escapando de la villa y visita

bue primeras dos semanas y no llegue con mi objetivo, quizas deba cambiarlo para no fracasar tan rapido. quizas deba dejar de tener insomnio por preocupaciones economicas respecto al a;o que viene, quizas deba dejar de enfurecerme con la institucion q me deja sin alternativas en un momento de particular vulnerabilidad. aca va lo que si escribi y que son mas unas 500 palabras por dia de trabajo. aun desordenadas, descriptivas, sin clara linea argumental aun. pero bue ahi va. escapando de la villa al barrio

1. Discourse
One of the first things that I heard about the Toba neighborhood from the older people living in it was how important was its constitution as a way to “get out” of the different villas (shanty towns) they were living in. This view was also shared by the people working in two NGO's who have helped them put together the project to receive the land donations and to generate a housing project, and different anthropologists who have been in touch with them during that period. Regardless the different moments of arrival to the city from the Chaco, the people that now constitute the barrio have lived and moved around several of the biggest shanty towns in Buenos Aires. Some of those shanty towns are very well-known through the press as being “holes of criminality”. Describe them as centres of illegal drug distribution, the residence of robbers and kidnapers that have generated a supposedly wave of insecurity, thus regarded as the responsible for one of the most compelling issues of concern of Buenos Aires Citizens (Quote TN, Macri’s campaign). Echoing the media discourses the common narrative among the “heads” of the families of the barrio is that life in the villas was getting unbearable: violence was escalating as a result of confrontation between gangs and with them and the police, drug dealing started to be a more common activity, and in the last years a lot of new people had arrived turning relations between neighbors into relations of strangers. Some people explained they had gotten robbed “even inside the villa” as a reference of the transgression of the basic respect of not stealing to fellow poor neighbors (a shift that Alarcon refers to in his journalistic research, 20xx).

Villas In all these descriptions a sharp contrast between the life in the villas and in the Chaco was stressed. The Chaco is presented as a place with no violence, where drug dealing and consumption is unknown, neighbors share food and tools and cooperate with each other. The adults in the neighbourhood (people in between 45 and 65) explain that they felt a total estrangement in the villas when they arrived to the city they and had no other place to go but to where most working class rural migrants settle.

Quote interview CL

The villas or barrio de emergencia, are scattered around different vacant areas near the city centre (such as railway lots) but mostly around the different concentric “rings” that surround Buenos Aires city constituting the conurbano or metropolitan Buenos Aires, a jurisdiction different from the city of Buenos Aires. People explain that they had no other networks in the city than with people living in villas, or when they did, it was in the villas where they were able to get a place to be. Coming from rural villages, marginal neighbourhoods in Chaco towns and cities, most people explain that they were unfamiliar with the dynamics of the villa, they felt observed, did not want to join collective events, were afraid of being caught in the middle of a dispute between youth banditas (gangs). Their estrangement got to the point that they were staying inside their homes most of the time in fear to being outside, they did not allow their children to play in public space, they run their way in and out of the neighbourhood to work, and could not receive visits because they were afraid of going there.

Quote Interview AM

Context of migration and arrival to villas. This, they explained, was in total opposition to how they use space in the Chaco, where most of the day is spent outside, meals take place around the outside kitchen, children come and go with ease being taken care by multiple women at the same time, and where visits are received in the galleries outside of the houses. Synthesizing this one man in his forties explained after a visit to the Chaco that he missed “the liberty to be outside, walk wherever you want, go hunting to any field”. The contrast was established in particular among the people who had arrived in the late 1980s and the 1990s to the city, a moment of deep economical crisis followed by the instauration of strict neoliberal reform. This reform that generated unemployment in the rural areas and in a broad sense can be identified as a cause for migration, also implied a drastic turn in the life in the city. State welfare programs and services were drastically reduced, the markets opened to foreign commodities and investment that generated national industry’s collapse and massive layovers of workers, state indebt and dependence from foreign loans that established the terms of those loans. The Tobas had experienced some of this process in the Chaco with the reduction of employment resulting from the crisis in the agro-industries and the mechanization of some of the processes they have been hired to cover decades before.

The first men coming for periods to Buenos Aires between the 50 and 70 had experienced the city in a different way. For them the city was a site of enhanced possibilities of accessing to a paid work, and to obtain better salaries than what they get in the Chaco. For these men, as for most migrant men the shanty towns were still potentially transitory places, however the context of the late 1980ies and the 1990ies the villas were places where people barely subsisted under the level of poverty and in some cases in state of indigence. For people arriving in the 1980 it was clear that people there no longer had the expectation of being able to get out of the villas.

The combination of successive crisis and unemployment, the retraction of state services, the exaltation of consumerism embraced by the middle classes, the arrival of illegal drug dealers are marked as elements introducing major shifts in the villas’ life. Unlike what their parents had experienced, for young men living in the villas in the 1990s the option of finishing secondary in a public school, finding a job in a factory or construction industry, saving money to have an independent home, stopped being a clear possibility. They did however share the desire for commodities, and the exposure to the search for immediate and intense forms of pleasure. This desires motorized by by the so called “the big 1990 party”, referring to the excess of commodity consumption, of political corruption, of easy money making to some groups, paired up with the experience of the impossibility to access education, health, the deferral of a accessing a salary, appear as the main reasons to explain why young men belonging to the former working classes got into robbery and into drug trafficking ( alarcon, “pibes chorros” svampa?) The involvement of young men in these activities conversely is what is presented as responsible for the start of a new era in the villas. An era in which the former widely accepted solidarity among the workers and poor was no longer sustained.

The Tobas however claim they have always kept themselves distant from those dynamics. They have been equally affected by economic crisis and social exclusion but in the narratives they present those changes as something exterior to them. In the narratives of people living for a longer time in the city they explained how the villas were very rapidly filled with people from other countries that were robbers, gangs known to have deals with the police, that generated situation in which they were caught in the middle with a reduced agency. All these events were presented as clear demonstrations for the need to leave the shanty town. Unlike other groups identifying with the shanty town in different moments of their history and all the social movements that have tried to transform the conditions of the villas and the life of the people in them, the Tobas now living in the neighborhood planned their way out.

Even when in longer accounts these experiences of feeling aliens to the villas were made relative, that the people they present as aliens and threats were in some cases good friends too, and when I found that not all the generations of each family had the same relation to the villas, the estrangement was a structuring narrative about the villas. In addition this estrangement is what explained the very existence of the barrio: as indigenous people they were not meant to be there, they had a different culture, they needed to be on their own in a calmer place. The NGO’s, schools, and anthropologists claimed the same, a suburban shanty town becoming violent could be a place for other people but was not a place for them one of the indigenous groups that have kept their authonomy form the Argentinean state for a longer time, who speak their language and thus are regarded as some of the most authentic unpolluted groups in the country. The indigenous are different: they had to be aided in finding a way out of the shanty town.

The barrio is therefore presented as a place of a necessary restoration of an order, in which in the Tobas distance themselves from other urban marginal groups, and in which the place they occupy is to be defined as a distinct place of aboriginality. In the words of one of the residents of the neighbourhood, a man in his forties, during a talk at a school, getting the lands of the neighbourhood was somehow like "going back to the chaco”, they now had big lots of lands with a garden and green fields around, they could see the sky and let the kids play outside. To this I would add that they also went back to living in delimited "Toba" locations and with a strong presence of the church, as the land donors and their immediate neighbours is a religious school (this is not to say that there is a relation of dependency, but that for many decades aboriginality in the Chaco is strongly intertwined with catholic and evangelic churches).

Barrio vs shantytown When I went to the neighbourhood the difference between villa and barrio were not absolutely evident in a first glance. I appreciated the main differences, in the barrio they have much bigger lots with space for a garden, they had brick houses, there was a smaller population density and the area was not as highly associated with criminality. However the young couples still had to take build themselves houses in plots they take, and they build these houses in a precarious way in the same way as shanty town houses are built. In addition in the dominant images the whole conurbano is a space of a general insecurity, housing of pauperized working class, (except of course for the north zone by the river and the spots of privilege represented by the gated neighbourhoods).

The first day I went to the neighbourhood the difference between barrio and villa was not so clear to me. I had received detailed instructions on how to avoid some dangers, go in the early morning, take the train in Retiro, do not walk from the train station but rather take a bus that would leave me in the barrio. I was in the middle of taking mates with the family that was my first contact that a kid clapped its hands outside, the younger of the men I was talking to went outside and asked the kid what was the matter, the kid replied they were collecting money to pay for the coffin of a neighbor that had killedhimself in the middle of an drug overdose. They explained everyone knew the man was very into drugs, he was unemployed and had a big family and robbed every now and then to get money just for the drugs. The barrio then was not an absolutely different space from the shanty towns. It was not exempted from the characteristics alluded as the reasons for moving away from the villas. Especially among Toba youth it could not be said that women and men were having better opportunities to find a job accessing education and saving for an independent house. If the improvement could be mostly measured in regards to owning plots and brick houses, why was such a huge distinction being made between one space and the other? In the initial months of my work and as I collected histories about the constitution of the barrio it was not clear for me how such a big qualitative difference could be established, except for the fact that the neighbourhood became a distinctively an indigenous place.

It is exactly because the neighbourhood is not only a "place" but mostly the result of successive flights form other places and situations that it is not enough to analyze of the narratives of how the neighbourhood contrasts with the shanty towns, how shanty towns contrast with the Chaco, how the neighbourhood is somehow like the Chaco. In this sense place making can be analyzed through semantic analysis to reach how places are experienced by people. However I find this is not enough. If place is a result of bodies moving in space and establishing new connections, of embodied rejection to become a villero (Agamben's muslim?), of the desire of being close to the big city of Buenos Aires, I found it was relevant to focus on the moving trajectories of those bodies. I did this by , tracing these movements in the narratives of people of the barrio and by joining some of their movements opening up space (Massey 2005). When people I talked to mentioned that coming to the neighbourhood was a relive as it implied moving out of the villas they were not just contrasting two places. They were also talking about the efforts they had to do to find a new place, the resources and relations mobilized and the fact they have succeeded to get away from a place that motorized relations they were not interested in pursuing but mostly to be placed in that location generated a series of stigmatizations they were not willing to carry. One question to pose is why they were not willing to renounce to be identified as indigenous while they did not accept to be regarded as villeros, ie pauperized working class, marginal, lacking of education and refined manners, even criminals. Unlike other ethnically marked urban enclaves, the creation of the neighbourhood then is not only the recreation of communal ties existing in place they migrated from, nor is it only the unplanned grouping resulting of chain migration, but rather is the result of a collective plan of escape, in which indigenous identity joins a groups of people from different Cahco areas, and is used to distance from the villas and the villeros. Thus to understand history of the neighbourhood it was not enough to compare country and city, Chaco and Buenos Aires, but to learn some more about the villas they were coming form and where many families have lived for more than ten years.

2. Visit

I worked with Z since the beging of my fieldwork. Being over seventy he is one of the older people, one of the first to come to Buenos Aires during the military service. Z is father of eleven sons and daughters, most of them adults with their own children living now in independent houses in the neighborhood. Because of his own children and as he helped other relatives to come he has generated one the biggest of the extended families networks in the barrio. In addition Z is experienced in working with anthropologists and linguists, and quite critical of them too. Z is sociable and fun, his daughters and adult granddaughters are particularly sociable and active. As Z got easily upset if i did not visited him when i was in the barrio, stopping at his place was thus always the first or last stop on my visit to the barrio.

After some of these visits I asked Z to make his life history. In it he told me about his childhood in the Chaco, his coming of age hunting with a distant uncle and cousins. He marked his pass through military service as a turning point that brought him to Buenos Aires, where he learnt and was able to do construction work on the weekends. He later went back to Chaco but returned several times to work for periods and svae some money and then come back to the Chaco, and finally his decision to move with his whole family to the city and the movements until they settled in one of the major villas in Ciudadela where they lived for fifteen years (check) and finally their moving to the barrio. It was at this point and after we have met for several times that we started talking about how the life of one of his daughters was as she, along with other of the older children, had stayed in Ciudadela when the rest of the family moved to the barrio. As we talked about this the idea of visiting her came about.

We met a Sunday morning at the train station, the station is one that sits on the limit between the city of Buenos Aires city and the suburbs named as conurbano. It is the line that runs from the capital city over the river at the east to the “big” Buenos Aires to the west. This is an area known for being inhabited by a lower middle class and a lower class this train carries the stigma of taking you to dangerous areas even when it is a succession of residential areas. Z was wearing a red beret, that was a personal item identifying him and that he wore for special events and visits, a black leather jacket and jeans and sneakers, all in perfect conditions, of a drastic cleanness and ironing. He conducted me to a bus stop under the highways that marks the limit of capital and the suburbs. We took a regular bus that zig zaged through the streets of the first suburb for less than half an hour until we got off in a corner of another street of a neighbourhood with flat and small houses. We walked east from where the bus have left us and as we did so he explained that that bus used to cross through the middle of the monoblocks the buildings that constitute the centre of the so called Fuerte. We arrived at a street that had a coffeshop at one corner and a closed grocery in the other, on the other side of the street there was an open space and a street getting pass through it. In the open space I could see the multiple carts of a Sunday fair Z has talked to me about. After the and contrasting the grey sky I could see the monoblocks, the multiple unit buildings of the housing project built during the third presidency of Peron (check). There was a typical Sunday morning movement in the area.

On one corner and under a tree there was a group of men in suits and women in long skirts, I identified as a group of the church ready to a Sunday service or to visit neighbors for bible readings. On the other corner there was a pretty different group that disrupted with the relaxed pase of a Sunday but reminded me that I was entering the supposedly most dangerous location in the country. A four wheel truck of gendarmeria nacional was parked in the entrance to the Fuerte. Beside the truck four men dressed in green battle uniforms, all of them taking long caliber guns and watching over the movements of the people passing by. We passed by them and made our way into the fair, we passed through it and arrived to a very well built soccer court, with synthetic grass, a tidy fence and professional looking goal fences.

Una entrevista radial al barrio de derqui

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

briones 2007 parte 2

Por algun motivo me fue imposible ser sintetica con este texto y el de grossberg, un poco por la densidad, por estudiarlo mas de cerca, y otro poco por que estan trayendo todas las lineas de la lista que estoy cerrando a una discusion que me ayuda a aclarar. Me quedo sin duda con un nivel amplio de discusion como este, quizas algoq ue no me cierre tanto es montar un andamiaje, que si bien flexible y que es mas que nada para pensar, en intuitivamente atravesaria mas. Me quedo pensando en las cosas que lei que critican a los estudios culturales, algunas sin ser tan elaboradas, otras que en la critica caen a un nivel muy subjetivista si bien dicen no hacerlo, y fianlmente otras que en el proyecto de crear conceptos como herramientas para pensar flujos, y contenidos y formas en devenir, no me dan muchas pistas metodologicas para pensar como poner esas herramientas a trabajar. el desafio seria entonces seguir a briones / grossberg en las dimensiones que abren, ver cuales me faltan, y pensar formas de ponerlos a dialogar para no usarlos como andamio. eso creo.



3. It is in this context of the discussion that Social Sciences incorporate the concept of performance. She presents Butler as bridging the gap Foucault leaves open between conscious everyday practice over the self and the psychoanalytic unconscious. She does this by getting away from narratives that propose to generate knowledge about the self, as these narratives veil the underlying dichotomy of self/other, and focus on the practices of signification. This position open the possibility of showing how for instance theories of a fragmented subject, reproduce the forms of oppression is trying to get away from. Butler thus gets away from any proposition implying identities precede practice, and proposes that it is in the act that the subject is constituted. In other words, the practices constitute the phenomena they seem to be expressing. This is different to existentialism that recognizes a pre discursive subject and of acts. Contrarily Butler’s subject and act are mutually and variably constituted each time. In this way she distances form Althusser’s foundational acts, in signifying chains to propose that each time is a re-foundation, and that the norms define intelligibility, this rules have substancialyzing effects and thus deflect themselves. It is only in the necessary repetition that any subversion is possible, in the sliding of meaning, accentuations and tone while repeating. This displacement is less the effect of strategic movements than of the multiple lines that transverse any disposition, (the superpositions are themselves what make any disposition unstable). But it is the emphasis in the performance as only practice, as a general “doing” that conducts to a “cliché performativity”. One problem is to equate performance with act, and with this the concepts looses the specificity of the emphasis in form and in the staging itself, it also looses the sense of Austin performative verbs, those that “do” instead of naming. If any action is preformative, we cannot see the non discursive dispotifs that also inscribe the rules. She then summarizes the implications of thinking identities following Hall and Grossberg, to set the base for a critique to notions of flexible identities. She criticizes the association between flexibility of identities as a form of articulation based on future rather than past, as future is not necessary more flexible. Mostly flexibility is problematic as it is not a quality equally distributed, to have more possibilities of movement and choice is something restricted to small sector of the world. There is a tension then between sedimentation and invention. Invention has the limit of : 1) the incapacity to transform or revert some processes (ie colonization), thus identities may be contesting power but also spaces of consent and frustration; 2) there are norms of what it is and is not debatable about the past , identities are exposed to “strategic forms of authentication”, that shapes the terms of articulation and the effectivity for gaining recognition; 3) the way of representing subaltern memories always implies the incorporation of dominant perspectives and logics. Tradition is then a complex result of practices of signification and simbolization in which continuity and change are ideas used to get recognized as a “contemporaneous different”.
4. Her final questions are what is the relation between subjectivation and subjectivity, and what mediates between subjectivation and identification. For this she takes the notion of fold of Deleuze in Grossberg, the interiority is only the exterior folded towards an “inside” that is only a second moment that creates a epistemological dimension not an ontological genesis. In sum there is no essential or pre given interiority. If this is combined with he notion of machineries what it is folded is the experience available as a result of the operating machineries, what is folded are the “mandates advice, techniques, norms to be human, the means through which self is constituted in different practices and relations” (Grossberg 2003 in Briones 70-71). She claims then that if the subjection operates through the inscription of the dispositif, subjectivity is linked to the fact that some parts of the fold are unstable part to be linked through a biography. Identification is a process in which some aspects of the fold are visualized as biography and the way these aspects are selected to make sense of the particular subject position. Subjectivity is thus the way this positions are inhabited and then made visible as social identities.
In this context performativity is the capacity of people to stabilize or generate lines of flight form social identities as they embody them. Agency is limited by structured mobilities that define possibilities of movement, access and empowerment. This limits to performativity, are the limits to constructivism as a theoretical approach. In other words, are the tension between the triple movement of the constitution of the subject, representation and act of theorization and the real, between capacities of agency and the performative realization of the real.
She points to the fact that most studies of identity come into being in a context of a politization of identities, in this she criticizes that this studies are implacable evaluators of the limitations defined in regards to desirable notions of subversion. In this she considers that the real would be a better starting point than the otherness that operates as “an excess, as a constitutive exteriority”.
What are then the effects of a cliché constructivism or performativity? The author warns against the tendency to analyze the processe of identification with the narrative force of theories we are using. Constructivism generally fails when it tries to generalize characteristics, rather than understanding conditions and machineries and its effects. It fails when it confuses contingency whit fluidity, necessary non correspondence as a critic to necessary correspondence, hybridity as emergent aspect of social interaction with hybrid identities. Hybrid identities confuses the multiple subject positions with the (necessary) fragmentation of identities, and because it postpones the discussion of why some subjectivations define hierarchies in the different folds, while other show more messy surfaces. Other problem is to read strategic essentialisms, in what we could understand as essentialist installations, to recognize a more dynamic political field rather than a strategies that swallows the subject (almost like Vonnegut’s epigraph of “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be”). Talking about installations let us understand the contrastive presentations of identities (with hard divisions between an us and other) as a non necessary discursive turn rather than as epistemological distinctions. To study identities as an us/them division veils the possibilities of understading different levels and the perforations that are more a regularity resulting form different articulations and the heterogeneity of any collective containing multiple subject positions. The theoretical emphasis in contrastivity then tends to find “problems” of identities something that is more a limitation of the theories, is more our limitations as users of those theories. Many analysis claim that indigenous identity politics of identity are dangerous as they close possible articulations with other groups, when it would be a better question to think which are the conditions and contexts making identities to emerge in those terms. Ultimately this theories frame the claims and are able to put into question the bases for the political claims.

Maruja Barrig "El mundo al revés: imágenes de la mujer indigena".

Her main interest is to answer the question of why indigenous women in Perú are invisible in feminist discourses as well as for development organizations. She follows the way both discourses are transverse by complementary notions of Indigeneity as a sign of backwardness, savagery but also degeneration on the one hand and notions of indigenous people as heirs of the grandiose past of the Inca state portrayed as a unifying and benevolent state. If the strong feminist movement developed in Perú especially since the 1970s have avoided the question as a result of both a claim of universality in the female condition (derived probably from the previous experiences in Marxists activism) but also as a “conspiracy of silence” in regards to the intimate relation of many feminist and the indigenous house keeping women at their homes. The Ngo’s on the other hand seem to be continuing the line of romantized Indigeneity which also relies on gender discourses that deny inequalities and the validity of thinking gender and ethnicity, as they portrait the indigenous women as a proud and rough defender of tradition. I am mostly interested in the her reflection upon the “muchachas” domestic service indigenous woman. She shows that in Peru of 17th century it was mostly women who were performing domestic service, and not just recently promoted female migration to the cities. If men who migrated to the city were merchants and cattle carers, women were confined to the domestic spaces and subordinated. In this the indigenous woman was considered more easily subordinated, it was denied the possibility for social mobility that men could gain from going to the city and erasing their indigenous identity into a mestizo one.
If previously the women were distinguished as women that needed to have the tutelage of white families, contemporary women are migrants but still in way regarded as minors in need of education and guidance. AS house keepers they live in an intimate relation with the family yet without ever “mixing” with it, rather they have to follow a set of rules that maintains the distance and reproduces difference of the social groups inhabiting the house. In a way that reproduces old patterns of mobility and fixity, domestic service women get fixed to the space of the house live there which puts them in a state of constant service, but also in constant moralizing view of the patrons. Despite some authors regard domestic service as a mutual empowerment of middle class women (that can develop professionally with the help of a housekeeper) and indigenous women that can get work and housing in the city as they arrive to it, domestic service fixed women –again- to the space of the house. This distinguishes the experience of migrant men and women, while men by dedicating to other activities can change their ethnic identity into a mestizo, women “remain” being indigenous.

Mary Louise Pratt

No es ficha de las que debo hacer, pero unas notas del Afterword de ML Pratt y con esto termino mi puesta al día con el tema indigenidad (curioso que en 15 de seminarios de ma y doc no volví sobre este tema directamente), las fichas que quedan son los tipicos de siempre. Bueno ML Pratt, otra vez esta muy bueno lo que dice, toma una distancia intersante de los trabajos y tambien del campo. No la distncia que toma Clifford que sobrevuela etnografías para justificar la defensa de la diaspora, sino una distancia sintetizadora y que finalmente busca algunos temas transversales. La introduccion de Starn y de la Cadena quizas se queda a medio camino en tratar de unir a los distintos trabajos como dimensiones de una difusa y mutante indigeneidad. Hace una critica fuerte a todos los trabajos pero no como un juego de remate, sino con mucha potencialidad.

ML Pratt habla otra vez de la multiplicidad de caminos por los que está navegando el indigenismo contemporaneo, desde academicos indigenas en universidades norteamericanas a huelgas de hambre de presos politicos indígenas. Todo esto habla de cambios en los terminos de las relaciones indígenas - no indigenas, pero tamben el surgimiento de nuevos actores y escenarios políticos. Todos los articulos (Indigenous Experince Today) muestran la relevancia da la categoría indígena en distintos escenarios contemporaneos y aun en los casos en que la categoría no es reclamda. En todos los casos el termino indigena (aborigen, nativo originario, etc. en ingles dice ella, pero tb en español) hace refencia a una relacion a una temporalidad: estar "antes de" el arribo de otros. En esta relación estos otros colonizadores que arriba son el primer termino que le otrogan temporalidad a los colonizados. Es decir que los que "estan antes" solo entran a escena en segundo lugar, cuando son invadidos. antes del encuentro entonces? Otro tiempo del cua dependerá luego a identificación en tanto indígena. Es decir que se indigena es a la vez relacional y dependiente de la continuidad -perfomativa- de una identidad no relacional, propia de la temporalidad anterior al encuentro. De modo que ser indigena se transforma en un proceso constante de "becoming", autodefinición, de la cosntitución de un modo colectivo de ser en el tiempo y el espacio.
Por otro lado lA identificación como indigena no es tanto un la identidad primaria, sino que surge de una reflexion de comunalidad entre tobas y adivasi y de un proyecto politico común.
Sobre a coenferencia que reunió los trabajo publicados reflexiona, que a discusion en todos los casos giró mas en torno a la categoría indígena, con discusiones entre los mas escepticos en cuanto al privilegio implicito en esta categoría y quienes la encuentran ineludible y quienes muestran liminalidades. Pero en todos los casos se excluyo a la "experiencia" y varias aspectos que podrían pensarse tambien trasversalmente: violencia, exclucion, suicidios, adicciones, criminalidad, violencia religiosa, genero y sexualidad "the unrelentening transgressiveness of the erotic that leaves no boundary uncrossed" )400). Y sigue con las implicancias politicas de esto, (cito en extenso)
"It was overdetermined that our deliberations would begin and end with the claim that indigeneity today is much complicated than people think. We performed the always legitimating scholarly gesture of presenting complicated truth against ignorance and reductive ideology. This gesture informs, often enchants, but it also leaves things much in their place. demonstrating complexity does not require or demand new ways of thinking. It seems unbearable that this should be the most scholars are able to do. IS there any way to grasp indigeneity not as a condition but as a force?" (400)

Acuerdo con esto pero me parece que pasa por alto que algunos de los artículos estan haciendo esto, no tanto tomando el esquema indigena sino viendo por que actua como fuerza, como es que hace confluir y que permite salidas (claro Tsing, Briones, tb De la Cadena 2002). Aca por lo menos me surge pensar en las condiciones de trabajo intelectual en Argentina al menos, donde no tenemos recursos materiales para ir a recorrer rincones perdidos del mundo entero, sino que trabajamos mas o menos cerca de casa, pero somo siempre localizables y estamos siempre interpelados mas facilmente, a menos por la gente con la que trabajamos pero tambien por el estado, en donde todos trabajamos. En esto podemos seguir pensando en las categorías de activismo, critica y sus combinaciones, pero no creo que podamos equiparar el campo de tensiones y hablar de implicancias politicas del trabajo critico de forma generica. En todos los casos me parece que los argumentos por escrito nos pueden ayudar a seguir pensando, pero justamente entender al indigenismo ( o lo que sea) como fuerza implicaría involucrarse en tanto fuerza. Bueno escribiremos mas sobre esto con Laura probablemente.

Bueno vuelvo a MLP, que termina su critica proponiendo que si el indigenismo se piensa generalemnte en base a una esquema cognitivo que permite una serie de definiciones y confluencias politicas, tambien restringe las nuevas configuraciones y que las nuevas experienciasse consideren parte de esta condición (ej Lorena en Briones) . Es por esto que propone pensar la indigenidad en términos generativos. Diferentes coyunturas y experiencia históricas "will activate different sources of energy" (402) con efectos no predecibles pero quepueden entenderse en retrospectiva (claro). aca entonces vulve a Tsing en que "indigeneity is produced y particular points of friction in specific settings" Como ejemplos pone a Marginalidad espacial (Remoteness), Territorialidad y subsistencias (ej modos de vida que son amenazados por un afurza externa), pueden ser nodos desencadenantes de indigeneidad. Pero tambien el modo en que s plantea la relación indígena - no indigena "has the power to obstruct the working out o difference on an equal footing" (403) (Generativity) conceives indigeneity not as a configuration or a state, but as a force that enables, taht makes things happen. This generativity, I would suggest, lies not only in what indigeneity makes happen in a given instance but also in the unrealized possibilities that it creates in every situation, and that remains as potentialities that can be activated in the future. One imagines indigeneity then as unfolding in space-time that generates realized and unrealized possibilities. (403) " Para que en ultima instancia, las indigenidades cobren forma solamente para luego desarmarse y pasar a ser otra cosa.

Briones

Bueno aca el articulo de Claudia sobre el que ya hablé, formo parte -marginal- de estos planteos asi que no puedo hacer una critica desde afuera. Me ayuda pensar en las maquinarias triples, me ayuda pensar formaciones de self, aunque esto es nuevo para mi. Si me pasa dos cosas, comparto con Cluadia el interes por pensar en formación de sujetos no solo como identidades o agencias o subjetividades, y me parece util pensar en comunalizaciones pero a la vez, con as ods cosas juntas me interesaría pensar en sujetos mas colectivos y menos individuales, quizas si me esta resonando pensar en efectos, que en definitiva es o que plantea tambien esta postura, si bien lo sedimenta un poco mas. Es decir que la idea de comunidad como construccion de pasado, lazos primordializadores, ayuda pero me resulta menos interesante una vez que sabemos que esto si pasa. Tambien mencionar que me gustaría pensar en las movilidades no solo como estructuradas sino tambien como escapes, claro que las posibilidades no son infinitas.


Para mas Campaña de autoafirmacion

Geaprona


Briones, Claudia 2007 Experiences of Belonging and Mapuche Formations of Self in Indigenous Experience Today. Marisol de la Cadena and Orin Starn eds. New York and London: Berg and Wenner Gren Foundation


Claudia Briones argues that identity and its politization is just a starting point on our understanding o much complex processes of individualization and communalization, one in which being mapuche is differently understood and felt and non the less a convergent force. She discusses how a process of differentiation with the Mapuche movement triggers discussions and actions that reshape the understanding of what is the understanding of the political and the very nature of the struggle in which Mapuches are involved. She uses the concept formations of self as an alternative to the notions of individuation in terms of subjectivity and identity. Formations of self emerge form regional geographies of inclusion and exclusion that “delineate a series of structured mobilities that foster mapuches –or may eve preclude- the opportunity and desire to come together despite differences.” (101). If these fields of available possibilities are read according to different maps of meanings, these “contested maps also promote different strategic installations and affective investments of belonging.” (101). Political economy of the production of difference help both to understand the challenges and reinscripton of hegemonic construction of aboriginality in mapuche self perception and performances that struggle for a better positioning in national and regional systems of stratification. Emerging identities with the mapuche movement are less a result of globalizing identities than trajectories available to the mapuches today and since colonization. In analyzing shifting youth mapuche identities self defined as mapunkies and mapurbes she prefers to follow Tsing in her notion of friction that both question the spaces of identity and desestabilize them while provisionally occupying them, a more useful notion than thinking through ideas of fusion and hybridity. She considers diversity in Mapuche movement more as a possibility for political articulation than a restraint, in this the different categories of youth adscription from exclusively mapuche (and denying the possibility of being mapuche and punky) to the map-urbes. She follows Grossberg in his proposition of thinking “identities” as formed through stratifying, territorializing and differentiating machines. In this subjectivity is an “unequally distributed universal value” (111) and “Experiences of the world are produced form particular positions, that although temporary determine access to knowledge and bring about attachments to places that individuals call ‘home’ and form which they speak. In the case that I analyze , these machines have created positions of subalternity and alterity that as Fakundo explains, force Mapuche to live in poor neighborhoods in Patagonian cities.” Commonality is created in the sense of being involved in a common “lucha” against forms of exploitation, but it also come from the diverse experiences that are narrated and become manifestations of a shared past. Both things transform “common people” into “luchadores”. Yet a sense “that the struggle has just begun” also comes form the different positions form which the struggle has been enunciated, so if previous generations focused in land claims and legal recognitions, youth consider that the struggle goes in other direction, such as including the experiences of marginal neighbourhood kids and making a mapuche appropriation of the city.

Tendre que dedicarme cada vez menos tiempo a esto y producir mas anotaciones lisas y yanas

Clifford

Otra ficha interminable. No me mata el texto, en realidad bastante pesado aunque necesario. Una defensa al concepto de diaspora -Clifford seguramente es amante de los barrios chinos globales-, ahora para pensar en las multilocalidades "indígenas". Sin duda es un tema que preocupa a varios, hasta que punto que la definición de indígena resida en anclarse a una localidad no resulta en definitiva un nativismo conservador (tacheriano clama alguien) que como minimo excluye entrada de nuevos grupos a un espacio y en lo mas extremo agita violencias con los "otros" (Tsing, Kuper, Baviskar). Mas que preocuparse en resolver este problema, o como definir soberanía indígena cuando hablamos de múltiples y "entangled sovereignties" (Moore), Clifford se dedica a defender por ue sería beuno seguir hablando de dispora a pesar del borramiento de lo politico que implica este concepto. Su argumento básico es que en las múltiples relocalizaciones (algo que podría ser parte de la definicion de indigena mas que su localización) ofresen grados variables de "disporicidad" - indigenidad. La pregunta no sería tanto si la gente pertenece o no al territorio sino como definien su lugar de origen y que relación guardan con este lugar. En este esquema hay varios modelos desde "indígenas diasporicos", "indígenas urbanos" a "circular migrants", "rural cosmopolitanism". La dispora tambien se cruza con los saltos de escala que posibilitan que un grupo localizado genere articulaciones con otros grupos y globalice su lucha, que se conformen identidades regionales, transnacionales (etc), como el termino mismo "indigena" lo plantea.

En general tengo dos problemas, uno es la idea de gradiente de mas localizacion a mas distancia, otro es que se piense esto como novedad. Mas que una tipología me interesaría pensar como despliegan movimiento distintos grupos y que es lo que los fija, que se pone en juego con el movimiento, que le pasa a la gente que se traslada, que pasa en el momento del viajeen si, como se construye distancia, (mudarse de barrio a veces es mas distante que cruzar el mar). Bueno y varias cosas mas. Respecto a la novedad, por momentos me parece un pregunta importante y por momentos me resulta un poco ridiculo insistir en las novedades y maravillarse con indios que "dwell in aiplanes" bueno si, las maquinas que hacemos (las de las que trabajan con, a pesar y a traves - las maquinarias y las maquinas- nuestro marcan diferencias, sin duda. pero entonces la maravillarse por el indio en el aeropuerto (aeropuertos, siempre), el indio que manda mails, termina siendo una apelación de novedad en donde hay muchas cosas mas interesante que pensar. en todo caso pensar que es lo distinto del viaje, que imagenes circulan ahora y se ponen en juego, efecto de que es el viaje, que trabajo hace el viaje, que lineas traza, necesita lugares y hogares el desplazamiento?
Bueno bueno estoy con baja tolerancia para gente con ganas de reflexionar sobre lo maravilloso de su jet lag y los barrios chinos que son casi casi como estar en la misma china. Igual esta bien Clifford.


Clifford, James 2007 “Varieties of Indigenous Experience: Diasporas, Homelands, Sovereignties” in Indigenous Experience Today. Marisol de la Cadena and Orin Starn eds. New York and London: Berg and Wenner Gren Foundation
Indigenous experience is difficult to restrict to the experience of being “of on place” yet whether or not they claim indigenous identity they are defined as having long roots in a locale and having experienced violent occupation, expropriation, displacement. This definition generates a wide spectrum of experiences involved . To understand the dynamics of the constantly changing configurations of indigeneity he proposes to open up concepts like native and sovereign, in their implications of a fix attachment – control of a people to bounded place, arising form the everyday practices o mobility and dwelling, or the superposition of multiple sovereignties. Particularly he wants to break down the opposition between indigenous and diasporic experiences, finding that in some cases they overlap, he wants thus to explore diasporic dimensions of indigenous experience. One case could be the relation of urban indigenous people with their homelands, and the cyclicall returns. Contrarily to assume (and critique its nativist backward nature) in indigenous groups negates the “indigenous forms of interactive cosmopolitanism” in which most indigenous groups have been involved and that configure other dimension to the multiple scales of any process of identification. Diaspora has been critizied for not being a uniform process of “long distance nationalism”. For Clifford “This dialectical instability can be an analytic strength : the opposed tendencies of diasporic experience, exclusivism , and border crossing are good to think with. Indeed a contradictory complexity with respect to belonguing –both inside and outside national structures in contemporary social worlds may be diaspora’s most productive theoretical contribution “ (201) Diaspora may help describe situations of “connectedness-in-dispersion” of social groups, which are many times dismissed as acculturation and denied land claims, but that in turn conform greater scales of affiliation (as tribal, people, etc). The term also points to the sense of belonging outside the nation state where the group is situated. However diaspora is different form circular migration (between cities and villages) and borderlands, cases that show struggles for multiple access to different places (country and city, multiple localities), even when legal recognition is not granted. He thus proposes to recognize “pragmatic sovereignties” when the ties to place have not been lost. He proposes a continuum of relations with the homeland, form everyday contacts to seasonal or “deferred” returns.“ Dispersion in connection then allows the arising of a different scale of identification and the formation of transnational nets. Patterns of circulation then becomes associated with multiple, political economic and cultural forces that reshape sociability in the locations included in the net, this opens up the possibility of other types of patterns of modernity which do not just follow the traditional description of loss of traditional ties, rural poverty, etc. “Rather than a linear process of dis-embedding (or deterritorialization, one observes a transformation and extension of culturally distinctive spatial and social practices: reembedding, extending territories, dwelling with airplanes.” (209) different kinds of perfomance are required in specific relational sites. Of course diaspora cannot explain the constraints that lead to displacement or the restraints that people experience in diaspora. “In practice for those many self identified natives who dwell in, and circulate through urban and semiurban settings, there can be no essencial privative opposition between “indigenous and diasporic” experiences. The problem is a question of representation, one of the limits of what are considered realistic and is challenged by the emergence of “new” social subjects. Finally a question of multiple indigenous soveregnie socme to play, in the range for being “domestic dependent nation” to nation state or an economic corporation (as casinos), there are multiple types of indigenous “graduated sovereignty”, that show many examples of claims for sovereignty without secession (“struggles of freedom to modify the system of internal colonization” Tully). Ultimately for him sovereignty (as ideology or as a set of negotiated attempts of control) evokes pragmatic possibilities and structural limits.

De la Cadena y Starn Indigenous Experience Today

Mas vale que deje de leer y escriba algo. Acá empiezo las fichas. Pero antes una nota sobre lo extraño de leer el artículo de Claudia -Briones- en la compilación que estoy por fichar, en inglés y en este contexto globalizador de la discusión de indigeneidad, pero hablando de la posición de Lorena , Oskar y Fakundo como jovenes mapurbes, y mapunkies, autónomos e independientes en contraposición a los jóvenes del cai herederos de la "conciencia" de sus padres-militantes. Esta lectura me recordó lo mucho que noches de charlas interminables, las múltiples presentaciones, las discusiones sobre la ciudad y las esquinas, las noches de recitales y gira, los encuentros y bailes en circulo, en mi ciclo de movilidad durante cuatro años provocaron muchas de las cosas que estoy pensando. Otra cosa que sigue haciendo ridículo definir al "campo". Bueno inglés y libros.

de la Cadena, Marisol and Starn, Orin 2007 "Introduction" in Indigenous Experience Today. Marisol de la Cadena and Orin Starn eds. New York and London: Berg and Wenner Gren Foundation

The authors set the discussion form some common grounds. Indigeneity show that the aspiration of the West to disseminate progress and civilize the others worldwide has not unfolded as it was expected. Contrarily indigenous populations (an -unstable-estimate of 250 million worldwide) still exist and constitute economic, cultural and social movement that do not just constitute alternative, counter force to modernity. Even though indigeneity is a lot of times intertwined with process of economic and social marginalization this is not a generalization we can make. Scholarly analysis seem to be dived among those who celebrate the political mobilization that indigeneity generates, and those who see it as problematic definition of boundaries and a machinery of exclusion.

A basic idea is then that "indigenous people are highly heterogeneous in their views and agendas" (2) Indigeneity is generated in complex nets of self and alter definitions in complex and "changing boundary politics and epistemologies of blood, culture, time and place" (3). Even present views on indigeneity tend to conform a coherent and enclosed definition of a "leftists environmentalist indigenous", this conform a "reverse Orientalism" (according to Ramachandra Guha). One configured in a history of Western epistemologies, policies and the indigenous interpellations and resistances that continued reconstructing difference, form savagery to one in need to be assimilated through development to current multiculturalism.

How then conceptualize indigeneity in the context a neoliberal multicultural politics that recognizes indigenous existence? "Indigeneity emerges only within larger social fields of difference and sameness; it acquires its "positive" meaning not form a some essential properties of its own but through its relation to what exceeds and lacks. (...) indigenous cultural practices, institutions and politics become such in articulation with what is not considered indigenous within the particular social formation where they exist. " In this indigeneity is historically contingent and names a relationship that implies a particular space- time (according Mary Louise Pratt).

The different forms this relationship took is not just a question of different ideologies, but effected material relations and state policies that configure post colonial formations, in which "colonizers" are not only form the West. The global indigenous movement was both conformed in the articulation of diverse indigenous activism and also in the travelling of the notion of indigeneity. It keeps insisting the waves of destruction that colonialism and capitalism generate (d), something that give a common ground to articulation with subaltern groups, which brings into play a diverse range of indigenous "positionings" enabled in contingent configurations that articulate "particular patterns of engagement and struggle" (according to Li).

Thus indigeneity is a field (not just of political identities but) of governmentality, subjectivity and knowledge, in which "becoming indigenous is always only a possibility negotiated within political fields of culture and history" (13) on "national formations of alterities" (Briones). Indigeneity encompasses questions of territory and political sovereignty, while challenging the "ethnospacial fix" of (Moore) that veil displacement, expulsions and "indigenous diasporas" (Clifford).

In many cases there is a "perverse confluence” of neoliberalism and political mobilization that conform new gorvernmentalities. Finally if indigenous self representation and collaborative work is currently an opening which opens a series of new possibilities, it also has to be acknowledge that asymmetric relations are not just erased in the act of collaborating, rather academic and non academic, north south, "local" and "universal" among other lines tend to complex entanglements of power, form which the formation of hybrid genres is only one of the possibilities.

Well Marie Louise Pratt takes lots of this ideas into a very very lucid after word.

Contents:

"Introduction," Marisol de la Cadena and Orin Starn

Part 1: Indigenous Identities, Old and New
“Indigenous Voice,” Anna Tsing
“Tibetan Indigeneity: Translations, Resemblances, and Uptake,” Emily T. Yeh
“‘Our Struggle Has Just Begun': Experiences of Belonging and Mapuche Formations of Self,” Claudia Briones

Part 2: Territory and Questions of Sovereignty
“Indigeneity as Relational Identity: The Construction of Australian Land Rights,” Francesca Merlan
“Choctaw Tribal Sovereignty at the Turn of the 21st Century,” Valerie Lambert
“Sovereignty's Betrayals,” Michael F. Brown

Part 3: Indigeneity Beyond Borders
“Varieties of Indigenous Experience: Diasporas, Homelands, Sovereignties,” James Clifford
“Diasporic Media and Hmong/Miao Formulations of Nativeness and Displacement,” Louisa Schein
“Bolivian Indigeneity in Japan: Folklorized Music Performance,” Michelle Bigenho

Part 4: The Boundary Politics of Indigeneity
“Indian Indigeneities: Adivasi Engagements with Hindu Nationalism in India,” Amita Baviskar
“‘Ever-Diminishing Circles': The Paradoxes of Belonging in Botswana,” Francis B. Nyamnjoh
“The Native and the Neoliberal Down Under: Neoliberalism and ‘Endangered Authenticities',” Linda Tuhiwai Smith

Part 5: Indigenous Self-Representation, Non-Indigenous Collaborators and the Politics of Knowledge
“Melting Glaciers and Emerging Histories in the Saint Elias Mountains,” Julie Cruikshank
“The Terrible Nearness of Distant Places: Making History at the National Museum of the American Indian,” Paul Chaat Smith

“Afterword:Indigeneity Today,” Mary Louise Pratt