Kusch

Notas de Kusch que vienen de un trabajo que estoy editando pal congreso de antropo argentina. Pronto notas de los dias de sol en Vancou, el viaje en tren, y la llegada.


Las “formas negras”, en lugar de hacer a un lado estos excesos de lo humano, la naturaleza y el intelecto, están imbricadas con/en ellas, constituyen un anti-discurso 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 con ellas a partir de lo mítico puesto en práctica, una religiosidad que forma parte de la incierta experiencia cotidiana.
Por otro lado, Kusch (1975) propone el interesante concepto de fagocitación para presentar la idea de que en América no sólo tienen lugar procesos de aculturación en un sentido unidireccional en el que se impone lo occidental, sino que estos anti-discursos se apoderan de la racionalidad occidental, la despedazan y “digieren”, incorporándola a formas de estar en las que aquella pasa a ser un elemento más del conjunto. La lógica racional pierde su universalidad, su carácter de verdad, su poder de objetivación, al pasar a integrar un mundo de fuerzas en constante redefinición.
En este sentido, Kusch (1975, 1978) ofrece una alternativa para pensar estas interacciones que se han interpretado como usos estratégicos de los tobas de los programas sociales, como reapropiaciones en términos de una cultura que no se modifica, o, en otro extremo, como caminos hacia una aculturación inevitable.
Las propuestas de Kusch parecieran no estar lejos de los análisis de los estudios subalternos que plantean la externalidad relativa de los subalternos y la imposibilidad de representarlos, tanto en lo simbólico como en el plano de la representatividad política. Kusch adheriría a esta relativa independencia de lo subalterno; para él, estos modos populares de estar–siendo. También coincide en señalar los problemas de representación de lo popular, que, para Kusch, no se salvarían tanto leyendo la historia entrelíneas, sino lanzándose a la “América profunda”, escuchando las narraciones de la gente del pueblo que dan cuenta de este “estar-siendo” que muchas veces ni siquiera se verbaliza, sino que se trasmite "por el cuerpo" en gestos y acciones.

Peter Grant. Indigenous rural-urban connection in the soviet world.

Back to finish my annotations.

In the soviet contexts the formation of indigenous Siberians intellectuals in Leningrad, was a highly valued by the communities, which were willing to confront the efforts to send s few students per year to the city (Grant 1995:88). The maintenance of indigenous links to the rural areas through the establishment of networks that organize the distribution of country food to the urban relatives or former neighbours, the visits form relatives form the country and the visits of people in the city back to their communities are just some of the dimensions in which connection between indigenous rural villages and people living in urban areas

citas guano

The neoliberal government—it had become clear to many—
had little interest in protecting the middle-classes.8 In the perceived
absence of institutional policies and interventions, everyday
strategies such as spatial segregation, symbolic evictions, and the
construction of social invisibility were among the measures enacted
to contain the alleged intrusion. All of these strategies had deep
roots in the local history of class struggle.
As Mitchell (2003) suggested, dominant social groups may
prevent urban space from becoming more “public”—hence
more inclusive—by tailoring the rules for spatial practice on
themselves. As they claim to embody the legitimate urban public,
these groups attempt to undermine the right to the city of those
who fail to comply with the dominant prescriptions for belonging.
It is through social struggle that marginal social groups can strive
to establish a “space for representation” (2003: 33) where it is possible
for them to become socially and politically visible. A space
for representation is an arena where one can posit oneself, and be
publicly acknowledged, as a citizen: a legitimate member of “the
public,” and a political actor endowed with the right to advance
claims about what reality is and should be.
Throughout the twentieth century, much of the struggle over
visibility in the Buenos Aires’ urban sphere was closely connected
to the clash over the cultural and political citizenship of the subaltern:
the thousands who lived in the slums, the tenements, and
the working class barrios at the margins of the bourgeois city. It was
between 1945 and 1955 that the socially and politically mandated
invisibility of the Buenos Aires lower classes was finally shattered—
even though only temporarily. During this time, Perón’s army of
the “shirtless” (descamisados) succeeded in appropriating Buenos
Aires’ bourgeois downtown as its own “space for representation":
an arena where it could exert the role of the most visible public
of Peronism. As the physical embodiment of the pueblo argentino
(the Argentine people), the poor could be periodically seen as they
acclaimed Perón and his wife Evita in raucous ceremonies held in
Plaza de Mayo. Most supporters of Perón’s 1946–1955 government
were members of those mestizo lower classes that had been consistently
disenfranchised by the elites and their governments, as
well as by many of those who opposed them. Poor, dark-skinned
Argentines had also been consistently excluded from the vision
of social justice that was upheld by immigrant European socialist
activists (Walter 1977). By bringing a mass of mestizo workers and
lumpenproletarians to the heart of Buenos Aires, Perón launched
a symbolic aggression against the white middle and upper classes
(Foster 1998:6; Ciria 1983:277).9 Under his presidency, the bourgeois
city became a stage for the glorification of a proudly self-referential
barbarism and its challenge to the exclusionary civilization
of the elite (Svampa 1992).10

Their presence in an urban sphere dominated by the middle and upper classes was still
categorized at best as invisible, and at worst as that of the intrusive
Other.

Faced with their own “disconnect” from modernity—a disconnect
that blatantly contradicted the neoliberal shibboleth of
Argentina’s successful modernization, in the late 1990s many
middle-class Buenos Aires residents experienced urban space as a
location where the drama of modernization through the looking
glass struck them with the force of first-hand experience. Fully
aware of their precarious hold on middle-classness, many of them
tried to reiterate their symbolic entitlement to a city that they
viewed as coessential to their own class identity, and on the verge
of being swallowed by the disorganizing forces of a reterritorialized
“third world”. In the attempt to explain and resist their predicament,
those who were concerned with their own fall from grace
inscribed a legacy of modernity into what they envisioned as
“their” urban space, and erected physical, but most often conceptual,
boundaries in the hope of safeguarding the social and spatial
integrity of middle-class Buenos Aires. Tropes of foreignness, pollution,
and propriety supplemented practices of segregation and
surveillance in the attempt to redress the trespassings. Articulated
along the distinction between civilization and barbarism, first and
third world, and modernization and its opposite, pervasive representations
of spatialized identities and identified spaces helped
middle-class residents to reinforce a fading social difference, while
simultaneously blaming their predicament on graspable culprits:
those who did not belong in the modern city.

Text 2003

page 7 Zygmunt Bauman (1994) has argued that the late-capitalist city creates a
sharp polarization of public and private space as a false alternative for an increasingly
captive flaneur. As public space becomes the urban jungle of danger,
decay, and fear, the flaneur can only resort to private spaces (malls, theme
parks, and citadels) to carry out his practice. However, through their Disneyfied
landscapes of meaning that seduce, capture, and discipline the gaze, these
urban sanctuaries appropriate the signifying playfulness and the freedom that
(supposedly) characterized modern flanerie. The postmodern flaneur, Bauman
concluded, is then at risk of becoming a passive gaper whose practice and experience
are controlled from above. It would, of course, be farfetched to categorize
the elegant downtown of Buenos Aires as a jungle of fear and decay, nor
has modernist flanerie disappeared from the life of middle-class portenos. And
yet, throughout the 1990s, open, centralized, and "Parisian" Buenos Aires
faced an erosion brought about by these new spatial formations. Malls, citadels,
and theme parks became the sites where the synergy of spectacle and segregation—
the spectacle of a transnational and elitist consumption and a segregation
that separated these places from the rapidly expanding slums—strove to
inscribe the ideology of neoiiberaiism into the everyday life of portenos.

In what follows I explore three of the most popular loci of "North American"
Buenos Aires: the Puerto Madero waterfront, the luxurious downtown
shopping malls, and the Tren de la Costa tourist railway. My object is to show
how, by implementing the strategies of segregation and spectacularization that
Bauman sees as essential of postmodernity, these spatial formations strive to
exert a compelling control on how the porteno flaneurs and flaneuses experience
the "North American" city. Hence, I argue that Puerto Madero, the malls,
and the Tren are not simply stages for the self-congratulatory dramatization by
the upper class of its own economic prowess and its status-building taste for
transnational consumption. In fact, even though they explicitly exclude the
"dangerous" lower class, these enclosed spectacles address yet another audience:
the middle-class public—a somewhat marginal public yet a necessary
one. Drastically affected by neoliberal policies and reforms but still politically
undecided, the porteno middle and lower middle class form a large social
group that has to be persuaded into accepting the dominant ideology.12 The
self-contained spectacles of the neoliberal city cater to these increasingly impoverished
flaneurs and flaneuses with a simulacrum of inclusion.

For porteno malls are not just about spectacle; they are about segregation,
too. Their success is inextricably connected to fear of a public space that the
middle classes have come to associate more and more with the "dangerous"
lower class.... However, just as with Bauman's flaneur-turnedgaper,
they are also trapped in a place that allows little room for alternative
practices and readings. Some portenos may not mind; others do.

p 17 What is sold in Buenos Aires's malls is not just foreign goods but,
even more importantly, the idea of consuming foreign goods. What is displayed
in the malls is the free market with its tantalizing promise of participation
in the privileged Western modernity to be found in the northern hemisphere—
still so distant from the south of the world.

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.
References


Nelson, Diane 1999 A Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quincentennial Guatemala. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Taussig, Michael 1987 Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hall Stuart in Nelson

Mitchel Tymothy in Nelson

Moore Suffering for territory

This is helping me to write this paper trying to now analyze in particular the attack to the lote 68 in 2002.

1. Donald Moore book presents a very complex theoretical framework, which is not and abstract model but the result of his intention to analyze the processes affecting Kaerezi people and places avoiding generating and homogeneous analysis. I will try to explain a few ideas I get form his analysis. I will then bring some theoretical questions that disturbed me while reading the book, not because I disagree but because I understand his making meaning of dark zones of analyzing micropolitics from an ethnographic perspective. The author analyzes subjectivity, power and spatiality in Kaerezi in which he brings together different critical perspectives. It could be said that he is talking about governmentality, and how along with sovereignity and discipline the foucaultian triangle, (which -he adds- is in motion and -he does not say this explicitly- in plural) operates on the imbrications of people and things. It can also be said that he spatializes governmental forms of power production and that he shows how space is at the same time a field, tool and means of power relations.
But this is also a historical account, were the effect of history on the present are not simple of simple determination, but rather of the production of conjunctures which offer conditions of possibility to different subjects and their relative positions. Power relations are neither a consequence of class inequalities nor are effected only by state centralization of institutionalized regimes of rule and their reproduction. Power relations are entangled in a multiple and complex set of relations where the sovereignty over population and territory are not a stable set of interaction, but rather multiple, overlapping, and contested, but fundamentally they are placed. Entangled Landscapes are the outcome of this multiple forms of power relations (in his analysis of the chiefs, the headmen, the rainmakers, the national government and state officials, among others) of the multiple spatialities shaping place simultaneously (of men, women, of different state agencies, of people form different villages, resulting form non human features, etc.), as well as multiple temporalities (colonial times, independence movements, post-coloniality). Historical power relations, spatialities and subjectivations are sedimented in places, not in a clear superposition, but in entangled sediment.
Race becomes a fundamental locus of place and subjects in the colonial area that informs all the relations under analysis, as racialized dispossession during colonization transformed the land property, labor relations it thus transformed spatiality and subjectivities. Affect is an effect of governmentalities, sovereingnities and disciplines, but also of the sedimented landscapes where subjects, power and place are entangled.
He complements governmentality with Gramsci’s analysis of hegemony, he use it to understand the way violence (coercion) is present in the establishing economic relations and a cultural field, the way culture becomes a battle field as it is the sphere making possible productive relations, and the way articulating a discourse, practice and meanings is fundamental in any regime of rule.
2. Questions: Could we say that if governmentality focuses on the way people are connected with things and how things are disposed for action, then hegemony complements as a battle over direction of the productive conditions of things and people? I am not sure how to address the overlapping and complementation of this two fields. Other questions this book sugest to make in other assemblages (places, histories, conjunctures): How does landscape complement to space and place? How articulations work with contradictions? How erasure works on sedimentation? There are many more question I have but I cannot yet phrase, as this book brings me a lot of “problems” into how to refine analysis of power practices and discourses making subjects and places.
References

Moore, Donald 2005. Suffering for Territory: Race, Place, and Power in Zimbabwe, Duke University Press

Williams, Raymond 1977. “Hegemony” in Marxism and Literature, Oxford University Press, 1977, pp. 108-114.