Gordillo

Image credits form no escaping gravity
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Gordillo G. 2004 Landscapes of Devils: Tensions of Place and Memory in the Argentinean Chaco. Durham: Duke University Press.

Gordillo’s book is a historical journey that examines the subordination of western toba people of the Argentinean Chaco and their incorporation to labor relations as making a new social formation that simultaneously produced a new type of space in the Chaco. This book is also an ethnography about how the memories of these past experiences shape the present of the toba communities. Spatialized everyday practices trigger the evocation of memories and conversely memory is built as people move through different places. Finally his work is also a theoretical exploration on the way social relations create space, a space that is not homogeneous but organized in the interrelation of different places only defined in constant tensions. Tensions differ form contradictions in that are not absolute negations, but ongoing, superposed and conflicts in constant redefinition, most times in tension –contradiction- in themselves.

In a dialectical movement through space time he shows how that place is not just a result of the social, and not only a by-product in the constitution of power relations but an active element in the construction of such relations and new post colonial social configuration. He shows how the experience of Toba men and women of going to work to the sugar canes, from the beginning of the century until the 1960s, is still a powerful force shaping their currents relations and notions of poverty and wealth (as spatialized categories), their becoming indigenous (as tobas were the less valued type of workforce in the plantations), relation to a state (that wants to kill them but latter employ them), independence and excess (exaltation of sexuality and “vices”), female independence (as they had a salary independently form men), and also death terror and fear of of physically disappearing as a group. This relations were defined in contrast to the communities and the bush, and also from the Anglican mission station established at the beginning of the century by request of the tobas asking for protection form military attacks. But the sugar cane is also in tension with the contemporary relations with the local municipality (located at the nearest town, where political patrons and toba leaders struggle for resources and especially paid state jobs), modern bean and cotton farms that employs them in the east and the marshlands left by the overflow of the river. The analysis the author unfolds, follow the principles of his argument: places are not described in just one chapter but acquire light when referring to the next place. To understand the way the mission stations were historically constituted as a place (and unmade in their abandonment) he unfolds the experience in the sugar plantations, and to explain the plantations he goes back to the bush and the river, and the importance of this places in the present, to then contrast the bush and the river with the government agencies in Ingeniero Juarez. In this way the author builds a complex net of multiple tensions of place that disestablish places in themselves but rather show how their boundaries and qualities are in their contradiction with other places. Thus he overcomes dual interpretation of dialectic movement as the negative opposition between two separate and independent “things”, and the progressive movements of synthesis which contains both in a ina form that supersedes both. Rather, he shows that contradictions imply the blurry differentiation of “the terms”, it implies that “both” are shaped in this interpenetration, and are always not just two but within multiple tensions.

If space are in tension they still share a common thread, they are all inhabited by different devils: payaks form the mountains, cannibals, the Familiar in the cane fields, and the bush devils, back in their communities. These devils are not metaphors of the social relations, they are not symbols condensing the social meanings and knowledge that sit in places, nor are they manifestations of a perspective which mask social relations, rather they are part of the matrix of social relations in the plantation and thus the plantation as a place (p138). For the analysis of the plantation devils he develops the concept of indigenous fetishism, as, he argues, the devils ultimately condense the experience of death and terror resulting form labour exploitation, in this they are not just images but active forces, and they contribute to reproduce toba’s economic subordination.

I can’t do many critiques as it is a very strong ethnography probably, and very strong ideas. Probably say that I still think the weight of the experience in the sugar plantations and its memories may be mediated by other processes. One is the state which makes its entrance only in relation to the military and then disappears until the refence of the 1990s political patronage. I also wonder if the notion of indigenous fetishism as a condensation of economic exploitation closes the discussion on the devils, as the devils of the bush are defined in the relations of reciprocity. Are there other ways of thinking the materiality of the devils without a reference to economic notions.