de la cadena

Marisol De La Cadena makes a historical analysis of the discourses on indigeneity in Cuzco during most of the 20th century. In them she demonstrates how the categorization that define what is indigenous and what is partly indigenous and what is not, are blurry and have changed many times during the period. The changes are explained in relation the production of power in Cuzco, but also in the dynamics between Cuzco and the country, and Lima. Hence he takes a localized perspective but without disregarding broader issues as national dynamics or the weight of international processes.

Her starting question is in relation to a blurry definition of indigenous mestizos which two university students present to her in Lima. The category presented her with the complexity of the social classification, which combines both the production of a racial ideology along with the relevance of cultural markers of ethnicity. The work demonstrates how this are two intertwined processes that cannot be analyzed separately. Even the discourses on racial determination have been strongly denied in the mid 20th century, the type of essentialism it carried were incorporated by culturalist perspectives which reproduced images of ethnic primordiality. This is what she calls a “culturalist definition of race” as the underlying logic of current matrix of subjectivities.
In this way she follows the way hegemonic discourses produced indigeneity, from traditionalist elites to leftist movements, to understand the “silent forms of racism” (p 40).

In her genealogical exploration she first presents the elaborations made by the 1920s elite members indigenistas, indigenists, who develop a reification of indigenous as a glorious past, now in decadency. According to their logic present indigenous are degenerated representatives of this past culture. Thus indigenous were valued as long as they keep a communal life, preserve their culture unchanged, and they had a controlled sexuality restricted to their ethnic group. She then shows how the triumph of liberal indigenists encouraged the incorporation of indigenous to the national project. They did this by promoting their progress through literacy campaigns and the development of particular policies. Indigenous in this period are assigned a subaltern place, as owners of an inferior culture. Race is now not explicitly mentioned but becomes eclipsed by culture. In this period, the category of peasants was introduced, under a perspective of class dominant in the international arena. The neoindianistas in contrast to indigenistas welcomed cholos, this is the sexual openness (of indigenous women having children form white men, never the opposite) that permitted mestizage, as a path to improvement of the race. In the 1960s leftist movement overtook an important critic to racial categories and wanted to promote a struggle in terms of class. The reinvention of an inka tradition was a result of this period. Finally in the 1980s the discourse on class was left behind, being the arena dominated by academic and political discussions.

A point of my interest is the relation between identity and places, De La Cadena developed. She points out the importance of places shaping subjectivities, as indigenous who migrate to the city are automatically considered indigenous mestizos. In this way each category has a spatial correlation. Indigenous location is the rural highlands, the indigenous mestizos, aquire this category by education and life in the city, while mestizos is the general urban population that lost ties with indigenous cultural markers, finally whites are city dwellers, particularly (but not only) form the coast, and members the elites and with a high education. In this regard the processes of migration have been variably understood as degeneration first, and as progress and integration latter. This spatial matrix has a close relation to processes undergoing in the Gran Chaco region in Argentina (see Vivaldi 2005).

For indigenistas this morality was a condesensed in the meaning of decencia, decency. Decent were the indigenous that kept their culture alive and had a controlled sexuality. Decent were educated white men, who could have indigenous lovers without affecting their reputation. Decent white women had control over their sexuality, and were the appropriate wife for white men, that could satisfy their intellectual needs and higher type of love. Indescents were the mestizos who had an uncontrolled sexuality (thus the object of white men’s fantasies) and were un educated and had lots their indigenous traditions. In contrast to decencia the chapter that focus the market mestizo women, the cholas, develops the new category condensing a new type of morality, the respeto, respect.

Being the market women recognized mestizas and city dwellers, the values they defend is not about having correct sexual behaviour, but rather is the self determination and empowerment of being economically independent, accessing to education, defying the constraints of governmental disciplining actions (for example police control in the market). In this way towards the end of the book she show the paradox of how respeto even challenging the negative stigmas of an indigenous identity, by stating their successful experiences in economic and educational spheres, they reproduce the hegemonic terms that classify people according to economic position and degree achieved in the formal education system. Paradoxically this new system of classification reproduces marginality recombining gender, sex, ethnicity, race and geographical position.

The question that remains open is which is the connection between the production of this categories through time and the way they are currently operating in everyday practices. We do have a close approach on the way market women build their particular positioning. Yet the work leads the question of how current production of masculinity and femininity, racial purity and mixing, indigenism, urban/rural relations, take place in everyday interactions of Cuzquenio men and women. Probably her field notes and interviews are full of reference into this direction. To answer this questions and advance into the analysis of this material would probably require a second book.

raffles

In this book Raffles analyzes how a place that has always been conceived as the essence of nature, the Amazon, is in fact the result of human labour, and so a social construction. To give an account of this idea he develops a micro ethnography of how the opening of a canal is related to the production of hegemony of a family in an area, and the production of a particular type of relations of production. I will not develop the details of his argument, but rather I am interested in pointing out some original ideas the author presents.

The opening of the book shows how the settlers of the region have strategically created the rivers and canals that appear to be a total natural creation to the outside spectator. In a micro-historical analysis he shows how people leaving in the region have always transformed the natural landscape. After the introduction of the book he describes how channels are a fundamental feature of Amazonian landscape, as they make possible economic exploitation, transport and communication. They have been opened by the settlers of the region, mestizos recognized as cabolcos (not the stereotypical “Indians” object of numerous Amazonian ethnographies), with different purposes: access to timber woods, access to farmed lands, to hunting and gathering zones, communication with other settlers or ways to the town, among others. In this ways channels are social products but also the result of social contradictions.

What he is really proposing is that rather than considering that there is a natural system that is transformed by social production, natural places always the result of the particular social relations of the people inhabiting this place. In this way he inverts the logic of Cultural Ecological analysis in anthropology that emphasise the way nature constrains and determine economic organization of societies. He breaks with the division between environment and society. The author understands the natural environments as the result of a dialectic relation between natural forces and social agents. One example is how channels are opened in the surrounding area of Veigas family shop as a result of the work relations established in the aviamento. A system in which people are allowed to explode the lands of Veigas family only if they sell the product to him and buy in his shop. Channels then, are a dynamic place and also a place worth fighting for (cfr. Gordillo 2004).

The author considers the agency of nature and society as analogous processes. What can be objected from this position is that even both human and natural forces imply transformative effects over places; it is hard to consider a type of consciousness to natural processes. The concept of agency was developed to include the individual innovations and decision making effecting the shape of social structure. It implies interactions where social distinctions are shaped (see for eg. Bourdieu 2000). It is hard to include effects of climate, biological cycles and animal behaviour in the same category of this particular dialectic between subjects and cultural structure. In particular he is disregarding the implications of production of meaning as a constructive force of places. As we have seen, Taussig (1987) demonstrated the relevance of the imagination, fiction and symbols as an aspect of reality. In this sense considering the agency of nature is implicitly inconsistent with the conceptualization of social relations in Taussig’s analysis.

Raffles seems to be confused by the perceptions of the people he is working with is in that he analyses the natural forces, as well as social interactions, as agents shaping the landscape. The river’s over flooding and erosion appears to be a force challenging from an equal positioning, the humanly built places (as the house of the Veiga’s family). The confusion Raffles seems to follow to closely the people he is working with representations. In this way getting a close insight perspective permits Raffles to analyze the importance of the river as deeply social produced and conflictive place. He sees this processes through the cabolcos eyes that have memories over the production and transformation of streams. However, he takes this view literally and considers that the transformations due to natural processes, such as floods, of human localities is the result of a type of consciousness of the river challenging this human action. These ideas may also be the result of falling into the western traditional conceptions, which he is trying to deconstruct in chapter 3, of civilization versus nature, as two analogous competing potencies.

A final interesting implication of the microanalysis the author does is the way he shows how struggles over hegemony as producing and transforming places. In this way he shares with other approaches on place how they are the result but also the object and tools of struggles (see Feldman, Gordillo, Harvey). But unlike other authors, Raffles shows how places become relevant but also how they fade away as a result of shifts in the production of power. I consider this is a very original contribution as power formation is generally the object of study and not so much how power is lost and what happens in those cases.

The objection we can still make to this is again maybe the result of a kind of sympathy of Raffles with the people he is working with. In this way he shows a type of nostalgia with Veigas hegemony and its location. This nostalgia, even making a vivid connection with the way tha place was in the past shuts some possibilities of analysis. For example even he mentions the new hegemony of but could further explore the way this ruined place of Veigas is built in relation to the new hegemony of the Macedos leadership embedded of a leftist unionized discourse that attributes Veiga as an old authoritarian patron. In the elements Raffles presents it seems that this new social configuration is built not only by shifting the power is located but maybe making an explicit contradiction of places between the old decaying shop an the new political patronage Macedo represents.

To conclude I consider that even the subtle critics that can be done to Raffle’s work, his perspective offers a very original and a new perspective over the studies of the Amazone. He makes a very interesting overview river as a place that challenges the more common analysis of places as a result of processes of delimitation. Even the river is well defined and boundarized the river is a place of constant movement and of transformation, is then a particular type of place that pushes us to consider movement as a strong factor of the constitution of locations (cfr Grossberg and De Certau). From a theoretical perspective his analysis of the disempowered places is an interesting proposition that can be included in any analysis on social space.

nelson

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.

Wright la colonizacion del espacio, la palabra y el cuerpo en el chaco

imagen de una articulo sobre lituratura de los desiertos


this commentary goes with some of my own added ideas. probably this essay could be turned into a much longer work, but guides what i could be doing with archival work and what type of events i can be looking for.


The brief but densely interesting paper explores the effect of the colonization of the chaco in the constitution of new types of order for chaquenian indigenous societies. Specifically the constitution of a new space, regime of language and body. The transition to a new spatiality only happened after the highly aggressive military campaigns that took control of the territories of the last indigenous society with a political and social autonomy. The military invasion demonstrated the defeat of previous the missionary and state attempts that combined both military "entradas" (advances) and the settlement of mission stations. Both were attempts of domesticating the savage nature of both indigenous and space.

With the consolidation of the state there was a new interest in gaining control over the land and territories in order to turn the chaco into a productive region for capitalist economy. The transformation of the space started by a delimitation of the spaces of colonization form the space of "the bush" a generic category implying a moral geography (my words) of savagism. The colonization efforts was then the transformation of this inhuman space into civilization and humanity as he quotes form the prefect of the Chaco -franciscan- Misions (fray Pedro María Pelichi) "no bautizaba sino a los que se hallaban en peligro de muerte, por que bien sabía que es preciso esperar que los salvages se hagan primero hombres para que sean despues verdaderos cristianos". It is though toil,that the Franciscans considered this can be achieved. The bush however remains as a space that is constantly threatening missionary efforts to fail.

The space of the missions and state reductions functioned as civilizatory islands, beyond which savagism and unruliness still prevailed. (as other authors show) Every time the indigenous live the missions, the habits that the priest were able to inculcate among them were lost, the missionaries complain that when returning form the bush the indigenous kept on behaving in their usual uncivilized manner still living "desnudos y de la caza" (naked and hunting and gathering) . (In other work Wright analyzes the contemporary contrasts among the indigenous of Tacaglé Mission between labour and hunting-gathering as a result of the incorporation of the missionary logic. In my ba thesis i analyze how this category is reappropriated among the Tobas of the lote who collapses the terms and claim that "marisca es trabajo") Thus space and body were connected in both its unruliness and as "site of operation" of the civilizatory power. Work more than the producton of economic goods was in this case the production of the human, a mean of inscribing a human habit to this non yet humans.

Finally even he does not quote Mignolo, he makes a point very close to his, by pointing to how the indigenous were also subjugated by the legitimation of a single regime of representation, which is spanish and the written language of bureaucracy. Interestingly he brings as an example the need of indigenous of carrying the documents of good conduct while traveling (generally to or form temporary work locations). This papers were written by any authority, from priests to state officials, to employers in the rural industries. This papers were thus showed to any white person meeting in their way as a proof of being good indians, already civilized and with no intention of attack. The indians were otherwise "always already" dangerous, something that legitimated killing non identified ones. (gordillo calls this part of what constituted a id paper fetishism among he analyzes in a recent article, he show how even with the papers some indigenous groups circulating were killed). this case is interesting for me as shows the early need of control over movement as another dimension of the colonization of chaco.

The Dynamics of Contingency

La defensa de proposal de Ms Sternberg se aproxima.... me gustar'ia ir por varios motivos,


*GEOGRAPHY COLLOQUIUM*

* *

*PhD Dissertation Proposal*

* *

*/Carolina/**/ Sternberg/*

*/Department of Geography/*

*/University/**/ of Illinois/**/ at Urbana-Champaign/**//*



*The Dynamics of Contingency: Neoliberal Growth Governances in Buenos Aires and Chicago*



ABSTRACT


Neoliberal growth governance has been ascendant worldwide in the last two decades and has come to profoundly influence mainstream urban politics. This project seeks to understand these formations from a comparative vantage-point, focusing on the global cities of Chicago and Buenos Aires. The study critically interrogates these governances to determine the degree to which they have significantly different institutional affiliations, operations, and outcomes. At issue is an important notion in the theorizing of these governances: contingent neoliberalism. While nascent research has suggested the possibility of a strong contingent aspect to these governances, its specifics remain under-explored.
The intellectual merits of this project thus rest on a novel focus: the study of contingent urban neoliberalism. Current work on contemporary urban governance in the west, to date, peripheralizes the centrality of contingency. Common sets of institutions, interests, programs, and motivations are seen to permeate and characterize these governances across the enormous diversity of places (Mitchell, 2001; 2004; Keil, 2002, Wilson, 2004). My study, in contrast, probes the nuances of these features to reveal their rich specifics and place-rooted basis. Using a cultural economy frame, my goal is not to marginalize the influence of structures that embed within capitalist economies and societies. Indeed, this is a foundational part of my study. However, I chronicle the inseparability of local-ness, place rootedness, historical specificity, human agency, and political variability that poignantly embeds within the human made operation and effects of locally circulating structures.



*Friday, October 3, 2008*

*3:00 PM*


219 Davenport Hall

*refreshments will be served*

Citro

este clasico de los illia k añade un glamour extranyo y apropiado al chaco.

Y mas sobre los toba y el cuerpo (estos eran una serie de articulos que quer'ia leer hace tiempo)

Citro's starting point is the studies of corporality among amerindian societies that focus on representational aspects of how the body is conceived. Assuming a some relative correspondence between representations and practices she proposes to focus on the habit of the Toba people that inform a particular form of relation with the world. She follows Csorda's notion of embodiment that make not a material body its object, but the way the social is produced, reproduced and exist as bodies move and act in particular ways. She thus follows four of the dimensions in which Foucault points that disciplining technologies shape the body and practice in order to make an analysis of the type of corporality of the Tobas of the rural easter chaco. She uses Foucault diemnsions not to understand how the toba were disciplined but rather how their habits have escaped in many ways this forms of regulation of conduct (she links the violence over the chaco as means of controlling the other wise uncontrollable for modernity, capitalism and the state).
If she sees in the persistence of particular non modern practices as source of active and passive resistance, she recognizes that this resistance is also limited by the lack of capacity to affect of tobas undisciplined bodies in the broader structure of the state, the structural subordination is the reason she finds to this. A subordination that allows the state to resignify this embodied otherness as corrupted and savage. If her proposition is really interesting and her account is attentive to alot of significant gestures one thing I cannot follow is why she need to make a cross cultural comparison in order to put into manifest difference. In this comparison i found difficult to follow a certain repertoire of action and response among the tobas. It is hard to make such an account without making an endless description of action that may lead nowhere. But I wonder if the emphasis on the continuity of the practices of the rural tobas that where visiting buenos aires and the stress of their specificity is the only way to make this. There is a lot I can take at the end of reading this no doubt, and habit that implies the extension of the person on the world, that informs action but also shapes the possibilities of improvising responses in new environments (this is a richness of the accounts of buenos aires), a type of ativities that both shape the world and also get engaged in precognitive activities in the world creating a particular adherence to the world while shaping the body in particular repertoire of preconscious movements (in this she follows merleau ponty and jackson). Finally a type of habit that informs perseption as an activity that generate embodied knowledge, thus the way senses and persption are shaped is informed too by habit.
The examples she brings are organized in: the coherence of representation of the body - world that organize practice: 1) sitting outside, exploring new environments and find signs for orientation, development of a wide rage of body actinos that demand strength and skill in certain forms of movement (form chopping wood, weaving, recollecting, to hunting), 2) body practice that evidence the un-discipline of the bodies such as not cleaning utensils or tyding up but when there is a practical need of reusing them, no need o private enclosed places (ie showering with door opened), 3) a different timing related with practicity rather than a regulated order over work and rest.

Gomez "El cuerpo por asalto"

Otro comentario sobre los tobas y el cuerpo. Este articulo de mariana relamente me gusta. E sun trabajo super minucioso de un tema que hasta ahora no se estaba haciendo visible e incluso se minimiz'o en arios casos.

Gomez analyzes the unequal gender relations among the tobas through the thread of sexual assault that women of while in the bush. She argues that the gender an sexual relations are unfold in a system of structural inequality, which is both manifested in the kinship and systems but that has also been the result of missionary work and their role in spreading a christian morality among the tobas, as well as their experiences in the sugar cane plantations during the first half of the 20th century.
The women of the rural communities of western formosa with whom she works go to the bush mostly to gather algarroba, during the harvest season, an to collect materials for their handicrafts. If the women unfold particular territorialities in their trips, each group using only some sectors of the forest. These trips are made with no masculine presence, it is in such context that the women meet the danger of finding men that may attack them. One strategy is for the women to always go in groups, to go to the bush alone is the. They also identify the machete and their own physical strength as ways of defending themselves in a the case of an attack. In these practices, the bush is produced as a non safe space for women, something that adds to the ambiguity of being also a place strongly identified with the practice that constitutes women's identity, this is the recollection and the production of handicrafts.
The bush is thus produced as non safe but is also experienced physically in this way. Women walking on the bush are alert constantly of any evidence of someone else's presence in the bush. If women and men engage in eventual sexual relations in the bush, and in this way it is constituted as a site both of experimentation but also of sexuality outside marital relation, men and women are not equally considered in this regard. Women's sexuality remains under control and safe as long as it is in the domestic areas and its surroundings, as far as the glance of husbands and other members of the family can reach.

The men are both exempted of having a bad reputation when engaged in these type of relations and are also participant in forcing the women into having sex in the bush. It is not uncommon, as Gomez registers form the accounts of many wome, group rape in which many men rape a single women or help other do it. The men attacking, who can be both members of the communities or neighboring criollos, legitimate their actions by regarding the female who go to the bush as not being careful enough.It is women who participate in this encounters who are categorized as "women who go out", thus as transgressors of the norm of staying within the social glance. Gomez, following Segato, understad rape not as an exepmtion but as a norm that serves to the purpose of limiting women's sexuality and generally limiting women's range of action. The unequal gender relations are thus constituted around the production of places, something that demarcates a relativity in the acceptability of violence, and defines the rage of action of what is acceptable for women to do. Both women's right to sexuality and the bush as a place are produced within ambivalent terms in which violence is accepted as a mean of constructing gender difference.

Tola No estoy solo en mi cuerpo

la imagen es por que hace un rato presencie como un ser humano que vive conmigo se desperto convertido en nutria regordeta.


I am commenting on this without having read the whole book, but based on the articles of Florencia. A coment to make is that even though the logic of the work follows in some ways the critique I make to Surrualles, I still find lots of things fascinating about this work and for some reason it does make mesuspend that critiques. I still find it difficult to claim to be only making a representation of other's thinking, that is disposed of western theory when one is talking within western theroy and at best trying to get close to. Something that alway fails and always results in some approach of some dimension of an encounter. I am very interested in what results form this encounter.

The more interesting point for me is her deep critique of the notion of person, that she argus, for the eastern Toba is a notion: extension and multiplicity. This multiplicity comes form the possibility of a person of adopting "multiple regimes of corporality" . The human person is then only one of the possibilities, she calls it an "embodied person". The person exists first as a potential and in virtuality, but is not this principle what gives life to an inanimate matter. Rather it is this first virtual person what wains consistency and becomes a body. During gestation both parents actively contribute to form and transform this person's body. The body is then a central point to understand the constitution and transformation of person and the close links to the process of collective constitution of the person. In other words this embodied person is not stable nor locked in one body. It is dispersed in a multiplicity of bodies through a series of body extensions: fluids, attributes and names. "The person exists as long as it extends and manifests in the bodies of other, by living traces in the bodies of other, by giving them some of their physical appearance, by determining some of their behavior. The human body is the vector of social life." (1) At the same time the way the multiplicity of social relations constitute the person she focuses on the role for the body fluids, the functioning of the body organs and a body image, this are elements that circulate in between bodies, are transformed and inherited, they are not only mediums but have some potency (she calls it agency), they can generate effects and have this effects gain a physical appearance. Emotions are related to cognition,they are reactions of knowledge, considering knowledge is about knowing with the body. All this processe gin significance when considering that the body is never fully completed, but constantly remade within the social relations, the body has thus great capacities for transformation but is also opened and vulnerable for a multiplicity type of affects. Thus in the life cycle there are moments of particular exposure, during gestation depending on the action of both parents, women menstruating and during lactancy. At the same time the body is never independent, but the menstruation is motivated with the women's active sexuality.

Guano

Emanulea Guano in her ethnograpy of the portenyo middle class points to the production of meaning around the legitimate terms of being portenyo in the face of the economic and political transforamtions effected by the 1990s neoliberal policies. The transformation of te econom that resulted in the encrease of unemployment and the empoverishment of the middle classes had as effects the encresed perseption of fear, loss and intruition among this sector. Fear of lossing their propoerty and social capital of being a white europeanized middle class, loss of the property but also of a city expected to be modern and european like. This generated a need of redifining and reinforcing separation form the "intruders", the urban poor whose population rised steadily. This need of diferentiation was not made just on the bases of class, but there was a growing claim that the poor invading the city as immigrants of neigbouring coutries and also racialized as non white. Even though the long tradition of the peronim of reclaiming the site of the "dark" "poor" shanty twon dwellers as an important part of "the people" and the centre of a ntional identity, the midle class reprasantions seem to be more linked with the discourses and desire of modernization, of becoming "real first world". Guano associates this with neoliberalism and call it "to see modernity form the looking glass", while embracing the project to be in modernity becomes more and more distant. Thus the middle class along with some of the dominant discourse of the government and the pres, construct a sense of disapearing middle class, along with a invasion of immigrants. It is for her a reactualization of the civilization/barbarism discourse. In which the middle class recoginizes as the inheritors of a european city only to see its cluster of slumnines in the cirujas [this is a pre cartonero research], the squatter and the insequrity. In this contexts only the granting of security, more than only possesion can guarantee the remaining in the middle class, thus the proliferation of location of exclusion, or the self enclosing of the public space in the mall, and the formation of gated communities. It is in the desparete definition of the other that middle class atempts to avoid the fact that is very close or with no clear distinction than this other.

TV On The Radio - Province

Diana Taylor Disappearing Acts

one of the archival photos she analyzes as part of the spectacle of disappearing.


In this book Taylor analyzes the role of performance in and after the Argentina “dirty war” as a both a form of creating the effect of terror and submission of the population and as way of diverging or processing its effects, and act that she will show many times falls into some of the structures they are trying to avoid. The way the military did this is through the making of the disappearing of political opponents visible while making the torture and killings invisible. With this simultaneous move they were both letting the population know/see that the enemies of the regime were abducted with no possibility of escape, as they were keeping the torture in the shadow as a form of enhancing its violent effect. This is what she calls a politics of looking that forced people to look without responding, act to paralyze a society, break its social capacity to react as a whole. The fact that the military actions were visible indicates that “the population as a whole was the intended target, positioned by means of that spectacle.” (123) People are positioned as witnesses and betrayals, if they talk they are likely to be on the stage as victims of the abduction the next time, if they do not talk they are kept with the responsibility of having watched a neighbor be taken away. This dynamic generated a growing depolitizing and traumatizing effect that quickly made social ties reduced to minimum.

At the same time this is an act of producing gendered identities, a gendered nation and operating on the actual bodies of the women. The military produce the nation as a women, a feminine mother, and attribute “her” the quality of vulnerability to “bad influences” that very easily threaten her, the incapacity to protect herself and the need of a masculine figure strong and determined to save her. This masculine figure is the military. It is them who are capable of cleaning the nation form the impurities that attempt to contaminate her, form the forces that attempt to take control of her. The advertising regimes as well as the public displays of masculinist power generated the framework making state terror possible, not as terror but as an action over the body of the nation in order to save her. This produces not just the nation as gendered but also the feminine as the site of constitution of the nation, and the making of national subjectivities as caught in this gender binarism.

In this play the body of the enemy is produced as a feminine body. Living no place for the actual bodies of women. Women are a dangerous matter, bodies are to be worked upon, exposed and over which to work the desired nation. It is this type of movement that Taylor sees even critical intellectuals producing theatre plays that attempt resist the dirty war, falling back into the “bad scripts” of the dictatorship play. Thus for example Pavlosky in his intention to immerse into the psychological world of a torturer he presents a tango dance that is both sensual and violent that ends up with a dead naked body. With this he exposes, subjects and ends up in a symbolic destruction of the feminine body, an act that is not only a representation, but that for Taylor reproduces and recreates this masculinist emptying of the female body meaning and force, and this masculinist appropriation of it. This is also something she examines in the plays of Teeatro Abierto, a counter dictatorship theratrical event.

Mothers of plaza de mayo occupy an ambivalent position as they make a political space out of the dominant principle of being a good mother and taking care of their children, but they are also caught in the bad scripts of assigning a dominant meaning to being a women. In this they cannot fully reapropiate their possibility of being women political actors.

Homeless numbers growing in suburbs

Homeless numbers growing in suburbs

By Jeff Nagel - Langley Times

Published: September 20, 2008 12:00 PM

The number of homeless people has more than doubled in many parts of the Lower Mainland since 2005, according to the 2008 Homeless Count.

The 24-hour snapshot conducted by volunteers March 11 found 2,660 homeless people in Metro Vancouver - a 22 per cent increase from the previous count in 2005 and up 137 per cent from the first count in 2002.

While more than half the total homeless remain in the City of Vancouver (1,372), the numbers are up sharply in the outlying cities.
The Tri-Cities saw the biggest jump, up 140 per cent (91 homeless counted versus 38 in 2005).

The increase was 110 per cent in Burnaby (up from 40 to 84); 102 per cent in Maple Ridge/Pitt Meadows (42 to 85); and 70 per cent in Richmond (33 to 56.)

Surrey had 402 homeless counted - up five per cent from 2005 - the second largest concentration of counted homeless in Metro Vancouver. Vancouver's numbers were up six per cent.

New Westminster (123, up 34 per cent) and North Vancouver (116, up 40 per cent) had the third and fourth largest homeless populations in the region.
Outside Vancouver city limits, homelessness climbed an average 35 per cent.
The final report, released Tuesday, gives the latest and most complete picture of the scope of the problem. It also uncovers disturbing trends about who is homeless.

Organizers pointed to the rising rate of homelessness among middle-aged people and seniors.

"We're seeing aging on the streets and aging in shelters," said Val MacDonald, executive director of the Seniors Services Society. "We're seeing increased numbers of seniors who have never been homeless in their lives but due to the absence of support services are now homeless."
The median age of homeless people counted was 41 in this count, up from 38 in 2005.

football challenge

Note from M-Eve: I was forced to send this message without editing it...
From Billy:

Hello Anthropologists!

Us Sociologists are challenging you all to a friendly soccer game next weekend, Saturday the 4th, around 3pm at the Jericho Beach football field (right across from the Jericho Beach hostel). I'll send all the final details once people are on for a game.

Now we know that when you Anthros start talking about 'fields' you get very nervous and bothered so we decided that, for once, we can settle this on a relatively neutral (playing) field where we intend to give your Franz Bo-azes a proverbial kicking!
If you are interested then send me (Billy) williamf@interchange.ubc.ca or Marie-Eve : mevecarrier@yahoo.com a quick email letting us know you're interested.
If we get a few responses by the weekend then we'll go ahead and set things up
Our generous department has guaranteed us $75 for refreshements -after approaching the head, Neil Guppy and he said you should have a very good case for getting the same amount from yours. So Marie-Eve is going to sort that out.
Hope to hear from you all soon!
Billy -Sociology (self-appointed agitator and spin-doctor for Soci Inc "the best department in the world"
Marie-Eve -Anthropology

p.s. if you have doubts regarding our status as "the best department in the world" then check out what some of the critics have said about Soci Inc

"two thumbs way up"
"simply the most amazing place I've ever been- a must see!"
"miss it at your peril"

Albo

Albo explores the sense in which Bolivia indigenousness is reemerging in the site of the Alto, the satellite city to La Paz and the fastest growing city in the southern Americas. He considers this city simultaneously as a hinge, inbetween the rural Aymara world and the urban European oriented La Paz. It is not something different form la Paz, as both together form a unity in which LA Paz has central infrastructure in El Alto, it needs its population, that is a constantly present-silent other. The Alto cannot be considered as separated form the rural communities as it is full of Aymara rural immigrants that at different stages have migrated because of the crisis in the rural areas, but also attracted by a better life in the city. In this, Albo points that there are multiple families doing a dual use of space having homes both in the communities and the city or living in oner and going back to the other for festivals, meetings, family reasons. The Alto is also a voragine: it is a space in the limit of two world that distrust the other and in such field a creative force take place. One that reinstalls the indigenous presence as a force in Bolivian nationhood. The "new" Ayamras form the Alto are presenting new forms than before, many young people were mostly born in the city, do not speak the language and yet they are proud of and self identify as Aymaras. HE does see this youth, who were very actively engaged in the upraises of 2003 and 2005 as part of a new political force of the city, as a type of coming of age of a city. The other forces Albo analyzes are the Juntas vecinales, that keep some continuity with forms of organization in the rural areas even while reproducing some clientelistic relations with the state in some instances. Finally the political organization refers to the general response of the totality of the alto population and their demands to the representatives to take a position and mobilize during the as conflict. It is the maturity of a consciousness based on the colonial experience, a cultural tradition, and an awareness of the use of natural resources what he sees as a trigger of the Alto organization and full mobilization during these conflicts. This creative force is what ended in the election of Evo Morale s and is now conducting bolivia.

anzaldua

Most comments about Anzaldua start by saying "she is a Chicana lesbian feminist" as if that is the main point of her critical perspective. I do not mean to deny her positioning as significant but I am suspicions very soon about the labeling as "radical" and the consecutive reclusion of her argument to some radical place.
In any case she does speak about and from a margin and a border. She speaks as a Chicana form Aztlan, this is not born in Mexico and emigrated to the us, but indigenous, then colonized by Spanish and then colonized by the us. She speaks about the emergence of a new mestiza one that is not only "born" form the violent sexual encounter of colonizers/colonized but that occupies a space in between: her territory has been cut in tow and now is a constantly crossing borders in between the us and the Mexico. None of this places is more her own than any other in both she is marginal and an other in both it is the space of the border with the constant flow of people, with the constant encounters, a space of interaction more than division in which she localizes herself. She recognizes the migration oto the US as part of a tradition: "we have a tradition of walks. Today we are witnessing la migraci'on de los pueblos mexicanos, the return odessey to the historical/mythological Aztl'an. This time the traffic is form south to north" (11) This is why she recognizes home as a fractured location: "This is my home. This thin edge of barbwire" (3) she claims is where "los atravesados live: the squint-eyeed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome .... those who cross over, pass over, or go through the confines of the "normal". (3) She produces a narrative of origin: of the mestizo, of herself and of the life in the border: " la migra" deporting us citizens who are Chicanos, the "mythical" foundation of Mexico city as a subjection of the feminine to the patriarchal order. The Mexicans are born as a hybrid mixed race "one that had never existed before" (5) and form this and further mixtures with indigenous and the the indigenous of the US Sothwest that Chicanos come form. It is her position as women what defines her and not any big revolutionary possess that in the name of "the people" have reproduced patriarchal structures and exploitation of women, what defines her critical standpoint. It is also the in-betweenness of language and the simultaneous use of both English and Spanish that make her capable of communication. Finally she writes in a self reflective style, not in terms of a theoretical critique, nor as fiction and not just as autobiography, she collapses some of this, and somehow opens up a particular space of/for writing. I still refuse the idea of hybridity, not so much in her work but for the implications it has latter used as a category. As it has been said so much (hall?) hybridity implies too much the mixture of different and separated entities that all of a sudden combine. In this I still love Mary Douglas and her constant remainder of what is the logic that separates first and then understand what happens when separate things come together. It is in blurring the boundaries tha the political possibility emerges, the posssibility of reveling against what has made "us belive that the ndian woman in us is a betrayer. We indiana y mestizas, police the indian in us, brutalize and condemn her. Male culture has done a good job in us."
To this Melissa Wright would propose that in the practice mestizas are not only finding this as a path for struggle but it is in the resignification process that some room of manuver can be gained too. In this the play of theri boriding crossing experience and in their capacity to deal with the two georgraphies and unfold both identities gives sepcific situation that wright sees some of the mestizas finding thier way [this is a bit " individual agency" oriented]. The mestizas working in the maquiladoras Wright analyzes are not claerly heroic, as in cases it implies individual paths to positions of power in the factory and reproducing the relations in which other mestizas are underpaid. She points that "Cruicial to this endavour is a critical enquiry into teh relationship between the border as a metaphor for myriad social divisions and the border as a material space that is policed, enforced and physically crossed" (Wright 116).


Her position is

Surralles The Land WIthin

The book is a collection of essays on the indigenous perception of the environment from the indigenous point of view. It explore both general epistemological principles and the particular contents of an "Amerindian perspective". They make an interesting point in that in the face of state and corporative interests in indigenous lands and given the advances in the titling of their lands there is still a lot to consider on how do the indigenous conceive of the territory and how they organize social life within it in order to establish "true intercultural dialogue" grant power to their life in the territory. The book is also intended to present an indigenous perspective in the face of environmental movement that has too quickly attributed a series of notions and practice to the indigenous perception of the environment. The author explains that it is for the indigenous to engage in the philosophical notion of legality during and claims as the underlying notions differ so much form their principles of territory and environment in which social relation are extended to all beings in the environment. It is form this starting point that they present the group of ethnographies that present with this visions. It is not just about acculturation, he argues but about how indigenous groups have both reproduced their culture and use it to understand the challenges they are faced to. The author has a very either or perspective, either Western or indigenous: "The purely indigenous political discourse, which wisely insists in differentiating a Western vision of an object - nature (in which its appropriation, domination and exploitation are justifies) form an indigenous vision (in which nature and man share existential relationships of reciprocity and mutual respect) must now shape the specific vision that doubtless gave shape to this poltical discourse." (11) In other words to start talking about politics we need to understand indigenous philosophy that underlies any politics and this vision is very different from the western one. This is an interesting claim, and it is a position to take that generates a specific type of knowledge that can be very enriching, there are different ideas, i consider, being produced among indigenous and also the subaltern in general. However the question is if there is any possibility form examining this knowledge outside colonialism, outsite the processes of subordination that trasverse thier position through. I am skeptical in that this type of anthropology can never be an indigenous philosophy to deal with "the notion of territory among the indigenous of nn" is already a conceptual decision of framing reality under the notion of theory and assigning a different meaning or redefining it altogether.
The book is organized in a theoretical part in which Descola presents a reexamination of the notion of animism, as for him one fundamental aspect for the indigenous relation with the environment is that they consider the elements that compose it "persons" (it intentionality, emotions, self consciousness), and forming different communities of persons. In this the distinction nature / culture will not sustain. His conclusion is that both in an amazonean society and in the canadian subartic what we think of as "nature" is an inexistent category intergrated in a complex "network of social interaction in which man is no more than one actor amongst many others. On his part Viveiros da Castro proposes that this soceties have a "perspectism" as a guiding logic for thought. With this he means that humans and non humans only occupy relative positions with a very complex network of interrelations, human are then predators in many cases but they are the prey for depredatory animals. In normal circumstances humans define as humans and animals as animals but in other the animal become human, and vise versa. The only one that can transit all this "subject positions" [my wording of course] is the shaman that can assume any form and position himself in all different type of the sides of teh relations. For Viveiros da castro this means that knowledge is generated through total subjectification, through a complete becoming somethin else and not through the separation, objectification and examinantion. The rest of the articles present specific case studies in which aspects of this ideas are presented. One interesting ones s the one that presents territory as the space of social relations, thus the territory extends as much as kin and personal realtions reach Oscar Calavia Saez.

Guss The reconquest of La PAz

This article follows the transformations of the use of space for popular festivities in the city of La Paz. To do this he has to follow the thread of the construction of a european bolivian elite at the opening of the 20th C and the massive arrival of rural population especially form the 1950s onward. He starts by a recapitulation of previous relations between indians and colonizers and the way the racialized distinctions was, in the spanish colonial context, a fluid delimitation of positions that could easily change when the social position, when the context changed, and especially the geographically location of a person shifted form country to city (he quotes Weismantle´s notion of "geography of race"). [esto me recuerda que un texto obvio que no inclui hasta ahora es "the country and the city" the ep thompson, una de las primeras cosas que lei para esto... lo tendría que revisitar]. However the space for this fluidity the dual organization of the city between the centre of La Paz and Chijini (displaced latter to el Alto). This division does not imply an autonomy but rather a segregation in terms of race, made possible by the possibilities of daily commuting of indigenous to the city centre that depends on its labour. Elites moved form the central colonial plaza to the lowlands where mot state services developed, while indigenous people were only able to settle in the highlands with less amenities and little possibilities of social mobility. The influx of indigenous rural population generates what Lipsitz calls "dangerous crossroads" (interesting to check) in which "colonizers" and "colonized" converge daily and both create frictions and enable the emergence of new forms socialization and more interestingly new forms of public space. So initially the use of public space of the city was apropriated by euro bolivian men, who dominanted the carnival parades divided in fratries dressed in european costumes and comunicating that the mass indigenous festivities were unwelcome. At a point there were a timid formation of new types of fraternities, more numerous, more diverse and composed of Ch'utas, or indigenous born in the city. They parodied the whites through the elaborated costumes and white masks. In parallel the cellebration of the gran poder resulted from the church rejection of a image of the holly trinity that quickly became adopted by the new immigrants who gave refuge, built a chapel in the Chijini and embraced its festivity as their own, with its own fraternities, fire works, the andean dance "suri suki", and soon the diabladas brough by the miners. With the revolution of the 1950 the new arrival of liberated indigenous (now "peasants" by revolutionary reform) increased the population again especially in El Alto, for whom joining a dance fraternity implied an important form of generating links in the city. The organization of the celebration was also a site of direct political struggle for the conformation of a Junta de Vecinos, to its replacement of an Asociacion de Conjuntos Folkloricos with the assumption to power of populist conservative Hugo BAnzer, who participated in the parade and turned this as a central manifestation of nationality. In this moment a new more elaborated type f group emerged: the morenadas related to populist bourgeoisie and their display of wealth, and were a last challenge to the oligarchy excluding indigenous form the national narrative, and ended up reapropiating the space of the city centre by the indians. In this process both the church complained about the celebration and the government "did all it could to prevent the festival form arriving at the city's centre... every year there was a confortation over the exact details of the route. The final importance of the fiesta was manifested with the interruption of the uprising of the 2003 (conflicts over the gas) that were interrupted for one day to give place to the celebration, and in 2005 when the alto put the city under siege, the fiesta was also a moment of reconciliation. 6 months latter Evo was elected invoking the prophecy of tupac katari (y robada por el peronismo!!) "volver'e y ser'e millones".


de golpe me muero por mascar coca, abrazarlo a evo y saltar en la calle al son del caporal. en fin.

varios

bueno me la pase leyendo sobe la paz hoy y realmente lo encuentro muy muy interesante. me encantaría conocer el alto, me parece que todo lo que me intereza esta magnificado aca y no pude parar de leer el journal dedicado a la "reconquista indigena" de la paz. no es casual que todo el numero que era sobre "nuevos urbanismo indígenas" y en el que me encontraba encontrar con un popurri de cosas, estaba en realidad soalemnte dedicado a la paz. reuslta que el alto es la ciudad que mayor crecimiento demográfico ha tenido en las americas. por supuesto el alto es un puesto dentro de los recirridos entre la paz y las zonas andinas, o es casi una cabecera en la ue viven incluso autoridades rurales. bueno eso tengo que anotar ahora.

mientras tanto hoy me la pase mirando en el teorico en el que cumplo el rol de ayudante de practicos sin practicos, me pase mirando la actividad de una chica sobre su computadora. tenia claro aviertas varias ventanas y despues de chequear su mail y facebook, tomo notas prolijamente pero tambien se la paso jugando a un jueguito de completar paises del mundo. complicada la parte de polinesia pero igual completo un monton. en fin. mientras tanto un macro relato del surgimento del capitalismo muy bueno. David, el docente, explico incluso las formulas MDM, DMD y las complico, con una frescura increible. a trabajar ahora.

Grimson bolivianos en Buenos aires

mas foto de fiestas, esta en el barrio



Grimson analizes the identity construction among Bolivian migrants to Buenos Aires as constituted within intra and intercultural frames of communication. This migratory process is not only seen as problematic by the Argentinean society, both by the state and by a public sphere, but is also falsely connect migration with unemployment. Communication for Grimson is not just the instance of the interpellation of migrants as others made by dominant discourses nor is an analysis of the interpretations of the immigrants readings of the dominant cultures but rather works over multiple dimensions of the communicative process. To do this he reconstructs the self construction of identities among the Bolivian immigrants, living in the charrua neighborhood (inhabited by a majority of immigrant and second generation of Bolivians) in the symbolic interaction that put into play multiple systems of meaning both in the everyday production of meaning that include the interpretation and appropriation of technological mean of communication (the radio). In this sense he carefully follows the interpretations of the actors of the social relations in which identity is recreated. He therefore analyzes the intercultural encounters in the spaces of everyday life: from the public transportation to the factory and interaction with the police. Even though he does not engage in a racial critique, he recognizes the force of the stigma carried in the body. He claims that “the inequality proclaimed by vast sector of the receiving society associate a symbolic difference with a sociobiological one.” (50 my translation). Its extreme construction associates a body fisionomy to poverty, lack of “education”, criminality and amorality. The body is thus a marker of difference read by the “porteños” who react in different ways as they recognize them as others, mostly in either direct verbalizations of stereotypes (among working class and “provincial” porteños) or by bodily signs of demarcations of difference, such as looking down, or showing fear of a projected criminality, among the “educated” middle class. In this sense for Grimson communication is also about proxemics and body communication. To this situations Grimson show how people react by either letting the stigma be manifested, by pushing the stigma to a limit through reinforcing it with exaggeration and by inverting the stigma and “giving it back” to the producer. This is what he call counterstigmatization strategies He uses the notion of hibridity to give account of the way identity is recreated in Buenos Aires in the intersections of nationality, religiosity, indigeneity, profession, and generational lines that converge in it. In his book he unpacks four dimensions of the communicative process: a) the every day situations of intercultural communication in the city especially in their interactions with different social groups defined by them as: educated and provincials porteños, Koreans, Paraguayan, Peruvian and chilenian; b) the analysis of the festivities in the charrua neighborhood as a site of community building and of negotiation of tensions with the “receiving” society ; c) the appropriation of technological media for a self construction of identity and a self generated space for bolivianness; and d) the use of the television as educational political and position taking tool in diverse reception practices. A great quote by one of the “informants” : mira la sociedad argentina quiere aparentar ser mas mala de lo que es, quiere aparentar ser mas linda de los que es, quiere aparentar ser mas inteligente de lo que es. Pero si vos tratás con ellos te das cuenta que no son tan malos como parecen, no son tan lindos como parecen ni son tan inteligentes como parecen.” (49) He finally points to the fact that even though that form hegemonic position there is a tendency to attribute a social homogeneity the field of the popular is trasversed by forms of fragmentation of the practice that restricts a unified mobilization and the articulation of common interest.

Turner Terence 1995

The three points he claims to be contributing to are: a) the emphasis in the activity of the body, b) the dividuality and permeability of its unity, c) the social character of the human body. He claims that anthropology can contribute to the debate through the ethno-theories on the body that are not attached to the western philosophical tradition that contemporary theorists are criticizing (such as Foucault). He starts his analysis of the kayapo by a statement on the “direct modification on the surface of the body as a general social practice tends to be found far more frequently in simple societies with relative rudimentary divisions of labor, than do not produce primarily for exchange.” (146). This is because the exchange of good that informs social identity in industrial societies happens as an exchange of social values through other venues such as performance and visual display that include the symbolic modification of the body as part of the production of cultural subjects. ). He then makes a detail description of the bodily habits of the kayapo and offers a series of interpretations of the meaning of the practices and adornment. He describes the roles and codification of such aspects of bodily practice as cleanliness, hair, body painting, apertures (ears, lips), elements as slings and bracelets, ceremonial costume. He makes some interesting analysis in relation to each of such features and the contexts of display. However there are of course some problematic aspects as we do not really know how do we get to those meanings, is it personal induction, the explanation of a kayapo specialist explaining a system of meaning, or is it the participants own interpretations. At the same time the parts in which he organizes the presentation are rather western forms of organizing knowledge: classifying types of practice dividing the body in sectors that deserve particular analysis (hair, ears, etc), giving one meaning to each of the defined fields of practice and each body part. He states for example”. The consecutive sets of bracelets symbolize physical growth” (157) or “symbolically opening holes in the ears, is understandable as an act of socialization, at once mimetic and performative” (154). We can quickly point to the fact that “mimetic” and “performative” are not part of a kayapo conceptual tools, and thus that his claim of manifesting a kayapo theory of the body is very much his appropriation of meanings and his own organization into a classificatory system (this is Bourdieu´s critique in OTP). It is surprising as well how form body parts and body adornment “Necklaces” “Body Paint” he jumps to the subtitles “sexuality and reproduction” or “the body as a recursive process” as if it was an dimension with a parallel entity to the previous ones. In his last subsection he offers a more general interpretation of the position of the body in relation to the world “From the Kayapo point of view, this thoroughgoing parallelism between cosmic and bodily form is neither a metaphorical correspondence between separately natural and social orders, nor a projection of the structure of the body to the structure of the cosmos. Rather body and cosmos participate in a single process of development, the form of all space-time.” (164) So this is an interesting idea to which we can agree even form western philosophical perspectives. At this point in his conclusion he insists that for the kayapo the production of bodiliness is not produced in terms of abstract conceptual attributes but “in terms of schemas of concrete bodily activity” (164), which is other point of criticism, as what is he understanding as concept, and as concrete, and how is not western subjectivity, even for Foucault shaped in technologies of the body of the individual and the population. I think this type of attacks to theory and defence to ethnotheroy do not lead us to useful places, the critique is not engaged with what Foucault is saying and is not giving credit to ideas both conceptual and “in practice” that these others produce. So his final point is a reiteration for the critique to Foucault, as the one who reproduced individual ideas of the body and detach them form political and social dynamics (????) and th Emily Martin as not recognizing that the current interest in the body is not just a self awareness of the lack of study of this problem but as a acritical reification of an ideological retreat to the subjectivity.




la foto mas interesante que encontre, de un sitio de "olimpiadas indigenas amazonicas" http://www.opendemocracy.net/arts-photography/article_2056.jsp

Joseph and Nugent - Everyday forms of state formation

The authors compile a series of articles that reconsider the rol of the mexican revolution in the constitution of conetmporary mexican state. Scott introduces the main question of the book as: "to what extent has the state's hegemonic project influenced by the force of popular experience and mobilized popular expecations of the revolution ? (viii)

They oppose to three lines of analysis: 1) the dominant discourses analyzing the Mexican revolution as the constitution of a popular state of the people end for the people, 2) revisionists approaches pointing to the betrayals of the revolutionary leaders conforming the Mexican state to the popular peasant sectors supporting and making the revolution in order to create a new regime of privilege, 3) the neopopulist approaches that claim that populist movements necesarilly influenced the revolution adn the concequent events but do not question exactly what they understand and how diverse and complex is the popular itself. They claim to take a relational, procesual perspective that considers difference within the popular, they propose to closely analayze what is that makes a popular culture into a revolutionary consciousness to understand how it acted upon the revolution and the state and how this constuitutes a form of negotiation form below.

The point of discussion of the authors is the dynamics within the long period of the revolution. The want to recover the proc3ess over the understanding of the revolution as event. In this they position their work in the lines of inquiry opened by Scott and MArtin-Barbero, in regards to popular culture, Abrams and Corrigan and Sayer in relation to the formation of the state. In regards to the concept of popular the consider it "to designate the day to day practices of subordinated groups" (17) that both denies the folkloristic approaches pointing to an atemporal and untouched patern of cultural practice and the approaches claiming for its massification as a result of the overlapping of popular culture media and the market. Popular cualture is a multilocal space in which subjects, different form the dominant groups are constituted.

They follow Currigan and Sayer in their understanding of the state as a cultural phenomena rather than as the constitution of an institutional "thing" with an entity and power outside social relations. For the authors the state is about how power effects are generated in society, of making sense of the world, unfolded in the state activities, rituals and habit and constituted in the experience of its subjects. One of the fundamental state dimensions is its embodiment of the habits of rule. For the authors a feature of modern state is both its totalizing power over population's identity and its simultaneous individualizing effects that find individuals as its point of operation rather than communities. [escribo esto como sentido comun arrollador, si estas ideas siguen siendo un punto de partida, cuanto mas hay para problematizar? probablemente foucault me resulta como un paso mas alla ahora]

In this they intend to focus in the relational nature of state and subject formation as well as the dimension of practice in this constitution. The state involvement with "grass root" society is one of the focuse of their interest not as space of necessary tension, but also where opening and collaboration may happen. For them the revolution opens a space in which new habits as well as institutional and power structures continuity took place and in which multiple tensions unfolded in the localities and particular conjunctures of what is understood as revolution. The perspective takes both the dominant projects and the popular cultures as arenas of diversity and struggle in themselves and not as coherent, unidirectional and organized blocks. How is this project translated into practice is other diemnsion the authors are interested in understanding [ojo con esto de traducir un proyecto a la practica, bastante problematico como piensan la acci'on politica en una cadena racional de planificacion, proposito y accion]
They join the critique to the subaltern studies group in their supposedly reification of that popular as a site of autonomy and as a consciousness never fully incorporated to hegemony. They claim the popular is nor autonomous nor a fabrication of the state rule. [bueno conozco esa critica, lo que si defiendo de Guha y cia ahora es que la idea de grupos contraditorios no permite entender lo generativo, no permite entender lo que queda por fuera de la sintesis, si bien esos grupos no estan por fuera de las relaciones, si quedan siempre sin condificar, si bien el significado les corre atraz nunca se captura totalmente, creo que a eso no puedo ir, aunque claro que sin saberlo estaba parada en la subalternidad de lo indigena no representado siempre]

To synthesize they quote of Nungent and Alonso "Popular culture is contradictory since it embodies and elaborates dominant symbols and meanings but also contests, challenges, rejects and revualues and presents alternatives to them" (22) tro do this they propose to engage in different and simultaneous time scales of the revolution.

isabela

trinh t min-ha

A quote form an interview with min-ha I find interesting

This may fit well with today's transnational economy, in which the crossing of geophysical boundaries is of wide occurrence, whether by choice or by political circumstances. But for the notion of the transversal and the transcultural to take on a life in one's work, traveling would have to happen in one place, or inward. Home and abroad are not opposites when traveling is not set against dwelling and staying home. In a creative context, coming and going can happen in the same move and traveling is where I am. Where you are is where your identity is; that's your place and that's your home...
G S: That's your now.

T Mh: Yes, exactly. Going from one place to another is here returning home.

Centros de Abastecimiento Comunitarios

Sábado 20/09: Productos al costo y a precios accesibles para los vecinos en California 2378, Barracas,en Darwin e Itati, Lomas y en la la calle 89 e/ 27 y 26, La Plata

Contra el Hambre y la inflación,

contra la inoperatividad y falta de voluntad política del gobierno

impulsamos Centros de Abastecimiento Comunitarios


El Frente Darío Santillán, inspirado en la experiencia venezolana del Mercal, viene impulsando ferias de productos al costo en los barrios con el objetivo de garantizar productos más baratos para los vecinos y para demostrar que es posible realizar iniciativa populares que tiendan a redistribuir la riqueza.



En este sentido, este sábado a partir de las diez de la mañana, realizaremos una nueva feria en California 2378, en el barrio de Barracas, otra en Lomas de Zamora, en Darwin e Itati, Lomas y en La Plata, en la calle 89 e/ 27 y 26, La Plata. Gracias a la colaboración de los trabajadores del Mercado Frutihortícola de Lanús, que funciona en el predio recuperado Rocanegra y nos vende frutas y verduras al costo, podremos venderle a los vecinos alimentos al costo, mucho más baratos que en cualquier supermercado o almacen.



Si bien en Argentina se producen alimentos para doce veces su población, hay millones de personas que no pueden alimentarse dignamente y con el aumento de la inflación en el último año, esta situación se agravo más aún. Desde el Frente Darío Santillán, junto al Frente de Organizaciones en Lucha, el MTD Aníbal Verón Nueva Fuerza, la Federación de Organizaciones de Base y el frente de Organizaciones por el Poder Popular, creemos que esto sólo puede suceder por una injusta distribución de la riqueza. Por eso reclamamos eliminar el 21 por ciento del I.V.A. y proponemos la creación de Centros de Abastecimiento Comunitario, que garanticen la soberanía alimentaria y la socialización de las riquezas que producen nuestros bienes naturales y los trabajadores.



El aumento de los precios de los alimentos ha sido mucho mayor al de los salarios y los ingresos sociales. El IVA es uno de los impuestos más regresivos de la política tributaria argentina. Si los alimentos y los medicamentos estuvieran exentos de IVA, los precios bajarían., al menos un 15,9 por ciento y dos millones de personas dejarían de ser pobres.



Por eso, con la realización de estas ferias de "Alimentos para todos" y com parte del espacio "Otro camino para superar la crisis" impulsamos la Campaña contra el hambre y la inflación para exigir:



- La eliminación del IVA a los alimentos

- Aumento de los impuestos progresivos (a la riqueza e impuesto a la renta financiera hoy exenta) para subvencionar la rebaja de los precios de los alimentos

- Centros de abastecimientos Comunitarios sostenidos por el Estado

- Un cambio profundo en el modelo agropecuario y el rechazo al tarifazo

Contactos:

Capital: (Federico, 155489-1374)
Lanús: (Celina, 154159-8369)


Actividades:


Sábado 20/09: Feria de Alimentos en California 2378, Barracas, Capital
Sábado 20/09: Feria de Alimentos en Darwin e Itati, Lomas.
Sábado 20/09: Feria de Alimentos en la calle 89 e/ 27 y 26, La Plata
Sábado 27/09: Feria de alimentos en Tucumán y Pirovano, barrio La Torre, Lanús
Sábado 4/10: Feria de alimentos en Tacuari 1444, local del MTD "Darío Santillán", Constitución, Capital.





Frente Popular Darío Santillán

fogel chance

Fogel-Chance, Nancy 1993. “Living in Both Worlds: Modernity and Tradition among North Slope Iñupiaq Women in Anchorage.” Arctic Anthropology,30 (1) :94-108.

The author points how the modernizing model in North Alaska fails to consider the first nations, in particular in the face of the development of oil exploitation of the region.. She points to the Inupiat cultural recreation in the city, which is a location expected to generate cultural loss. Inupiat positioning in regard to modernization is even more challenging than either “traditionalist” or “modernizing” claims, as they claim to be “living in both worlds”, in which a careful selection of what is more suitable form each social formation (the more “traditional” rural communities and the cities). To leave in both worlds entails to be in-between two cultures, and challenge the limits of both. The author focuses on a gender dimension of Inupiat in the city, as women are both the focus of policies aiming to transform the Inupiat (and trying to impose a western femininity over the women) and are central actors in the cultural recreation. Inupiat women in Anchorage are not marginal, rather they are mostly employed and have fulfilled their expectations of having better conditions of living that in the communities. The women’s economic position in the city is then not a field of tensions, however the social incorporating offers some challenges. The women’s migration was caused by: 1) a family member’s migration, 2) lack of employment in rural communities, 3) to accept a work or higher education offer. Indirectly the oil agreement generated labour for indigenous in the city, many of which were taken by women, who have more “freedom” that in the communities. Men tend to have a more mobile pattern of going to the city for seasonal work and then returning for the hunting season. In spite of employment some women supplement work with craft production. Women are central actors in the generation of kin and friendship networks in the city, and some cultural practices likewise are central for women’s assimilation to the city. Parental styles are one f the points of friction, as women’s cooperative parenting was regarded by institutions as abandonment. Inupiat households generally include more member than the nuclear family, and they generally host family members visiting the city. Networks or reciprocity are also active in the city, and do not present challenges to economic upward mobility as in other contexts. This networks are active for the distribution of good but function as well as means of communication. Given frequent is expensive each trip of someone form the communities to the city is taken as a chance to transmit messages, and carry goods. Travel is thus a means of community / city redistribution in which relatives but also friends and other community members are included. Networks are built extensive enough so as not to put too much pressure over one person and at the same time cover a variety of roles. Living in both worlds then menas to be in between “tradition / modernity” and the “ rural / urban” but it also means for the women to are lobbiests of the indigenous matters, while in the city and that they may return to rural communities. Movement in between the country and the city is in part a continuity of seasonal variations of resources, but now subsistence activities have changed and offer a complex variety of options.

Marston The social construction of scale

The author offers a review on the developments on the theorization of the concept of scale in geography as well as proposes a line to advance in such productions, particularly by incorporating consumption and reproduction (as suggested by Lefebvre) to the analysis. Scale is a central concept in all geography subdisciplines and varies form issues of size, level and relation. Arelational analysis of scale may contribute to problematize this three dimensions in their interconnections. If the contemporary debates around scale offer a constructivist approach, which recognizes scale as a social product and not an ontological fact, scale is not only a product but constitutive of geographical relations. To address the production of scale she points to the need of understanding both the dynamics of capitalist production which is always producijng and reproducing scale, but also to understand the state as one of the factors effecting globalization and being in turn affected by them. for this she takes Brenner reading on the state as a scial organization of space that makes the “enables the extension of power and control enabling the circulation of capital.” (227) Globalization is a fundamental force constructing different scales. The case studies she review show how scale is generated form power positions, that both distinguishes levels and create specific articulations of scale, as well as how social movements use the opening made at different scales. Thus subjectivity and agency need to be considered as forces producing scale, the differential production of subjectivity, made through particular positionings is transvered by the axis of scale. The body as well as the home, nature and global capital production of value are forces affected by and affecting the production of scale. “The urban is perhaps the most intense site of political struggle because this is where the process of the capital competition and cooperation play themselves out” (232) having immediate and different affections over social groups. In this there is the possibility of a study of the struggles of articulating locations as a politics of scale. Networks analysis may offer insight in how some localities have more possibilities than other to associate with others that are not close to their immediate boundaries, and how they do so by associating simultaneously at different scales. She reviews the work of Neil Smith as offering a theory of scale, at a political economic level. He is takes Taylor´s distinctions to point to a global scale of a world economy organized around the capitalist relations that are directed towards an equalization of relations, a urban scale one of experience that tends towards a differentiation not only of relation but also by the way international labor market is divided. Finally the scale of the nation mediates between them. The state scale remains important with globalization as states remains central for protecting the interests of national capitals competing against others, and as a power that controls localized labor force. Thus the level of the reproduction of life and the gendered dimension of it is a central, overlooked dimension. Capiralism cannot be understood as a simultaneous constitution of a gender, ethnicity, race and class, all play out in the making of the public private domenain. She takes for example the making of a scientific managerism of the house as the housewife responsibility, something that made them into responsible citizens and thus linking the house with the broader community. This can be also connected to the suffragists movements that turned women into public political actors. Thus the home was a complex geographical structure in which production and reproduction were converging enabling shaping economic and political forces.

Auyero Poor People’s politics

In the context of contemporary interpretation of political clientelism as one of Latin Americas’ political limitations to democracy, Auyero offers an alternative analysis of the problem solving networks between problem holders and solvers (brokers) as a means of creation of an alternative for the creation of subsistence among the large groups of socially and economically excluded groups inhabiting Greater Buenos Aires slums in the 1990s. In a context of structural division of the labor market and of both economic neoliberalism and state abandonment, the peronist networks offer the sometimes only alternative for accessing necessary services and goods, but also as an institution that gets involved with this sector. He critiques the interpretations of clientelism as a form of political and ideological submission, as a rational “exchange” of goods for votes or as a political strategy for dividing the field of the popular. Rather Auyero offers a “microphysics of politics” to understand the “way politics affects and engages the real lives of people” (24) in this problem solving networks recreate the bases of political party organization by reinventing populism. Through material and symbolic practice. He also offers reading on gendered dimension on politics in which the constitution of a feminine field is not only an opening of a sphere of resistant for women’s participation, but rather contributes in a particular way to reinforce forms of subordination. The neighborhood he works at was a result of the rural urban migrations of the late 1940s, and that benefit form peronist politics until 1955. If the military dictatorships were both efficient in developing the shanty town with infrastructure they were also in evicting people form it. Finally the 1980 and 1990 was the moment in which the neighborhood stopped being a place of upward mobility that would take people out of the shantytown and transformed into a permanent place of survival for the socially and economically excluded (66). In this context an everyday type of “internal” violence emerged as a result of the recourse to criminality and drug traffic by some sectors of the youth, and of development of forms of stigma against the immigrant population of the neighborhood. This has generated a strong and violent presence of police in the everyday life (73-77). To understand the way networks function he unpacks the practices of political brokers and in particular the women that function as the coordinators of state social programs made effective through the party structure. He claims that is not enough to understand the structural position of brokers but also the specific performance they unfold. The brokers function as gatekeepers to the benefit of programs and of general help, but they present as disinterest coordinators totally committed to social solidarity. This brokers are mostly women and have a particular life trajectory: strong family ties with peronist networks and a early start in social work. Further Auyero claims that they create relations with their followers by presenting themselves as incarnations of Evita, they perform Evita and this is part of the way they produce their life trajectories. Brokerage is not something fixed but a patter of coherent articulate conduct that occupies the available social spaces and reenacts the past and therefore it reinscribes it. Women brokers present themselves as being close to the people as a maternal figure. Thus they work disinterestly as maternal caregivers for their unprotected children something assumed as “natural” of the feminine condition, and that operates in a realm different form politics (even when they could eventually be involved in politics latter).
He points to brokers and political leaders mobility as a form of performance that creates a territoriality of it dominium. By moving, both the municipal major and the brokers impart a “personal touch” to the local politics they get in touch with the people by physically getting to them, transversing the neighborhood in a bike entering the intricate shantytown pathways, is a way in which Evita is embodied in practice, an Evita performance that re-actualizes her figure as mother of the poor.
In regards to this collapse of politics and kinship the actualization, the constant recreation of the practice and image of evita as mother, is done through incessant broker´s performativity. In it they produce their circle of followers as a family. He quotes Bourdieu “a united integrated entity which is stable and indifferent to the fluctation of individual feelings” “a transpersonal person” in which the laws of economic exchange and interest are apparently suspended, of trusting and giving. (138) This is a space of the women as care givers and the men as responisibel and providers. Women brokers have to work within this parameter: they shape their public role on gender, women comply what men decide and they do social work while men do politics.
“Performing Evita, restoring constructed behavior, is not purposely engineered or cynical action. It is not theatrical. It is a practice in Bourdieu’s sense of the term: taken ofr granted, unreflective and outside of the realm of discursive consciousness. Their practice is an embodiment of the way a woman should behave if she is going to be a public peronist woman.” “these women perform Evita not only ou of affinity and admiration for Eva, but laso because, as Eva Perón herself found out there are few good roles for women in the public arena. But their practice is also improvisation.” (145) By constituting social work as a duty they occupy a space of relative autonomy opened to them. Through this embodied aesthetic, discursive practice women enter the field of politics but they also construct it, they both seek to satisfy personal interest as they feel impelled to embody Eva to be peronist women. For Auyero the presentation of the women broker operate as an ideological mechanism in order to veil relations of power.