Marginality

By framing my research within the study of marginality rather than indigeneity as such I want to understand the way groups articulate or not an indigenous identity. For the last years indigenous movements have been the arena of heated discussion within anthropology among those who criticize them as part of new social movements that problematically that fail to generate a broader social consciousness (Piqueras) essentialize and create fractions and tensions within a collective subordinated and marginalized group (Baviskar , Kuper); and scholars that have celebrated their appearance in the political arena and their conquests in the field of indigenist politics (ie Turner) as well as their everyday resistances by generating forms of cultural resistance and “weapons of the weak” (Scott, Elsass, Nash). However most of the works tend to show the ambiguities and rather than being able to make
In this research I follow Anna Tsing (1994) to focus on marginality as a converging point in the making of subaltern alterities and their marginal spatial location. The author shows how this position even if defined in its negativity in relation to the dominant society, is not only characterized as a site of subordination. Rather the distance and relative separation form the locations where hegemonic politics are displayed open the space for other forms of politics (Chakrabarty ). It is form this perspective that I do not want to understand the politics of movements just as effects of disciplinarian forms of power, but rather I am interested in the way in which the point of application of power is deflected into subaltern forms of politics. I do not claim an absolute autonomy of this domain but rather the constitution of entangled field of multiple, overlapping, and contested power relations, which are also fundamentally spatialized (Moore 2003). Going back to Tsing, marginality can be a position of limitation but also a relative distance form the centres of hegemonic forms of politics, that may make possible the use of dominant forms of power in forms that were not intended (this wold be the case of for example making alliances with state officials as a way f enhancing local forms prestige, a movement in which state’s recognition is reproduced but at the same time subverted by the redirection of its power to situations to which it was not intentionally directed.
Scholars have examined multiple forms of construction of alterity within modern nation-states, this is the way social groups are first distinguished and excluded form the categorization of what a normal citizen is, in this process they subordinated and prevented participation form the dominant field of politics. Barth (1969), for instance, has shown how internal alterities is in part a production of group distinction between any social group. Li (), Ramos (), Brubacker, and Cooper (2000) argue that differentiation on the part of marginalized groups also constitutes a strategic positioning for the negotiation of power relations. Difference cannot be just chosen as one among multiple forms of identification, nor can it be easily transformed, but is generated within social interaction which defines people’s bodies as markers of difference. These demarcations are not stable, but have to be constantly remade, or reiterated in Buttler’s terms, in a processes which is not solely discursive but mostly within repetition of practice (Bourdieu’s ). Combining and developing these perspectives, I understand difference in terms of a complex construction of social subjectivities in which structures of inequality, sedimented in historical processes (Sider 1997 , Comaroff 1992), are legitimized through shifting demarcations and invisibilization (Ramos 2003 , Li 2003) that are neither freely “chosen” nor merely imposed (Moore 1998, Hall 1986).
In colonial contexts, the production of modern subjects has the unique distinction that it casts the differential other as subaltern, in a process in which aboriginality is only one of multiple lines of demarcation (Beverley 1998, Tsing 1993 ). “Normal” subjects legitimate themselves by universalizing a group particularity, thus making their own specificity invisible while the subaltern is left beyond representation (Spivak 1998, Zizek 1997). I will consider the tensions in the construction of Toba subjectivity as a subordinate other within the Argentine state and the challenges their presence poses to the definition of the argentine big cities as spheres of a universalized white normality (Guano, Svampa).