Thrift. Intensities of Feeling

Thrift, N. 2004 “Intensities of feeling: towards a spatial politics of affect.” Geograkiska Annaler Series B 86: 57–78

Thrift claims that there is a need for considering affect as a constitutive force of cities (largely ignored in the bibliography) , he considers it both as a field of new forms of the political and for the construction of knowledge about the city. He identifies three (plus one) lines of defining of affect: 1) coming from a phenomenological tradition as a set of embodied practices, that produce visible conduct as a response (rather than thought), the emergence of emotions are in relation to particular contexts of interaction, a process which escapes representation (it can rather support it); 2) originated in psychoanalytic ideas which understands drive as a main motor of human motivation and identity, emotions are in direct relation to desire, some reformulations recognize a series of motivations apart for drive; 3) building over Spinoza and Deleuze and Guatari on the idea of affect as adding capacities to a body of through it interactions with a world "which is constantly becoming"-this section is very long- ; 4) a Darwinian interest in the facial expressions as universal and not just human way of expressing physiological processes. His main question is how to think the way affect works as a political force, in the face that contemporary power is linking knowledge, technique and affect that tends towards an "engineering of affect" (64) expanding in urban landscape in 4 ways: 1) a change in the form of the political, from party politics to the emergence of agencies of choices that make more and more areas of life be part of a set of responsibilities also called "choice"; 2) the mediatization of politics that enhance the importance of the perfomative, by concentrating on affective sites and magnifying details, "one line of movement can become a progression of meaning able to actualized and implanted locally" (65)-here he refers to massumi's example of regan- and that "provide a new means of creating fractal subjects challenged to perform across a series of different situations in a way which demands not so much openness as controlled flexibility [ok, but then a perfomativity in front of the camera and space of ambiguity, or affect os always ambiguous?]; 3) new forms of calculation in sensory registers that allow manipulation of very small spaces of time politically (form managing small body movements to producing knowledge about them) embodiment is expanded once opned it can be manipulated politically, generating a new type of power is created through a "microbiopolitics".
We should think of the opening of the politic of affect in different ways: 1) as a care of the self or a reflexivity that triggers forms of channelling and repressing affect in relation to the circumstances; 2) as a politics of virtual as decorporizations and deterritorializations that can both limit encounter or generate new forms of it; 3) as a politics of hope as productive sense of life as positive engaging with the world. All this can contribute to building a politics of affect that are beyond forms of articulation. Finally there are 4 ways in which microbiopolitics is being constituted (in relation to the definitions of affect): 1) as an enhancement of receptivity by developing skilful response; 2) working on negative affects through reparative rejoining different range affects; 3) widen the potential number of interactions (of play, of changing effects of sensory modes into others -synesthesia?- and recognizing the neuropolitics (ver Collony); 4) the transmission of emotion through the face in order to trigger common emotion in "redemptive" and even therapeutic ways (his ex. Bill Viola's work).
His conclusion are kind of intriguing: the politics of affect can reunite the passions and thought; it is been done currently through collaborations between theoretical and practical knowledge. This can both open new fields of the political as well as restoring old forms of it (bring back politics to discussion).

Bueno todo esto es interesante. Me quedan muchas preguntas de todos modos. Un poco confuso como es que se espacializa el affecto, si es solamente en estos micromovimientos y estos microespecios de tiempo, pero entonces que pasa con los punto de operacion de mayor esacala y que pasa con efecto de mayor escala, la ciudad que es en definitiva su interes. Algo de eso hay en la multiplicidad de formas de actualizar una misma linea de sentido. Que pasa con las formas mediatizar el espacio urbano por ejemplo o como el espacio puede disparar afectos en el cuerpo, en y fuera de la ciudad. Me generan dudas el enfasis en la mediatizacion visual, pesnando en el trabajo de Hirschkind, por ejemplo. Estaría buena alguna mensión a como se relaciona el proyecto the Thrift con los rusos hablando de desautomatizar la percepsión.

Antes de la salida del sol

Pez - Toda la mañana

Mary Louise Pratt

No es ficha de las que debo hacer, pero unas notas del Afterword de ML Pratt y con esto termino mi puesta al día con el tema indigenidad (curioso que en 15 de seminarios de ma y doc no volví sobre este tema directamente), las fichas que quedan son los tipicos de siempre. Bueno ML Pratt, otra vez esta muy bueno lo que dice, toma una distancia intersante de los trabajos y tambien del campo. No la distncia que toma Clifford que sobrevuela etnografías para justificar la defensa de la diaspora, sino una distancia sintetizadora y que finalmente busca algunos temas transversales. La introduccion de Starn y de la Cadena quizas se queda a medio camino en tratar de unir a los distintos trabajos como dimensiones de una difusa y mutante indigeneidad. Hace una critica fuerte a todos los trabajos pero no como un juego de remate, sino con mucha potencialidad.

ML Pratt habla otra vez de la multiplicidad de caminos por los que está navegando el indigenismo contemporaneo, desde academicos indigenas en universidades norteamericanas a huelgas de hambre de presos politicos indígenas. Todo esto habla de cambios en los terminos de las relaciones indígenas - no indigenas, pero tamben el surgimiento de nuevos actores y escenarios políticos. Todos los articulos (Indigenous Experince Today) muestran la relevancia da la categoría indígena en distintos escenarios contemporaneos y aun en los casos en que la categoría no es reclamda. En todos los casos el termino indigena (aborigen, nativo originario, etc. en ingles dice ella, pero tb en español) hace refencia a una relacion a una temporalidad: estar "antes de" el arribo de otros. En esta relación estos otros colonizadores que arriba son el primer termino que le otrogan temporalidad a los colonizados. Es decir que los que "estan antes" solo entran a escena en segundo lugar, cuando son invadidos. antes del encuentro entonces? Otro tiempo del cua dependerá luego a identificación en tanto indígena. Es decir que se indigena es a la vez relacional y dependiente de la continuidad -perfomativa- de una identidad no relacional, propia de la temporalidad anterior al encuentro. De modo que ser indigena se transforma en un proceso constante de "becoming", autodefinición, de la cosntitución de un modo colectivo de ser en el tiempo y el espacio.
Por otro lado lA identificación como indigena no es tanto un la identidad primaria, sino que surge de una reflexion de comunalidad entre tobas y adivasi y de un proyecto politico común.
Sobre a coenferencia que reunió los trabajo publicados reflexiona, que a discusion en todos los casos giró mas en torno a la categoría indígena, con discusiones entre los mas escepticos en cuanto al privilegio implicito en esta categoría y quienes la encuentran ineludible y quienes muestran liminalidades. Pero en todos los casos se excluyo a la "experiencia" y varias aspectos que podrían pensarse tambien trasversalmente: violencia, exclucion, suicidios, adicciones, criminalidad, violencia religiosa, genero y sexualidad "the unrelentening transgressiveness of the erotic that leaves no boundary uncrossed" )400). Y sigue con las implicancias politicas de esto, (cito en extenso)
"It was overdetermined that our deliberations would begin and end with the claim that indigeneity today is much complicated than people think. We performed the always legitimating scholarly gesture of presenting complicated truth against ignorance and reductive ideology. This gesture informs, often enchants, but it also leaves things much in their place. demonstrating complexity does not require or demand new ways of thinking. It seems unbearable that this should be the most scholars are able to do. IS there any way to grasp indigeneity not as a condition but as a force?" (400)

Acuerdo con esto pero me parece que pasa por alto que algunos de los artículos estan haciendo esto, no tanto tomando el esquema indigena sino viendo por que actua como fuerza, como es que hace confluir y que permite salidas (claro Tsing, Briones, tb De la Cadena 2002). Aca por lo menos me surge pensar en las condiciones de trabajo intelectual en Argentina al menos, donde no tenemos recursos materiales para ir a recorrer rincones perdidos del mundo entero, sino que trabajamos mas o menos cerca de casa, pero somo siempre localizables y estamos siempre interpelados mas facilmente, a menos por la gente con la que trabajamos pero tambien por el estado, en donde todos trabajamos. En esto podemos seguir pensando en las categorías de activismo, critica y sus combinaciones, pero no creo que podamos equiparar el campo de tensiones y hablar de implicancias politicas del trabajo critico de forma generica. En todos los casos me parece que los argumentos por escrito nos pueden ayudar a seguir pensando, pero justamente entender al indigenismo ( o lo que sea) como fuerza implicaría involucrarse en tanto fuerza. Bueno escribiremos mas sobre esto con Laura probablemente.

Bueno vuelvo a MLP, que termina su critica proponiendo que si el indigenismo se piensa generalemnte en base a una esquema cognitivo que permite una serie de definiciones y confluencias politicas, tambien restringe las nuevas configuraciones y que las nuevas experienciasse consideren parte de esta condición (ej Lorena en Briones) . Es por esto que propone pensar la indigenidad en términos generativos. Diferentes coyunturas y experiencia históricas "will activate different sources of energy" (402) con efectos no predecibles pero quepueden entenderse en retrospectiva (claro). aca entonces vulve a Tsing en que "indigeneity is produced y particular points of friction in specific settings" Como ejemplos pone a Marginalidad espacial (Remoteness), Territorialidad y subsistencias (ej modos de vida que son amenazados por un afurza externa), pueden ser nodos desencadenantes de indigeneidad. Pero tambien el modo en que s plantea la relación indígena - no indigena "has the power to obstruct the working out o difference on an equal footing" (403) (Generativity) conceives indigeneity not as a configuration or a state, but as a force that enables, taht makes things happen. This generativity, I would suggest, lies not only in what indigeneity makes happen in a given instance but also in the unrealized possibilities that it creates in every situation, and that remains as potentialities that can be activated in the future. One imagines indigeneity then as unfolding in space-time that generates realized and unrealized possibilities. (403) " Para que en ultima instancia, las indigenidades cobren forma solamente para luego desarmarse y pasar a ser otra cosa.

el videito de hoy: Pez

Briones

Bueno aca el articulo de Claudia sobre el que ya hablé, formo parte -marginal- de estos planteos asi que no puedo hacer una critica desde afuera. Me ayuda pensar en las maquinarias triples, me ayuda pensar formaciones de self, aunque esto es nuevo para mi. Si me pasa dos cosas, comparto con Cluadia el interes por pensar en formación de sujetos no solo como identidades o agencias o subjetividades, y me parece util pensar en comunalizaciones pero a la vez, con as ods cosas juntas me interesaría pensar en sujetos mas colectivos y menos individuales, quizas si me esta resonando pensar en efectos, que en definitiva es o que plantea tambien esta postura, si bien lo sedimenta un poco mas. Es decir que la idea de comunidad como construccion de pasado, lazos primordializadores, ayuda pero me resulta menos interesante una vez que sabemos que esto si pasa. Tambien mencionar que me gustaría pensar en las movilidades no solo como estructuradas sino tambien como escapes, claro que las posibilidades no son infinitas.


Para mas Campaña de autoafirmacion

Geaprona


Briones, Claudia 2007 Experiences of Belonging and Mapuche Formations of Self in Indigenous Experience Today. Marisol de la Cadena and Orin Starn eds. New York and London: Berg and Wenner Gren Foundation


Claudia Briones argues that identity and its politization is just a starting point on our understanding o much complex processes of individualization and communalization, one in which being mapuche is differently understood and felt and non the less a convergent force. She discusses how a process of differentiation with the Mapuche movement triggers discussions and actions that reshape the understanding of what is the understanding of the political and the very nature of the struggle in which Mapuches are involved. She uses the concept formations of self as an alternative to the notions of individuation in terms of subjectivity and identity. Formations of self emerge form regional geographies of inclusion and exclusion that “delineate a series of structured mobilities that foster mapuches –or may eve preclude- the opportunity and desire to come together despite differences.” (101). If these fields of available possibilities are read according to different maps of meanings, these “contested maps also promote different strategic installations and affective investments of belonging.” (101). Political economy of the production of difference help both to understand the challenges and reinscripton of hegemonic construction of aboriginality in mapuche self perception and performances that struggle for a better positioning in national and regional systems of stratification. Emerging identities with the mapuche movement are less a result of globalizing identities than trajectories available to the mapuches today and since colonization. In analyzing shifting youth mapuche identities self defined as mapunkies and mapurbes she prefers to follow Tsing in her notion of friction that both question the spaces of identity and desestabilize them while provisionally occupying them, a more useful notion than thinking through ideas of fusion and hybridity. She considers diversity in Mapuche movement more as a possibility for political articulation than a restraint, in this the different categories of youth adscription from exclusively mapuche (and denying the possibility of being mapuche and punky) to the map-urbes. She follows Grossberg in his proposition of thinking “identities” as formed through stratifying, territorializing and differentiating machines. In this subjectivity is an “unequally distributed universal value” (111) and “Experiences of the world are produced form particular positions, that although temporary determine access to knowledge and bring about attachments to places that individuals call ‘home’ and form which they speak. In the case that I analyze , these machines have created positions of subalternity and alterity that as Fakundo explains, force Mapuche to live in poor neighborhoods in Patagonian cities.” Commonality is created in the sense of being involved in a common “lucha” against forms of exploitation, but it also come from the diverse experiences that are narrated and become manifestations of a shared past. Both things transform “common people” into “luchadores”. Yet a sense “that the struggle has just begun” also comes form the different positions form which the struggle has been enunciated, so if previous generations focused in land claims and legal recognitions, youth consider that the struggle goes in other direction, such as including the experiences of marginal neighbourhood kids and making a mapuche appropriation of the city.

Tendre que dedicarme cada vez menos tiempo a esto y producir mas anotaciones lisas y yanas

Clifford

Otra ficha interminable. No me mata el texto, en realidad bastante pesado aunque necesario. Una defensa al concepto de diaspora -Clifford seguramente es amante de los barrios chinos globales-, ahora para pensar en las multilocalidades "indígenas". Sin duda es un tema que preocupa a varios, hasta que punto que la definición de indígena resida en anclarse a una localidad no resulta en definitiva un nativismo conservador (tacheriano clama alguien) que como minimo excluye entrada de nuevos grupos a un espacio y en lo mas extremo agita violencias con los "otros" (Tsing, Kuper, Baviskar). Mas que preocuparse en resolver este problema, o como definir soberanía indígena cuando hablamos de múltiples y "entangled sovereignties" (Moore), Clifford se dedica a defender por ue sería beuno seguir hablando de dispora a pesar del borramiento de lo politico que implica este concepto. Su argumento básico es que en las múltiples relocalizaciones (algo que podría ser parte de la definicion de indigena mas que su localización) ofresen grados variables de "disporicidad" - indigenidad. La pregunta no sería tanto si la gente pertenece o no al territorio sino como definien su lugar de origen y que relación guardan con este lugar. En este esquema hay varios modelos desde "indígenas diasporicos", "indígenas urbanos" a "circular migrants", "rural cosmopolitanism". La dispora tambien se cruza con los saltos de escala que posibilitan que un grupo localizado genere articulaciones con otros grupos y globalice su lucha, que se conformen identidades regionales, transnacionales (etc), como el termino mismo "indigena" lo plantea.

En general tengo dos problemas, uno es la idea de gradiente de mas localizacion a mas distancia, otro es que se piense esto como novedad. Mas que una tipología me interesaría pensar como despliegan movimiento distintos grupos y que es lo que los fija, que se pone en juego con el movimiento, que le pasa a la gente que se traslada, que pasa en el momento del viajeen si, como se construye distancia, (mudarse de barrio a veces es mas distante que cruzar el mar). Bueno y varias cosas mas. Respecto a la novedad, por momentos me parece un pregunta importante y por momentos me resulta un poco ridiculo insistir en las novedades y maravillarse con indios que "dwell in aiplanes" bueno si, las maquinas que hacemos (las de las que trabajan con, a pesar y a traves - las maquinarias y las maquinas- nuestro marcan diferencias, sin duda. pero entonces la maravillarse por el indio en el aeropuerto (aeropuertos, siempre), el indio que manda mails, termina siendo una apelación de novedad en donde hay muchas cosas mas interesante que pensar. en todo caso pensar que es lo distinto del viaje, que imagenes circulan ahora y se ponen en juego, efecto de que es el viaje, que trabajo hace el viaje, que lineas traza, necesita lugares y hogares el desplazamiento?
Bueno bueno estoy con baja tolerancia para gente con ganas de reflexionar sobre lo maravilloso de su jet lag y los barrios chinos que son casi casi como estar en la misma china. Igual esta bien Clifford.


Clifford, James 2007 “Varieties of Indigenous Experience: Diasporas, Homelands, Sovereignties” in Indigenous Experience Today. Marisol de la Cadena and Orin Starn eds. New York and London: Berg and Wenner Gren Foundation
Indigenous experience is difficult to restrict to the experience of being “of on place” yet whether or not they claim indigenous identity they are defined as having long roots in a locale and having experienced violent occupation, expropriation, displacement. This definition generates a wide spectrum of experiences involved . To understand the dynamics of the constantly changing configurations of indigeneity he proposes to open up concepts like native and sovereign, in their implications of a fix attachment – control of a people to bounded place, arising form the everyday practices o mobility and dwelling, or the superposition of multiple sovereignties. Particularly he wants to break down the opposition between indigenous and diasporic experiences, finding that in some cases they overlap, he wants thus to explore diasporic dimensions of indigenous experience. One case could be the relation of urban indigenous people with their homelands, and the cyclicall returns. Contrarily to assume (and critique its nativist backward nature) in indigenous groups negates the “indigenous forms of interactive cosmopolitanism” in which most indigenous groups have been involved and that configure other dimension to the multiple scales of any process of identification. Diaspora has been critizied for not being a uniform process of “long distance nationalism”. For Clifford “This dialectical instability can be an analytic strength : the opposed tendencies of diasporic experience, exclusivism , and border crossing are good to think with. Indeed a contradictory complexity with respect to belonguing –both inside and outside national structures in contemporary social worlds may be diaspora’s most productive theoretical contribution “ (201) Diaspora may help describe situations of “connectedness-in-dispersion” of social groups, which are many times dismissed as acculturation and denied land claims, but that in turn conform greater scales of affiliation (as tribal, people, etc). The term also points to the sense of belonging outside the nation state where the group is situated. However diaspora is different form circular migration (between cities and villages) and borderlands, cases that show struggles for multiple access to different places (country and city, multiple localities), even when legal recognition is not granted. He thus proposes to recognize “pragmatic sovereignties” when the ties to place have not been lost. He proposes a continuum of relations with the homeland, form everyday contacts to seasonal or “deferred” returns.“ Dispersion in connection then allows the arising of a different scale of identification and the formation of transnational nets. Patterns of circulation then becomes associated with multiple, political economic and cultural forces that reshape sociability in the locations included in the net, this opens up the possibility of other types of patterns of modernity which do not just follow the traditional description of loss of traditional ties, rural poverty, etc. “Rather than a linear process of dis-embedding (or deterritorialization, one observes a transformation and extension of culturally distinctive spatial and social practices: reembedding, extending territories, dwelling with airplanes.” (209) different kinds of perfomance are required in specific relational sites. Of course diaspora cannot explain the constraints that lead to displacement or the restraints that people experience in diaspora. “In practice for those many self identified natives who dwell in, and circulate through urban and semiurban settings, there can be no essencial privative opposition between “indigenous and diasporic” experiences. The problem is a question of representation, one of the limits of what are considered realistic and is challenged by the emergence of “new” social subjects. Finally a question of multiple indigenous soveregnie socme to play, in the range for being “domestic dependent nation” to nation state or an economic corporation (as casinos), there are multiple types of indigenous “graduated sovereignty”, that show many examples of claims for sovereignty without secession (“struggles of freedom to modify the system of internal colonization” Tully). Ultimately for him sovereignty (as ideology or as a set of negotiated attempts of control) evokes pragmatic possibilities and structural limits.

tanta calma desespero

Friction

Una cita larga

While the situation in Indonesia is distinctive, it can also take us to the heart of the liveliest debates and discussions in contemporary scholarship. Thus, scholars of the Left have worried through how best to describe post-Cold War capitalism, with its global pretensions. Humanities scholars and social scientists tend toward opposite poles: Where the former often find the universalizing quality of capitalism its most important trait (e.g., Jameson 2002), the latter look for unevenness and specificity within the cultural production of capitalism (e.g., Yanagisako 2002; Mitchell 2002). Where the former imagine mobilization of the universal as key to effective opposition to exploitation (e.g., Hardt and Negri 2000), the latter look for resistance in place-based struggles (Massey 1995) and unexpected linkages (Gibson-Graham 1996).

The contribution of each of these works is stunning; yet placed in conversation they seem to block each other. There is a cross-disciplinary misunderstanding of terms here; as Jameson (2002: 182) explains, "the universal is [not] something under which you range the particular as a mere type."4 Social scientists have often done just that. But rather than rectify the disciplines, my goal is to grasp the productive moment of this misunderstanding. At this confluence, universals and particulars come together to create the forms of capitalism with which we live. There is no point in studying fully discrete "capitalisms": Capitalism only spreads as producers, distributers, and consumers strive to universalize categories of capital, money, and commodity fetishism. Such strivings make possible globe-crossing capital and commodity chains. Yet these chains are made up of uneven and awkward links. The cultural specificity of capitalist forms arises from the necessity of bringing capitalist universals into action through worldly encounters. The messiness of capitalism in the Indonesian rainforest exemplifies the encounters in which global capital and commodity chains are formed.

A related set of debates characterizes discussion of the new social movements that arose in the late twentieth century as vehicles of protest: human rights, ethnic identity politics, indigenous rights, feminism, gay rights, and environmentalism. Scholars are divided: Some see these movements as expressions of a frightening new force of global coercion, while others portray them as carrying hopes for freedom. The split here is not across disciplines but rather across audiences. Those who address themselves to cultural theorists stress the formation of new kinds of disciplinary power (e.g., Rabinow 2002); those who include activists in their audiences stress such movements' potential (e.g., Keck and Sikkink 1998).5 The former explain the universalizing logic of liberal sovereignty and biopower; the latter tell us of the urgency of particular cases. Again, these commentators talk right past each other; and, again, their intersection could be more productive. It is essential to note how protest mobilizations--including the Indonesian democratic movement of the 1980s and 1990s--rely on universalizing rhetorics of rights and justice. Through these, they make their case to the world; through these, too, they are shaped by liberal logics. Yet they must make these rhetorics work within the compromises and collaborations of their particular situations. In the process, new meanings and genealogies are added to liberalism. This does not mean people can do anything they want; however, it changes our view of liberal sovereignty--with its universals--to imagine it in concrete purchase on the world.

Both these discussions can benefit from a focused look at global connections. In the historical particularity of global connections, domination and discipline come into their own, but not always in the forms laid out by their proponents. On the one hand, this work can avoid the idea that new forms of empire spring fully formed and armed from the heads of Euro-American fathers. On the other hand, this work avoids too eager a celebration of a southern cultural autonomy capable of absorbing and transforming every imperial mandate. Instead, a study of global connections shows the grip of encounter: friction. A wheel turns because of its encounter with the surface of the road; spinning in the air it goes nowhere. Rubbing two sticks together produces heat and light; one stick alone is just a stick. As a metaphorical image, friction reminds us that heterogeneous and unequal encounters can lead to new arrangements of culture and power.

De la Cadena y Starn Indigenous Experience Today

Mas vale que deje de leer y escriba algo. Acá empiezo las fichas. Pero antes una nota sobre lo extraño de leer el artículo de Claudia -Briones- en la compilación que estoy por fichar, en inglés y en este contexto globalizador de la discusión de indigeneidad, pero hablando de la posición de Lorena , Oskar y Fakundo como jovenes mapurbes, y mapunkies, autónomos e independientes en contraposición a los jóvenes del cai herederos de la "conciencia" de sus padres-militantes. Esta lectura me recordó lo mucho que noches de charlas interminables, las múltiples presentaciones, las discusiones sobre la ciudad y las esquinas, las noches de recitales y gira, los encuentros y bailes en circulo, en mi ciclo de movilidad durante cuatro años provocaron muchas de las cosas que estoy pensando. Otra cosa que sigue haciendo ridículo definir al "campo". Bueno inglés y libros.

de la Cadena, Marisol and Starn, Orin 2007 "Introduction" in Indigenous Experience Today. Marisol de la Cadena and Orin Starn eds. New York and London: Berg and Wenner Gren Foundation

The authors set the discussion form some common grounds. Indigeneity show that the aspiration of the West to disseminate progress and civilize the others worldwide has not unfolded as it was expected. Contrarily indigenous populations (an -unstable-estimate of 250 million worldwide) still exist and constitute economic, cultural and social movement that do not just constitute alternative, counter force to modernity. Even though indigeneity is a lot of times intertwined with process of economic and social marginalization this is not a generalization we can make. Scholarly analysis seem to be dived among those who celebrate the political mobilization that indigeneity generates, and those who see it as problematic definition of boundaries and a machinery of exclusion.

A basic idea is then that "indigenous people are highly heterogeneous in their views and agendas" (2) Indigeneity is generated in complex nets of self and alter definitions in complex and "changing boundary politics and epistemologies of blood, culture, time and place" (3). Even present views on indigeneity tend to conform a coherent and enclosed definition of a "leftists environmentalist indigenous", this conform a "reverse Orientalism" (according to Ramachandra Guha). One configured in a history of Western epistemologies, policies and the indigenous interpellations and resistances that continued reconstructing difference, form savagery to one in need to be assimilated through development to current multiculturalism.

How then conceptualize indigeneity in the context a neoliberal multicultural politics that recognizes indigenous existence? "Indigeneity emerges only within larger social fields of difference and sameness; it acquires its "positive" meaning not form a some essential properties of its own but through its relation to what exceeds and lacks. (...) indigenous cultural practices, institutions and politics become such in articulation with what is not considered indigenous within the particular social formation where they exist. " In this indigeneity is historically contingent and names a relationship that implies a particular space- time (according Mary Louise Pratt).

The different forms this relationship took is not just a question of different ideologies, but effected material relations and state policies that configure post colonial formations, in which "colonizers" are not only form the West. The global indigenous movement was both conformed in the articulation of diverse indigenous activism and also in the travelling of the notion of indigeneity. It keeps insisting the waves of destruction that colonialism and capitalism generate (d), something that give a common ground to articulation with subaltern groups, which brings into play a diverse range of indigenous "positionings" enabled in contingent configurations that articulate "particular patterns of engagement and struggle" (according to Li).

Thus indigeneity is a field (not just of political identities but) of governmentality, subjectivity and knowledge, in which "becoming indigenous is always only a possibility negotiated within political fields of culture and history" (13) on "national formations of alterities" (Briones). Indigeneity encompasses questions of territory and political sovereignty, while challenging the "ethnospacial fix" of (Moore) that veil displacement, expulsions and "indigenous diasporas" (Clifford).

In many cases there is a "perverse confluence” of neoliberalism and political mobilization that conform new gorvernmentalities. Finally if indigenous self representation and collaborative work is currently an opening which opens a series of new possibilities, it also has to be acknowledge that asymmetric relations are not just erased in the act of collaborating, rather academic and non academic, north south, "local" and "universal" among other lines tend to complex entanglements of power, form which the formation of hybrid genres is only one of the possibilities.

Well Marie Louise Pratt takes lots of this ideas into a very very lucid after word.

Contents:

"Introduction," Marisol de la Cadena and Orin Starn

Part 1: Indigenous Identities, Old and New
“Indigenous Voice,” Anna Tsing
“Tibetan Indigeneity: Translations, Resemblances, and Uptake,” Emily T. Yeh
“‘Our Struggle Has Just Begun': Experiences of Belonging and Mapuche Formations of Self,” Claudia Briones

Part 2: Territory and Questions of Sovereignty
“Indigeneity as Relational Identity: The Construction of Australian Land Rights,” Francesca Merlan
“Choctaw Tribal Sovereignty at the Turn of the 21st Century,” Valerie Lambert
“Sovereignty's Betrayals,” Michael F. Brown

Part 3: Indigeneity Beyond Borders
“Varieties of Indigenous Experience: Diasporas, Homelands, Sovereignties,” James Clifford
“Diasporic Media and Hmong/Miao Formulations of Nativeness and Displacement,” Louisa Schein
“Bolivian Indigeneity in Japan: Folklorized Music Performance,” Michelle Bigenho

Part 4: The Boundary Politics of Indigeneity
“Indian Indigeneities: Adivasi Engagements with Hindu Nationalism in India,” Amita Baviskar
“‘Ever-Diminishing Circles': The Paradoxes of Belonging in Botswana,” Francis B. Nyamnjoh
“The Native and the Neoliberal Down Under: Neoliberalism and ‘Endangered Authenticities',” Linda Tuhiwai Smith

Part 5: Indigenous Self-Representation, Non-Indigenous Collaborators and the Politics of Knowledge
“Melting Glaciers and Emerging Histories in the Saint Elias Mountains,” Julie Cruikshank
“The Terrible Nearness of Distant Places: Making History at the National Museum of the American Indian,” Paul Chaat Smith

“Afterword:Indigeneity Today,” Mary Louise Pratt

Manuel

ya engrosa las lineas de boca juniors.

Massey

Al final las charlas sobre budismo con Rafa, o sobre taismo con Chan y el post estructuralismo parecen estan cada vez mas cerca. Aunque es bastante intuitiva, me gustó esta cita, de Massey en For Space del 2005.All the essences become events"; place as "Real as Nature, narrated as Discourse, collective as society, existential as Being (Latour 1993 :82,92). And space and time, together, the outcome of this multiple becoming. Then "here" is no more (and no less) than our encounter, and what is made of it. It is irretrivably, here and now. It won't be the same "here" when it is no longer now." (2005:139)
The elements of this place will be at different times and speeds, again dispersed.
(And yet, in its temporary constellation we (must) make something of it. This is the event if place in part in the simple sense of the coming together of the previously unrelates, a constellation of processes rather than a thing. This is place as open and internally multiple." (141)

En todo esto sigue colgando la internalidad / externalidad problema que me preocupa un poco aunque es otra de las dicotomias falsas en las que te quedas pedalenado una bici sin cadena.

(Por ahi habría que citar mas las charlas con amigxs. "uno aprende de las relaciones" sintetizo el dia de año nuevo alguien que conocimos por casualidad -y esto es bastante evidente tambien-).

Cita Rita Segato

La moral tradicional recubre a la mujer con una sospecha que el violador no consigue soportar, pues esa sospecha revierte sobre él y sobre su incapacidad de gozar del derecho viril de ejercer el control moral sobre una mujer genérica. (...) El desacato de esa mujer genérica, emascula al violador, que restaura el poder masculino y su moral viril en el sistema colocándola en su lugar relativo mediante el acto (criminoso) que comete. (Series Universidad de Brasilia 2003)

Lefebvre on the Situationist International

Bueno buscando la influencia de los situacionistas en algunos de los autores que vengo usando para laburar apareció esta entrevista que esta buena.

Interview conducted and translated 1983 by Kristin Ross


H.L.: Are you going to ask me questions about the Situationists? Because I have something I'd like to talk about.

K.R.: Fine, go ahead.

H.L.: The Situationists . . . it's a delicate subject, one I care deeply about. It touches me in some ways very intimately because I knew them very well. I was close friends with them. The friendship lasted from 1957 to 1961 or '62, which is to say about five years. And then we had a quarrel that got worse and worse in conditions I don't undertsnad too well myself, but which I could describe to you. In the end, it was a love story that ended badly, very badly. There are love stories that begin well and end badly. And this was one of them.

I remember a whole night spent talking at Guy Debord's place where he was living with Michele Bernstein in a kind of studio near the place I was living on the rue Saint Martin, in a dark room, no lights at all, a veritable. . . a miserable place, but at the same time a place where there was a great deal of strength and radiance in the thinking and the research.

K.R.: So the Situationist slogan "Never work" didn't apply to women?

H.L.: Yes, it did, because this wasn't work. They didn't work; they managed to live without working to quite a large extent -- of course, they had to do something. To do horoscopes for race horses, I suppose, wasn't really work; in any case, I think it was fun to do it, and they didn't really work.

But I'd like to go farther back in time, because everything started much earlier. It started with the COBRA group. They were the intermediaries: the group made up of architects, with the Dutch architect Constant in particular and the painter Asger Jorn and people from Brussels -- it was a Nordic group, a group with considerable ambitions. They wanted to renew art, renew the action of art on life. It was an extremely interesting and active group, which came together in the 1950s, and one of the books that inspired the founding of the group was my book Critique of Everyday Life. That's why I got involved with them from such an early date. And the pivotal figure was Constant Nieuwenhuys, the utopian architect who designed a Utopian city, a New Babylon -- a provocative name, since in the Protestant tradition Babylon is a figure of evil. New Babylon was to be the figure of good that took the name of the cursed city and transformed itself into the city of the future. The design for New Babylon dates from 1950. And in 1953 Constant published a text called For an Architecture of Situation. This was a fundamental text based on the idea that architecture would allow a transformation of daily reality. This was the conception with Critique of Everyday Life: to create an architecture that would itself instigate the creation of new situations. So this text was the beginning of a whole new research that developed in the following years, especially since Constant was very close to popular movements; he was one of the instigators of the Provos, the Provo mopvement.


y sigue

Por Matías Catrileo

PROTESTA ANTE LA EMBAJADA DE CHILE EN BUENOS AIRES

Martes 8 de enero, 11 hs. – Tagle entre Av.Libertador y Figueroa Alcorta

Por el asesinato del joven mapuche Matías Catrileo

El estado chileno acabó a través de sus fuerzas represivas: los carabineros, con un balazo en el abdomen con la vida de un nuevo Weichafe (guerrero) MATIAS CATRILEO. Su culpa: defender su identidad y territorio ante el abuso de Jorge Lushinger, "dueño legal" del Fundo Santa Margarita.

El estado chileno ya no puede ocultar más sus intenciones de escarmentar a todo el que proteste, así sea exterminándolo físicamente. Lo hizo antes con Alex Lemún y Zenón Díaz Necul. Pregunta: ¿quién continuará ahora?

Queremos, desde este punto del Wajmapu (Argentina) transmitir toda nuestra fuerza mapuche a su comunidad Yupeko de Vilcum, para que no retroceda en su objetivo de luchar y recuperar sus derechos. La historia y la razón está detrás de ellos y todos y todas los que creemos en la lucha por la recuperación de sus derechos estamos a su lado.

Desde nuestros propios frentes sostenemos que cada día vamos a denunciar al represor estado chileno, a su farsa de democracia neoliberal, a toda su dirigencia corrupta, que inclusive traiciona la historia de lucha del pueblo chileno mismo y no reacciona ni ante la muerte.

Los mapuches ya no queremos cargar con más muerte. Somos una cultura basada en la vida.

Hoy asesinan la esperanza que son nuestros konas (jóvenes militantes). Por otro lado, la lamien Patricia Troncoso continúa su huelga de hambre por más de 80 días, arriesgando su vida por defender los derechos de los y las presos/as políticos/as mapuches.

Marcharemos para que cese la represión y no haya más muertes.

¡ SI A LA VIDA, NO A LA REPRESIÓN, NO AL RACISMO Y NO A LA MUERTE!

Invitamos a todos los miembros y organizaciones de Pueblos Originarios de Buenos Aires, y a las organizaciones sociales, políticas y culturales a acompañarnos y a repudiar estos horrendos crímenes de lesa humanidad.


Organiza:
Coordinadora de Organizaciones Mapuches de Neuquén
Adhieren:

Organización Nacional de Pueblos y Organizaciones Indígenas de Argentina, ONPIA
Equipo Pueblos Originarios del SERVICIO PAZ Y JUSTICIA, SERPAJ
Diálogo 2000
Centro de Estudios de Políticas Públicas para el Socialismo, CEPPAS
Cooperativa de Trabajo Cacique Chalimin
Cooperativa de Vivienda Tupac Amaru
Comisión Mapuche de Los Toldos
y siguen las firmas
Para más información y contactos: 4306-7665 y 1554944637.-

Kusch

Venimos de pasar un lido primero de año con los primos de Rafa y donde nos encontramos hablando de blogs y escritura, bueno mi resolución para este año es ser un poco menos perezosa y subir mas de lo que estoy trabajando. Acá va algo de Kusch, un filósofo-antropólogo argentino (graduado de filo de la uba) que escribió entre los 50 y 70 y se desveló pensando en generar formas "latinoamericanas" de generar pensamiento critico. Para eso va a busca algo asi como un ethos indígena que propone imprime lo popular en la actualidad, que anda subterráneo algo así como un inconsciente, situado en la "América profunda". Esta lógica amenaza constantemente "fagocitar" la racionalidad occidental que rige las ciudades y es siempre incompleta justamente por la existencia de este modo de existencia basada en el "estar", un estar -siendo en contraposición del "ser" (que aspira a mejorarse, ser alguien, tener) occidental. Algunas ideas son un poco esencialistas y homogeneizadoras de los americano, pero sin duda interesante, no se por que no lo leímos mas en la facu. Aca va una parte de lo que escribí ayer y no volví a leer, a ver cuanta edición necesita.

Kusch, distingue dos lógicas fundamentales que estarían operando en América. Una es la lógica racional, objetivante, universalizadota, secular de la filosofía y ciencia occidental, que definen a las ciudades latinoamericanas. Por otro lado existe una forma de estar en el mundo que no puede explicarse a través del discurso sino que se constituye en la practica, en su contingencia y en la vulnerabilidad de la vida, esta es la lógica de los pueblos indígenas Americanos que imprimen el hacer popular. Este autor plantea que la lógica occidental se enfrenta en América a “formas negras” que son los modos de otorgar sentido que no se operan a través de modos de significación objetivantes, de una racionalidad que buscar organizar y explicar de modo causal una realidad construida como externa. Las formas negras se reinscriben en las prácticas de una simbolización que forman parte de la existencia misma. No objetivan la realidad para luego interpretarla y que esas interpretaciones vuelvan a constituir una realidad (tal como lo plantearía la hermenéutica, de Ricoeur, por ejemplo), no pueden desligarse de formas de habitar el mundo, de una existencia entrelazada con otros sujetos y objetos que exceden las posibilidades de inteligibilidad.
Las formas negras en lugar de hacer a un lado estos excesos de lo humano, la naturaleza y el intelecto, están imbrincadas con/en ellas, son un antidiscurso en tanto corroen toda forma de encadenamiento ordenador gramatical. En lugar de excluir lo que no se puede controlar, se asume ese temor y se convive con él, con la precariedad de la vida. La formas de estar en el mundo de los sectores populares americanos (en contraposición al “ser” occidental que implica poseer objetos y poseer una identidad con un significado determinado) se vincula con las fuerzas de la naturaleza sin aspirar a controlarlas, sino que se relaciona a partir de lo mítico puesto en práctica, una religiosidad que forma parte de la incierta experiencia cotidiana.
Por otro lado, Kusch propone el interesante concepto de fagocitación para presentar la idea que en América no solo se presentan procesos de aculturación en un sentido unidireccional en el que se impone lo occidental, sino que estas formas negras, estos anti-discursos, se apoderan de la racionalidad occidental, la despedazan y “digieren” incorporándola a formas de estar en las pasa a ser un elemento mas del conjunto. La lógica racional pierde su universalidad, su carácter de verdad, su poder de objetivación y objetividad al pasar a integrar un mundo de fuerzas en constante redefinición. Para Kusch estas formas negras presentan una imposibilidad inherente al investigador, para explicar o comprender los significados de la acción.
Es decir que podemos pensar que las dos narraciones presentadas, que dejaban entreveer cierto dejo de frustración, estaban haciendo frente a estos núcleos oscuros de acción de los tobas del lote. Kusch indica incluso que esta forma de generar sentido a partir de una estar en el mundo “fagocita” la racionalidad de los programas. En este sentido Kusch ofrece una alternativa para pensar estas interacciones no solamente como usos estratégicos de los tobas de los programas sociales, pensarlos como meras reapropiaciones en términos de una cultura que no se modifica, o en otro extremo, como caminos hacia aculturación inevitable. Permite pensar en las tensiones generadas en los intentos constantes por parte de un poder – saber por apropiarse y “ordenar” lo que queda por fuera y está constantemente escapándosele, en este caso las prácticas tobas. Las propuestas de Kusch parecieran no estar lejos de los análisis de los estudios subalternos que plantean la externalidad relativa de los subalternos y de la imposibilidad de representarlo tanto en lo simbólico, como en el plano de representatividad política. Kusch adheriría a esta la relativa independencia de lo subalterno, para él estos modos populares de estar – siendo. También coincide en señalar los problemas de representación de lo popular, para Kusch no se salvarían tanto leyendo la historia entrelineas, sino lanzándose a la América profunda, escuchando las narraciones de la gente del pueblo que dan cuenta de este estar-siendo que muchas veces no es siquiera verbalizado, sino gestual.

Eso hasta ahora, y feliz año a Kerou.