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.

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.

Rural Cosmopolitanism

Vinay Gidwani Gidwani and K. Sivaramakrishnan, 2003 Circular Migration and Rural Cosmopolitanism in India. Contributions to Indian Sociology 37; 339
The authors focus on what they call rural cosmopolitanism, by examining the circular migration between country and the city, as a movement that disrupts the traditional divisions of rural and urban spaces. It also reexamines the notion of globalization and point to the fact that rurality has rarely been included as being involved in this type of analysis when they are also intertwined in globalizing movements as well as being important nodes in the flows of capital, populations, technologies and ideas. For this they base on Lefebvre by understanding the way the lived (representational) and the perceived (practice) dimensions of space are reproduced in the movements form country to city. They propose to expand the notion of the cosmopolitan, by retaining the aspect of the concept that refers to the coexistence of capacities of a person to adapt to and have social competence in multiple socio-cultural formations, but deny the specificity of being a process only linked to big metropolis which function as centres for global capital flow. The circular migrant does not only transmit ideas when they move form one place to the other, but also techniques and material forces which transform the spaces of their circulation. Recent process of industrial regionalization and demands for specific types of labour force are the types of new phenomenon enhancing these types of movements (which have probably always existed). Restricting the cosmopolitan only to trans-national, transcontinental flows limits the analysis to only one of its dimensions and scales, by preventing us see how other social subjects, by moving transform the conception, inhabitation and perception of spaces. Examining these invisible movements can be relevant to nation formation, social movilization and modernity in India, and also in a more general way in other postcolonial contexts.

Bueno breve, nada que me parta la cabeza, pero muy en linea con el "caso" que voy a pensar. Esta bueno el poner atencion en que los movimientos son circulares y los polos de atraccion van variando, aca mas que nada por movimento de capital -en el ciclo D-M-D y la movilizacion de fuerza de trabajo-. Esta bueno tambien pensar un concepto asociado a la globalizacion desde lo mas supuestamente "anti-global" que son campesinos moviendose. Tamben esta bueno que la proponen como diemnsion necesaria para entender al modenidad, nacionalismo, movilización. Bueno algo obvio pero que no me habia detenido a pensar ultimamente en que el capitalismo necesito las grandes relocalizaciones de campesinas con los enclosures, otra dimension espacial de la politica. Bueno tambien recuerda que esta bueno tener el panorama en clave economica.

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.