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Indigenous Media And The End Of The Lettered City

2008; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 17; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13569320801950674

1469-9575

Freya Schiwy,

Cultural and Social Studies in Latin America

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgements This article would have been impossible to write without the kind support of members of CAIB (Audiovisual Indigenous Communicators of Bolivia). The author would like to thank particularly Jesús Tapia, Julia Mosúa, Alfredo Copa, Marcelino Pinto, Faustino Peña, and Marcelina Cárdenas; CEFREC (Center for Formation and Training in Cinematography, Bolivia), especially Iván Sanjinés and Reynaldo Yujra. She also appreciates the help of Mario Bustos and Lucila Lema at the CONAIE (Indigenous National Council of Ecuador) and of the staff at the consulate of the CRIC (Indigenous Council of the Cauca) in Bogota, Colombia. Versions of this article have been presented at several universities in the US and Canada. Many thanks are offered for the insightful comments received on each occasion as well as to Walter Mignolo, on the research project as a whole. Jacqueline Loss, Susan Antebi, and anonymous reviewers have offered detailed comments. Thank you. All shortcomings are the author's own. Notes 1 Narrative transculturation generated a modern and progressive literature that incorporated and transformed the vestiges of indigenous oral traditions as well as the regional conservative narrative conventions by putting them into contact with the literature of Joyce and Faulkner, generating thereby a modern homogenous fusion (Rama, 1982 Rama, Angel. 1982. La transculturación narrativa en América Latina, XXIMexico: Siglo. [Google Scholar]). The task, certainly, remained in the hands of the lettered classes (Cornejo Polar, 1998 Cornejo Polar, Antonio. 1998. 'Indigenismo' and heterogeneous literatures: their dual socio-cultural logic, introduction and translated by John Kraniauskas. Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 7(1): 13–27. [Google Scholar]). 2 Julio Ramos, in his recently translated and revised study Divergent modernities, details how, in Latin America, the nineteenth century brought about a significant split among the lettered classes that was related to the aesthetics of representation. Ramos shows that state thinkers, such as Faustino Sarmiento whose writings were influential beyond his native Argentina, sought to control orality by converting the voice of a largely illiterate people into literary representation and thereby symbolically enacting the subjection of oral social groups to the educated urban elites. Ramos, however, also indicates that the professionalization of the writer and the subversive strategies of modernist poetry allowed not only for a resistance to positivism in the figure of the literato (lettered man), but also for a lettered practice that resisted the state (Ramos, 2001 Ramos, Julio. 2001. Divergent modernities: Culture and politics in nineteenth-century Latin America, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. translated by John D. Blanco[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]: xliii; 60). 3 CAIB (Coordinadora Audiovisual Indígena de Bolivia) brings together a diverse group of Bolivian indigenous and aboriginal (originarios) communicators. They work with CEFREC CEFREC 2001. Home page. Available from http://videoindigena.bolnet.bo ; INTERNET (accessed 15 September 2001). [Google Scholar] (Centro de Formación y Realización Cinematográfica), a training centre in cinematography with headquarters in La Paz, Bolivia. 4 CLACPI, the Latin American Council of the Indigenous People's Film and Video (Consejo latinoamericano del cine y video de los pueblos indígenas). CLACPI recently renamed itself Coordinadora Latinoamericana del Cine y Video de los Pueblos Indígenas y Originarios. 5 Only after a five-year process of questioning the self-denigrating effects of colonialism are video makers now moving towards creating an intercultural debate with 'national society' (CEFREC, 2005b CEFREC 2005b. Plan nacional. Available from http://videoindigena.bolnet.bo/plan1.htm ; INTERNET (accessed 13 January 2005). [Google Scholar]). 6 John Beverley discussed the difference between transculturation as a project designed by the state in contrast with reverse transculturation or 'transculturación al revés' (1998: 271) designed by indigenous social movements in the brief essay 'Siete aproximaciones al problema indígena', a comparative study of the drama Ollantay, the Sandinistas, and Rigoberta Menchú's testimonio. 7 The concept of the colonization of the soul borrows from Frantz Fanon's Fanon, Frantz. 1967. Black Skin, White Masks, Grove Press. [1952] Transl. Charles Lam Markmann [Google Scholar] analysis of colonialism in Black skins, white masks; it has acquired particular resonance in Bolivia (Rivera Cusicanqui, 1991 Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia. 1991. Pachakuti: los aymara de Bolivia frente a medio milenio de colonialismo, Chukiyawu: THOA. [Google Scholar]). 8 Qati Qati/Whispers of Death was shot and produced by members of CAIB and CEFREC. Reynaldo Yujra, an Aymara actor and member of CEFREC directed or, as CAIB prefers to phrase it, "is responsible for" the short. The piece has won prizes at international indigenous film and video festivals in Guatemala, Ecuador, Montreal and it has screened at the Native American Film and Video Festival in New York. 9 Many thanks to Reynaldo Yujra for clarifying this aspect. In my conversation with him, Yujra also asserted that indigenous audiences are not at all surprised by this connection. 10 This gendering of tradition is a problem for postcolonial politics, as Partha Chatterjee (1993 Chatterjee, Partha. 1993. The nation and its fragments: Colonial and postcolonial histories, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. [Google Scholar]) and Ann McClintock (1995 McClintock, Ann. 1995. Imperial leather: Race, gender, and sexuality in the colonial conquest, New York: Routledge. [Google Scholar]), among others, have argued for different contexts. 11 During the first years of the Indigenous Peoples' National Plan there were few explicit references to weavings. Male producers and protagonists were privileged and the films resisted more extensively exploring male violence as it appears, for example, in the opening sequence of Qulqi Chaliku/The Silver Vest (1998 Qulqi Chaliku/The Silver Vest. 1998. Resp. Patricio Luna. Prod. CEFREC-CAIB (La Paz). Fiction. 25 minutes. Distr. CEFREC, Bolivia. [Google Scholar]), where the protagonist Satuco (Reynaldo Yujra) physically threatens his wife. With the recently growing attention to gender and women's rights in the communities – as well as in the international arena – CAIB-CEFREC have begun to incorporate the topic of gender and weaving into the diegetic space. A recent documentary by Marcelina Cárdenas compares and investigates weaving and embroidering in highland and lowland cultures. (Thanks to Marcelina Cárdenas and Max Silva for letting me see an almost finalized cut of the documentary in August 2005 in CEFREC's office in La Paz, Bolivia.) At the same time, the film's structure is, like Qati Qati/Whispers of Death, modelled on the idea of weaving different threads together. Llanthupi Munakuy/Loving Each Other in the Shadows (2001) begins to question indigenous patriarchy itself. The fiction Venciendo el miedo/Overcoming fear (2004) directly addresses the issue of women's rights. 12 On the concept of the coloniality of power see Quijano (2000 Quijano, Aníbal. 2000. Coloniality of power, eurocentrism, and Latin America. Nepantla. Views from the South, 1(3): 533–80. [Google Scholar]) and Mignolo (2000 Mignolo, Walter D. 2000. Local histories/global designs: Coloniality, subaltern knowledges and border thinking, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. [Google Scholar]); as well as Escobar, forthcoming Escobar, Arturo. Forthcoming. Hybrid nature: Cultural and biological diversity at the dawn of the twenty-first century, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. [Google Scholar]. Coloniality of power does not understand power/knowledge as a product inherent to Europe's modernity. Rather, modernity itself is understood as constituted fundamentally through the colonial experience, beginning with the conquest of the Americas. It involves the construction of racial categories along with epistemic hierarchies or Eurocentrism, as well as deeply unequal and exploitative economic relations. 13 There is much literature on embodied forms of transmitting social memory and indigenous identity (e.g. Dover et al., 1992 Dover, Robert V. H., Seibold, Katharine E. and McDowell, John H., eds. 1992. Andean cosmologies through time: Persistence and emergence, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. [Google Scholar]; Abercrombie, 1998 Abercrombie, Thomas A. 1998. Pathways of Memory and Power. Ethnography and History Among an Andean People, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. [Google Scholar]; Harrison, 1989 Harrison, Regina. 1989. Signs, songs, and memory in the Andes: Translating Quechua language and culture, Austin: University of Texas Press. [Google Scholar]; Taylor, 2003 Taylor, Diana. 2003. The archive and the repertoire: Performing cultural memory in the Venciendo el miedo/Overcoming fear 2004. Resp. María Morales. Prod. and Distr. CEFREC-CAIB, Bolivia [Google Scholar]). 14 See also Shohat and Stam (1994 Shohat, Ella and Robert Stam. 1994. Unthinking eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the media, London and New York: Routledge. [Google Scholar], especially chapter 3). Brian Winston (1996 Winston, Brian. 1996. Technologies of seeing: Photography, cinematography, and television, London: BFI. [Google Scholar]) argues that even the development and use of dyeing processes in colour film responded to racist ideas about skin colour and privileged the mimetic rendering of whiteness over blackness. Colour technologies that would have actually recorded the structure of colour and been able to realistically represent hues of white and black were neglected. As Winston summarizes, 'essentially, the research agenda for colour film (and more latterly colour television) was dominated by the need to reproduce Caucasian skin tones' (1996: 39). 15 For a brief exploration of indigenous media's relation to the film market see Schiwy (2005 Schiwy, Freya. 2005. La Otra Mirada: Video Indígena y Descolonización. Miradas. Revista del audiovisual 8. [Online] Available from http://www.miradas.eictv.co.cu/index.php [Google Scholar]).