Eli sigue ganando premios

PREMIO MUNICIPAL DE LITERATURA
LUIS JOSÉ DE TEJEDA - 2008
Género Novela Breve

ACTA DEL JURADO

En la ciudad de Córdoba, a dieciocho días del mes de diciembre del año dos mil ocho, tras haber evaluado los cuarenta y cuatro trabajos presentados, el Jurado del Premio Municipal de Literatura Luis José de Tejeda 2008, Género Novela Breve, integrado por Tununa Mercado, Angélica Gorodischer y Perla Suez, acuerda en otorgar de manera unánime las siguientes distinciones.

El Jurado otorga el TERCER PREMIO por unanimidad a El color de las rocas, ingresada con el número 32, presentada al concurso con el pseudónimo de Eloísa Andrade.

Escrita con una prosa austera y un lenguaje íntimo y sutil la novela crece cada vez que la protagonista va en busca de los suyos. En una lengua reticente, la temporalidad de la memoria es el núcleo que sostiene esta historia de familia. La escritura del pasado ocupa un lugar medular y la familia, tema central de la memoria, recupera una forma imaginaria inquietante, un diagrama con afectos que se va construyendo de modo preciso y eficaz. La narradora ahonda con singularidad en su pasado familiar y nos conmueve mientras construye el desamparo que la lleva hacia los orígenes.

El pseudónimo Eloísa Andrade corresponde a ELIZABETH LERNER

Fragment and Fluid

This call for papers has an interesting focus that makes me think further in the method for my work as layers of overlapped maps that produce space in the way.


I am organizing a panel on "Fragment and Fluid Urbanities" at the
European Conference on African Studies to be held in Leipzig 4-7 June
2009. I would like to invite innovative papers that contribute to
theorizing urban spatialities in African cities beyond dominant accounts
of socio-spatial fragmentation. The full panel description is copied
below. I have also attached some general information on the conference
and on how to submit an abstract. Please review the panel description
and consider providing a paper or pass this call for papers to other
interested colleagues. Abstracts need to be uploaded to the conference
website by December 31, 2008.

For a list of the approved panels and further information please see:
http://www.uni-leipzig.de/~ecas2009/approvedpanels
(Panel 56)

For questions regarding the panel please contact me.

Yours sincerely,

Christine Hentschel



Fragmented and Fluid Urbanities

This panel seeks to foster a new understanding of urban spatialities in
African contexts. It contrasts common accounts of fragmentation,
polarisation, and 'new segregation', with more dynamic, fluid
understandings of contemporary urban space.
Dominant accounts of postcolonial or post-apartheid cities emphasize
their deep-rooted or newly created morphologies of social and spatial
fragmentation. According to these depictions of contemporary urban
realities, the city, as such, does not exist (anymore) and is divided
into bubbles of gentrification and forgotten slums, into islands of
safety and hotspots of fear and terror. Wealth and spatial disparities
correlate with governance disparities, triggering new forms of exclusion.
This panel encourages urban scholars from a variety of disciplines (e.g.
geography, sociology, political science, urban planning and
criminology), to challenge the concept of the fragmented city with more
dynamic, fluid theories of urban space, governance and everyday life,
using temporality, movement and informal productions of space.

Che, el Argentino de Soderbergh

Despues del frenesi

HAce unos quince dias que termine con los examenes de doctorado y el frenesi de leer sin parar. SIgo leyendo sigo con trabajo y no se si algo realmente cambio demaciado, pero si se que al menos cerre por un tiempo esto de leer todo el dia el placer de seguir el hilo de las ideas que se me crucen y me den ganas de seguir, pero tambien las cuentas regresivas de textos. Quede relativamente contenta con lo que logre escribir y la defensa oral fue bien entretenida. Las preguntas rondaron alrededor de que es exactamente el movimiento, como estudiarlo, cual la relacion entre movilidad de algunos e inmovilidad de otros, razones politicas del trabajo, profundidad historica precolonial, que es indigeneidad para mi, que es lo que cambia si cambia la movilidad y que no cambia si no cambia, cual es la relacion con el tiempo, LA verda que finalmente en el dialogo aprendi un monton, despues del trauma de escribir encerrada, en donde tamien calculo que se aprende pero en un estado de frenesi total.

la unica cosa en la que me dejo pensando es lo tremandamente individual que es el proceso, un paso mas a que eso que es el proyecto de uno se transforme en un centro en si mismo. me resulto muy raro en un lugar, por alguna razon mas rponnciado aun que en arg dnde uno es parte de una genealogia mas marcada, habla desde un grupo y hace movidas dentro de avanzadas mas colectivas. y sin embargo la academia arg fragmenta, en lo cotidiano y atrinchera de algun modo en las charlas, mientras que aca los dialogos con todos los puntos de contacto del probelame que uno encare son casi obligatorios y multiples.

Bueno ahora la pregunta es como encarar al campo para seguir pensando y armando algo pero de otra forma. Esa es la pregunta central de estos dias y algo que comprati en mi charla que fue mas dialogo que charla que di el viernes pasado en el learning community del depto.

esta es una entrada que nunca termine y deje abierta con la idea de completar tambien con resumenes de las charlas del congreso de antropo gringo, cosa que no se si pase. voy a seguir con entradas cortas hasta que enganche de vuelta a laburar a traves del blog y esto se transforme en un cuaderno de campo, con informacion no sencible claro.

Twitter and the World Simulation

este tipo es lo mas.

CAT STEVENS ... the wind

para las noches de insmnio. eramos tan hippies.

Comentarios sobre la parte teorica

My decision to focus on the constitution of subjectivities rather than on the making of indigenous identities has been generated by several factors: a) the limitations that many authors have noted regarding the studies that only focus on “identity”, b) an attempt to find an alternative to the unsolved debates over the celebration or critique of indigeneity, c) an interest in being able to discuss what type of subjects are generated in moments in which identity is not fully-articulated, d) an attempt to examine the entanglements in which subjectivities exceed a single dimension. In other words, my starting point is Marisol de la Cadena’s and Orin Starn’s claim that indigeneity is not just a political identity but a field of governmentality, subjectivity, and knowledge, in which "becoming indigenous is always only a possibility negotiated within political fields of culture and history" (2007:13). Why and in which contexts do subjects get constituted as indigenous?
Subjectivity, agency and identity have been at the centre of debates regarding culture and politics. The so-called “politics of identity” helps us understand processes of cultural production of a defined group through the making of a chain of articulated elements that brings together and presents a group as distinct from other groups defined by their contrasts. But this theory does not offer us an alternative for thinking beyond this practice of articulation. The negative definitions of social subjects have stressed modernity’ s construction of an (exterior or interior) ‘other.’ Postcolonial and subaltern scholars have argued that subjects are not a cause constituting their identity but a difference that is an effect of power (Spivak 1988). The literature on the politics of difference proposes, then, a subjectivity that always exceeds any definition, threatens all demarcations, and is never fully articulated. These perspectives offer the possibility of thinking of this “other” beyond an explicit articulation. However, the problem with this definition is that restricts our understanding of the internal social and cultural dynamics within subaltern actors.

De lo que escribi en esta seccion y quedo sin editar este parrafo es el que mas me intereza, despues hay quizas demaciado enfasis en indigeneidad, introduzco parrafo en castellano con algunas ideas mas

De esta critica a la politica de identidad y diferencia aun sigo a Grossberg con su propuesta de la subjetividad como construccion en sucesivas capas que territorializan cada vez mas a los cuerpos. Por otro lado sigo a Briones-Ramos, en su obsecion con los pliegues, a ellas se les suma Grosz y claro todas siguen a Deleuze. Si antes del sujeto estan los cuerpos, los cuerpos no son mas que pliegues del exterior que generan una interioridad. Este exterior es un campo politico por supuesto, pero tambien incluye lo no humano. Para Grossberg entonces primero vienen las maquinarias estratificadoras, que se generan del hecho de que los sujetos surgen dentro de campos espaciales en los cuales tienen distintas posibilidades de acceder a la experiencia. El acceso a differentes experiencias, yo agregar'ia: generadas a partir de la repeticion de practica, se inscriben luego como diferencia de los sujetos. Estas son las maquinarias diferenciadoras. Finalmente la diferencia se territorializa en lugares construidos en la practica y en los desplazamientos.

Como se define la colectividad no es solo en relaciona estas estratificaciones, diferenciaciones y territorializaciones, sino que al final de su texto Grossberg vuleve a Agamben y define a las "comunidades por venir". Ahi tanto sujetos como collectividad se definen solamente por pertenencia, da lugar asi a una configuracion colectiva, que se define en positivo, pero no por iguldad, ni solo como resto, sino por la copresencia. Esto permite pesar configuraciones de diferencia mas alla de ser el "resto" del poder, en las que confluir en un lugar y pararse define un sujeto colectivo y politico.

Bueno dos cosas, tendr'ia que leer a Agamben y lo de los pliegues, pero tambien critica a Grossberg. las etapas de Grossberg y donde el termina situando la accion es algo parcial. Lo que no sigo de Grossberg es que sigue hablando de maquinarias por un lado y formas en que los sujetos habitan y se mueven estrategicamente en un espacio territorializado. Esta reconceptualizacion de la agencia no me convense, si bien esta muy refinada. Lo que no cierra es que haya un territorio por un lado y sujetos que actuan en relacion a ciertos fines. Claculo que aca lo sigo mas a Massumi y su idea de que lo que mueve son afectos que se van desatando mutuamente, que traviezan y movilizan. Mmmmmm pero con esto tampoco iria a algo totalmente antiracionalista, y tampoco dejaria todo librado a un cuerpo que siente intensidades, me da un bastante claustrofobia la verdad. Pensaria un poco mas como las subjetividades son formaciones de multiples, que se agregan y desagregan. Si las ideas con su origen intersubjetivo son un afecto entonces hay cierta resonancia, y hay ciertas formas de porcesar y darles mas impetu o hacerlas morir, creo que hay ambas cosas, un poco de manejo parcial, y bastante de atravesamiento. que es el manejo parcial, probablemente algo asi como una orientacion para el movimiento, algo que no es una certeza de un lugar especifico, pero que si es ir en cierta direccion.

En fin por ahi ando.

proposal

mobility

There has been a tendency to consider movements as either effects of power relations (labour migrations, land dispossession) or as forms of resistance from situations of subordination (modern nomadism and the flaneur as escapes from state discipline). There are some aspects of this movement that are effects of power relations: the definition of state sovereignty over the Chaco, capitalist advance over the region. We can also understand some movements as forms of escape from state control: resettlements, hunting and gathering expeditions. However, in the context of an embrace of “flexibility” as a dominant value of the economy and in the face of an increasing development of technologies of policing movement and controlling access, it would be a reduction to consider movement as only an effect or a form of resistance to power relations.

Subjectivity

Bueno volvi a Grossberg, aunque en un punto me habro, por que trae a discusion todo lo que me intereza. Grossberg ademas especializa la subjetividad y eso es exactamente lo que me intereza. Un punto en el que estoy desde ayer es si poninedolo en dialgo con massumi nos queda que el cuerpo y el movimineto son las fuerzas que se transforman lugo en "sujeto", espacio y lugares. claro es imposible pensar en cuerpos moviendose por algo que no es espacio social, y me quedo pensando si hay cuerpo sin interpelacion (butler y althuser dicen que no), aca me sirve rsossberg de nuevo en pensar que los cuerpos estan en algun lugra que no es posicion de sujeto necesariamente (esto es una critica un poco de mas de massumia grossberg) pero si es posicion que da ciertas posibilidades de movimiento y reposo y cirtas posibilidades y potencia para actuar. por eso mas que lugares sociales esas localizaciones son las trayectorias entrecruzadas de las que habla massey. el sujeto ntonces seria algo secundario que viene de la separacion y la reagrupacion, que en la modernidad ya sabemos mas o menos como opera. en este punto me da nostalgia la nocion de clase que al menos presneta un sujeto colectivo que transforma y actua no como uniformidad pero si como fuerza que se suma. si voy a mantener la nocion de sujeto que no reprodusca la individualidad y la agencia como puntos de partida, necesito algo que me permita esa dimnsion, pero que de posibilidad a comunidad definida por sus miembros prescindibles (deberia leer el agamben que menciona grossberg).


Subjectivity, identity and agency have been central concepts in contemporary debates over the possibilities of transformation and manoeuvre within a given social structure. I follow Grossberg (1996) in his critique up to a certain point at which I diverge. Identity and agency have generally taken for granted modern notions of subjectivity as individual and rational. Agency tends to understand action as a strategy and a negotiation, disregarding the unrational aspects of practice. Identities have stressed what are the mechanisms by which people act together within a given articulated formation, this is within a given system of equivalences that unify in order to be recognized by an exterior. Identities have been criticised as ignoring the inequalities and misunderstandings that also bring people together as well as the internal power relations in any given articulation. Both perspectives take as a starting point an individual modern subject, they collapse it with the notion of identity (sef) and agency and leave no alternative to modernity. Theories based on the negative construction of the other as a necessary movement of modernity, negate any possibility of a constitution of something different than modernity. Difference is the other that threatens form within or from the outside to the order of things. To unpack the three concepts he proposes to understand three levels in the process of individuation: subjectification that results form the positioned body in geopolitical organization of space, self as inscription of difference in the body, agency as the possibilities available to act over space in regards to the power organization of space and difference.
This is why Grossberg proposes to think of subjectivities by the means of alterities. He proposes to think of a positive and spatialized subject, and as the capacity of affecting and being affected. I agree with him but I still consider that is not very clear how he makes this subject into a collective one, and especially how he understands what is before the subject. What comes before the subject for Masumi is movement, bodies and the capacity of affecting and being affected. I consider that Massumi again concentrates too much in the individual body, even when he is making very interesting analysis of politics becoming affective. It does not offer me ways of understanding how a body can become part of a collective bodies and where are the openings for collective subjects.
I consider movement, subjectivity and spatiality as ineviatably embodied. I am interested in describing the directionality, trajectories and speeds of different types of movements, considering what is the intensity of those involved in them and how much they get empowered by them. In this way my project searches to make a contribution to the study of spatiality by engaging to the experience of movement as a not just a hiatus of in betweenness, which fades under the “concrete” definition of places, but as a significant moment of generative practice which can both recreate and transform the configurations of power over space and the unfolding possibilities of subjectivity to vary.

soccer !!

esto fue el finde pasado. el equipo amateur de antropologia sufrio una enormes pero heroica derrota frente a los sociologos. quevachacher,

middterms everywhere

Sedentary metaphysics- Critique to Malkii

No se si esto queda pero fue una noche de hacer una critica a la idea de sedentary metaphysics, para pensar por que me estoy alejando de ese argumento.


The concept of structured mobilities (Grossberg 1992) considers how places are made in tension with one another, as they are shaped through people’s spatial trajectories. I will examine mobility as a bodily spatial practice (Lefebvre 1991, De Certeau 1984), which contests a system of alterity that ascribes indigenous people the status of an internal other of the postcolonial nation-state (Alonso 1994, Ramos 2003). Through a variety of forms of discipline, state agencies have historically tried to “fix” these groups in well-bounded places. From that perspective indigenous mobility is a practice that challenges the “sedentary metaphysics” of the state that assumes that people and social groups are attached to fixed locations (Malkki 1997).
However sedentary metaphysics cannot be considered as the only way in which state constitutes power through and over space. It is also through the control of movement rather than is prevention that state constitutes post disciplinarian forms of power. If movement and displacement of population have been a focus of concern among researchers identifying the effects of the globalization of capital this movements do not necessarily and always contradict the logic of the state and its connection to economy. So if the tension between state and globalization has been considered thoroughly to the point of claiming for the possibility of dissolution of the former (Appadurai), in this context sedentary metaphysics could be regarded both as a reactionary movement and as a logic of a power in dissolution. I want to consider it however as one of the necessary dimensions of the logic and the way nations find their materiality.
At the same time we need to consider that a controlled movement is in the base of the constitution of new forms of power. Deleuze (19xx) proposes that we live in a post disciplinarian society or society of control based on constructing subjects in their relation to things in the word in a way in which there is no sanction but the possibility of moving: always within a given paths and always being monitored. If this type of power is about the control of the flow then sedentarism is not necessarily a logic contributing to shape this form of power but rather what is condensed in the discourse of flow and flexibility, and not in the logic of a positioning and “fixation”.
Sedentary metaphysics can also be complicated through a number of cases in which movement back and forth form the “rural” to the “urban” are not challenging but rather part of state projects, for example of indigenous intellectuals education (Grant 1992: 88), of labour migrations (Gidwani ), or within movements of nationalist intellectuals that rather than threatening the state expand and consolidate it (Anderson) just to mention some cases.
We can link sendentary methaphysiscs with what Grossberg proposes to call the definition of social jurisdictions as an action of machineries territorializing subjects into place. Jurisdictions include not only the places but also the access and connections between them. Jurisdictions define which types of subjectivity (both organized hierarchically and into systems of difference) can access an circulate where, and how much empowered they can become in these movements. With this we can go beyond the mapping of difference in place to consider the way movement gets regulated. However we can critique to Grossberg that stability of this jurisdictions is never at rest. This does not mean that the jurisdictions are negotiated, which in a way they might be, but there is also always unexpected turns that emerge form the encounters in space. There is thus always more complex devises to control the speed of movements and to attempt to canalize them (Virilio). Technologies of control of movement, its canalization and the possibilities of its detention (war) are not the same as redefining jurisdictions. It is in this point that I see power over space operating effectively.

An anthropological introduction to YouTube

Timo

Un de las personas mas lucidas con las que me cruce, se fue para otro lado a los cuarenta y cortos. Se fue llevado por algo tan evitable como la tuberculosis y la falta de comida, algo que sabemos que pasa todos los dias, pero no deja de ser una certeza tremenda. Bueno igual pensar en Timo da alegria siempre. La ultima vez que lo vi fue en un encuentro de educacion en formosa al que viajamos mucha gente junta y en monton del lote al campo, no paro de hablar de lo lejos que estamos de cualquier educacion indigena y de la dureza de lo que se viene, pero siempre desde el optimimso y contento de que estuvieramos todos juntos conversando.

Aca una parte de una charla con el sobre el monte

Es mejor mariscar entre amigos porque uno ya se conoce las mañas, en el monte compartís todo, así que tenés que conocer bien a las personas. Algunos les cuesta compartir, se llevan su mate para tomar solos. Entonces si no lo conocés por ahí lo tomás a mal y empezás a pelear y eso no está bien. Por ahí otros que entran al monte y ya empiezan a pelear, hablar mal de otra gente. Eso tampoco está bien, porque estás distraído, y lo que decís se puede venir en contra tuyo. Vos en el monte no tenés que mandarte la parte, ninguno va a decir a los demás lo que tienen que hacer. Tenés que ir con personas que estén bien con vos, que sepan compartir, que estén atentos. Es importante que te cuiden si te pasa algo, así como vos lo vas a cuidar si viene el peligro, no vas a salir corriendo. Si no estás bien con la gente mejor que ni vayas al monte.

la imagen viene de indymedia
http://media.argentina.indymedia.org/uploads/2006/04/timoteo_francia.jpg

wesimantel

The exploration of Mary Weismantel shows the relevance of the study of sex and race as organizing the categories of a hierarchical grid constituting the Andean societies. She shows how the classifying grids of sex, gender, race and ethnicity are mutually interpenetrated and result form colonial experience. She gives a relevant role to the action of exchange as creating racial identities. The author demonstrates how issues of culture cannot be considered in isolation form but rather in connection to social and biological reproduction. She positions herself along with anthropologist such as Marisol de La Cadena (2000), in rethinking the study on ethnic identity as not only as the production of meaning and affiliation to a particular grouping. These authors search to overcome the idea of identity as only a symbolic super-structural product by taking into account the role of sexual interactions as a form of connectivity of social bodies and as a site of transmission of social qualities through the exchange of qualities through blood.

To analyze this aspect of materiality of social categories, and stating that she is considering the materiality symbolism and the meanings of practice, she takes the dichotomy between Pishtacos and Cholas as foundational division of the Andean society after the conquest. Pishtacos is a mythical figure that represents a white man that is armed with a knife and wanders in the night in search of Indians. There are multiple accounts related to the Pishtaco in the present and through time, having changed his shape from a religious priest to an hacendado, form a medical doctor to a soldier. The common characteristic of it is that it searches for Indians and kills them to extract their fat, they rape indigenous and mestizo women and castrate indigenous men. But Pishtacos are not just a destructive figure, they have the aim in their killing of extracting fat to sell it.

Killing is part of a process of production under capitalists logic which has the aim of obtaining a profit. Thus, Wesitmantel proposes that whiteness is constituted as an activity as well as an identity, and innate condition. Whiteness is a type of performance that results form and permits, accumulation. Accumulation is possible in unequal exchange relations, in this case, exchange is done in hierarchical sex relations. This condition is associated to the possession of certain objects, such as cars and guns that are represented as body parts and markers of identification. As Diane Nelson (1999) would argue, this is both a critic and a literal image of society. In accordance to the first, Pishtacos are seen as something un-natural and so evitable, thus they are not a fatality. Also they are an almost literal expression of the colonial and Post-colonial relations between white, mestizos and indigenous.

The counter part of Pishtacos are the mestizo women, whose common place is the market, known as Cholas. Weismantel analyzes how they are genderized, represent the nurturing reproductive figure, but also the whitening of society. Cholas are categorized only as women, there are no cholos, and who have a white man as eventual partner to have their children. Cholas are thought to be born form the union of an indigenous woman and a white man. Thus they embody the colonial clash and the violence in it, a violence that is not only to conquest a territory but an appropriation by rape of the indigenous bodies. They are single mothers and attributed a exacerbated sexuality. They are the object of desire of white men who see in them the wilderness of indigenous and the beauty of white women. She also analyses the mythical opposite of the Pishtaco, the Mama Negra, black mother a woman with exacerbated sexuality and reproductive power, strong and defiant of white men. In accordance to this strength and independence she has virile qualities which are symbolically condensed in the possession of penis. The black mother then condenses some of the qualities of the cholas, seen as negative by hegemonic discourses, and so stresses the contested positioning of their identity.

The author shows how this dual oposition organizes the structure of inequalities according in relation to blood, class and place. Thus, as De La Cadena (2000) has argued, indigenous are the pure settlers of the rural areas who have not mixed with whites. White women in this grid are correct partner for a white men and owners of a “controlled” sexuality. Interestingly the uncategorized people are the indigenous and mestizo men, whose bodies cannot contribute to whitening, and whose location is restricted to the rural areas.

There are a few critics that can be posed to this work. On the one hand, the ambivalent regarding of Pishtacos as a part of reality yet then differentiating them form Cholas as being only imaginary. In this way if we follow Taussig’s (1987) logic we could argue with her that Pishtacos are in fact real, as fiction is a constitutive component of reality. The other is the ambivalent extension of the location of her fieldwork. Not being a multi-sited ethnography, she takes the Andean regions as a unity disregarding the national and regional differences. She even jumps into examples of the Caribbean islands (sse page 201) and Brazilian fazendas. The connection between different colonial situations is no doubt enlightening, yet the heterogeneous source of the sources she analyzes lead us with the question about which are the different situations of each case. Different authors have analyzed the weight of national, regional and provincial particular processes in the production of subjectivities in contemporary Latin America (see for example GEAPRONA 2005 ).

Finally, is curious that the author, does not take the analysis of sex to the analysis of social production and reproduction into the further implications these concepts. She analyzes the generation of racial categories as a result of exchange, as a trading activity that permits accumulation, which is one constitutive factors of race. She leaves outside the analysis the way sex produces the racial, gender and ethnic inequalities of the people involved. Also sex implies the gestation of people who will be ascribed to a particular category in the social structure. This is sex produces the people involved into particular type of subjects as well as reproduces society and its structuring. This reproduction has yet some transformative effects as it is directed to towards the whitening of people. Even she reaches some of these conclusions, looking to production and reproduction permits to see the unfolding of the processes through time, rather than considering them constant and invariable type of interactions. The analysis of exchange then make it difficult to understand the shifts and create an overlapping effect of events happened in different periods as analogous types of interactions.

To finish it can be said that the salient contributions of Weistmantel’s work is to reconsiders the correlation between sex, race and ethnic categorizations that are not just abstract classifying categories. Rather they constitute the bodies and possibilities of subjects. They locate people to certain places, attaching identity to certain locations. She offers a case analysis of perspectives that brings back to reflection sexuality not only as reproduction (in classical Marxists terms) or a sphere of discipline of bodies to produce social differentiation (in Foucaultian terms). Sexuality is also an interaction generating social categories.

deluze y gutari a thousand plateaus

deje esto para el final para que decante un poco. en buenos aires fui de oyente a unas clases (7) donde hablaban de la primera parte y ahi dos companyeritos, muy interesantes y apacionados, y que me recomendaron varias buenas lecturas complemetarias meintras tomabamos cafe, me anunciaron que me tomar'ia 10 anyos entender algo de k y esquizo. asi que aun si entenderlo espero arrebatarle algunas cosas que sirvan.

Deleuze and Guatari open thier book giving some directions into how to make the reading as well as establishing a base for their work. They position themselves outside the genealogy of state philosophers that they claim have contriuted to build a state power [among others by claiming a distinction between reality and representation, and the possibility of the aproximation of the real to a more perfected ideal that is represented by the state]. They will present pairs of concepts that is not implying a dualistic distinction but is a form of presenting different a form of connecting that establishes divisions and hierarchies and alternative momevents. Non is absolute in its result, and both get confused, but this is a presentation choice i understand.
They use the structure of plateaux following Batson notion of it: the making of a zone of intensity that instead of being evacuated and exhausted maintains its level as much as possible. This will be the opposite to a western climax as a drain of accumulated energy. [bateson lo usa luego para explicar la esquizo]

1. rhizome and tree
[esto me importa por Metodologico] The point is asking how does something work rather than what does it mean. Looking at work implies: how does it function?
what is connecting?
in connection to what is it transmitting intensities?
how multiplicities connect to other multiplicities?
how does this connection transform the parts/bodies connected?

To talk about how something work is different than to talk about how ideology is being produced, and what are the real relations that ideology is veiling. They claim that: "There is no ideology and there never was." (p4) The state philosophers work with a tree structure: hierarchical, dual and dialectic (states that are an improvement of previous states). The propose to follow a rhizome logic: with no given order, no centre periphery, no predefined movements, multiple. Any point of the rhizome can be connected to anything other and must be." (7)
In the rhizome there is no hereditary code but a flux of intensities.
[meth] The rhizome has no beginning and no end but only a midle. (20)
"Arborescent systems are hierarchical systmes with centres of significance and and subjectification, central automata-like organized memories." (16) If the tree is made of points and positions, the rhizome only of lines
However there are arborescent structures emerging form rhizomes and also rizhomatic roots of trees.

2. assamblage and multiplicities. (no encuentro las notas sobre las maquinas y el deseo pero basicamente el deseo conecta mas que busca la carencia y las maquinas incluyen toda serie de multiplicidades - humana y no humanas, animales y no animales, esta es la base de su postura antihumanista creo, por que implica un "funcionamiento" mas aca de la accion racional o de una estructura social, masumi da el ejemplo de tirar un piedra y romper la venta y todos los niveles en los que se puede entender, donde la piedra y la furz que lo arroja tambien son importantes)

Principles of Connection and heterogeneity. Ennunciation does not escape this, thus a semantic chain is connected with diverse forms of coding. Enunciation is also part of machinic assemablages and not a question of decoding, the wuestion is what is being connected and how does it work.
Principle of Multiplicity. Multiplicity imples the need to approach in extension, no discrete elements separated for their connections. They are flat as they occupy all the dimensions they can possibly do in a given plane [esto no lo entiendo]. They are defined by the outside, the possibility of connecting to other multiplicities and changing in nature.
Assemblage is the increase in the dimensions of the multiplicity through connections, by adding up. The basic relation is to add.
Multiplicities can be either heterogeneous, continuous, and qualitative or homogeneous, numerical and discrete

3. territorilization deterritorialization and reterritorialization - cartographies
Principle of asignifying rupture: the rhizome can be broken and this implies nothing as it can start again form any fragment. Ruture is deterritorializaton or a pat becoming detached form an assamblage, cretaing the possibilities for other configurations, by being reterritorilized somewhere else, an organization will stratify parts again. Rupture-Deterritorilization may be pushed by the circulation of intensities. Deterritorilization is about lines of flight that undo the strata and makes new connections. [como lo demustra el ig nobel de arqueologia: el armadillo desarma la estratigrafia del arquologo]
The rhizome is not good for a structural or generative analysis, to follow a genetic line or a structure is a This are principles of tracing would be about following predifined lines [transectas], rather than of producing a map of a number of connections to be discovered in the process. Maps then need to remove the blockages by fostering connections, and finding the many ways of entering.


4. nomad - war machine - and state
They propose to relate to the outside of a given territory by producing an assamblage that connects to it, and not by producing a model. Though need to be nomadic in order to connect to this outside, unlik the sedentary production of history, writen form the position of the state, within its structure. To map is about coming back and forth and using different speeds.

In the chapter Nomadology - war machine, they expand on the a nomad organization that precedes the state. they use a number of anthropological references to define what is the nomad.

The nomad moves across the desert with no prefigured direction. The stops are operative but not define a territory, any eye of water. They follow no path but advance and define in the way. [estos son algunos de los errores antropologicos de su argumento, basados en lecturas estudios de cr que ademas de estructuralistas fueron luego bastante criticados por el tipo de dato que producian] The nomad are guided only relatively by a magician, who has no funding pact with the group. The king has always been portrayed as good, clear and fair, while the magitian as obscure, arbitrary, unfair. this is the state logic warning against the nomad.
The state attempts to prevent war as much as it can, the nomad contrarily develops the war machine to be able to advance when the state develops and is in its way blocking movement. The nomad is a free floating war machine, composed of warriors. The state is more about police that prevents confrontation [esto vienen de virilio creo]. The state is about regulating the social through distinctions state-subjects of state, men and women. To have a military force the state appropriates a free war machine, thus the constant problems between state and army.
They use Clastres society against the state to explain why the nomad is different form state and rather develops mechanisms to prevent form becoming a state. The mechnisms are diminihing the prosperous and the arrogant, sorcery and the other etc.
But also war is a way of preventing form state to emerge as a central organization organizing and distributing social work.

The state main functions, aided by state science, are related not to producing but to internalizing the nomad body and the nomad band, sedentarizing them, regulating movement and organizing labour and rest. They dedicate a long examination to the production of science. The nomad creates an inexact science, that is always being appropriated by the king. The science of state finds correspondence of form and matter, restricting possibilities of other forms of association. The state is woried in reproduction raher than in following, a process that is constantly extending territory rather than fixing. The nomad science produces a smooth space, a field with no measures, that resists euclidian space by the possibility of undefined multiple vectors. It is nomos vs logos.

(toda esta seccion de vuelta no numeros de paginas)

5. smooth and striad

"the nomads do not move they leave to conquer or die" (482). The travell with a prefigured destination is the travel of the state apparatus. Voyage in place is the name of all intensities, even if they only develop as such. "What distinguishes the modes of voyage is the manner of being in space, of being for space." Travelling smoothly is uncertain and about becoming something different and multiple.
The striad is the closed space produced by the state apparatus to infold the nomad. But also the "multinationals fabricate a kind of deterritorilized smooth space in which points of occupation as well as poles of exchange become quite independent of the classical paths of striation. What is really new are the always the forms of turnover." (492)
To translate the smooth to the stria is not a secondary operation, not just to substitute trasversed space for movement. It consists in subjugating, overcoding, metricizing it. An example is the traslation fo intensive into extensive, or qualitative multiplicities of distance into a system of magnitude. The smooth allows the creation of the striad, the striad reimparts the smooth (smooth space of capitalism).
What defines the straid is that the number of diemnsions are given and this makes it possible to asigns constant directions.
While smooth space is that it does not have a dimension higher than which it moves through [aca de nuevo definenen esto como flat multiplicity y no entiendo muy bien que queiren decir]. The smooth space is a zone of indiscernability, an unexact multiplicity, constituted by an accumulation of proximities. The space escapes striation through deviation and through the spiral.
If gravity is a given force of atraction, Work is a force of displacement in a certain direction. Labour is to free action what in physics gravity is to work. Both transform free action into a defined movement. Work is an invention of the state, appears with the creation of surplus labour.

The smooth space is a haptic space. The orientation and links are in continuous variation. Creative process is done in the smooth space. The smooth space is made in the abstract line of the nomad (aca no entiendo por que abstracta) The striad is made in the concrete line. The abstract all is pure intensity, it is the live that is before the organism, inorganic, germinal, a body without organs (no organization no hierarchies).
What is interesting in the distinction of smooth and straid is the passages form one to the other. How the forces at work within the smooth straite it, and in this striation new forces develop new smooth spaces. Movements, speed and slowness are sometimes recreating the smooth.
Smooh spaces are not in themselves emancipating, but the strugle is changed in them, life finds new obstacles, invents new paces and finds new ways. "Never belive that smooth spaces will sufice to save us" (500)

bueno y con esto culmina la obsecion lectora por encargo. es un poco torturante el marco del examen pero leer y pensar siempre esta bueno. pero espero seguir subiendo cosas que lei, por ejemplo para los multiples grupos de lectura.

Chatarjee whose imagined community?

He starts pointing to the fact that nationalism as a phenomenon is beyond research within "area studies". But this prevents to see the particularities of nationalism in the context of anticolonial movements in which nationalism was framed as a an emancipatory project. But with the normalization and discipline instituted by the state it is relegated to the past. The revolutionary aspects are categorized as ethnic politics of minoritarian groups while the state represent the interests of elites. If nationalism was considered one of Europe's significant gifts to the rest of the world [pero ojo que siempre se olvida el capitulo de anderson sobre los nacionalismos americanos y la pregunta de como es que se consolidan aun antes que en europa, otro contexto colonial y aca el nacionalismo aflora como vanguardia y no solo como imposicion]. Anderson's idea of nationalism as imaginated brings teh problem to a universal level. He argues that europe and america [but also LA] develop modular institutions that are then adopted by asian and african nations. The critique he poses is what is the room Anderson leaves for imagination in this "adpted"/ imposed nationalisms, as both colonizationa and anti colonial movements would be part of a european imagination. "Even our imaginations must remain forever colonized". He claims that the most powerful results of (anti)colonial nationalism emerge form difference with the modular european ones.
Nationalisms not only about institutions but the movements create their own domain of sovereignty even before the actual struggles. The do so by dividing the domain of the material from the one of spiritual. In post colonial nationalism the european superiority is recognized in the field of economic production, but the spiritual is considered to be an asian superiority and thus made as a essence of cultural identity. The implications of this are that these nationalism produced the spiritual as its domain of sovereignty, and thus by refusing colonial intervention over this domain, it generates its own reform towards modernity ("eastern" modern subjects are going to be materially emulating western achievements but spiritually superior, thus eastern modernity is shaped by eastern intellectuals as a better modernity, an emprovement to western one). If nation is about imagination this asian imagination generated is own field of overeignty even under colonial rule.
The spiritual reform is thus based on the construction of a national language, and through establishing a national literature, drama, art, education and family . This is a central domain to understand the "inner" difference of postcolonial nationalism. The "outer" recognizes no difference as it separates the private for the public domains and regards the private and thus as an individual choice. Of course the field of the spiritual is not only private and this generates a different nationals in which private public divisions are overflowed. The post colonial national project is thus a cultural normalization of class cast and religion, undertaken by a national elite initially subordinated to colonial power. The contradictions emerge by the difference between this particular nationalism and the imposed modular institutions, that do not allow the national imaginations to develop. The nationalism emerges as two different political domains: the hegemonic elites and the subaltern. The presence of populist comunitarian elements in the liberal constitutional order is a recognition in the elite domain of a an arena of subaltern politics over which it must dominate and yet which also has to be negotiated in its own terms for the purposes of producing consent." (soy una idiota no anote el n de pagina) "The task is to trace in their mutually coniditioned histories the specific forms that have appeared in teh domain defined by the hegemonic project of natinalist modernity, on the other in the numerous fragmented resistances to taht hegemonic project." (idem) The nationalistic project claims its difference but supresses elements of the subaltern.
In conclusion the "western universality" is as particular as the "oriental exeption" , which provoque the need of a "diverse universality" perspective.

tamago en la casa del hombre blanco

TAmagno analyzes the recreation of toba identity in the city of La Plata, through recreating cultural practices. She questions how is identity maintained in spite of assimilationist, acculturation, or proletarization as different authors predict. This is done by redefining territoriality as a discontinuous urban and rural, defined in the historical experience. This experience of migration is thus reconstructed through a series of significant points during migration, as are the intermediate points in between places of origin and the final destination in the city. In spite of the spacial discontinuity among these places there is a symbolic unity, recreated by history and by the trips to the rural areas. There is a strong emphasis among the tobas o get a place in the city where "they could live all together". the toba presence in the city starts in the 60 and appears as a paradox. In spite the first settlements were connected with other settlements in cities and with the rural communities, teh quesion n whether if the people were aboriginal outside the chac is a paradox to recognition. Should government apply indigenist policy with them? [ estas son paradojas nuestras me prece, en todo caso lelvan a la necesidad de reformulaciones, por otro lado invalida la presencia indigena como fundante de la ciudad].
The chaco apperas as a unifying and reference point in the historical narratives about migration and coming to the city. Pampa del Indio appears as a central point in the migrant toba's narratives. [she does not mention whethere spcecific locations are refered, ut probably this is not a central point in her argument]. If initially the group was located in Quilmes, then a part of it moves to La Plata. Others come form Ciudadela Norte (Fuerte Apache), they move form Ciudadela and QUilmes to either La Plata or Derqui, however some families remain in those locations. In La Plata they get land and the possibility of building houses, a work that starts in 1992, through the government "Plan Pro tierra" . The particularity is that the indigenou specificity is not rrecognized, but rather they are given the houses as urban poor, the lands remain as fiscal, they do not yet have a "personería jurídica" [legal recognition as an indigenous association]. The group is not included as legitimate demanders of historic reparation measures as they are not settling in their traditional lands. However in 1999 the city mayor recognizes is presence as a community represented by the Toba Association. The association, even with no legal recognition, was created in 1991 and was according to the author the unifying entity negotiating with the government. For her the community is not only a level of political organization but also a form o flife manifested in the spatial organization of the houses and the use of common areas (where all children play together and all adults watch over all of them). The church, La Iglesia Unida, is also a significant institution bringing people together, organizing communal acivities and keeping links with the Chaco.
She rejects the notion of marginality, as she says that people are in fact integrated in different levels, as well as functionally suboridnated to the city. She points to the fact of language loss, but this is not just a tendency in La Plata but in other urban neighborhoods in the Chaco region too. Kinship is significant way that connects people in the city as well as maintains ties with the rural communities that they visit with frequency. She observes that who travel the most are the married women who generally take the younger kids with them, they stay between one week and three months, and a lot of times the purpose of the trip is to tak care of an ill relative. (paraphrasing page 197). The places they are most in contact with is Quitilipi, Pampa, and Bo. Toba Resistencia. The women political participation in the neighbourhood is secondary and regarded as "help" to the men, thus they are responsible of going to state institutions when men cannot. She concludes that there is not a single identity being produced in the city but a a complex subject position in relation to ethnicity, class, religion. Thus the city is a locus with which the tobas relate but not a space with a rigid socializing structure that is imposed over them. Overall she wants to contribute a better understanding about the internal migrants who hve gone to the city and are regarded under this generic category but many times forced to keep indigenous adscription aside.

beasley-murray posthegemony

notas sobre la intro y conclusion de las versiones nuevas. va sin citas por inedito pero aca esta bastante.

Beasley Murray proposes to break equally with the concept of hegemony and civil society, and with this he makes a citic of cultural studies and the social studies of civil society. He proposes to rewrite the relation of the cultural with the political, and what is culture and politics, through the concepts of habit (Bourdieu), affect (Deleuze) and multitude (Hardt and Negri). The book critiques theory as well as it critiques the state, meaning, constituted power, trascendence, distance, closure, and many other (as for example the organizational dichotomies of subaltern/hegemony) as principles constituting the social, in this his critique is also situatited within the social, his study is not a better presentation of the world to then better act on it but is situated within, attempting to provide "constitutive" concepts.

The critique to hegemony is double, it is in a way temporal, as it is in the context of postmodernity that people seem to not be convinced of any elite conduction and by any grand narrative of ideologies, but is also transversal and terminant: "there is no hegemony an never has been". If critiques of post modernity agree in claiming that power has lost its location in the state, it has now diffused in the social, for him this is not an expansion of hegemony, but rather the consolidation of power as biopower as a control over the body, the "small" everyday and "private" actions.

By using this term cultural studies make a problematic sustitution: the state is taken for granted and replaced by (dominant) culture. The theory of civil society, by assuming a rational subject as agent, disregards culture and only focuses on politics. The critique to hegemony is over the work it does as a concept: it generates the "hegemony of hegemony" making and presenting the consensus as a need for society, and thus the state as necesary. Civil society takes a reasonable subject as its base (and of a mind that guides action), and thus the agreement of reasonable minds will derive into harmonious, non self destructive actions. Cultural studies take discrete identities at its base and thus understnads the social as articulations of equivalents in a chain of meaning. Both disregard the state as a construction of habit, and reinforce state's power by its interest in discursive regimes and transcendence. But he claims the social is not gathered by agreement -a contract whose grantor is the state- but rather by habit and affect.

By habit he follows Bourdieu, in his claim that social order is neither created by rule nor by consensus but rather through the internalization of a social world through the repetition of habit. Habit is embodied practice not pre-announced by conscious decision making but by a embodied knowledge of how to act. Habit is the structure of dispositions for actions, and is not mechanical reproduction nor automatous motion. Thus habit explains how the social is activated and recreated, and how the state is also embodied habit (in this he is close to Abrams but not exactly).

In introducing affect he follows Deleuze to focus on the inter/ impersonal and embodied flows that activate or decrease action. Affect is also in a different avenue than consciousness, discourse and emotion, all of the manifestation of the canalizing and capture of affect. Affect is also not restricted to the human, but is a capacity of any body/idea/configuration of affecting other bodies, and the capacity of them to being affected. The question is then about surfaces, contact and the possibilities of enhancing, diminishing transforming that affect rather than a question of interpelation, representation, resignification.

In taking the Negri's notion of the multitude he is simultaneously distancing of the ideals of popular democracies, that he claims would be the regime backed up by cultural studies, and of a civil society controlling the state, a model that is the bases of many political studies projects. The multitude is the subject constituting society, it is always prior to the state and any form of constituted power. It is like the working class to value, but in producing society, it generates it and then allienated form it (esto es una cita que no encuentro). Thus is feared by both state and the sovereign as this other that holds the power in which their dominium rests. The multitude is linked by affect and habit and thus is pre individual.
The multitude is also always open. It prevails as long as multiplicity of singularities remain acting as a single (composed) body, when the intensities and speeds are two different and the distance is such that what affects a body does not affect the others the multitude disolves, or dies as a body/subject. The multitude thus overflows the distinction of hegemony and subaltern, as it tends to the absolute by the constant expansion of limits. This expansion is done by contact rather than a contract, teh contract for him is what founds civil society by capturing the multitude and transforming it. Revolt, insurgency are part of the expanding force of the multitude who always betrays constitutive and the contract. The contract creates a separation and projects it as a natural distinction the people and the state, it creates the individual subject of law and frames it as a necessity for human and social, when in fact they capture and formalize affect and encode habit.

The multitude works over and results form what are common resources, the triggering of the common are love (as pleasure from an encounter with other, desire of togetherness), money (as an also fluid ubiquitous and connecting force), corruption (as a connecting expanding force that overmines established rules, unlike Negri for the author the question is wether it is self destructive or not). It is it continuously expanding and thus creates a continuous commonality.



Termino despues me falta recorrer rapidamente el analisis:
Latin America: requerimiento, peronism, sendero, salvador, chile, venezuela. Que loco estoy buscando la version final de esto y no lo encuentro estuve un par de dias rellenando esto con los distintos analisis y se perdio maldicion.
preguntas

ubc alumni

Que suerte que tengo que soy ubc alumni.


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varias

que los ruralistas insistan en lo cortes de rutas me parece ya una inversion diabolica de la protesta. uno a uno estan haciendo mimesis de las salidas interesantes de los movimientos sociales para continuar este conflicto. no se si sera una nueva vuelta de la histora sobre si misma esta vez como farsa, pero bueno los cortes de ruta en el "interior" y las cacerolas en el bs as la verda que ya me indignan, quizás anuncian que nos movemos hacia otro lado.

al mismo tiempo antropología y guerra en el primer mundo (que se parce cada vez mas al resto del mundo).

y mientras tanto, llevo 20 meses de estudio de doctorado. continua el ciclo que sigue el de planear y coordinar programas de educacion, de ver grupos de chicos varias vece por semana y eventualmente capacitar docentes y eventualmente docentes rurales y de viajar a formosa y bariloche.mintras tanto la tarea de conectar las anotaciones y escribir decentemente, y dejar la adiccion de seguir leyendo.

de la cadena

Marisol De La Cadena makes a historical analysis of the discourses on indigeneity in Cuzco during most of the 20th century. In them she demonstrates how the categorization that define what is indigenous and what is partly indigenous and what is not, are blurry and have changed many times during the period. The changes are explained in relation the production of power in Cuzco, but also in the dynamics between Cuzco and the country, and Lima. Hence he takes a localized perspective but without disregarding broader issues as national dynamics or the weight of international processes.

Her starting question is in relation to a blurry definition of indigenous mestizos which two university students present to her in Lima. The category presented her with the complexity of the social classification, which combines both the production of a racial ideology along with the relevance of cultural markers of ethnicity. The work demonstrates how this are two intertwined processes that cannot be analyzed separately. Even the discourses on racial determination have been strongly denied in the mid 20th century, the type of essentialism it carried were incorporated by culturalist perspectives which reproduced images of ethnic primordiality. This is what she calls a “culturalist definition of race” as the underlying logic of current matrix of subjectivities.
In this way she follows the way hegemonic discourses produced indigeneity, from traditionalist elites to leftist movements, to understand the “silent forms of racism” (p 40).

In her genealogical exploration she first presents the elaborations made by the 1920s elite members indigenistas, indigenists, who develop a reification of indigenous as a glorious past, now in decadency. According to their logic present indigenous are degenerated representatives of this past culture. Thus indigenous were valued as long as they keep a communal life, preserve their culture unchanged, and they had a controlled sexuality restricted to their ethnic group. She then shows how the triumph of liberal indigenists encouraged the incorporation of indigenous to the national project. They did this by promoting their progress through literacy campaigns and the development of particular policies. Indigenous in this period are assigned a subaltern place, as owners of an inferior culture. Race is now not explicitly mentioned but becomes eclipsed by culture. In this period, the category of peasants was introduced, under a perspective of class dominant in the international arena. The neoindianistas in contrast to indigenistas welcomed cholos, this is the sexual openness (of indigenous women having children form white men, never the opposite) that permitted mestizage, as a path to improvement of the race. In the 1960s leftist movement overtook an important critic to racial categories and wanted to promote a struggle in terms of class. The reinvention of an inka tradition was a result of this period. Finally in the 1980s the discourse on class was left behind, being the arena dominated by academic and political discussions.

A point of my interest is the relation between identity and places, De La Cadena developed. She points out the importance of places shaping subjectivities, as indigenous who migrate to the city are automatically considered indigenous mestizos. In this way each category has a spatial correlation. Indigenous location is the rural highlands, the indigenous mestizos, aquire this category by education and life in the city, while mestizos is the general urban population that lost ties with indigenous cultural markers, finally whites are city dwellers, particularly (but not only) form the coast, and members the elites and with a high education. In this regard the processes of migration have been variably understood as degeneration first, and as progress and integration latter. This spatial matrix has a close relation to processes undergoing in the Gran Chaco region in Argentina (see Vivaldi 2005).

For indigenistas this morality was a condesensed in the meaning of decencia, decency. Decent were the indigenous that kept their culture alive and had a controlled sexuality. Decent were educated white men, who could have indigenous lovers without affecting their reputation. Decent white women had control over their sexuality, and were the appropriate wife for white men, that could satisfy their intellectual needs and higher type of love. Indescents were the mestizos who had an uncontrolled sexuality (thus the object of white men’s fantasies) and were un educated and had lots their indigenous traditions. In contrast to decencia the chapter that focus the market mestizo women, the cholas, develops the new category condensing a new type of morality, the respeto, respect.

Being the market women recognized mestizas and city dwellers, the values they defend is not about having correct sexual behaviour, but rather is the self determination and empowerment of being economically independent, accessing to education, defying the constraints of governmental disciplining actions (for example police control in the market). In this way towards the end of the book she show the paradox of how respeto even challenging the negative stigmas of an indigenous identity, by stating their successful experiences in economic and educational spheres, they reproduce the hegemonic terms that classify people according to economic position and degree achieved in the formal education system. Paradoxically this new system of classification reproduces marginality recombining gender, sex, ethnicity, race and geographical position.

The question that remains open is which is the connection between the production of this categories through time and the way they are currently operating in everyday practices. We do have a close approach on the way market women build their particular positioning. Yet the work leads the question of how current production of masculinity and femininity, racial purity and mixing, indigenism, urban/rural relations, take place in everyday interactions of Cuzquenio men and women. Probably her field notes and interviews are full of reference into this direction. To answer this questions and advance into the analysis of this material would probably require a second book.

raffles

In this book Raffles analyzes how a place that has always been conceived as the essence of nature, the Amazon, is in fact the result of human labour, and so a social construction. To give an account of this idea he develops a micro ethnography of how the opening of a canal is related to the production of hegemony of a family in an area, and the production of a particular type of relations of production. I will not develop the details of his argument, but rather I am interested in pointing out some original ideas the author presents.

The opening of the book shows how the settlers of the region have strategically created the rivers and canals that appear to be a total natural creation to the outside spectator. In a micro-historical analysis he shows how people leaving in the region have always transformed the natural landscape. After the introduction of the book he describes how channels are a fundamental feature of Amazonian landscape, as they make possible economic exploitation, transport and communication. They have been opened by the settlers of the region, mestizos recognized as cabolcos (not the stereotypical “Indians” object of numerous Amazonian ethnographies), with different purposes: access to timber woods, access to farmed lands, to hunting and gathering zones, communication with other settlers or ways to the town, among others. In this ways channels are social products but also the result of social contradictions.

What he is really proposing is that rather than considering that there is a natural system that is transformed by social production, natural places always the result of the particular social relations of the people inhabiting this place. In this way he inverts the logic of Cultural Ecological analysis in anthropology that emphasise the way nature constrains and determine economic organization of societies. He breaks with the division between environment and society. The author understands the natural environments as the result of a dialectic relation between natural forces and social agents. One example is how channels are opened in the surrounding area of Veigas family shop as a result of the work relations established in the aviamento. A system in which people are allowed to explode the lands of Veigas family only if they sell the product to him and buy in his shop. Channels then, are a dynamic place and also a place worth fighting for (cfr. Gordillo 2004).

The author considers the agency of nature and society as analogous processes. What can be objected from this position is that even both human and natural forces imply transformative effects over places; it is hard to consider a type of consciousness to natural processes. The concept of agency was developed to include the individual innovations and decision making effecting the shape of social structure. It implies interactions where social distinctions are shaped (see for eg. Bourdieu 2000). It is hard to include effects of climate, biological cycles and animal behaviour in the same category of this particular dialectic between subjects and cultural structure. In particular he is disregarding the implications of production of meaning as a constructive force of places. As we have seen, Taussig (1987) demonstrated the relevance of the imagination, fiction and symbols as an aspect of reality. In this sense considering the agency of nature is implicitly inconsistent with the conceptualization of social relations in Taussig’s analysis.

Raffles seems to be confused by the perceptions of the people he is working with is in that he analyses the natural forces, as well as social interactions, as agents shaping the landscape. The river’s over flooding and erosion appears to be a force challenging from an equal positioning, the humanly built places (as the house of the Veiga’s family). The confusion Raffles seems to follow to closely the people he is working with representations. In this way getting a close insight perspective permits Raffles to analyze the importance of the river as deeply social produced and conflictive place. He sees this processes through the cabolcos eyes that have memories over the production and transformation of streams. However, he takes this view literally and considers that the transformations due to natural processes, such as floods, of human localities is the result of a type of consciousness of the river challenging this human action. These ideas may also be the result of falling into the western traditional conceptions, which he is trying to deconstruct in chapter 3, of civilization versus nature, as two analogous competing potencies.

A final interesting implication of the microanalysis the author does is the way he shows how struggles over hegemony as producing and transforming places. In this way he shares with other approaches on place how they are the result but also the object and tools of struggles (see Feldman, Gordillo, Harvey). But unlike other authors, Raffles shows how places become relevant but also how they fade away as a result of shifts in the production of power. I consider this is a very original contribution as power formation is generally the object of study and not so much how power is lost and what happens in those cases.

The objection we can still make to this is again maybe the result of a kind of sympathy of Raffles with the people he is working with. In this way he shows a type of nostalgia with Veigas hegemony and its location. This nostalgia, even making a vivid connection with the way tha place was in the past shuts some possibilities of analysis. For example even he mentions the new hegemony of but could further explore the way this ruined place of Veigas is built in relation to the new hegemony of the Macedos leadership embedded of a leftist unionized discourse that attributes Veiga as an old authoritarian patron. In the elements Raffles presents it seems that this new social configuration is built not only by shifting the power is located but maybe making an explicit contradiction of places between the old decaying shop an the new political patronage Macedo represents.

To conclude I consider that even the subtle critics that can be done to Raffle’s work, his perspective offers a very original and a new perspective over the studies of the Amazone. He makes a very interesting overview river as a place that challenges the more common analysis of places as a result of processes of delimitation. Even the river is well defined and boundarized the river is a place of constant movement and of transformation, is then a particular type of place that pushes us to consider movement as a strong factor of the constitution of locations (cfr Grossberg and De Certau). From a theoretical perspective his analysis of the disempowered places is an interesting proposition that can be included in any analysis on social space.

nelson

Commentary on Nelson’s: A finger in the wound. Body politics in Quincentennial Guatemala


Nelson’s book can function as a synthesis of different topics discussed during the course. Taussig (1987) operated as an opening work that challenged and deconstructed some of our previous ideas, and influenced the latter readings by creating in us a particular perspective. Nelson’s book re examines the issues concerning the politics of race, sexuality and ethnicity. Her work examines some of the issues opened by Taussig in his analysis of colonialism and the reproduction of colonial relations in the present. The establishment of a state of terror and the role of healing as a search of countering the wounds violence has left, may be related to the analysis of Nelson considering Guatemala as a fragmented body.

Nelson’ s analyzes the body politic in Guatemala using the image of an injured body with a finger deepening and not letting the wound to cure. As she advances in the analysis she shift to considering individual bodies constituted in relation to class, gender, race and ethnicity. Nelson’s analysis takes hand to many interesting metaphors referring to the body. The metaphors of fluidarity, orthopedic, fixing, piñata effect and splatter, all refer to different conditions of the body politics of Guatemala and to the subjective bodies of people. These concepts help us to think it as a fragmented and contradictory bodies rather than the representation of a well boundarized and united one.

I will examine the possibilities opened by these concepts in relation to her work.

She proposes the concept of fluidarity in connection to the concept of articulation such as developed as Stuart Hall, as a conjunctural and not permanent alliance of different social groups. The concept is developed in her positioning in the field, as an anthropologist positioned against the Guatemalan dictatorship and backing up social movements searching to change violence and inequalities. In this way she is referring to the constant production of identities and subjectivities in the shifting interactions. In them meanings, affect, pleasure and erotics are put into play, made and remade. Identity is then always incomplete, never fixed, vulnerable, partial and porous. Her identity as gringa is fluid as it is crated and interconnects her with people she met in Guatemala. Racial, national, class and gender distinctions are thus fluid. Fluidarity is the way identities are connected in some cases escaping form orthopedic actions of institutions. Orthopedy is performed form a site of power, is the reshape, direction and correction pre-existent bodies that produces a particular body politic.

Also the definition of the state is fluid. Following Tymothy Mitchell, she shows how the notion of state as an institutional corporation in opposition to civil society, has little sense, as state is created in the practice and meanings constantly produced by people. Not to observe this fluidarity, constitutes then the fetishims of the state, a term borrowed form Taussig. Fetishism as there is a veiling perspective in considering the state as an object detached from the social relations that produce it. They cretate the piñata effect that means that even in the context of a ruined state, recognized as corrupted and illegitimate, is still is recognized as an arena of struggle where some benefits can be achieved. This idea is condensed in the image of the piñata, if you hit the government you may get some sweets form it. So state fetishism is simultaneously challenged in the total recognition of its corruption, a corruption performed by the men producing it. Yet state (and its fetishism) is re-made in the practice of making claims to the state.

The fragmentation of the body, the bodies that splatter is related to the contradictory racialized categories organizing Gutemalan society. Being the indigenous and the emergence of ethnic claims a process feared as a finger in a profound non-healing wound. In this way she examines how indigenous are rejected not so much by whites but by ladinos who recognize their connection to them. Indigeneity is as have been analyzed by other authors attached to class condition and gender. Thus, one of the forms in which ladinos are defined is as better off indigenous. Indigeneity is then defined in relation to tradition (she points out the importance of traje the traditional dress) and also of a primordial biological relation (the son of an indigenous woman and a white man, in this case in indigenous). In this sense two contradictory logics coexist: the one considering a racial unity in ladinoness, that has homogenized the population, the other that considers the implications of mestizage as the conjunction of differential races where the indigenous claims remind that there are differential races. In this way ladinos, even disregarding racism fear a race war as the emergence of indigeneity is unavoidable. Ladinos also recognize indigeneity as a component of their identity. Thus the indigenous as race is categorized in the process of incorporation where indigenous are simultaneously an “other” but also the core of the national identity as a representation of a glorious past appropriated by the society as a whole. So indigenous as recognized as the condition of possibility of a ladino Guatemalan identity, but their contemporary claims are understood as a fragmentation of the Guatemalan body.

Orthopedic implies that when a body is injured it can still be fixed. In this way the injure that represent the indigenous identity can be both repaired by orthopedic measurements, controlling bodies. This function is related to the emergence of particular type of politics laws and action of professionals. Bodies that splatter can be corrected and can be fixed to a particular site visible to control of power. Society can then be remade not by an homogenizing effect but by the creation of controlled threads linking the fragments.

Nelson leads us with body politic that has the shape of a Frankeinstein creation. A society of control where heterogeneity is feared yet accepted if has been corrected and fixed. However this body politic is inevitably fluid, thus cannot be totally normalized and immobilized. The spalttering of Frankestein is always a possibility.

Wright la colonizacion del espacio, la palabra y el cuerpo en el chaco

imagen de una articulo sobre lituratura de los desiertos


this commentary goes with some of my own added ideas. probably this essay could be turned into a much longer work, but guides what i could be doing with archival work and what type of events i can be looking for.


The brief but densely interesting paper explores the effect of the colonization of the chaco in the constitution of new types of order for chaquenian indigenous societies. Specifically the constitution of a new space, regime of language and body. The transition to a new spatiality only happened after the highly aggressive military campaigns that took control of the territories of the last indigenous society with a political and social autonomy. The military invasion demonstrated the defeat of previous the missionary and state attempts that combined both military "entradas" (advances) and the settlement of mission stations. Both were attempts of domesticating the savage nature of both indigenous and space.

With the consolidation of the state there was a new interest in gaining control over the land and territories in order to turn the chaco into a productive region for capitalist economy. The transformation of the space started by a delimitation of the spaces of colonization form the space of "the bush" a generic category implying a moral geography (my words) of savagism. The colonization efforts was then the transformation of this inhuman space into civilization and humanity as he quotes form the prefect of the Chaco -franciscan- Misions (fray Pedro María Pelichi) "no bautizaba sino a los que se hallaban en peligro de muerte, por que bien sabía que es preciso esperar que los salvages se hagan primero hombres para que sean despues verdaderos cristianos". It is though toil,that the Franciscans considered this can be achieved. The bush however remains as a space that is constantly threatening missionary efforts to fail.

The space of the missions and state reductions functioned as civilizatory islands, beyond which savagism and unruliness still prevailed. (as other authors show) Every time the indigenous live the missions, the habits that the priest were able to inculcate among them were lost, the missionaries complain that when returning form the bush the indigenous kept on behaving in their usual uncivilized manner still living "desnudos y de la caza" (naked and hunting and gathering) . (In other work Wright analyzes the contemporary contrasts among the indigenous of Tacaglé Mission between labour and hunting-gathering as a result of the incorporation of the missionary logic. In my ba thesis i analyze how this category is reappropriated among the Tobas of the lote who collapses the terms and claim that "marisca es trabajo") Thus space and body were connected in both its unruliness and as "site of operation" of the civilizatory power. Work more than the producton of economic goods was in this case the production of the human, a mean of inscribing a human habit to this non yet humans.

Finally even he does not quote Mignolo, he makes a point very close to his, by pointing to how the indigenous were also subjugated by the legitimation of a single regime of representation, which is spanish and the written language of bureaucracy. Interestingly he brings as an example the need of indigenous of carrying the documents of good conduct while traveling (generally to or form temporary work locations). This papers were written by any authority, from priests to state officials, to employers in the rural industries. This papers were thus showed to any white person meeting in their way as a proof of being good indians, already civilized and with no intention of attack. The indians were otherwise "always already" dangerous, something that legitimated killing non identified ones. (gordillo calls this part of what constituted a id paper fetishism among he analyzes in a recent article, he show how even with the papers some indigenous groups circulating were killed). this case is interesting for me as shows the early need of control over movement as another dimension of the colonization of chaco.

The Dynamics of Contingency

La defensa de proposal de Ms Sternberg se aproxima.... me gustar'ia ir por varios motivos,


*GEOGRAPHY COLLOQUIUM*

* *

*PhD Dissertation Proposal*

* *

*/Carolina/**/ Sternberg/*

*/Department of Geography/*

*/University/**/ of Illinois/**/ at Urbana-Champaign/**//*



*The Dynamics of Contingency: Neoliberal Growth Governances in Buenos Aires and Chicago*



ABSTRACT


Neoliberal growth governance has been ascendant worldwide in the last two decades and has come to profoundly influence mainstream urban politics. This project seeks to understand these formations from a comparative vantage-point, focusing on the global cities of Chicago and Buenos Aires. The study critically interrogates these governances to determine the degree to which they have significantly different institutional affiliations, operations, and outcomes. At issue is an important notion in the theorizing of these governances: contingent neoliberalism. While nascent research has suggested the possibility of a strong contingent aspect to these governances, its specifics remain under-explored.
The intellectual merits of this project thus rest on a novel focus: the study of contingent urban neoliberalism. Current work on contemporary urban governance in the west, to date, peripheralizes the centrality of contingency. Common sets of institutions, interests, programs, and motivations are seen to permeate and characterize these governances across the enormous diversity of places (Mitchell, 2001; 2004; Keil, 2002, Wilson, 2004). My study, in contrast, probes the nuances of these features to reveal their rich specifics and place-rooted basis. Using a cultural economy frame, my goal is not to marginalize the influence of structures that embed within capitalist economies and societies. Indeed, this is a foundational part of my study. However, I chronicle the inseparability of local-ness, place rootedness, historical specificity, human agency, and political variability that poignantly embeds within the human made operation and effects of locally circulating structures.



*Friday, October 3, 2008*

*3:00 PM*


219 Davenport Hall

*refreshments will be served*

Citro

este clasico de los illia k añade un glamour extranyo y apropiado al chaco.

Y mas sobre los toba y el cuerpo (estos eran una serie de articulos que quer'ia leer hace tiempo)

Citro's starting point is the studies of corporality among amerindian societies that focus on representational aspects of how the body is conceived. Assuming a some relative correspondence between representations and practices she proposes to focus on the habit of the Toba people that inform a particular form of relation with the world. She follows Csorda's notion of embodiment that make not a material body its object, but the way the social is produced, reproduced and exist as bodies move and act in particular ways. She thus follows four of the dimensions in which Foucault points that disciplining technologies shape the body and practice in order to make an analysis of the type of corporality of the Tobas of the rural easter chaco. She uses Foucault diemnsions not to understand how the toba were disciplined but rather how their habits have escaped in many ways this forms of regulation of conduct (she links the violence over the chaco as means of controlling the other wise uncontrollable for modernity, capitalism and the state).
If she sees in the persistence of particular non modern practices as source of active and passive resistance, she recognizes that this resistance is also limited by the lack of capacity to affect of tobas undisciplined bodies in the broader structure of the state, the structural subordination is the reason she finds to this. A subordination that allows the state to resignify this embodied otherness as corrupted and savage. If her proposition is really interesting and her account is attentive to alot of significant gestures one thing I cannot follow is why she need to make a cross cultural comparison in order to put into manifest difference. In this comparison i found difficult to follow a certain repertoire of action and response among the tobas. It is hard to make such an account without making an endless description of action that may lead nowhere. But I wonder if the emphasis on the continuity of the practices of the rural tobas that where visiting buenos aires and the stress of their specificity is the only way to make this. There is a lot I can take at the end of reading this no doubt, and habit that implies the extension of the person on the world, that informs action but also shapes the possibilities of improvising responses in new environments (this is a richness of the accounts of buenos aires), a type of ativities that both shape the world and also get engaged in precognitive activities in the world creating a particular adherence to the world while shaping the body in particular repertoire of preconscious movements (in this she follows merleau ponty and jackson). Finally a type of habit that informs perseption as an activity that generate embodied knowledge, thus the way senses and persption are shaped is informed too by habit.
The examples she brings are organized in: the coherence of representation of the body - world that organize practice: 1) sitting outside, exploring new environments and find signs for orientation, development of a wide rage of body actinos that demand strength and skill in certain forms of movement (form chopping wood, weaving, recollecting, to hunting), 2) body practice that evidence the un-discipline of the bodies such as not cleaning utensils or tyding up but when there is a practical need of reusing them, no need o private enclosed places (ie showering with door opened), 3) a different timing related with practicity rather than a regulated order over work and rest.

Gomez "El cuerpo por asalto"

Otro comentario sobre los tobas y el cuerpo. Este articulo de mariana relamente me gusta. E sun trabajo super minucioso de un tema que hasta ahora no se estaba haciendo visible e incluso se minimiz'o en arios casos.

Gomez analyzes the unequal gender relations among the tobas through the thread of sexual assault that women of while in the bush. She argues that the gender an sexual relations are unfold in a system of structural inequality, which is both manifested in the kinship and systems but that has also been the result of missionary work and their role in spreading a christian morality among the tobas, as well as their experiences in the sugar cane plantations during the first half of the 20th century.
The women of the rural communities of western formosa with whom she works go to the bush mostly to gather algarroba, during the harvest season, an to collect materials for their handicrafts. If the women unfold particular territorialities in their trips, each group using only some sectors of the forest. These trips are made with no masculine presence, it is in such context that the women meet the danger of finding men that may attack them. One strategy is for the women to always go in groups, to go to the bush alone is the. They also identify the machete and their own physical strength as ways of defending themselves in a the case of an attack. In these practices, the bush is produced as a non safe space for women, something that adds to the ambiguity of being also a place strongly identified with the practice that constitutes women's identity, this is the recollection and the production of handicrafts.
The bush is thus produced as non safe but is also experienced physically in this way. Women walking on the bush are alert constantly of any evidence of someone else's presence in the bush. If women and men engage in eventual sexual relations in the bush, and in this way it is constituted as a site both of experimentation but also of sexuality outside marital relation, men and women are not equally considered in this regard. Women's sexuality remains under control and safe as long as it is in the domestic areas and its surroundings, as far as the glance of husbands and other members of the family can reach.

The men are both exempted of having a bad reputation when engaged in these type of relations and are also participant in forcing the women into having sex in the bush. It is not uncommon, as Gomez registers form the accounts of many wome, group rape in which many men rape a single women or help other do it. The men attacking, who can be both members of the communities or neighboring criollos, legitimate their actions by regarding the female who go to the bush as not being careful enough.It is women who participate in this encounters who are categorized as "women who go out", thus as transgressors of the norm of staying within the social glance. Gomez, following Segato, understad rape not as an exepmtion but as a norm that serves to the purpose of limiting women's sexuality and generally limiting women's range of action. The unequal gender relations are thus constituted around the production of places, something that demarcates a relativity in the acceptability of violence, and defines the rage of action of what is acceptable for women to do. Both women's right to sexuality and the bush as a place are produced within ambivalent terms in which violence is accepted as a mean of constructing gender difference.