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.

trinh t min-ha

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

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

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

Benjamin "The Flaneur"

Benjamin, Walter (1973). Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. New Left Books: London.

Benjamin presents the context in which Baudelaire is writing, that of the rise of life in the cities and the consequent appearance of a city life style. He points how at the opening of the 19th C literary movements shifted form panoramas, which elaborated descriptions of the new urban settings, to physiologists, that presented the movement of progress through descriptions of the functioning of machines. Baudelaire slides form these genres, as he understands that there is a different demand from modernity. The figure of the flaneur is both a character that condenses some of these newness of living in a modern city, and a perspective form where to observe the space of the city and the new social formation of the multitude form within but at some distance. Is a point form which to be and to give account of the tension between the extreme closeness of being in the multitude and the great anonymity and the ephemera of the encounter, (an immersion in a constant “good by”). The flaneur is a complement of the city architecture, he wanders at night thanks to the new gas-lights (that allow night life and also permits the clarity surveillance), it is also an inhabitant of the arcades, shopping streets roofed by the shop owners. The flaneur thus gives subjective descriptions in the city and its instantaneous moments, fragments of the life in the city (as the passing by a street and all the small fragments of scenes one passes by –he refers to Poe) rather than the totality of actions in a community that are recognized by everybody. The flaneur is in constant movement and has no concrete direction, the trajectory can only be understood ones finished and never recreated (as the woman cleaning the street when passing by won’t be there again if ones returning). Both this movement and anonymity trigger the need for new forms of social control and surveillance. Benjamin discusses the tensions around house numbering by the police and which were resisted both in working class neighbourhoods, and by Baudelair himself who avoided paying rent by moving constantly and changing addresses (buena idea).

Mmm probablemnete debería leer bastante mas para redondear los aportes (y leer la a buck morss tb), me queda como deuda. Este texto me lleva de nuevo al problema de la perspectiva que voy a tomar y desde donde mirar las trayectorias y que es exactamente lo que voy a reconstruir. Si no me convense de De Certeau que hable de reconstruir trayectorias desde historias, tampoco quiero tomar una perspectiva en la que percepciones subjetivas de los viajes sean lo que los define. Si bien me intereza saber que “ven cuando ven” distintas personas durante los viajes, probablemnte me intereza pensar efeco de que es el movimiento y que trabajo hace el movimiento sobre sujetos y re-configuarciones de los espcaios-trayectorias. Bssss no se si esto tiene algun sentido. Bueno volvamos, hay algo de estilo en el que escribe que esta que no es ni socilogico, ni de critica, ni literario del todo, calculo que eso es en parte lo que hace que tanta gente se lo apropie de distintas formas, pero no creo que se le pueda hacer decir cualquiercosa, da imagenes bastante potentes que sugieren ser usadas no de cualquierforma.
Me resulta interesante como flaneur – luz artificial- noche - arcadas –cigarrillo se conectan y hacen a la ciudad-y lo nuevo de la ciudad (“yo paso fumando” dijo mi pequeño hermano una vez). No es la arcada sola o el flaneur solo lo que hace el “trabajo”, sino la connexion, que se puede expandir a la connexion ciudad-muchedumbres. Me resulta interesante la irreversibilidad de las trayectorias (algo que tiene que ver con lo anterior sobre perspectiva-metodo). También es interesante la secuencia muchedumbre en movimiento… nuevas formas de control, que marca que formas en que canalizando el movimeninto se construye poder.

Pfffff probablemnte este comentario no hace el honor necesario, me recordo lo mucho que nos afecto cuando lo leimos en el cbc, y no me acuerdo si tiene algo que ver o no con el free-walking nocturno, todo hace mucho. A bueno y el dibujito de mafalda me hace pensar los limites del flaneur, quizas como decia massey haya que distinguir niveles de trayectorias las mas o menos validas, pero tambien trayectorias con mas o menos posibilidad de "deriva". Por ahi aca tenemos dos extremos, la posicion desde la que hay mas posibilidades de deriva son o de mucho "excedente" en posibilidades de movimiento y ocio, pero tambien posiciones desde las que no queda mas que moverse, en la que el movimiento es escaparse constantemente o buscar algo todo el tiempo.

Massey 2005 For space. o el sabor del encuentro

Ok this was also a key text for my work. El cambio de diseño es puro credito de Rafa.

Chapters 11-14

Chapter 11
Space is not a map. As long as map presents the space form above it constructs it as a surface rather than depths, this is not inherently bad, but is partial. Maps try to establish determinacy into what is indeterminate, but because of chance space is not representable (quoting Letch). for which she proposes the metaphor of the palimpsest of multiple erasures and overwirtings This is not solved by presenting the hidden transcripts of sedimented mapping, which would be imaging space " as superimposed horizontal structures rather than full contemporaneous coexistence and becoming" (110), it fails to let us think the flow of juxtaposition of multiple trajectories shaping space. She takes the example of the flaneur as a trajectory that has no origin and no end, it has no identity but is rather and entity of contingency. To travel in between places is to move between collections of trajectories and to reinsert yourself in the ones to which you relate.

Some quotations form chapter 11:
p 118: " The presentness of the horizontality of space is a product of a multitude of histories whose resonances are still there, if we would see them, and which sometimes catch us with full force unawarness.... is not just buried histories but histories still being made now." "So take the train... You are not just travelling throgh space, you are altering it a little. space and place emerge form active material practices. Moreover this movement... is also temporal. The London you left is not the London of now. It has already moved on." (mmmm habia un griego que decia algo sobre el tiempo y que uno no se baña dos veces en el mismo rio... parmnides? ahora lo googleo)

p 119 "at the end of the journey, then a town or a city (a place) which itself consists of a bundle of trajectories.... You are, on that train, travelling not across space-as-a-surface you are travelling across trajectories.... Thisnking space as a multiplicity of trajectories , imagining a train journey as a speeding across on going stories, means brining the woman [you see through the window] to life, acknowledging her as another ongoing life."
p 120 Acknowledging all the different trajectories implied in space is impossible, yet we can still "retain some sense of contemporaneous multiple becomings."

p 124-5 "you can never simply go back to home or to anywhere else... the place will have moved on just as you yourself will have changed. And this is the point. For to open up space is to this kind of imagination means thinking time and space as mutually imbricated and thinking both of them as a the products of interrelations...
Finale p125 "You can't hold places still. What you can do is meet up with others, catch up with where another's history has got to now, but where that now is itself constituted by nothing more than -precisely- that meeting-up (again)."

Chapter 12 She has a very long analysis of how nature, that what we tend to see as a fixed and stable entity over which culture acts upon as a transforming force, has a deep history of transformation and change. She uses this image to point to a kind of always already unstable nature of spatiality. She is arguing against the fixity of place as a location in space. All essences are events, no fix “place” really exists but a flow of movement. Space is more a constellation of stories as a temporary point of encounter of multiple and conjunctural trajectories. The scope processes are in relation to the scales of spatial and temporal dynamics . (She takes a definition of the political form Laclau, Mouffe and a bit of Derrida.)
To overcome the distinction space and time, we can think of space as a series of encounters in an ever changing flow of spacio-temporal events. Space “If space is simultaneity of stories-so-far, then place are collections of those stories, articulations within the wider power-geometries of space.”(130) Force of narrative in shaping reality. But still materiality of forces, not just discourse. Non human forces, not rationality but are forces non the less.

Chapter 13 The political is the moment of when the tension between the different unspoken alternatives bought by the different trajectories encountering in space become antagonism. The resolution of this antagonism entails the visibility of power relations (I add in their reconfiguration).
Spatiality as a condition of the socio-political, what she call the through-togetherness, is two fold: it is inherently unstable, all spatial politics are attempts to put order into the chaotic, to control juxtapositions in space. "Place does change us, not through some visceral belonging but through the practising of space, the negotiation of intersecting trajectories, place as an arena where negotiation is forced upon us." (154) The spatialization of the social, has at least two dimensions, 1) it is in space time that the social and the political unfold and specifically is the sphere of multiplicity, and 2) much of the political practice is constituted through the negotiation of places, in which the imaginations of space are both means and "object" of this negotiation. She takes cities as particularly dense places in the respect of the political, she understands this because of the lack of rooted identities which makes them a site of negotiation of multiple constellations of identities, within hierarchies of spatial geographies. "negotiations of place are on the move between identities that are on the move. It also means that any politics catches trajectories at diferent points, is attempting to articulate rythms that which pulse at different beats. It is other aspect of the elusivness of space that render politics so difficult."

h 14
There are no rules for the spatiality, no valid statement ca be made as: openness is good vs closeness is bad. To mantain a generality is a way of maintaning an imagination of universality in relation to space , and a type of spatial fetishism ("spaces should always be open to new comers" says the left but then the newcomers are yuppie gentrifying a neighbourhood and thus they defend localism.) There is no good or bad politics in locality or openess, but socio-political relations of power and place in which each case is ntangled (this echoes in Lacalau and Mouffe there is no universal politics of topographic categories ie the state is not bad per se) . There is not an a priori on whether or not one should argue for or against openess but is a consecuence o regarding the power relations involved.
p 172-6 She make a critique to post modern theory in the dangers of being to enthusiastic about openness and nomadity. Nomadity and the notions of the periphery, escape (the desert as a space of pure intensities) can be linked to a modernist vision of space a bourgeoisie identity of the analyst, but ultimately an imperial imagination. She draws on citique by Kaplan Hansen and Pratt to Deleuze and Guatari. Lines of flight may be individualistic and be in sharp contrast to mass migration or escape. Also “Europeans in the name of mobility and unboundedness, casually and symptomatically invade half of the world of the desert.” (172). In that the “others” inhabiting the “deserts” would not have the same possibilities of fleeing o the desert as they are already there “the others are not allowed a life of their own” (173) (she points to Miller critique form an anthropological perspective). She argues that following a deconstructionist perspective does not necessarily avoid being he instability of meaning can also be part of forms of oppression. In this line she also replies to Hardt and Negri their critique thst if places are open then the concept is useless altogether. She points that this is based on binaries openness-enclosure as universal that further reproduces the problems of the romance of free flow.
“The closed geographical imagination of openness, just as much as that of closure, is itself irretrievably unstable. The real political necessities are an insistence on the recognition of their specific and an address to the particularity of the questions they pose.” (175) She ends up with Derrida, proposing that the only way to operate politically in the face o openness or enclosure is through experience and experimentation.

Benedict Anderson on Creole Populations

Una tarde que fui a hacer tramites a Filo, me lo crucé a Pablo en la vereda. Venía pensando sobre peregrinajes y movimiento asi que fue bastante afortunado el encuentro. Me tiró dos referencias que vienen mas que bien (que luego Otamendi corroboró), Turner y Anderson. –Anderson... Benedict? - Si en el analisis de los nacionalismos habla del peregrinar de funcionarios y retoma a turner incluso. Había dejado a Anderson como esas lecturas pedagógicas iniciales (en la combinacion Anderson, Gellner, Hobsbawn, Anderson Perry - eran familiares Benedict y Perry?), asi que estuvo bien releer partes de naciones. En este tiempo me habia olvidado por un lado que Anderson tiene unas cuantas ideas interesantes, en especial el tipo de procesos historicos que va uniendo en su argumento (aunque claro a veces muuuy forzado), por otro lado las barbaridades que dice.

En especial habia olvidado su analisis de los nacionalismos americanos, que retoma la idea de peregrinage de Turner como parte de lo que conforma la unidad entre criollos. No queda del todo claro cual es el detonante que hace recaer indefectiblemente a los movimientos independentistas criollosen el nacionalismo, pero Anderson presenta varios argumentos: 1) las fuertes restricciones de la corona española para e comercio de sus colonias entre si, 2) la discriminación hacia los criollos que no pueden aspirar a ser funcionarios mas alla de los límites administrativos de la colonia, en contraposicion a los funcionarios españoles que tienen posibilidad de ir y volver entre america y europa (Anderson recuerda como con el surgimiento de los nacionalismos se instala tambien con mucha rapidez el racismo que no abundaba durante el absolutismo, donde las poblaciones eran intercambiables y asimilables al poder de un soberano) , 3) el terror de los criollos a las sublevaciones de los sublternos (por decir) 4) el surgimiento de una identidad compartida entre criollos en sus peregrinajes hacia acentros administrtivos, (cuyas cabeceras eran generalmente comandadas por españoles) y la inversion de la logica de la corona española (si no permite el acceso criollo al estatus de español, entonces por que dejarse comandar por un grupo ajeno a America?) 5) la propagacion de las ideas iluministas en las elites criollas y la influencia de la declaración norteamericana, 6) (por supuesto para guardar coherencia con el resto del libro) la propogacion de periodicos en America Hispana. Todos estos elementos combinados parecieran ser la formula detonante de los nacionalismos "prematuros". Mientras tanto el "atrazo" del capitalismo español respecto al resto de europa explicaría la fragmentacion en multiples naciones (en lo que eran las divisiones de la corono española, claro) que impiden una Latinoamerica unida en la conformacion de una identidad americana unica, algo que si logra Eu, que hereda la sofisticacion Inglesa al parecer y hace efctiva la apropiacion del apelativo Americano para su nacion.
Su conclusion es:
"the fialure of the Spanish America experience to generate a permanent Spanish America wide nationalism reflects both the general level of development of capitalism and technology in the late eighteenth century and the local backwardness of Spanish capitalism and tchnology in relation to the administrative stretch of the empire. (Is Indian nationalism not insperable from colonial administrative market unification, after the mutiny, by the most formidable and advanced of the imperial powers?"
Claro lo que importa a los terminos de mi tema es que justamente es en la comunitas del peregrinar de los funcionarios criollos que Anderson ve un escenario efectivo para el surgimiento de movimientos independentistas que se alzan alrededor de una idea de nacion soberana, que se define por su oposicion a la nacion colonial que las domina. En este ejemplo el efasis que hace en la necesidad de unificar el idioma lo tiene que dejar de lado, por que no ayuda a pensar como se definen los limites nacionales ni tampoco que se hace con la heterogeneidad social -y linguistica-. En este sentido la distancia al centro administrativo y un reclamo por un manejo local de los asuntos es lo que prima. Es decir que me sirve pensar como se deinen espacialidades de soberania y el rol que juegan los viajes, de los españoles a america por un lado y de los funcionarios americanos viajando solo entre paises latinos, un movimiento que permite una articulacion pero tambien una conciencia de limites que justamente sirven para definir los limites de la nacion. Habría que ver como eplica los nacionalismos asiaticos y africanos en relacion a estos temas y si establecería diferencias.

correcciones mañana

Turner sobre peregrinajes

Turner, Victor 1974 "Pilgrimage as Social Processes" in Dramas Fields and Metaphores. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.

Turner proposes to understand pilgrimage as liminal processes, lbut also as part f rituals that reinforce a sense of community beyond the local ties, suchas a a common religious community. Liminality is a way of understanding the relations established during pilgrimage and also the spatiality of the sacrate places that generate the pilgrimage. Pilgramage is liminal because is a time and space outside regular time and space, it is moment of anti-structure, a state in-betweenness. He links pilgrimages as being part of a type of rituality that links people to general, shared condition, rather than reinforcing local status and roles, in this pilgimage brings together people for far away locations, who share nothing but a same religion together.
"self conscious pilgrims regard them "both as occasions on which communitas is experienced and as journeys towards a sacred source of communitas" (203)
The trip itself is a moment of creation of communitas, in which the unity of the society is strengthen above the differences and tensions, the collective is reinforced in the trip, people share of food, share the time of walking, sleep together, but also local people offer food and lodge to the travellers.
" As the pilgrim moves away form his structural involvements at his home his route becomes increasingly sacralized at one level and increasingly secularized at another. He meets with more shrines and sacred objects as h advances, but he also encounters more real dangers, he has to pay attention to the need to survive and often earn money for transportation. But all these things are more contractual, more associational, more volitional, more replete with the novel and the unexpected, fuller of possibilities of communitas, as secular fellowship and comradeship and sacred communion that anything know at home. And the world becomes a bigger place. He completes the paradox of the Middle ages that it was at once more cosmopolitan and more localized than either tribal or capitalist society" (183)
He proposes a synchronic (of the process of pilgrimage) and a diachronic (the way pilgrimages have changed through time especially form being unstructured to being structured and vice versa) analysis. In this the first aspect to be considered is the social structure of the religious system that generates the trip and the way this trip is motivated. The social structures of the places that are transversed should also be considered. He proposes that one can distinguish between pilgrimages that are absolutely spontaneous and un-regulazied and ones which are regulated and for a specific social purpose. To explain pilgrimages in modern times he evoques the fact of the crisis generated by the loosening up of social structure, in this pilgrimage arises as a anti structure response but that can enhance cohesion. If we distinguish ritual activity related with reinforcing the different social roles, hierarchies and mitigate the conflicts generated by this division, and ritual that regard an universal and shared nature of the society, the pilgrimage is more related with the latter. He states that pilgrimages have a strong component of being an elective choice, while there might be a moral obligation in some instances, people generally go because of a personal interest. This interest is generally linked to an expectation of personal tranformation, of becoming something else of what you were. "the pilgrim's journey becomes a paradigm for other kinds of behaviour" (198) In this the limanality of the pilgrimage can function or not as a rite of passege in which a person is rincorporated as something different of what he was.
"pilgrimage liberates the individual form the obligatory everyday onstraints of status and role, defines him as an integral human being with the capacity for free choice and presents him with a living model of human brotherhood and sisterhood. It also removes him form one time to another" (207)
Pilgrimage involved people moving to places outside the community in which people belong, it manifest a dual spatiality in which the sociopolitical structure (even the regular religious and its centres do not coincide with the centres of peregrination. The importance of these places seem to be connected to places the manifestation of the divine in them but also with reminiscences of past topographies of power, this does not mean that pilgrimages in some cases promote the creation and growth of towns, villages or cities. The trip implies transversing a series of places charge of symbolic meaning and in some cases the re-enactment of a events by transversing those places, in his case study the end of the trip seem to be especially charged of symbolism. The way you move can also be relevant (ie. walking an not by car) But also the end of the trip is encountered with markets and fairs that locals and non locals establish for the arrival of the pilgrims. For him pilgrimages that complement with religious orthodoxy, rather than challenge religious systems altogetherby a set of heterogeneous practices, are more likely to last longer.


Turner ayuda a pensar que es lo que pasa con el movimiento en si, no solo desde el punto de vista de la experiencia sino como es que se trazan rutas y se definen los lugares relevantes a los que ir. Tambien si bien no lo profundiza menciona las relaciones que se abren en el viaje con la gente que se encuentra en el camino (que alimentan y hospedan a lo caminantes). Hace un analisis interesante de la espacialidad doble, una politico social (que incluye la administracion religiosa) y una de lugares sagrados. Muestra como el camino en si atraviesa una serie de lugares significativos en su trayecto, como el recorrido puede ser parte de uan recreacion de hechos que se reviven al hacer el recorrido y atravesar puntos signifactivos (via crucis). Finalmente muestra como el espacio es transformado por los caminantes, como se establecen ferias y mercados, es decir activiades comercailes que florecen como consecuencia de la pergrinacion, algo que da cuenta que su distincion entre espacialidades sagrada y política no estan escindidas ni son solamente complementarias.

Me resulta intersane la paradoja cosmopolitismos - localismo que plantea para la edad media. Me parece que esta tensión no es solo para este momento sino tambien para otras "otredades" de las que se separa la modernidad. En esto podríamos proponer que las ideas de localismo cosmopolitismo de los analisis de la globalizacion arrastran no solo falsas dicotomías, si no que también se sustentan y recrean imagenes de quitud que parecen tener mas uqe ver con una de las formas de poder moderno. corresponder a localizado que tiene mas que ver con una necesidad del estado que con configuraciones sociales

Es importante lo que resalata en relacion a la trasnformacion personal que se espera como resultado del viaje, este argumento que es tan comun para las propuestas de “literatura como viaje”, e incluso se podría tomar el genero de diarios de viajes [ahora que lo pienso podrñia revisar ese art de mary l. pratt sobre esto] hasta ahora no habia aprecido, y sin embargo tampoco ocupa un lugar tan importante en turner, mas que en su reflexión acerca de la mandatoriedad o no de la peregrinación, y si el estatus cambia o no luego del viaje. Por supuesto que algo que le obseciona es la estructra y la anti estructura y al igual que en todo su trabajo, solo justifica la antiestructura como algo functional a la estructura (cambio de estatus), si bien esto empieza a ser relativizado al final de su carrera donde reconoce a sujetos en estado continuo de linialidad. Todos los puntos que toca en relacion al viaje en sí pueden ayudar para mi trabajo y a pensar que es lo que pasa durante el trayecto, si bien claro no comprato su vision estructural y la idea de cambio como algo que se da dentro de la estructura. Y como nota hace una distincion entre sistemas de estatus y de contrato, algo que usa Segato en su analisis de la violencia, y me quede con la duda de si es un propuesta de Turner o viene de antes.

Ideas sueltas que relaciono al peregrinar, por un lado el turismo por supuesto, el turismo como peregrinar, la tension entre el llegar a destino y perderse, en la que perderse o retrazarse puede ser en si mismo lo que motiva el viaje. Puede ser que el turismo y el peregrinaje sea no tanto sobre a donde se llega sino sobre salirse del camino y los encuentros que no se pueden planificar. los viajes que siguen rutas de viajes anteriores y se definen en la referencialidad a una experiencai pasada, como seguir lso pasos del che y leer su diario en el camino. Puede que haya algo de esto con los tobas y sus viajes a Buenos aires, que recueredn viajes anteriores, en algunos relatos que recuerdeo había refencias a las profesías de megexogoxi, y como la gente veía esas profesías cumplidas en los subtes de Buenos aires.

Pero hay mucho tambien de peregrinaje en el ir a la plaza de peron, y en la protesta callejera, recorridos de congreso a casa de gobierno, del ministerio de educacion al rectorado. Por el lado religioso tenemos no solo por las peregrinaciones varias y la visibilidad que estan teniendo practicas religiosas no oficializadas, tambien por el interes que cobra. El libro de Terranova como la nueva nueva literatura y su libro sobre un viaje a conocer a maria lidia que no es de etnografo ni de peregrino creyente, ni tampoco de periodismo que intenta acercarse a los hecho, sino de muchacho urbano semiabulico que se reconstruye una historia con cierta curiosidad y se interna en el viaje pero para mirar desde la distancia y narrar luego de un modo autorefencial, un especie de estilo peridistico desafectado.

Bueno da para seguir, pero finalmente y a pesar de lo estructurado de Turner empiezo a pensar que pasa con el movimiento como practica. Los vectores se hacen un poco mas gruesos y son masas de gente (o personas aisladas -kung fu-) trasladándose.

De Certeau

Michel De Certeau (1990) plantea que existe una dimensión doble de la espacialidad, lo que el llama lugares, es la disposición de elementos y sus posición en tanto a sus relaciones de contigüidad – distancia. Por otro lado el espacio es aquella dimensión en la que los lugares son atravesados por movilidades diversas, prácticas que establecen vectores de movimiento, demarcan temporalidades, circunstancias, orientaciones e intensidades. Si bien estas definiciones no coinciden con el uso que en este trabajo le damos a “espacio” y “lugar”, sin duda es de interés el entrecruce entre las definiciones de hegemónicas de “lugares” y la definición del “espacio” de los tobas. En este sentido en este apartado hago un acercamiento inicial, en base a relatos y ciertas experiencias en el campo sobre los modos en que si bien
“que un orden espacial organiza un conjunto de posibilidades (por ejemplo un sitio donde se puede circular) y de prohibiciones (por ejemplo, a consecuencia del muro que impide avanzar), el caminante actualiza alguna de ellas. De ese modo, las hace ser tanto como parecer. Pero también las desplaza e inventa otras pues los atajos, desviaciones o improvisaciones de andar, privilegian, cambian o abandonan elementos espaciales.” (De Certeau 1990 : 110).

Esto es lo que De Certeau llamaría la construcción de un espacio a partir de vectores de movimiento con direccionalidades e intensidades variables que actualizan la disposición de elementos en el espacio y la funcionalidad asignada, desde el poder.
Tácticas “consumen” el espacio, no poseen un espacio desde el cual desplegarse, son invenciones del momento, mas ligadas a lo inconsciente que a la planificación y la improvisación coyntural que hace uso de lo que “está a mano” .

Las estrategias son movimientos planificados desde un lugar de poder que busca explícitamente mantener o incrementar el dominio. Tienen que ver con modos dominantes de apropiación y producción del espacio, y con una serie de tecnologías para el control dirección de los movimientos espaciales.

Naval y carcelario: este capítulo corto y que parece anecdótico hace una serie de reflexiones interesantes sobre el viaje en tren. Señala al menos dos aspectos interesantes: 1) el modo en que el movimiento del tren contrasta con la fuerte disciplina del cuerpo que uno debe seguir para estar allí, (asientos numerados, guardas, decorado); 2) el modo en que le movimiento del tren genera otra espacialidad, una distancia con los lugares que atraviesa con los que no hay contacto sino un mirar por la ventanilla, y que se abstraen por la velocidad del movimiento, pierden particularidad.


Falta Traducir

Falta tambien:

- Aretxaga: redondear, con dirty protest pero tambien espacios en irlando, viajes de las mujeres a la carcel como momeno de construccion de agencia politica en charlas con otras meujers en desesperacion a la vulta depes de ver a familiares heho merda.

- Tsing: buscar algunas citas mas sobre movilidad en 1993

- Massey 1994: pasar

- Ingold cita

A dormir

Thrift. Intensities of Feeling

Thrift, N. 2004 “Intensities of feeling: towards a spatial politics of affect.” Geograkiska Annaler Series B 86: 57–78

Thrift claims that there is a need for considering affect as a constitutive force of cities (largely ignored in the bibliography) , he considers it both as a field of new forms of the political and for the construction of knowledge about the city. He identifies three (plus one) lines of defining of affect: 1) coming from a phenomenological tradition as a set of embodied practices, that produce visible conduct as a response (rather than thought), the emergence of emotions are in relation to particular contexts of interaction, a process which escapes representation (it can rather support it); 2) originated in psychoanalytic ideas which understands drive as a main motor of human motivation and identity, emotions are in direct relation to desire, some reformulations recognize a series of motivations apart for drive; 3) building over Spinoza and Deleuze and Guatari on the idea of affect as adding capacities to a body of through it interactions with a world "which is constantly becoming"-this section is very long- ; 4) a Darwinian interest in the facial expressions as universal and not just human way of expressing physiological processes. His main question is how to think the way affect works as a political force, in the face that contemporary power is linking knowledge, technique and affect that tends towards an "engineering of affect" (64) expanding in urban landscape in 4 ways: 1) a change in the form of the political, from party politics to the emergence of agencies of choices that make more and more areas of life be part of a set of responsibilities also called "choice"; 2) the mediatization of politics that enhance the importance of the perfomative, by concentrating on affective sites and magnifying details, "one line of movement can become a progression of meaning able to actualized and implanted locally" (65)-here he refers to massumi's example of regan- and that "provide a new means of creating fractal subjects challenged to perform across a series of different situations in a way which demands not so much openness as controlled flexibility [ok, but then a perfomativity in front of the camera and space of ambiguity, or affect os always ambiguous?]; 3) new forms of calculation in sensory registers that allow manipulation of very small spaces of time politically (form managing small body movements to producing knowledge about them) embodiment is expanded once opned it can be manipulated politically, generating a new type of power is created through a "microbiopolitics".
We should think of the opening of the politic of affect in different ways: 1) as a care of the self or a reflexivity that triggers forms of channelling and repressing affect in relation to the circumstances; 2) as a politics of virtual as decorporizations and deterritorializations that can both limit encounter or generate new forms of it; 3) as a politics of hope as productive sense of life as positive engaging with the world. All this can contribute to building a politics of affect that are beyond forms of articulation. Finally there are 4 ways in which microbiopolitics is being constituted (in relation to the definitions of affect): 1) as an enhancement of receptivity by developing skilful response; 2) working on negative affects through reparative rejoining different range affects; 3) widen the potential number of interactions (of play, of changing effects of sensory modes into others -synesthesia?- and recognizing the neuropolitics (ver Collony); 4) the transmission of emotion through the face in order to trigger common emotion in "redemptive" and even therapeutic ways (his ex. Bill Viola's work).
His conclusion are kind of intriguing: the politics of affect can reunite the passions and thought; it is been done currently through collaborations between theoretical and practical knowledge. This can both open new fields of the political as well as restoring old forms of it (bring back politics to discussion).

Bueno todo esto es interesante. Me quedan muchas preguntas de todos modos. Un poco confuso como es que se espacializa el affecto, si es solamente en estos micromovimientos y estos microespecios de tiempo, pero entonces que pasa con los punto de operacion de mayor esacala y que pasa con efecto de mayor escala, la ciudad que es en definitiva su interes. Algo de eso hay en la multiplicidad de formas de actualizar una misma linea de sentido. Que pasa con las formas mediatizar el espacio urbano por ejemplo o como el espacio puede disparar afectos en el cuerpo, en y fuera de la ciudad. Me generan dudas el enfasis en la mediatizacion visual, pesnando en el trabajo de Hirschkind, por ejemplo. Estaría buena alguna mensión a como se relaciona el proyecto the Thrift con los rusos hablando de desautomatizar la percepsión.

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.