comics

Bueno justo en estos días me entero que mi amiga Sandra hace el guion de una tira que se inicia, los dibujos son potentes, aunque con un estilo medio manga que no me resuena tan familiar (como hablar de ilustracion, no tengo ni idea), hay una ambiguedad que esta buena y pinta para una historia interesante. No escaping gravity

Bien distinta en el estilo de dibujo historietil pff como calificarlo, guarro? y autoreferencial por supuesto me reencontre con una de las estrellas del circulo de historietista suburbano con el que simpatizabamos: el granjero de jesu. es gracioso lo generacional de la tira, una onda estamos treintañeros pero siempre seremos medio raros.

Auge

Augé, Marc 1995 Non-Places: Introduction to An Anthropology of Supermodernity. John Howe, trans. London: Verso. Chapter 3: From Places to Non-Places, pp. 75-115
Auge defines modernity as a simultaneity of past in a present that claims to supersede it. If the spatiality of the pre-modern was built around a re-centred space of the park and the church within a reordered time, modernity pushes them places and rhythms to the background, but preserving the temporalities of place as marks of the passage of time. If place is defined as relational, historic and as concerned with identity, then a non place is one that has not got these characteristics. Supermodernity produces non-places, which are non anthropological, do not integrate earlier places, earlier places are turned, classified and distinguished as places of memory. Places are never fully erased while non places are never fully completed, but are as “palimpsests in which the scrambled game of identity and relations is ceaselessly rewritten. This distinction derives from the one between place and space, not in De Certeau’s sense of place as arrangement of things, but rather the anthropological place including the movement journeys made in it, the discourses in and about it, and space as a more abstract, a non symbolized surfaces. The traveller’s space is a non-place one in which the position of spectator (the relation between gaze and landscape) is more important that the place itself. Movements generates solitude, thus the lack of relations, with the place generates non places of travel as an emptying of individuality. The movement itself and the abolition of place is the aim of travel, in contrast with pilgrimage whose end is imbued with meaning and a prefigured path. In supermodernity the posture of the viewer empties up the content of the landscape. Non places refers to two aspects, spaces formed in relation to certain ends (as transport), and the relations people have with them. The set of relations established in non places are not directly related with aims, they create solitary contractuality [can we say non places mediate then?, but aren’t other places of capitalism somehow of solitary and contractuality]. Some non-places are created in the evocations of them crates an image, produces myth and makes it work (vs De Certeau who points to discourse as the gap between everyday and the lost myth, here discourse creates the myth). In non places individuals are expected to interact with texts produced by institutional morality. Highways avoid towns and do not require stopping (or even looking) at a place, sign shows proximity to a place and makes comments on them that stand for the place itself, in contrast to old routes and trains that transversed the towns. The non-p create an “average man” that talks to all and nobody, it crates a uniform and shared identity that is in constant relation to the contractual nature of the relation with the non place, there is no commonality but similitude in turn in place of individual identities are formed. A person is relived form his usual identity and determinants, although has to constantly prove his innocence. History is only and element of the spectacle of the non-place, which is dominated by the urgency of the actuality, it is a constant present and a constant encounter with and ideal self (masculine or feminine- esto medio problemático). These images of non place create a system it also creates effects of recognition, the world of consumption as a filled of familiar symbols and non places. Places and non places are tangled together, one becomes a refuge of the other, a home is where a person can be understood is rhetorically demarcated with a communicational boundary. In supermodernity “people are always and never at home the frontier zones or marchlands no longer open on to totally foreign worlds. Supermodernity (which stems simultaneously figures of excess : overabundance of events, spatial overabundance and the individualization of references) naturally finds its expression in non places.”(109). Non places hold the contradiction of dealing only with individuals but they are identified only as they enter or leave them, they are not the same for individuals and for governments. Non places are thus a parenthesis but also the target of those in territorial struggles. Terrorism take non place as target as they are anti-utopia: they exist without containing any particular social group. In contrast state administration does not know so much about non places as of dealing with the universalist - localist tension, likewise empire as a totalitarian control over space is never a non place.

Comment: One can criticize the concept of non place in itself as defined within a dichotomyc logic against places. We can also critizise how much can we consider non places as detached form national, regional territorializations, however the particularity of the production of places that (at least) attempt and claim to be detached form other formations (of history, identity, specific social formations) is a point that needs consideration. His obsessively distinguishes non places of supermodernity form the places of modernity and in some cases it is not so clear if these contrast works (ie. i agree that the mall is not the factory, however the factory also erases social contradictions, detaches itself form history and erases the particular identities of workers into an homogeneous labour force, thus the newness may be somewhere else than in these characteristics) ut ultimately what he totally avoids in his analysis is the analysis of the production of difference in which non-places are an active component.

Harvey

Harvey, D. 1996. “From Space to Place and Back Again”, in: Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference. London: Blackwell.

Harvey’s interest is to show how contemporary capitalism is producing georgraphies of difference, and to look at these differences as not only results of unequal social relations but also as constituting them. The difference he is pointing to includes the way nature and its appropriation is shaped as a locus of difference. In this chapter he concentrates in defining place agains more general theory of space, time and environment. If space is socially produced, places are unstable locus that “had to be secured against the uncontrolled vectors of spatiality” (p 292). In this place can be understood both as a position “within a map of space-time constituted within some social process”, as well as a “permanence” within the space-time flow, and that transforms this flow. This tension can be thought in relation to the fixity of places produced by capitlist expansion and flows of capital circulation, what we can regard as a political economy of capitalists production of place. “Difference and otherness are produced in space through the simple logic of uneven capital investment, a proliferating geographical division of labour, an increasing segmentation of reproductive activities and the rise of spatially ordered (often segregated) social distinctions.” (295). However this process is not uniformly shaped but rather generated within a series of tensions, the major of which is the tension between place bounded investments of capital and the spatial mobility of capital, which generates a constant spatial reorganization. Some of the processes linked to this are the transformation of time-space in relation to speeding in the mobility f capital, isolation as “protectionist” strategy against this flows, competition for capital among different places, overinvestment in place has made it more difficult to now find “profitable locations.” These movements of capital are not passively accepted by people, but result from a combination of cooptation and coersion of capital. He understands this tension as the cause for a strong emergence of place as a problem for social sciences, in this many works search for “roots” and reinforcing the “dwelling” as ways to reassure a lost sense of identity and reestablishes connection with a world in motion from which people have been dispossessed. Also environmental movements represent an opposition to the capitalistic place construction, as it proposes to produce knowledge of the particularities of a place and that place formation, along an unmediated sensuous interaction of body and world in an ecological sensitivity, as a way of un-alienated interaction with enviros, but it does not regard that this within commodity fetishism (consuming landscapes as sensuous as a chocolate?) which ends up fetishizing the body. It also does this by a re-sacralization of place a search for a genius Loci as a determinate identity of place, but this rises the question of whose identity we are representing and whether this loci represents the inevitable conflict or rather erases it. This is a process also happening in the shaping of a “community” as a localized entity, which can be both used as a way of creating docile bodies for power exploitation, and revolutionary forces with deep transformative potential in other extreme case. The tension between a Marxist analysis of production and heidegger emphasis in dwelling, shares an interest in “production as a privileged moment of sensual engagement with the world” with Marx. For Marx politics of exploitation and fetishism are place based, as for Heidegger place based experience is an escape form capitalist relations, ultimately Marx’s critique is that sensuous experience is in capitalism inside fetishistic relations. This is pointing to the fact that in capitalism there is an ongoing tension between sensuous and social relations in place [yes this is what Lefebvre is pointing to], thus place is dependent of the relations of space likewise space is dependent on the network of relations going on in place. Everyone who moves to establish difference contemporarily has to engage in social practices that mediate the power of capital, thus cultural politics and political economy are intertwined processes of place production. But to consider that places within themselves have power is a to fall in a misleading fetishism, that reproduces the logic of the construction of secure places as a production or resistance to power. In all cases places are understood within “heterogeneous mental maps of the world each of which can be invested with all manner of personal and collective hopes and fears” (321), thus place making is as symbolic as it is a result of material practices. Likewise place base social movements though are good in fighting for the control over place, they easily slide into “parochial politics” which are easily rearticulated by capitalist accumulation, which manages fragmented universal space.
Conlcusion: Places as social constructs, have to be understood as such. “There are ways to provide a materialist history of this literal and metaphorical geography of the human condition and to do it so as to shed light on the production of historical-geographical difference. An understanding of that process makes it possible to ground a critique of both the chimerical ideals of an isolationist communitarian politics and the inevitable insensitivities of any kind of universal emancipatory politics.” (325) In this it has to be considered that to represent “other” places as stereotypically different is a first step into the production of exclusion and a self-definition. How to rethink place is of course of political relevance, but we cannot do this by disinvesting them form space and spatial struggles . Rereading the historical production of spatial difference is a “crucial preliminary step towards emancipating the possibilities for futue place construction. And liberating places –materially, symbolically and metaphorically- is an inevitable part of any progressive socio-ecological politics.” (326)

Critique: Though Harve is in a way mirroring the homogeneization of space under capitalism he kind of falls into the trap of not offering a model to think of difference outside capitalism. There is a tension between difference created by economic flows and other lines of difference which are implicated but not just effects of political economy. In this if place based identities have potential for deeply transformative movements it is not so clear how this shift outside capitalism can be made when capitalism appears as such a uniform, unmediated and universal force. All this does not mean that Harvey does not make a contribution into thinking the newness in a broad sense of capital spatial reconfiguration, his analysis would needs to be refined to be more specific, for instance take into account the difference of spacial fragmentation and competition for resources in "central" and "peripheral" regions (o west and others) and the way difference in terms of a capitaist but also against a western -bourgeoisie- statal model is not just any form of unequal distribution of capital and cultural meanings but one generating a series o intertwined forms of power .

Feldman

cortita y buena

Feldman, Allen 1991 Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Chapter 2: Spatial Formations of Violence (pp. 17-45).
Feldman examines the common explanations for violence in Ireland that explain it as a result of various causes, from economic inequalities, to social or economic contradictions. This is as a result of structural problems, which reach moments of intensity and are explode in the “abnormal violent behavior”. Contrarily he proposes to consider it as a generative force, which opens a new arena of social conditions. In this violence as a condition for its own reproduction generates a particular spatiality. For Catholic Irish in Belfast the house is made into a “safe place” in tension with the streets as sites of danger, need of constant movement and hiding. The making of the house as safe is created in a set of practices, to get inside a kind of “purification” of the body takes place in the changing clothes and burning the ones used in fights, The violence as a ritualized practice is manifested in the making of sanctuaries that evoke the events of particular struggles and commemorate specific deaths. The sanctuary is seen as a safe place but only as long as it has military surveillance, which acts as a counter-surveillance to British force. Sanctuaries are then claimed as significant spaces even when they are outside “safe” locations, thus religious marching are turned into acts of political transposing of boundaries, as moments of collective remembering violence and of actualizing its tensions spatially. It is in the memory of violence that specific locations in the city constitute and zones of interface and “neutrality” are shaped.

Appadurai

Un par de notas de los ultimos días. Cierro la lista con los analisis de las transformaciones espaciales de la posmodernidad. Esta corriente en general no me sirvio para contestar preguntas que me venían interesando, y por lo general lei con cierto esceptisimo, si bien Appadurai siempre me resultó interesante. Me doy cuenta que incluso Harvey plantea algunos puntos fundamentales, claro que el tema es como los procesos de los que hablan ponen en funcionamiento movimintos que muchas veces se desprenden e incluso se enfrentan de los movmientos iniciales por ejemplo de fragmentacion espacial del capitalismo tardío.

Appadurai, A. 1996 Sovereignty Without Territoriality: Notes for a Postnational Geography. In Setha Low and Denise Lawrence-Zúñiga, eds. The Anthropology of Space and Place: Locating Culture. London: Blackwell, pp. 337-349

Appadurai proposes to think beyond the nation to cosntrcut a post- sovereign moral geography to re consider the principle of territorial sovereignty in which nation-states rest. He argues that this is an urgent topic in the face of the crisis o the nation state, and thus consider the issue of state sovereignty as a cultural topic. It is in the disjunction of state, sovereignty and territory manifested in the new localities that the nation state loses its unity. If the local has always been in contradiction to the unifying forces of nationalism toward and imagined community, it is in the production of trans-localities that this gap becomes enhanced. There is a contradiction between the principles of self determination as freedom to act and move and the encarceration of people to places as a need of the state’s administration to contrl and organize “different types” of citizens resulting from migrations. By tran-slocal he is referring to the intensification of movement, as trans-national migrants, who create a new type of locality, conformed in heterogeneity rather than in the homogeneous unity of a community. Both challenge the isomorphism people, territory over which state sovereignty resides. It challenges the political and ethnographic maps that erase difference within and erases movement. The new heterogeneous ethno-scapes force the state to reconsider the universality of rights even among people occupying one same territory, as this universality demands for an homogeneous population of citizens. National territory and “homeland” become two distinct objects, one of the state bureaucracy and the other for its “citizens-subjects”, territory as defined and boundarized space becomes desattached from people’s national affects, as more heterogeneous ideas of home and roots come into play (based on communities, religions, ongoing relations, ethnicity among others). However the crisis of state territorial sovereignties are not the same in all cases, if for some the problem are refugees, the borders are the main problem in other cases, or the presence of foreign populations in significant centres for national identity. In this cases is more the state administration and power is what is challenged, while nationalities become become articulated in other terms (of race, religion, language, region, among others). “states are the only major players in the global scene that really need the idea of territoriality based of sovereignty.” (342) In this context new post national (non national, translocal) solidarities emerge in which homeland can still be an important marker but gather around notions of community, labour flows, racial or religious ties. Thus the new postnational cartography, indefectibly effected by the globalization of economy, is emerging with more blurry boundaries than neat nation-state division, as some configurations are global and others regional, and defining its new centres (sometimes around trasnlocalities). The idea of coherent nation territory is in part sustained by the cultural theory that territorializes cultures. However if the contemporary moment has been defined as deterrtorialized it is important to note the reterritorializations effected by this two. These reterritorializations take shape of counternationalism, nativisma but also the production of new localized communities (such as refugee camps). But in the extension of nationalisms it must be differentiated the ones generated by diasporic populations from the ones generated by attempts of expanding state nationalism through emigrants [this is we cannot forget politics of this transloclities]. It is the new “minorities” that demand the efforts of the state to reterritorilize them within a new civic order [and has to redifine the limits of tits jurisdiction] Thus the problem is not so much ethnic plurality and transculturality, but the broader gap diasporic pluralism opens to the ideals of territorial stability of the nation state.

Malkki

Este texto (como el de grossberg, que me quedo muy sin comentar, y que es otro punto de partida con la idea de las movilidades estructuradas, que podría desestructurar y las inversiones de afecto que podria desinvertir un poco) incluye un concepto central que uso en mi propuesta metafisica del sedentarismo o metafica sedentaria (sedentary metaphysics), recordaba que su texto era de interes, pero no que me generaba algunas objeciones importantes. Asi que quizas un punto de partida, criticar a Malkki. Por supuesto su texto es importante y abre un par de puntas interesantes.
Creo que tengo tolerancia baja para las critica a las "esencializaciones estrategicas" de los indigenas que se corresponden "el mito del buen salvage". Todo bien, ya aprendimos a que los indios a veces se ponen las plumas para cumplir con los deseos "occidentales" y conseguir cosas, y tambien que estos deseos desconocen y no les importa poco el sufrimento de los indios sin plumas. Ya está, vimos que es una idea problematica, por que parcializa y limita la accion politica, y nos sentimos cool por descubrir la trampa y complejizar el asunto y sentir que le sacamos un velo a una representacion erronea de la realidad, que gente piola. Me molesta bastante esta critica especialmente cuando se vuelve "cliche antropologic" (dice Briones), por que tambien esta critica encierra el problema de hacernos escepticos a "eso que perfoman como indiecitos en el amazonas para conseguir simpatías" y nos hace detener el analisis ahi (idiecitos astutos y nuevos movimientos sociales naive), pero quizas sea interesante hacer una critica mas profunda y pensar que es lo que lleva a tal conjuncion de ideas y que cosas se estan poninedo en juego, que politicas se estan conformando y por supuesto que abren y que limitan estas formas de politica. Por otro lado por que es inevitable (y tiene sentido, mas alla de su "agencia" y de "estructuras") para mucha gente "ser" indios, a pesar de los litros de lavandina invertidos en bañarse en silencio, con verguenza y desesperacion "para sacarse al indio de encima" (cuenta Sider) a pesar de todo siguen siendo indios (no solo identificarse, reconocerse, performar, sino que su subjetividad esta atravezada por tal marca).
Bueno probablemente hacer esta critica no es algo tan problematico en si, pero me molesta cuando se instala como "algo interesante que tenen los antropologos para decir" y se desata una catarata de articulos que repiten lo mismo y cumplen con la heroica misión de salir a desenmascarar movimientos sociales. Y no me refiero a Kuper que hace una critica interesante y que moviliza. En fin, no se por que me enoja tanto si tambien critique este tipo de cosas y especialmente pase horas tratando de explicar esta idea algunos amigxs con los que trabaje.



Malkki, L. 1992 “National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees.” Cultural Anthropology, 7(1): 24-44.
Malkii critiques the correlation space – culture in Anthropology, specially by pointing to the sedentary metaphysics of theory, government and commonsensical discourses. The question of rootedness is calling to attention for analysis to take into account that maybe the displacement has become routine, and movement chronic. This is not absolutely new as people has always moved as a result of violence and desire. “The recognition that people are increasingly moving targets of anthropological inquiry is associated with the placing of boundaries and borderland at the centre of our analytic frameworks, as opposed to relegating them to invisible peripheries or anomalous danger zones.” This concern is not so much the result of actual corporeal movements but of issues of cultural displacements, of people, things and cultural products, what Edward Said call a general “condition of homelessness”. She proposes to re-examine the relation between identity and territory (she does this by examining the refugees) both in the refugees’ ideas about their homeland, but also in the discourses constructing a national order of things, and explaining the the condition of a refugee.
Malkii is critiquing the correlation space – culture by pointing to the “sedentary metaphysics” that have ruled theory, state and common sense. Sedentary Metaphysics: is peculiarly enabling of the elaboration and consolidation of a national geography that reaffirms the segmentation of the worlds into prismatic, mutually exclusive units of word order, … is taken for granted so much that is nearly invisible, …is deeply metaphysical and deeply moral, sinking people and cultures into “national soils.” (she quotes Del And Guatary in the need of a nomadology, or to write history form a nomad point and not form the Unitarian state apparatus perspective)
proposes a metaphor of cultures following an arborescent root (trees deeply rooted in the soil) metaphor along with kinship metaphors. This is created both discursively and through practice. This logic defines movement as pathological, as abnormally producing “uprootedness”, mobility is presented as not being a natural part of sociality. In anthropology the lin between nation and culture has produced a “spatial incarceration of the native”, by establishing a orreltion between culture and place and a discontinous organization of them, but also by establishing a correltion between culture and land in the notions of “indigenous”, “autoctonous” linked to place and nature. She critiques the metaphysical and moral implication of these as manifested in for example the alliance between conservation movements and indigenous advocates in the defense of the rainforest. [the morality of rootdenes may a dimension of my analysis, yet I’m not sure it plays the central aaspect of my case] It shows how there not only a need to root others but also a nostalgic search for a home in the mobile west.

[I agree that the “myth of the good savage”, now also presented as heroic defender of his soil against evil multinational capitalism, that is implicit in these actions is problematic as long as it makes a rootdeness = good correlation at the time that it “naturalizes” the indigenous. She raises an important concern in relation to what happens to thes people if they move (or even desire to move) to the city. Yet Indigeneity as a effect of colonization puts space as a relevant political dimension of struggle, well just as we said with massey that most politics is spatial]

This is a logic that goes mostly uncontested form social science to state discourses, “civilized” populations (agriculturalists) are presented as having a deep and intimate relation with a particular land or terriotory. This rises the question of how to define indigeneity, and the relativity of its time frames, as all populations come form somewhere else, at what moment one becomes indigenous is a relative matter.

My critique: I agree with this however, the complicated issue is to neither erase colonization form these process, nor erase politics, it is not the same to be part of an ex military dictatorship in exile than to be part of a displaced marginalized group.

In sum the dualities produced by national order of things are the rooted-uorooted, and the sedentary – mobile.
She proposes that a logic of the naturalness and moralization of nationalism generates a notion of the refugee as problem, a pathology and an unmoral condition. However in the two cases of Hutu refugees she analyzes she sees two different models challenging the national metaphysics. In one set of refugees living in camps sustain an identity as refugees is constant long for their homeland, a discourse that attract international aid. This notions do not just unsettle notions of nationalism but also generate an alternative national project by expecting to return to their country, only after a certain moralizing process is achieved (and “illegitimate” government taken away form power). The other is a group of people who relocate themselves in a town and rather than retaining a single national identity, they manage a repertoire of identities (hutu, refugee, tanzanises, form that town, etc) and do not long for a moral return to Burundi. She calls these identities cosmopolitan and rhyzomatic, as they do not have a clear starting point and are not rooted in a singe point (following the concept of Del and Guattari). She finishes her work suggested that the rootdness of the national identities were in part what triggered the massacres of Hutu- Tutsi in Burundi and Rwanda (and she briefly compares it with the Jewish genocide).

My critique: Even she states that no one identity should be considered as just the decision of the ones holding it, but a complex construction, she implies some preference for the “ryhzomatic cosmopolitan”, a type of identity that she presents as embracing complexity, fluidity and its relational character. One can be sympathetic with such a preference, however the issue of cosmopolitanism raises a multiplicity of questions and need for further explorations if we are going to chose it as a supersiding paradigm, as for example what Gidwani and Sivaramakrishanan do without much presumptions. At the same time it raises the question on how much this is not a general and a-critical celebration of cosmopolitanism form a position of a cosmopolitan academy.


esto es muy largo.

y Grossberg

Esto es parte de mi tesis de lienciatura, del 2003-4.

Grossberg, Laurence 1992. We Gotta Get Out of this Place. Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture. New York: Routledge

Lawrence Grossberg (1992) argues that power is constituted in everyday life through the correspondence between systems of identification and what he calls economies of value, this are historical systems of production, distribution and cosnumption that regulate the availability or scarcity of value (the simplest systems are the one that regulate economic production, but also power is produced in systems of meaning, social relations, desire and pleasure among others)

Habla entonces sobre las posibilidades que tienen los sujetos en realizar ciertas prácticas y sobre sus efectos. Tales efectos se constituyen en valores, definidos en disputas históricas y no con una existencia intrínseca.
Por consiguiente, los sujetos son constituidos a través de interpelaciones de los discursos hegemónicos que los inscriben y los fijan en posiciones (cambiantes y relacionales) dentro de la experiencia social, que les habilitan acceso a ciertas prácticas y les restringen otras. Pero también se activan articulaciones por parte de los sujetos, alrededor de sensibilidades compartidas. En consecuencia, las personas delimitan prácticas, experiencias y significados, sobre los que se deposita afecto , entendido como la inversión de energía en sitios constituidos como relevantes (Grossberg 1992). Grossberg entiende afecto como un concepto que "identifica la fuerza de la inversión que ancla a las personas en experiencias, prácticas, significados y placeres particulares, pero también determina cuan vigorizada se siente la gente en cualquier momento de su vida, su nivel de energía y pasión. (...) también se define cualitativamente por la forma en que cierto evento es hecho significativo [is made to matter] * (1992:82)". Concluye que es "el plano o mecanismo de pertenencia e identificación"* (1992: 84)
Grossberg (op. cit.), rastrea la producción de lugares dentro de redes de circulación que los atraviesan de manera diferencial, y por lo tanto producen sentidos diversos sobre ellos y efectos diferentes para quienes participan en las prácticas que allí se desarrollan. En palabras del autor, esto es reconocer a los lugares como señales en una movilidad estructurada de los sujetos, y a éstas como parte constitutiva de maquinarias territorializadoras. Estas últimas tienen que ver con la producción de sistemas de circulación que habilitan e inhabilitan formas de uso, movimiento y producción de lugares, entre los distintos sujetos. Grossberg define dos sistemas de identificación: (1) las maquinarias de territorialización, que definen regímenes de jurisdicción, que demarcan lo que se puede hacer y cómo; y (2) las maquinarias diferenciadoras, asociadas a los regímenes de saber y verdad, que delimitan las razones y principios de la acción.
Grossberg también señala que dentro de estas movilidades que se entrecruzan, los lugares aparecen como domicilios temporales sobre los cuales la gente deposita mayor o menor grado de afecto, y por tanto genera distintos sentidos de pertenencia e identificación. En palabras del autor, los lugares
sirven como puntos temporales de pertenencia y orientación, moradas alrededor de las que mapas de significado, deseo, placer, etc. pueden articularse. Las inversiones del afecto son cruciales a esta circulación ya que están implícitas en las prácticas a través de las que estos lugares se construyen. Las inversiones de afecto son el mecanismo por el cual la circulación es detenida, fijada y articulada * (1992: 107).

Puede considerarse que el autor está evaluando las posibilidades de elección que los sujetos están habilitados para realizar, dentro de los constreñimientos de estructuras de circulación política e históricamente constituidas. De este modo, la producción de sujetos está íntimamente relacionada a la de lugares, en tanto los sujetos no se articulan en abstracto sino en lugares concretos. En el presente trabajo tomo a los lugares en estas múltiples dimensiones y no como algo dado, ni tan sólo como escenarios de la acción.

Gordillo

Image credits form no escaping gravity
a post on this soon

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

Gordillo’s book is a historical journey that examines the subordination of western toba people of the Argentinean Chaco and their incorporation to labor relations as making a new social formation that simultaneously produced a new type of space in the Chaco. This book is also an ethnography about how the memories of these past experiences shape the present of the toba communities. Spatialized everyday practices trigger the evocation of memories and conversely memory is built as people move through different places. Finally his work is also a theoretical exploration on the way social relations create space, a space that is not homogeneous but organized in the interrelation of different places only defined in constant tensions. Tensions differ form contradictions in that are not absolute negations, but ongoing, superposed and conflicts in constant redefinition, most times in tension –contradiction- in themselves.

In a dialectical movement through space time he shows how that place is not just a result of the social, and not only a by-product in the constitution of power relations but an active element in the construction of such relations and new post colonial social configuration. He shows how the experience of Toba men and women of going to work to the sugar canes, from the beginning of the century until the 1960s, is still a powerful force shaping their currents relations and notions of poverty and wealth (as spatialized categories), their becoming indigenous (as tobas were the less valued type of workforce in the plantations), relation to a state (that wants to kill them but latter employ them), independence and excess (exaltation of sexuality and “vices”), female independence (as they had a salary independently form men), and also death terror and fear of of physically disappearing as a group. This relations were defined in contrast to the communities and the bush, and also from the Anglican mission station established at the beginning of the century by request of the tobas asking for protection form military attacks. But the sugar cane is also in tension with the contemporary relations with the local municipality (located at the nearest town, where political patrons and toba leaders struggle for resources and especially paid state jobs), modern bean and cotton farms that employs them in the east and the marshlands left by the overflow of the river. The analysis the author unfolds, follow the principles of his argument: places are not described in just one chapter but acquire light when referring to the next place. To understand the way the mission stations were historically constituted as a place (and unmade in their abandonment) he unfolds the experience in the sugar plantations, and to explain the plantations he goes back to the bush and the river, and the importance of this places in the present, to then contrast the bush and the river with the government agencies in Ingeniero Juarez. In this way the author builds a complex net of multiple tensions of place that disestablish places in themselves but rather show how their boundaries and qualities are in their contradiction with other places. Thus he overcomes dual interpretation of dialectic movement as the negative opposition between two separate and independent “things”, and the progressive movements of synthesis which contains both in a ina form that supersedes both. Rather, he shows that contradictions imply the blurry differentiation of “the terms”, it implies that “both” are shaped in this interpenetration, and are always not just two but within multiple tensions.

If space are in tension they still share a common thread, they are all inhabited by different devils: payaks form the mountains, cannibals, the Familiar in the cane fields, and the bush devils, back in their communities. These devils are not metaphors of the social relations, they are not symbols condensing the social meanings and knowledge that sit in places, nor are they manifestations of a perspective which mask social relations, rather they are part of the matrix of social relations in the plantation and thus the plantation as a place (p138). For the analysis of the plantation devils he develops the concept of indigenous fetishism, as, he argues, the devils ultimately condense the experience of death and terror resulting form labour exploitation, in this they are not just images but active forces, and they contribute to reproduce toba’s economic subordination.

I can’t do many critiques as it is a very strong ethnography probably, and very strong ideas. Probably say that I still think the weight of the experience in the sugar plantations and its memories may be mediated by other processes. One is the state which makes its entrance only in relation to the military and then disappears until the refence of the 1990s political patronage. I also wonder if the notion of indigenous fetishism as a condensation of economic exploitation closes the discussion on the devils, as the devils of the bush are defined in the relations of reciprocity. Are there other ways of thinking the materiality of the devils without a reference to economic notions.

Csordas

Csordas, Thomas 1990 “Embodiment as a Paradigm for Anthropology.” Ethos 18(1): 5-47
Csordas argues that embodiment constitutes a concept (and paradigm) to overcome the body-mind, subject-object divisions. It is through the body that experience is possible, which then becomes experience of the body. Csordas combines two focuses that appear to be in tension, that of theory of practice and phenomenology to develop hi paradigm of embodiment for examining Christian charismatic Church phenomenon of spirit possession, glosolalia and communion with the divinity. He uses Merlau Ponty’ idea of perception as pre-objective generative process to understand the way something that was normally understood as superstition can be regarded as real, with this he questions the notion of reality and objectivity altogether. Phenomenology is a useful for understanding perception as an embodied capacity molded by culture but not result of a universal reason. Phenomenology situates reason as a consequence of perception, which poses the potentiality of many variants of objectification, as reality is complex. At the same time he takes the notion of habit to propose that this objects defined after perception do not just create a general external world but the social structure of it. It is, following Bourdieu again form the body’s activity that the social structure is created. He not only applies these concepts but also crates an interesting framework to advance in the complexity of these experiences considering both the point of view of the participants and how a realm of reality comes into being, from a shares experience of social constraints in other spheres and as a response to them. This response is not just a “reaction” is not clearly “resistance” is not an alternative movement but rather a opening of possibilities in a different dimension.

The Shins- Phantom Limb

intermezzo entre bourdieu y csordas