wesimantel

The exploration of Mary Weismantel shows the relevance of the study of sex and race as organizing the categories of a hierarchical grid constituting the Andean societies. She shows how the classifying grids of sex, gender, race and ethnicity are mutually interpenetrated and result form colonial experience. She gives a relevant role to the action of exchange as creating racial identities. The author demonstrates how issues of culture cannot be considered in isolation form but rather in connection to social and biological reproduction. She positions herself along with anthropologist such as Marisol de La Cadena (2000), in rethinking the study on ethnic identity as not only as the production of meaning and affiliation to a particular grouping. These authors search to overcome the idea of identity as only a symbolic super-structural product by taking into account the role of sexual interactions as a form of connectivity of social bodies and as a site of transmission of social qualities through the exchange of qualities through blood.

To analyze this aspect of materiality of social categories, and stating that she is considering the materiality symbolism and the meanings of practice, she takes the dichotomy between Pishtacos and Cholas as foundational division of the Andean society after the conquest. Pishtacos is a mythical figure that represents a white man that is armed with a knife and wanders in the night in search of Indians. There are multiple accounts related to the Pishtaco in the present and through time, having changed his shape from a religious priest to an hacendado, form a medical doctor to a soldier. The common characteristic of it is that it searches for Indians and kills them to extract their fat, they rape indigenous and mestizo women and castrate indigenous men. But Pishtacos are not just a destructive figure, they have the aim in their killing of extracting fat to sell it.

Killing is part of a process of production under capitalists logic which has the aim of obtaining a profit. Thus, Wesitmantel proposes that whiteness is constituted as an activity as well as an identity, and innate condition. Whiteness is a type of performance that results form and permits, accumulation. Accumulation is possible in unequal exchange relations, in this case, exchange is done in hierarchical sex relations. This condition is associated to the possession of certain objects, such as cars and guns that are represented as body parts and markers of identification. As Diane Nelson (1999) would argue, this is both a critic and a literal image of society. In accordance to the first, Pishtacos are seen as something un-natural and so evitable, thus they are not a fatality. Also they are an almost literal expression of the colonial and Post-colonial relations between white, mestizos and indigenous.

The counter part of Pishtacos are the mestizo women, whose common place is the market, known as Cholas. Weismantel analyzes how they are genderized, represent the nurturing reproductive figure, but also the whitening of society. Cholas are categorized only as women, there are no cholos, and who have a white man as eventual partner to have their children. Cholas are thought to be born form the union of an indigenous woman and a white man. Thus they embody the colonial clash and the violence in it, a violence that is not only to conquest a territory but an appropriation by rape of the indigenous bodies. They are single mothers and attributed a exacerbated sexuality. They are the object of desire of white men who see in them the wilderness of indigenous and the beauty of white women. She also analyses the mythical opposite of the Pishtaco, the Mama Negra, black mother a woman with exacerbated sexuality and reproductive power, strong and defiant of white men. In accordance to this strength and independence she has virile qualities which are symbolically condensed in the possession of penis. The black mother then condenses some of the qualities of the cholas, seen as negative by hegemonic discourses, and so stresses the contested positioning of their identity.

The author shows how this dual oposition organizes the structure of inequalities according in relation to blood, class and place. Thus, as De La Cadena (2000) has argued, indigenous are the pure settlers of the rural areas who have not mixed with whites. White women in this grid are correct partner for a white men and owners of a “controlled” sexuality. Interestingly the uncategorized people are the indigenous and mestizo men, whose bodies cannot contribute to whitening, and whose location is restricted to the rural areas.

There are a few critics that can be posed to this work. On the one hand, the ambivalent regarding of Pishtacos as a part of reality yet then differentiating them form Cholas as being only imaginary. In this way if we follow Taussig’s (1987) logic we could argue with her that Pishtacos are in fact real, as fiction is a constitutive component of reality. The other is the ambivalent extension of the location of her fieldwork. Not being a multi-sited ethnography, she takes the Andean regions as a unity disregarding the national and regional differences. She even jumps into examples of the Caribbean islands (sse page 201) and Brazilian fazendas. The connection between different colonial situations is no doubt enlightening, yet the heterogeneous source of the sources she analyzes lead us with the question about which are the different situations of each case. Different authors have analyzed the weight of national, regional and provincial particular processes in the production of subjectivities in contemporary Latin America (see for example GEAPRONA 2005 ).

Finally, is curious that the author, does not take the analysis of sex to the analysis of social production and reproduction into the further implications these concepts. She analyzes the generation of racial categories as a result of exchange, as a trading activity that permits accumulation, which is one constitutive factors of race. She leaves outside the analysis the way sex produces the racial, gender and ethnic inequalities of the people involved. Also sex implies the gestation of people who will be ascribed to a particular category in the social structure. This is sex produces the people involved into particular type of subjects as well as reproduces society and its structuring. This reproduction has yet some transformative effects as it is directed to towards the whitening of people. Even she reaches some of these conclusions, looking to production and reproduction permits to see the unfolding of the processes through time, rather than considering them constant and invariable type of interactions. The analysis of exchange then make it difficult to understand the shifts and create an overlapping effect of events happened in different periods as analogous types of interactions.

To finish it can be said that the salient contributions of Weistmantel’s work is to reconsiders the correlation between sex, race and ethnic categorizations that are not just abstract classifying categories. Rather they constitute the bodies and possibilities of subjects. They locate people to certain places, attaching identity to certain locations. She offers a case analysis of perspectives that brings back to reflection sexuality not only as reproduction (in classical Marxists terms) or a sphere of discipline of bodies to produce social differentiation (in Foucaultian terms). Sexuality is also an interaction generating social categories.