multisited ethnography conducted in Brazil, Argentina, and online spaces, the article first presents lived controversies concerning the compatibility between a universalist conception of the human being and the agendas of anti-racism and feminism as mobilized by actors. It then analyzes ritual and collective practices oriented toward producing experiences of reconnection, in which situated forms of engaging with difference and suffering are explored. In this context, repair becomes a way of taking into account inequalities and histories of violence and domination without severing ties with those with whom alliances are woven in the pursuit of shared futures.Engaging with pragmatism, the article argues that these forms of coexistence do not eliminate tensions, but rather intervene in how they take shape through deliberate practices of recomposition and repair. Rather than resolving fissures, such practices seek to render them habitable, sustaining—albeit in fragile yet persistent ways—the possibility of producing the common in schismatic contexts.