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Place-making as negative labour: a review essay of Gastón Gordillo's landscapes of devils. Tensions of place and memory in the Argentinean Chaco

2008; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 17; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13569320802544252

1469-9575

Isis Sadek,

Politics and Society in Latin America

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 Landscapes of Devils seems to take such negative characterizations of the Chaco as a starting point. In the same interview cited above, Braunstein recalls that a contemporary ethnographer wondered why Alfred Métraux had been so fascinated with the Chaco region throughout his research, seeing as it was inhabited ‘only by hunting and gathering peoples, who had more or less recently settled there’ (in Monnier: 138; my emphasis). Gordillo responds to such a negative appreciation by taking the dearth of visible traces left by the Toba as an incentive to restore the rich spatialized history contained in their memories. 2 This is a more encompassing description of what Gordillo demonstrates throughout his book, guided by the premise that ‘places are produced in tension with other geographies and (…) these tensions are made tangible through the spatialization of memory’ (3). 3 For a probing critical discussion of this tendency in relation to critiques of the (capitalist) ‘production of space,’ that is, of its dissociation from relations of production, see Andermann (2007 Andermann, Jens. 2007. The Optic of the State. Visuality and Power in Argentina and Brazil, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. [Google Scholar]), particularly the section entitled ‘Maps,’ from which I quote here. 4 See ‘The Political place of locality studies’ (Massey 1994 Massey, Doreen. 1994. Space, Place, and Gender, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. [Google Scholar]: 125–45), particularly pp. 131–8, from which I quote here. 5 Harvey develops the concept of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ in his The New Imperialism (2005). Having published Landscapes of Devils in 2004, Gordillo could not yet know of this category but he does marshal Harvey's previous concepts in order to describe the way in which the Toba's condition as part of a floating seasonal proletariate affects their perception of different sites of labour. 6 The bush's dramatically tall and dense vegetation was not part of the Ancient ones' landscape, characterized in Toba memory by its ‘savannas and wide vistas’ (53). The bush originated with the arrival of cattle brought by Criollo settlers and the ensuing spread of tree seeds by cow feces, along with the cessation of the Toba practice of brush fire, used for hunting and as a weapon and means of communication in warfare (21). 7 While the mission is the product of needs common to Anglican missionaries and Toba chiefs seeking protection and knowledge, this protection imposed a constraining spatial pattern that was foreign to the Toba (‘the villages with their centralized distribution of power’ [78]), along with a bodily and spiritual/moral discipline. In relation to this, and as we find out in the second part, the bush will become a place of ‘spatialized dissent,’ allowing for practices of shamanic healing that were severely punished at the Mission. 8 One such form of protest, the chupe de caña consisted in sucking on the fields' sugar cane stalks. As Gordillo signals, this harshly punished practice draws its strength from its spatial inscription by subverting the use of the ingenio's most valuable commodity. By providing basic energetic sustenance, the chupe de caña became a ‘politically charged (…) spatialized survival strategy’ (163). 9 Toba labour was remunerated in function of the completion of tasks assigned for half a day, often in higher proportion than what could be completed in that length of time. Each completed task was registered, thus allowing the worker to obtain payment for it. 10 This combination of perplexity and terror is spatially inscribed in the Toba's belief that the factory, a central site of the ingenio, was inhabited by a ‘Familiar.’ The Toba defined the Familiar, a recurrent figure in Latin American rural proletarian imaginaries, as a devil whose magical powers produced Patrón Costas' wealth in exchange for sacrificed workers, also guaranteeing his impunity. Gordillo interprets the Toba's articulation of the Familiar as expressing specifically their powerlessness at the ingenio. 11 The ‘nomí,’ a dance that lasted all night long, turned this place of ‘trabajo,’ of death and disease (negative excesses of sorts), into a place of moral freedom in which the Toba could find respite from the lines of conduct enforced by missionaries who aimed to rule out what they perceived as indigenous modes of excess. Gordillo considers the nomí, remembered as the ‘dance of the Aborígenes,’ as producing an ‘ethnicized class identity’ (150) since, in this dance, believed to be of Chorote origin, participants from the workforce comprised Toba, Wichí, Chorote, Nivaclé engaged in circular dancing, seduced one another and subsequently engaged in casual sex or sought mates. 12 By refusing to ascribe a single, fixed meaning to a place, choosing instead to examine relentlessly the historicizing tensions that constitute it, Gordillo's interpretative method foregrounds the ambiguity that constitutes the mission and the ingenio as places, as well as the (experiential) dialectics in which they are inscribed. Both the mission and the ingenio are places of bodily control, exercised in different ways and likewise differentially remembered. The mission offered protection from the terror and death experienced and feared at the ingenio yet, in relation to the mission's bodily control, the ingenio paradoxically became a place of social reproduction. In a final dialectic turn, Gordillo links the experience of the nomí to the alienation of labour on the fields, being likewise performed on a daily basis and remembered by one Toba dancer as his other ‘trabajo.’ In his description of the nomí as ‘a spatialization of contestation’ (153) and simultaneously as ‘a bodily experience of estrangement’ (157), Gordillo demonstrates the ambivalence that modulates place-making mechanisms pertaining to the ingenio – compounded by the sense that the Toba had of ‘living’ in its lotes while they died in the plantation's fields. Equally complex is the notion of aboriginality consolidated there, shown to be associated both to its positive reproductive role (by way of the nomí) and to the Toba's subordinated position in an ethnicized division of labour. 13 In Gordillo's discussion of subsequent sources of wage-labour, the example of the logging of quebracho colorado trees brings to bear the complexity of the relation between ‘trabajo’ and ‘marisca,’ as well as that of their spatial inscription, since this ‘trabajo’ performed in the bush contributed to making it safe by cutting through its densest part, a ‘hostile landscape’ for the Toba. 14 In responses that express affective relations to land and valorizations of aboriginality, some articulate nostalgic memories involving the stability of employment at the ingenio and the abundance of the arreglo, and contribute to the ‘cultural sedimentation’ of ‘necessity’ in their lands, viewing poverty as a ‘condition,’ a ‘destiny’ inscribed in ‘the lands in which they were born’ (201). Others historicize it by situating its origin in the disappearance of the Pilcomayo, reiterating also their estrangement from the wealth present at the ingenio, and they counter ‘necessity’ by emphasizing the bush's abundance of bush food, a characteristic that they trace back to the time of the Ancient ones (206). 15 This political activity was made necessary by another effect of the flood: the Mission's disappearance under thick layers of the river's sediment. With the missionaries' subsequent departure, it forced the Toba to engage the State on their own, exercising the rights theoretically conferred by the ‘documentos’ obtained two decades earlier, by dint of the mediation of Alfred Leake's son (279). 16 Such was the case when, faced with a severe drought in the mid-nineties, some Toba projected a utopian return of the Pilcomayo on the site of the marshlands. Embodying an impossible return to times of plenty, of autonomy, and to a past free of trabajo, the imagined Pilcomayo River is a site of inscription of ‘dreams of freedom,’ against the actual bush, whose sheltering characteristics are perpetually eroded (251). 17 Gordillo's alternating use of deictics in the Toba's language and the naming in Spanish of the referred places or periods could be seen as a refusal to ascribe a cultural fixity to these places or to ‘situate culture within a well-bounded place.’ 18 This is exemplified in a Toba man's memory of Patrón Costas, condensing in him both fear and paternal protection: ‘Patrón Costas had a Familiar. Patrón Costas was the nicest, very nice man’ (133). 19 Each has a different perspective as regards the ‘dual’ character of the economies within which these semi-proletarians function: Taussig (1980) uses it as an analytical tool (183) and Gordillo rejects it as simplifying (5). 20 I am echoing here Taussig's methodological observation according to which ‘the alleged proletarian devil contract is more than an ascription of evil to agribusiness. Over and beyond that, it is a reaction to the way in which the system of market organization restructures everyday life and the metaphysical basis for comprehending the world’ (113). 21 The process of place-making and the political struggles ensuing over specific spaces is for Gordillo more than a consequence of the partial integration of the Toba in capitalist labour relations. The control and command over the meaning of spaces and over their resources becomes an integral component of the Toba's understanding of their experiences of labour, of ownership and uses of their land, and of means of survival and social reproduction. 22 The semantic destabilization constitutive of terror can be seen as inversely proportional to attempts to describe the area North of the Putumayo and to plan roads so as to make it available to institutional penetration, whose social and cultural basis (embodied in practices) Taussig details in his chapter entitled ‘On the Indian's Back: the Moral Topography of the Andes and its Conquest.’ 23 The Putumayo is, for Taussig, a space in which various forms of fetishism converge, as he ponders the existence of ‘a magical concept fusing powerful elements of religious fervor with those of frontier capitalism from which each race and class would draw its quotient of redemption’ (317). 24 Taussig admits to fetishizing the ‘image’ as he uses the noun to simultaneously signify the product and the social process of producing, reading it, and re-producing it (198). 25 Mitchell defines landscape's role with respect to ideology as double, since ‘it naturalizes a cultural and social construction, representing an artificial world as if it were simply given and inevitable, and it also makes that representation operational by interpellating its beholder in some more or less determinate relation to its givenness as sight and site’ (2). 26 Both studies seem to heed Henri Lefebvre's methodological prescription regarding critiques of space, to resist the neat closure, the transparency obtained through a unity that modernity and capitalism attempt to naturalize between ‘modernity, [integral] legibility and visibility’ (105). 27 Taussig's description of the confusion between debt and credit that flourished in the Putumayo's jungles during the rubber boom perfectly enacts this intertwining of social relations and (visual) landscape: ‘One gets the feeling that it was not the rivers that bound the Amazon basin into a unit but these countless bounds of debit and credit wound round people like the vines of the forest around the great rubber trees themselves. While the vines were things you could see, even when overgrown with mosses and fungi and obscured by the dark hollows of shade in the forest, the bonds of credit and debit were not all that visible. Their effects were certainly clear. You could see the scars on the bodies’ (68). 28 Mitchell characterizes the power of landscape as being mostly affective: ‘Landscape exerts a subtle power over people, eliciting a broad range of emotions and meanings that may be difficult to specify. This indeterminacy of affect seems, in fact, to be a crucial feature of whatever force landscape can have’ (vii). In relation to this interpretation of its functioning as a genre, Gordillo can be said to situate the affective component in a earlier moment as, for him, it is constitutive of landscape (and of the meanings inscribed in it, as they subsequently become sedimented in memory), instead of holding it to exclusively be an effect produced on reader or viewer sensitive to the cultural codes that underlay a given landscape. This is evident in the way in which, for example, their fear and terror constituted the meaning of the range of mountains as a landscape for Toba workers and their families.