ABSTRACT
Civil society is one of the most frequently used but also most elusive concepts in the contemporary study of politics and society in the Americas. The “modern” idea of civil society as disseminated in elite circles in both the Global North and Global South has its roots in the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment in the 1700s but faded into intellectual obscurity for centuries. The story of the uses and abuses of “civil society” in the Americas reveals a much more complicated and rich conception of how ideas travel across time and space. Instead, as Anna Tsing suggests, popular Latin American actors creatively engaged in dialogue with some aspects of the Western civil society paradigm, while rejecting those that did not reflect their local situations. The context in which civil society was eventually embraced in Latin America was very different from the European sites in which the concept initially arose.
