antes

Esto es un intento anterior de predentar el tema,

My research analyzes how indigenous mobility in between urban neighbourhoods rural areas in the Argentine Chaco, a lowland area to the north of the country, are a response to state-imposed spatial reconfigurations that are part of an ongoing process of colonization. This process has involved violent state appropriation of indigenous’ lands, and their confinement to mission stations and reservation within economically marginal lands, and the creation of extensive land properties owned by a small national elite. If the indigenous were first incorporated as cheep (and even “free”) labour force, they are now mostly unemployed and, in the rural areas, facing the constraints to growing population, the lack of paid jobs, the crisis of the state as provider of social services and paid jobs, as well as the advancement of neoliberal forms of exploitations over previous Toba hunting and gathering fields.
In this context my project explores how the Toba respond to these contradictions, by constantly moving between and re-making a variety of different places: their own urban neighbourhoods; other parts of the city including the city centre; rural communities; and the surrounding bush.
My central hypothesis is that Toba spatial mobility is part of a strategy to cope with a socioeconomic exclusion that results form the inscription of difference in place. I ask how their movement changes the production of ethnic differences in relation to other systems of inequality. What transformations do these trips imply for their production of and experience in places? I suggest that their repeated geographical displacements destabilize the fixed categories of the dominant spatialization of difference which assumes that indigenous people belong in rural areas. To develop this hypothesis, I examine the particular recreation of Toba embodied identities within differential contexts and in the face of: 1) local, regional and national state formations; 2) other lines of differentiation that interpelate them in class, gender, and racial terms; and 3) in what types of located practices and in which social contexts is indigenous alterity produced and what type of space results from their subordination.
The Toba live throughout the Chaco region, in both urban neighbourhoods and rural villages. Many have also migrated to some of the country’s larger metropolises, resulting in the formation of urban Toba neighbourhoods elsewhere in the country, because of thanks to successful land claims well outside of the group’s “traditional” territory. If contemporary indigenous policies, fostered by an international context of multiculturalist recognition, have facilitated processes of ethnic identification, the existence of Toba urban neighbourhoods is not a simple consequence of this context (Carrasco 2000, Briones 2005). Rather the politics of indigenous recognition developed at the international level, and influencing the Argentinean mainly by the generation of development programs particularly dedicated for indigenous people, and made effective through the transference of important funds to the national, provincial and private sectors (Lorenzetti 2007, Lorenzetti y Lenton 2005). However indigenous politics had been opened in Argentina before the constitution of this international arena, it was Formosa, a province in the Chaco Region that contains half of the Toba population, the first province to have indigenous constitutional recognition and legislation on the area. If the multilateral and international agencies have contribute to shape the possibilities available for people who recognize themselves as indigenous, one cannot state that they were a central motor of this type of articulation as it has happened in other contexts (se for example Li 2003, Tsing 2005), nor can we claim that the identifications made available for the Toba are a type of globalized identities that find its local subjects. Contrarily it is necessary to locate these identities as resulting form long processes of colonization and which have effected particular social trajectories that have generated diverging and converging situations of subordination, from which people have positioned and produced a particular political arena.
Movements between these diverse communities are very common (Tamagno 2001, Vasquez 1991), yet little has been said about how they contribute to shaping Toba production of localized identities, and how this mobility reconfigures the spacialization of power relations. These trips are not necessarily permanent migrations, but are more usually “visits” undertaken for instance to meet up with relatives or to avoid political conflicts at "home." It cannot either be claimed that this movements result from the recreation of a hunter-gatherer “ethos” as some authors have claimed (Miller, Von ), as it has been extensively demonstrated the way the hunter gatherer system was forever transformed as a result of colonization (see Gordillo 2005). If there are traditional forms of knowledge associated to particular locations in the Chaco, it would be misleading to consider that movement is motivated by a nomadic tendency to travel remained unaffected by the multiple transformations of their colonization. The Tobas themselves recognize other motivations as the cause of their will to live in the city (as consumption, the possibility to progress, paid jobs, among others)
Although there is a strong sense among the Toba that the city is the site of “progress” (Vivaldi 2007), this is not the only directionality of their movements rather, they weave a complex net of interconnected spatial trajectories between city and country but also between different urban barrios and different location in the rural areas including Toba villages but also, for example, cotton plantations.
My project’s major fieldwork will consist of twelve months of research. I will use a multisided ethnography in one neighbourhood in Buenos Aires (the capital city of Argentina around 1000 kms far form the Chaco region) and the places people travel to from that location: mainly rural communities and areas in the eastern Chaco and Formosa Provinces. I will base my work in this neighbourhood and I will travel with the people back to the Chaco. Through participant observation and semi-structured interviews, I will reconstruct the trajectories of the people that have migrated to these places and their experiences of travel (Pratt 1992, Creswell 2006, Tsing 2005). I will also document the place-making that results from their daily movements between neighbourhoods, regular trips between city, village, and bush, or more occasional movements between cities. While staying in the Chaco with urban tobas in their visits to the rural areas, I will search to explore how people who have not travelled out of the village relate to the travel experience and evocation of distant places of the visitors and how this reshape the place of the villages as the constellation of stories so far.
I search to do this by way of the analysis of the experiences of the people who are shaped by these forces and who also subvert them. In a context of widespread social mobilization against entrenched neoliberal policies in Argentina, the Toba’s subtle political practices both show ways in which subordinate groups might escape state domination and social stigmatization, and also offer a strong case for further analyzing the effects of colonial and neo-colonial violence on the formation of social subjectivities.

nuevo intento

aca estoy tratando de ordenar la perspectiva de mi trabajo por enesima vez en este anio [no hay enies aca] y medio. esta vez para un proyecto casi sin teoria, que me obliga a tratar al menos de sintetizar todo al maximo. bueno y va con un enfasis importante en lo urbano como requicito.


This research will be structured around three main themes: spatial mobility, urban marginality (), subaltern alterities ( ). To this terms that define the field of my research there are a series of associated concepts: circular migration and rural cosmopolitanism, urban segregation, urban indigeneity ()


While many initial studies of globalizations emphasised the encrease of mobility as a result of flow of capital, travel, labour migrations, and the growing circulation of goods and communications (Harvey, Appadurai) it has been also pointed to the fact that mobility is not equally accessible to all social groups (Massey, Urry, Creswell). This does not only mean that some locations that may have been highly communicated by the circulation of trains are now isolated, but also has been dramatically manifested in the face of Katrina hurricane and the fact that most refugees where people who did not own a car as all collective transportation fail to provide an escape form the city. This research will thus consider the way the Tobas use the available transportation system in order to make their trips, it will consider the way this travels are made and experienced and the way they reshape their experience of places.


I will follow Gidwani and Sivarakrishnan (year)proposition of studying the role of circular migrations (to the cities and back to the rural areas) as constituting a type of “rural cosmopolitanisms”, a term the authors use to refer to the groups of people who have a “cultural competence” and skills form different rural and urban locations. This is a concept that can be used to think the effects of travelling back to the communities and the tension between the Tobas’ capacity to make themselves a place in the city but also the exclusion that results in the stigmatization of them as rural, backward.

Urban Marginality has been a focus of concern in social sciences since the opening of the century. While initial lines of inquiry looked to marginality as a negative outcome of modernization that has to be corrected and eradicated (ie Simmel?), a contrastive perspectives have celebrated the urban peripheries as sites of resisting communal life in the fase of individualization and alienation of big metropolis (ie W Foote). In response to both perspectives have argued that marginality is a complicated term as it masks the fact that social polarization is no just an unexpected outcome but in fact the existence of a subordinated and impoverished population provide cheap and always available workfoce that allows higher levels of accumulation (ulf). Thus many authors point to the need of understanding the structural relation of exploitation for which the existence of such inequalities is functional. In the last years such perspective was challenged in the face that it is not always possible of talking of a functionality of such sectors, as in many cases cities deindustrialization and the huge retraction of labour market has excluded whole sectors altogether (ie Waquant, Caldeira). If the forms of marginalization vary, ranging from Chicago ghettos to French banlieue, and Brazilian favelas, the localization of sections excluded from dominant forms of politics and sociality is a general pattern of contemporary cities.

To this perspective studies of colonization and decolonization and focusing the making of race and ethnic difference as way of inscribing systems of inequality of exclusion have contributed to show how process of racial and ethnic segregation were constitutive of the creation of cities. These works show how some of colonial settlements where sites of coexistence and exchange between different groups (indigenous, settlers, merchants, among others) that where then made into locations of white supremacy by defining racially and ethnically different groups as inferior “others” (Mawani, Kuppinger, Bashford).

This project will explore the tension between marginality resulting form a process of differentiation and segregation that has defined indigenous as an “other” and “new inhabitants”, from the city’s “normal citizens”, and their participation in the formation, and the ongoing history of coexistence within the city (and of the Argentinean nation at large).

Finally As post colonial studies have largely analyzed the large sector of colonized populations were mostly excluded from the field of dominant politics, and not considered full citizens. This “remaining” subaltern sector constitute a field of partial independence in which politics and sociality have its particular forms as it is excluded form political and symbolic representation (Chakrabarty, Spivak). This difference was constituted not just by distinguishing groups but also by defining different humanities and inscribing it into people’s bodies through racial ideologies as well as by spatially re-localizing those groups. Many researchers have showed that these processes of excluding and dominating non white others was part of the process of constitution of white supremacy, and a “dark side” of the foundational ideas of modernity that restricted “freedom and equality” to the fully human, civilized whites Europeans (Gilroy, Goldberg, Mignolo).

Urban Indigenous situation on Argentina is linked to long trajectory of struggles for political recognition, resulting from a long process of colonization, in which the indigenous people and culture, unlike other Latinamerican countries, were negated as a part of the national identity. This project situates within the frame that consideres that the particularity of contemporary indigenous people is having been colonized, and displaced in their own lands, in contrast to other ethnicities. If the state project of indigenous transformation into workers and citizens was never fully achieved, to the economic and political marginalization experienced in rural communities, the advancement of the agricultural frontier in the 1960-70, and the mechanization of tasks for which Tobas were employed, generated a great pressure that resulted in big migrations to cities in the Chaco and then outside the region (mostly Rosario, Santa Fe, Buenos Aires). If the maintaining of connections to rural areas is a characteristic many urban indigenous around the world share (Kishagami, Peters, Fogel Chance), one particularity of the Tobas is that rather than disperse in the margins of the cities, they have formed urban neighbourhoods in the cities to which they have collectively migrated. The concentration of Toba population on a city (and nation) that imagines itself as totally white – constituted European descendant puts into manifest a the social diversity that rather than being recognized is excluded from the way portenios present themselves (Guano)

I will thus explore the way tobas are constituted as a subaltern other, in a position shared with other subaltern groups (as, for example, migrants form neighbouring countries), but that this position does not erase the particularity of being a group colonized in their own territory. Indigenous then challenges both the dominant imagination of a white city and simplistic formulas of multiculturality that deny the complex mechanisms of exclusion to which indigenous people (and other marginalized groups) have been subjected.

Philippe Bourgoise

Pense que la búsqueda bibliográfica había termianado cuando esta mañana vi el comentario "underengagement with urban anthropology literature" Aca estoy haciendo una puesta al día. Necesito no perder este vínculo, y delicious tiene tantas cosas que ya no encuentro nada.

Philippe Bourgoise trabaja con drogadicción y marginalidad urbana. Laburo interesante de un antropologo ¨publico¨.

Informe especial: CAE

No puedo evitar colgar esta nota formidable, que surgio de un intercambio colectivo sobre uno de los mejores temas musicales en youtube

por Ale

A pedido del público, voy a poner en conocimiento de quienes - sin excusas, claro está - no saben quien es Cae.

2008/4/15, Ana escribió:che que es "Cae" a todo esto????

"Cae" es el nombre artístico de Carlos Alberto Elías, el ex cantante de LA banda de glam metal argentina por excelencia, más conocida como "Bravo" (ya todos estarán entonando las primeras estrofas de "Desierto sin amor"..."despacio y en silencio, el reloj castiga el tiempoooo...").
Cae nació un 20 de octubre.
Cae es de libra.
Cae compuso memorables canciones para el film "Mi familia es un dibujo" (cuyo soundtrack está disponible en casettes y cds).
Cae vivió un año en México y en Miami, donde se rumorea que conoció a la máxima diva Suana Gimenez.

Les dejo unos videos para que se deleiten con este verdadero heredero de David Bowie y Marc Bolan.

1) "Una larga historia de amor", cuyo video comienza sutilmente con un primer plano del bulto de Cae:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QH7UZy4fleo

2) Otro hitazo, "Te dije adiós mientras dormías" (qué letra...) en el cual Cae actúa junto a Bravo (cuyo inicial nombre era "Rocket"); video que comienza, como podrán apreciar, con Cae oliéndose el chivo.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0jgjMyi0MM&feature=related

3) Y, finalmente, el hitazo por excelencia, cuya performance Tincho supo apreciar en todo su esplendor:

"Te recuerdo" (Live & Acoustic) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4m9yMr8TB0 . Como podrán apreciar, no todos son fanáticos de Cae en Youtube. El segundo comentario a este video reza: " Oh.oh, me corto los huevos con una servilleta".

En fin, me despido con la letra del más alto éxito de Bravo, que más que una letra es una poesía (que alguna vez, no sin razón, en un jueves melancólico la he confundido con un poema de T. S. Elliot).

Adiós. Espero que alguna vez valoremos lo que tenemos acá, y dejemos de escuchar tanta música en inglés. Si al final, no se entiende nada de lo que dicen, y seguro te están puteando. Apoyemos a los artistas argentinos. El arte argentino da trabajo!!!

Saludos

Alejandro

Bravo - "Desierto sin amor" (obviamente, music and lyrics: Cae)

Despacio y en silencio
El reloj castiga al tiempo
Siento el frio de tus labios
Al mentir diciendo adiós
Tu nombre lo trajo el viento
Salvaje amor, placer intenso
Tan sólo dame una vez mas
Como en áquella canción
Y si de algo te sirve
Yo digo que te amo
Y clavo entre tus manos
Mi fuego y la pasión
No prendas ya las luces
Quiero recordar tu cuerpo
Como una rosa en el desierto,
Desierto sin amor

Y tu tren cruzó mi alma
Y mis ojos se cerraron
Lágrimas que se escaparon
Al correr por el andén
Pon tu cara entre la gente
Y les digo que aún te amo
Bebo los días y te extraño
Quisiera volverte a ver

Y ahora nuestro tema sonando en la radio
Es como si tu boca se acercara hasta mi
Solo apago las luces y recuerdo tu cuerpo
Como una rosa en el desierto,
Desierto sin amor

Y mis manos ya no saben
De caricias con deseos
En el piano no hay mas juegos
Desde que me faltas tu
Mas despacio y en silencio
El reloj castiga al tiempo
Ya siento el frio de tus labios
Al mentir diciendo adiós

Y ahora nuestro tema sonando en la radio
Es como si tu boca se acercara hasta mi
Solo apago las luces y recuerdo tu cuerpo
Como una rosa en el desierto,
Desierto sin amor
Desierto sin amor
Desierto sin amor
Desierto sin amor
Desierto sin tu amor

PD: Fíjense qué vuelta de tuerca le da Cae al último verso de este poema. Le agrega, a la frase ya adaptada a nuestra mente, la segunda persona del singular "Tu", que le da un giro lingüístico sin precedentes al poema lírico y juglar.

farsa

Marian hablando sobre el quilombo en argentina en general recuerda: "Hegel dice en alguna parte que "todos los grandes hechos y personajes de la historia universal se producen, como si dijéramos, dos veces. Pero se olvidó de agregar: una vez como tragedia y otra vez como farsa".

nation and movements

i have been trying to put a paragraph together for the last hours in an attempt to complicate malkki's idea of the sedentary metaphysics of the state (i love that concept and malkki's work), and set of notions with which -she argues- transnational migrants and refugees clash in their relocations.
so one thing to consider would be that nations are not detached form the production of globalization of capital, as kay anderson but also many others (quienes eran todos lo que rescataban a la nacion en el debate, no me acuerdo), say. nations have a role to play and are not just "threatened " in the process of globalization. thus we cannot think of the sedentary metaphysics without thinking its simultaneous tensions with the constitution of more fluid forms of economy and sociability which are also part of national projects.
this can be thought for movements within the nation, which could also be thought in relation to malkki's concept. sedentarism can be also connected to practices of seclusion and segregation of marginalized societies as one of the aspects of generating ghettos was to restrict movement and interactions with social others by fixing them in the space of the ghetto which further marks the population as a marginal, racially different, characterized as delinquent and a source of contamination, in sum "subaltern other". this segregation is not just a detention of migrants intending to get into the city as virilio proposes but also has showed to be a process of separation of what was not clearly separated (as in mawani who presents the way a city composed of the cohabitation of indigenous, white settlers and migrants, that then are constituted as spaces of white settler hegemony through racial segregation). this was also the case in the sedentarization of the chaquenian populations which were not only an internal other whose territory had to be radically reduced in order for the sate to appropriate it, but also as nomads they had to be sedentarized.
but again the state also promotes movements of population form one region to satisfy the demand of work in other. thus sedentary metaphysics is there and is useful, but these other ways of dealing with movement may be considered as part of the type of power generated from the state.
a last tension with her notion can be seen in relation to foucault's ideas of power and the way there is a turn towards considering governmental forms of power as playing a fundamental role in contemporary societies. so if the power resulting form disciplinarian technologies in which the fixation, separation and delimitation of people in a transparent place was one of its features, governmental forms of power are based in even more diffuse forms of control, based in the decay of institutions and the emphasis in the control of all movement and choice, which is presented as an individual free choice, thus the conduct of conduct. The type of mechanism are thus the delimitation of access and the definition of areas of circulation through particular dispositions of people and things, subjected by detailed monitoring of action through deployment of an ad hoc technology. thus sedentary metaphysics challenges were responded by the cosntitution of more fluid forms of power that are effective in shaping subjectivities even by "let them free" to move. which is what i read from deluze in the postcript on societies of control that i already commented.

so as a conclusion what can i say? that sedentary metaphysics is there but that i shouldn't make the generalization of state as a sedentary space which intends to control any form of movement as "counter" to power. i have though thsi a fwe months ago but what else, then? the governmental forms of power and the characterization of contemporary society as one of control, does not however make invalid a type of disciplinarian power that is also in the base in the practices of spatial segregation of "others" (in the interesting things i read form mawani, peters, kay anderson, dt goldberg). so maybe is the combination of how things are disposed in space to regulate movement as well as what is what is fixed and what is the importance and which are the locations that demand a "password" for entry. what type of subjects result from the circulation of this paths and the navigation through the broken walls of the former disciplinarian institutions, what prevails in their crisis but is monitored, what mediates the glance, how many simultaneous planes does it take, what collective social subjects result form it, were is difference in this and how does it come together.

a final note is that of course sedentary metaphysisc resonate in the idea of the state as a space of sedentarism and striation maybe a question is again what type of movement is going on, if it a movement with direction set within straition, that does not open up a space to go through the "buildings" and its weight. so maybe malkki is having this in mind. however it is that refugees are nomads? i am not sure. the question for deleuze and guatari is whether nomad is any real subject, not the ones they refer to in thier text for sure, but maybe nor are they just "nomads thinkers", very nice but laking the intensity they seem to be implying. i guess for me the closed to nomad they describe would be some collective states of mobilization, not for food or water.

wellme fui a la mierda, de vuelta ahora.

rapidamente

mientras pienso que es lo que tiene en particular el caso que estoy trabajando de indigenas urbanos, y esucho musica en loop, continuo la entrada en la que intentaba hablar de lo que lei en este ultimo tiempo y anote en papel. bueno algo de indigeneidad, ademas de lo que habia leido al pricipio. realmente la compilacion indigenous experience today esta buena, el articulo final de pratt toma una distancia interesante y saca una conclunciones que despavilan.

otras cosas que lei estan bien, lo que es un poco precupante es que el enfasis en las revindicaciones indigenas si bien genera un marco de acion que es fundamental para entender otros porcesos, sin embargo si no hay un movimiento mas alla nos deja en un lugar que de algun modo define un campo de accion bastante limitado. esto es sin subestimar la importancia de los efectos de definir marcos que abran posibilidades a ciertos grupos, sin embargo limitar nuestro trabajo a pensar solamente como se consiguen estos marcos y paralelamente celebrar a lo indigena como manteniendo un especie de nucleo cultural que filtra el sistema social mayor, es complicado. otra vez tampoco negar que esto ocurre o barrer con la palabra colonizacion cualquier diferenecia sin que la diferncia sea subordinacion , esto tampoco ofrece muchas salidas.

el libro de ramos plantea puntos intersantes cuando se pregunata cual es al importancia de un peque;o porcenatje de poblacion indigena sobre la totalidad de una poblacion mayor. la respuesta qe encuentra en su trabajo de investigacion y activismo, es que el pensar la nacion moderna necesito de los indigenas como sujetos y espacio social a partir del que definir civilizacion por la negativa. en la actualidad para ramos los indigenas -especialmente los amazonicos- representan una especie de inconsciente colectivo que concentra tod lo que se desterro de la vida civilizada.estos trabajos sin embargo me hacen acordar a charlas en el chaco en las que no me resultaba tan claro como mayor represnetacion politica iba a implicar mayores posibilidades necesariamentes, si bien claro que la posibilidad de acceso es una diferencai mayor, me quedaban dudas si el porblema se termina ahi, y si nose termina entonces como seguir. de todas formas algo que es raro es que sobre ste tema es casi necesario posicionarse politicamente, en la antropo y con la gent econ las que se este haciendo el trabajo.

como sea seguramente necesito hacer una critica mas seria a todo esto, pero lo que encontre de interes son analisis bien interesantes sobre el segragacion, la construccion de otredades racializadas y la creacion de ciudades. en especial lei trabajos de renisa mawani bien interesante snobre como los indigenas de la ciudad de victoria fueron primero separadosde un lugar en le que coexistian en diveridad, pero al margen del impreio, COn la llegada de formas de administrcion y colonos blancos y britanicos. DT Goldberg se;ala algo similar sobre como el sistema espacila de aparheid no deberia tomarse como exsepcion sino com esageracion de una modalidad. siguireeee

manuel,

me mori con estas fotos

calle

bueno el fin de semana pasado iba a escribir de dos charlas callejeras con desconocidos que estuvieron buenas. una cuando miraba a unos pibes de negro que estban frente a la galeria de arte haciendo una performance de algo que no entendia muy bien. se me acerca una chica para contarme que son un grupo cristiano, que hacen giras por el mundo. que ella labura de eso y le gusta mucho, pero no es bailarina sino que estudio teologia. me aclara que hay uno que representa a jesus y otro al mal, el resto son personas dominadas y salvadas luego. relamente no me habia dado cuenta, aunque mirando bien si claro. pense en la antropologia y que el mensaje a veces es muy parecido. me conto que los pibes tampoco actuan como profesion. pero eran realmente buenos .

el segundo encuentro fue en un cafe sin onda, un pibe al lado mio me pidio ver uno de los libros que tenia desparramados, charlamos un rato y me conto que pinta y que estudio letras pero hace bastante que dejo y lo extraña a veces. me conto de una conferencia de spivak en la que estuvo en francia y me mostro algo de su laburo en un ipod. cuando volvi a casa y a mi compu me alegre de encontrar cosas suyas en internet. asmund havsteen y la serie casualmente se llama mental landscapes, ahi van dos.

problems to think through comparison

I have stoped the overloading of notes on the blogg for a while and turned back into my paper notebooks. But i needed to come back and think to some topics that have came out in the readings, i guess every medium has it own mode of thinking and i got somehow used to this. I have been trying to catch up with two big areas I was interestingly asked to take a looka at urban indigenous and movements towards the city and take some comparative perspective on this.

A first thing i realized is that i haven't yet acquired the "imperial" habit of anthropology in the north of distancing form our region and compare it to others. I discover that is an interesting practice but I have never done nor i am sure exactly how to do. At the most i a used to compare the tobas with other chaquenian group It has some interesting and a somehow probleatic implications of overgeneralyzing or being superficial in the comparison. But I guess that rely in other people's work make it possible, The problems I see with the practice in general is establishing an agenda of topics to be applyed over different contexts. but I write thi and realize that is te problem of case study in general hen and of corse we are not going to impose nor are we going to neutraly let the case speak for itself. We have discussed this a lot already and is in a way not very usefull to keep on discussing it, at laast in those ways.

Then what is comparison based in? Undeniable Interconnections? The fact of Global relations including colonization? The export of capitalism, natioalism and progress? General repertoires of "discourses and practices"? In my case i guess the comparison inevitably lies in the effects of colonization and "while here this hapened there soemthing different was assambled" type of reasoning. I cold point to national formations and its alterities, subalterns in a cmparative "clave". I still i find this generalizations hard too see in teh readings adn difficult to infer. I will have to find a way in my proposal so inevitably when i have that paragraph added i guess i will have acquiered a new accademic habit taking me towards an "international anthropology" rather than my local intellectual model (of a lot of "universal" theory reading and its "application" to "national" problematics, of course with the strong mediation of generations of my teachers studying abroad to return adn bring the discussion and habits back). I am still skeptical about the problematic detachment in the "north" that even makes people ask in a very honest way "how to get involved", "how to contribute to the other", -and i am still thinking how to think about solidarity groups that even in the really interesting connections put "change" at some distance (emxico, but now also tibet are starnge case), anyway making a total critique would be probably problematic too. In any case is a strong contrast to "how are we getting out of this" and "how to deal with tis eergency" "what shall we do with this new front" type of questions i have at "home". So maybe I am makig it too complicated but i feel there are implications in what tpe of contrast i am creating and what commonality i am establishing. One of the dialogues that inform my doubt is once i proposed some "indigenous activists friends if we could generate an encounter with people form other group and the strong answer was "what for?" to which they added "we are in too very different political moments, to get together, even some exchange can be done of course we still have to work at one level and then go to the otehr". It also took a team to make an indeapth comparative approach in indigenous policies. However i of course see the need for a comparative perspective implying a broader perspective of similar types of connections happening in different contexts or forms of power formation that transcend the nation without having to call them "global".
Well i will be reading on "scale" (marston and the debate in georgraphy, which i just saw was a recent savage mind comment) and cosmopolitism (mignolo) soon.
En la foto Flor con su pavo de navidad perpetuando encenianzas de Doña Petrona de Gandolfo.