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