Gomez "El cuerpo por asalto"

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

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

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

Diana Taylor Disappearing Acts

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


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

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

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

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

Taussig Shamanism, Colonialism

Unos de mis etnografias predilectas, que marcan algo de lo que estuve pensando desde que estoy en cana. Este comentario es del momento en que lo lei a ppios del 2006.

In this book Taussig takes a dialectical thinking into the totality of its possibilities. Shamanism is not only a case study on the colonization of the southwest of Colombia, of the violence during the rubber boom and the contemporary practices of shamanism. His work is an intense epistemological exploration.

The topics I will discuss in this commentary are the result of the arbitrary questions and thoughts I had reading this book. From all of them I also chose to discuss a few. I am interested in discussing what type of epistemological asseveration underlying this work. I will only superficially address the main tension of the book that arises between terror and healing. Finally, I will finish with some specific questions in relation to a topic that opens and closes the book; this is the notion of death space.

1. knowledge
The work of Taussig shows the operation of contradictions not by enunciation but through direct analysis on the production of terror and healing. The author deconstructs objectivism in its understanding of the world as a system of delimited logically interconnected, classifiable and measurable subjects and objects. He agrees with Foucault in the non-existence of an objective truth “out there” but in its social production as systems of power construction. Even not drawing in Niesztche’s work he seems to imply the division between apolinear and dionisiac views, were he discharges any apolinear attempt as veiling the real contradictory changing reality.

He analyses the logic of the concrete contradictions in the constitution of epistemic murk, a concept he uses to synthesis points of sedimented tensions. This is, for example the idea of terror as mimesis, of how the imagined fears of colonizers on the monstrosity of Indians and of the environment, produce the colonizers as the monsters they fear, inflicting the violence they imagine into the others, mainly the Indians. The epistemic murk is the area of tensions were fiction is reality and vice-versa, manifests that violence is not caused by a social or an economic “need”, it has no utility. So, knowledge cannot be produced by distinguishing conditions, causes, and results. Rather Taussig is claiming in the praxis of writing that only in the contradictions processes, subjects and objects take temporal shape. Also processes and subjects in themselves are contradictory. One of the first examples of this is the figure of the muchachos during the Putuamayo rubber boom. Muchachos are young “indians” in charge of policing and controlling the work of other indians, they are the object of very strong control but at the same time are the authors of the biggest acts of violence against indians.

2. Terror and Healing
Turning to the main theme of the book, it can considered that the tension showed between the two parts of the book are both a way of understanding the particular processes he analyses. It can also be taken as a path for understanding some underlying processes in other points of Latin American (but probably also other colonial context from South Africa to Ireland or Thailand). In the line of what has been discussed, the conquest cannot be understood as the contact of two separate worlds (as for example Marshall Salhins would argue, see Sahlins 1999). Rather Colonization is a huge clash that destroys and re builds reality, societies and people. Against culturalist, functionalist and structural takes, the author makes visible that there is no stable essence that prevails, no redefinition of a system, and no deep universal structure that finds its way to manifest through a new shape.

Terror and healing are two of the surfacing aspects of colonialism. Terror is the result of fear and the representations of wilderness of the Indian and nature. Terror is a productive force shaping both indians and colonizers. Is the nightmare of the civilized world living their worst imagined horrors. Terror brings unpredictable torture and death to indians, at the same time it constitutes an un-measurable, feared power in them. In the same process colonizers are constituted through the exercise of banal terror. Death is inflicted for the never fulfilled pursuit of controlling what cannot be controlled. Violence is the intent of putting order into a reality that is never organized. One of the origins of horror is the mysterious powers of indians, powers to heal and also power to damage. Therefore terror cannot be understood without understanding healing.

Healing is not just the opposite movement from terror, is not the instauration of a new harmony. Healing deals with the open scars of the violence, and uses images of terror as a power to deal with this. This process is related to the practice of shamans and the use of yague, as an alucinogetic that helps to project the images of what cannot be seen otherwise. In this sense healing does not provide order but allows to represent and so interact with and within contradictions. Healing is also a practice that empowers indians. White fear of un known powers of indians and in this they produce this power. As a aresult the effectiveness of healing is not in the action or knowledge of the shaman but rather in the relation patient – healer. The illness the patient brings makes possible to the shaman to see and cure his own scars. The patient can not express nor represent his illness, however he has the certainty of pain and suffering, while the shaman has a diffuse suffering but the possibility of approaching it through yague. Healing is then the dialectical relation between patient and shaman and between illness or ignorance and the power of representing it.

Terror and healing are then mutually constituted, one could not operate without the other.

3. Death space

The death space is one of contradictions, of life and death, of chaos that lies beneath order, of illumination and obscurity of reason, of hope and despair. Is a space ruled by terror of the certainty of death as a imminent possibility yet the uncertainty of when, how and if it is even really going to happen. Terror in the space of death is not the result of the functional need of conquest, but rather is originated in the culture of evil as opposed to space of God’s order.

If we take Lefebvre’s definition of absolute space as the religious one that follows the organization and the control of a totalitarian God, the origin of the space of death is the counter part of this space. Absolute space is organized, logic, fair, where suffering has a cause. While the space of devil or absence of God (Taussig mentions Homer, Dante, Bosch, Rimbaud) is illogic, arbitrary, is where suffering is generalized and unpredictable. In this way the space of death is the result of the Western culture about it, shaping its reality in the encounter with New World. So the death space is the result of a fiction, of the imagination of a space. The space of death is what makes possible a society of terror and torture, is a creative force shaping meaning and consciousness but not creating a totality. It is composed of fragments it dismantles unities and re arranges in a temporal, unstable formation.

Even Taussig is not explicitly defining what he means by death and space he give some clues about it. By death he is not only implying the end of life and its destruction, he is not only referring to the terror resulting form arbitrary murder. But he describes it as the illuminating consciousness of life when death is immanent part of everyday life. In respect to what he means by space I consider is the productive force that through fictions that become and are real, make the social relations of terror something that happens in place, in his case he is thinking of the Putumayo rubber boom at the beginning of the 20th century. Even Taussig does not analyze the problematic of space and does not pose it in this terms we can consider that the death space is produced as a result of social relations of terror, in this case especially the lowlands, and in contradiction to places of healing (cfr. Gordillo 2004).

With this concept Taussig opens and closes the book showing how the knowledge we can have about social relations is in projecting the contradictions within them, inhabiting those contradictions during the research process. Looking through terror Taussig searches to understand healing being both terms unstable forms of montage. Montage implies the destruction and fragmentation of bodies and things and their possible relations. But it implies the generation of meaning form the precarious gathering of the fragments. Montage is what best represents the space of death and in a more general way the actuality of colonization. Thinking through contradictions and avoiding logically organizing social reality is a principle that according to Taussig is applicable to every event.

References

Taussig, Michael 1987 Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1967 The Birth of Tragedy Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books.

Lefebvre, Henri 2005 [1974] The production of Space. Tans by Donald Nicholson – Smith. London: Blackwell.

Gordillo, Gastón 2004 Landscapes of Devils: Tensions of Place and Memory in the Argentinean Chaco. Durham: Duke University Press.

Mbembe Provisional notes on the Post Colony

His ppurpose is to analyze bureocratic banality ofpower in the postcolony, meaning not just bureocratic formalities or arbitrary rules nor the habit of daily forms of power. Rather he is interested in those elements of the obsene and the grotesque that, what Bakhtin locates in the field of the popular and as a mean of critique to power. He points that these elements are part of any regime of domination, to the way they operate and are deconstructed.
The post colony is chaotically pluralistic, but has some internal coherence related to the violence implicated in the colonial experience: it is a particular way of creating simulacra. In this the grotesque is not just a mirror reflection of power, is also a style of political improvisation, an excess, a multiplication transformation and circulation of identities. But even more the postcolony is made of a series of corporate institutions and political machineries which together constitute a particular regime of violence, that produces subjectification as a dramatical effect. He is interested in two diemnsions of this: 1) How, in creating the central code of society, state power governs the various logics that underlie all other meanings. 2) How in its attempts to institutionalize this meanings as real the state creates a common sense and attempts to integrate it into the consciousness of the period. Thus the state legitimates itslef in the form of a fetish. He thus proposes to invert Bakhtin claim of the obsene as a popular way of resisting from dominant culture. Rather he proposes that grotesque is: used as a means of creating time and location, through specific material means, and operates creating a spectacular performative display of manificence for its subjects.
Post colonial power is then an "illicit cohabitation" in which "commandmentn and subjects share the same living space" what has generated a "mutual zombification" (rather than an energic domination/resistance) in which each robbed the other vitality and has left both impotent."(4) He proposes to focus on "the logic of the conviviality, on the dynamics of domesticity thta inscribe the dominant and the dominated with te same episteme". The postcolony does not have a one public space but several entangled ones, each with a particular logic. The postcolonial subject is visible as he navigates these spaces and is able to mange several identities (what he calls "homo ludens"), but also when he is subjected in the daily rituals of reatification of comandment's power. The emphasis on the fluids, genitals, eschatological of the commandment's body "contribute integrally to the making of political culture of te postcolony", to joke on the commandment's body generates a participation in the system of signs, ritual displays, and makes it possible to "follow the trail of violence", by "taking the official world seriously" (7), it also breaks the boundaries between the boy of the despot and the that of its subjects. The conflict is then not inverting the systems of meanings but unifying the chaotically pluralistic systems into a single one.
But also because of this plurality and constant change the commandment needs to constantly project its image (of himself and the world) into its subbjects to even start habits of obedience, it needs to tire out the bodies of the subordinated to ensure docility rather than productivity. There is not opposition between official and popular culture but a lot of commonality which generates the need of foficial grand displays of prestige to signal sovereignty and to "ensure the maxim docility" (one of the central pillars of a phallocentric system is the subordination of women to the princple of male pleasure). It is not very clear were conflict or tension emerges, not of course between two entities but what is the site to evade power. He states for example people's "laughter kidnaps power and force it to examine its own vulgarity" (8), so instead of Bakhtin inversion there is forced appropriation to undermine magnificence. But laughter is not resistance, in its desire for majesty the popular borrow the power's repertoire, while the official world mimics the popular vulgarity. What is particular about post colonial violence is the way even there is this shared identity with the dictator there is also violent mobilization against the regime. This violence takes the language of the dictator and re-mythologize the conceptual universe, disempowering both.
If the ruled fail to put together an identity to adul the dictator, the dictator sees this as blasphemy, as the creation of other mindscape. It is also understood as a "theophagy" a cannibal like praxis in which the body of the god is devoured by its worshippers. This practice is only a continuity with colonial power, the violence over the body to subject it rather than make it produce. Theopagy is then a continuity of colonial economy of death, death as a display of power and as a site of spectacular enjoyment, a line in which obscenity has to be understood too. So he proposes to see how exactly the economy of pleasure is made into a site of death, how access to pleasure is part of the economy of power. If food and sexual pleasure are a value creating power, then famine and death are the counterpart of the disposed. The mouth, the belie, and the sexualized parts of the body function as sites of power in this regime.
Power shaped in conviviality and coersive power should not be dismissed however as part of this other dynamic. The colonial subject thus engages in barroque and ambiguous practices that mimics and eats power while internalizing dominant epistemology. This disempowering is what defines colonial situation.
I think Membe brings to attention a multiplicity of interesting points, however I can't follow him in his emphasis in power as mostly a system of meaning that is effective as long as is internalized. I find his notion of power as created in cohabitation more interesting, and interesting as something created in the repeated practice. Also the economy of pleasure and death are suggestive, again i would focus it more as a series of actions that regulation of practice and not so much as the mantainance of a regime of spectacular and visual adulation to incorporate a system of meaning. The question on difference and otherness remains unanswered, how dispossesion is related with subjection as one different for m the dictator (he mentions women as other that are totally available to his pleasure but no more than that).

Caldeira, Teresa.

1. Caldeira, Teresa. 2000 City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in Sao Paolo Bearkley: University of California Press. (Selections)

The circulation of discourses of fear and the proliferation of segragation are intertwined with processes of social transformation in the peripheries (as the return to democracy of Latin America and the end of the apartheid) as well as with the proliferation of violence. Neoliberalism segregation and spatial reconfiguration have generalized effects. Yet in Sao Paulo there is a particular configuration of crime, fear, violence and disrespect of citizenship, that combined with urban transformation has generated new patterns of segregation with the return to democracy. This patterns of exclusion have been generated through the proliferation of partitions, walls, distance, rules of avoidance, and movement restriction. What she calls the “talk of crime” propagates fear as much as it is a way of processing violence. Violence is related with criminal actions but cannot be separated with economic recession and neoliberal project. The discourse of crime produces social groups (and places) as dangerous and divides the social milieu. This discourse generates exclusion and generates two forms of discrimination: 1) the privatization of security, 2) the seclusion of social groups in fortified enclaves. For Caldeira the privatization of force challenges the basic definition of the state (following Weber), and of democracy, as private police does not recognize civil rights and generates a circle of violence. In this she is not discriminating between police and army, she avoids exploring police as a control of movement as much as defining criminality. The configuration of urban exclusion conform repertoires of spatial organization from which cities borrow. Democratization is then challenged in the sense of lack of defence to human rights and the lack of limit to intervene in the body of the criminal. One of them are fortified enclaves that separate groups form sites of social heterogeneity. Thus the space that emerges from the return to democracy is an undemocratic space organized by principles of inequality. This points to the entangled relation between political system and urban system, as well as how space is a dimension in which democratization is contested. She argues against post colonialism, as there is no fixed position of exteriority. To study segregation in the city there is a need to take a bigger scale perspective, take the city as a subject ad make a cross class analysis. Her work is an ethnography of violence and segregation, not of a neighbourhood. In regards to the body she argues that “the society that produces unbounded bodies is unlikely to have strong civil rights and vice versa” (374). The challenge is for her whether “can we conceive of a model that can leave a space for the promiscuity of bodies and sensuality of and yet enforce respect to privacy, individuality and human rights” But the notions of privacy, individuality and human rights remain without problematization.