Carmen Catalina y Jaime Javier, Capítulo II: Regresa a la Selva

Photo by Arturo Godoy

Travel in a Time of H1N1

With WHO declaring H1N1 a pandemic international travels in the last two weeks has been, if anything, an ethnographic experience (which of course begs the question of what isn't an ethnographic experience, but methodological/existential quandaries aside...). Flying into Tokyo last week meant extensive quarantine paperwork, having fully biohazard suited people come on board to check on anyone with symptoms, and heat detection monitoring.

Biopolitics at the borders? State of exception?

Ironically, my travels to India today (post-pandemic declaration) have made me feel less like "bare life." And the busy consumerism of duty free shopping at Singapore airport provide happy distraction (oh wait, are we in a global economic crisis?).

Would be interested to hear how H1N1 is perceived/experienced in our different field sites!

Regroup, E-Group, La Casa de la Fantasma

Hola, etc. from Guatemala. After a rousing, waterless night, Keycli, Jaime, and Pepe the Ghost are writing from the comfort of a hotel room. Moms, don't worry, we've got Tamiflu.

After packing and finishing some last minute semester business, we head to El Zotz. This year we welcome many more researchers for what promises to be a productive season.

The final paper I finished this semester reminded me about something that probably comes up in other folks' work quite often. Why do we love typologies? The use of not-so-primitive classification in archaeology and architecture has led me to see some of the deep problems in previous research on so-called "E-Groups." By overgeneralizing, previous work has lumped a lot of very different places into the "E-Group" category without full taking into account local architectonic and ritual practices. So as I head off to the field, I'm trying to keep an open mind and think about the local aspects of the group that looks "E"-like at El Palmar, and how the archaeological data speaks for itself rather than confirms a preconceived categorical notion.

Adios to all, and until we meet again post-radio blackout.

JotJ

*Tap tap* Is this thing on?

You all, can you believe it's almost that time again? I just dropped a pile of summer funding on airfare and this new tent:


It's called the "Hobitat." Adorable!

And they all survived...

The Cohort survived our MA presentations on Friday. Jallalla!

James
“Meaning and History Behind Classic Maya Day Signs”

Láura
“Family Ties/Family Maintenance - Transference of Care for the Elderly”

Colin
“Gravestones and Social Order in 17th-century New England."

Caitlin
“A Ceramic Chronology of the El Zotz region, Petén, Guatemala”

Sohini
“From Burra Bazar to Big Bazaar: Selling the New World Order in the Marketplaces of Kolkata”

Stacey
“Image is Everything: Transnational Governance and the Management of Reputation in Nigeria”

Susan
“Replicating" Democracy?: U.S. Foreign Aid and Democracy Promotion in Bolivia

A Month to Conjure the Modern/Pre-Modern Divide

At the risk of you-all becoming sick of me posting....A response to today's New York Times article, "A Month to Conjure Luck With Sacrifices in Fire."

Link to the original piece: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/21/world/americas/21witch.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Let me know if you think I'm overreacting...


On August 1st, a few days before I returned to the U.S., my co-father and his brother bundled up and headed to the cumbre [mountain top] to perform a misa/mesa [offering] to the Pachamama [mother earth], because she's especially hungry in August; her mouth is open. I met two dear friends for lunch that day -- one of them a dirigente [union leader] for The National Federation of Indigenous and Peasant Women "Bartolina Sisa." Her first question: have you done your Misa/Mesa yet?

Later that night I met friends Cleo, Ely and Anali (Ely’s daughter) to do a Misa/Mesa: pijchar coca (chew coca leaves), ch’allar (offer libations), reflect on our antepasados [ancestors], talk about the various challenges we are facing in our lives, and burn the mix of herbs, purple, yellow and orange–dyed wool, and sweets molded into the shape of animals that represent wisdom and life journeys (our mesa did not include llama fat or a llama fetus as they sometimes do). It was a time to reflect on the year, our shared and individual struggles, and to offer gratitude to Pachamama and the achachilas, awichas, and antepasados in our lives.

I’ve participated in mesas/misas aimed at reconciling Catholic, evangelical and Aymara members of the UMAVIDA network I used to facilitate, and at other ecumenical gatherings; mesas with a group of Aymara women who have organized a cooperative for fair trade export; and I’ve watched friends consult yatiris (wise healer, practitioner of traditional medicine) and do mesas/misas at the Boca del Sapo (mouth of the toad) at Lake Titikaka.

Now the August mesas/misas are getting coverage in the New York Times. But while I’m always glad to see Bolivia getting news coverage, I also worry about what that coverage conveys. For example, I’m not happy with journalist Simon Romero’s emphasis on “luck” in this article. It reduces the mesas to a kind of Bolivian rabbit’s-foot and diminishes the extent to which such community and familial rituals are deeply ingrained in people’s everyday lives and ways of thinking about human and non-human relationships, as well as the social and political critiques that are often implicit in the practice. The article exoticizes the mesa (Llama fetuses! Witches’ market! Oooo!), rather than illuminating the meaning of those practices and the roles they play in peoples’ lives.

While the August and other mesas/misas are important and widespread practices, I’m always a little anxious about what stories like this one do, what kind of representational patterns they perpetuate. In their accounts of conflict in Bolivia, North American policy makers and political commentators frequently fall back on categories like modernity (reason) and pre-modernity (irrationality/emotionality/religion). They have not seen indigenous protests as the stuff of rational actors reflecting on policies they find inimical to their personal or national interests. Instead, indigenous protesters are infantilized and portrayed as hyper-emotional, irrational. On the other hand, Bolivians working to forge alliances with larger social and environmental movements outside of the country have been romanticized, exoticized and spiritualized in ways that may inadvertently reinforce that same rational/irrational divide. The American news media has tended to depict Bolivia’s indigenous and peasant protests as “an expression of mindless passion ” rather than hearing and taking seriously protests as rational and legitimate critiques of unjust policies. One of my professors at Harvard Divinity School, anthropologist Michael Jackson argues

"not only against the false dichotomy of reason and unreason, but the way these terms have been used to distinguish between two different kinds of society, and two classes of humanity, conventionally labeled civilized and savage, or modern and pre-modern. This language game, in which reason is assigned to oneself and unreason to the other (though we are careful now days to euphemize unreason as cosmology, myth, religion, folklore, cultural values, traditionalism, fundamentalism or spirituality) is a strategy for denying coevalness and, when applied to entire societies, has no empirical justification. All human beings think and act rationally and irrationally, depending on circumstance, and to consider oneself intrinsically or wholly reasonable is itself a form of irrationalism" (Jackson, 372-373)

Enganchada

One of my favorite concepts from Feminist – particularly Mujerista and Womanist (black feminist) – theology (yeah, theology) is the “community of accountability”: that those of us working in academia must have communities that hold us accountable for our work and that keep us grounded – that prevent us from floating away on clouds of theory that don’t relate to real people’s lives.

Repeatedly throughout my visit, people I interviewed expressed their frustration and hurt at the number of researchers – especially foreign researchers – who conduct interviews, promise to keep in touch, and then disappear. They are viewed as aprovechando (taking advantage) and as personalista (ego driven by their own careers). People express their suspicion that I will do the same. Anthropologist Silvia Rivera has a scathing critique of Euro and American scholars working in the Americas – whom she views as elitist and co-opting postcolonial knowledge generated by Bolivia’s social movements to advance their careers in academia. As such, scholars are engaged in a kind of colonial enterprise themselves, mining Bolivia for knowledge and escaping off to their own enclaves.

Of course, people make similar critiques of NGO workers and other foreign aid programs that seem short-lived, paternalistic/neo-colonial, and self-interested. Political geographer Juan Arbona, who works in El Alto, recently told me about a project he and other Alteños are developing to try to prevent that pattern from repeating – creating a forum for foreign researchers to present their work back to the communities where they have worked, and demanding of those researchers a kind of compact to translate and return their work to Bolivia, where it can be discussed, critiqued, interpreted, found useful, appropriated or challenged and rejected.

I’ve been thinking about these issues as I find myself increasingly enganchada (hooked in) to friends’ lives through the compadrazgo system I described in an earlier post – particularly as a godmother of baptism now for two children (Mao and Sofia) and a godmother of rutucha (first haircut) for a third.

I’m also thinking about the challenges of maintaining those ties and cumpliendo mis responsabilidades (coming through on my responsibilities) as a godmother, friend and researcher in an era of multi-sited ethnography and as my own research interests may lead me to work in other regions of Bolivia and perhaps even in other countries…