Gastón R. Gordillo

The clientelization of ethnicity: party hegemony and indigenous political subjectivities

On three different occasions between 2003 and 2007, Channel 13 from Buenos Aires aired on Argentinean national TV investigative reports that were highly critical of the ruling party in the province of Formosa, the Partido Justicialista (PJ), also the governing party at the national level and heir to the legacy of Juan Domingo Perón in the country. Produced by the ‘Telenoche Investiga’ show, these TV programmes brought to light the various patterns of intimidation and manipulation carried out by candidates and activists of the PJ in order to secure the votes of indigenous people prior to and during elections in Formosa. This included the ‘purchase’ of votes in exchange for money and goods, locking people up in warehouses to make sure they were available to be transported to the polling stations on election day, and the temporary withholding of the ID cards required to cast a vote (that were returned to the voters upon entering the election booths with the ‘right’ ballot to be cast in the box). While some of these practices are common elsewhere in Argentina, the public impact of these shows on the Buenos Aires public opinion was relatively high. This response was largely due to the fact that the main victims of the practices presented on these programmes were indigenous people, who in the national capital are often viewed as the most marginalized subjects in the country. This perception was accentuated by the fact that most middle-class people in Buenos Aires see themselves as descendants of European immigrants and imagine Formosa, located in the north of the country in the Gran Chaco region, as a poor, politically backward geography. The airing of these programmes contributed to making visible in the public arena aspects of the political reality of a province that rarely reaches the Argentinean national media. In this article, nonetheless, I want to begin by critically examining the representations about indigeneity condensed on these programmes, in order to subsequently make a broader analysis of indigenous political subjectivities in Formosa: that is, of the identities, loyalties, meanings, values, and dispositions that people create and mobilize in their political demands. In this regard, in addition to exposing a situation of political exploitation and manipulation, the image of the aborı́genes (indigenous people) that prevailed on the ‘Telenoche Investiga’ reports was that of powerless, passive victims of forces and relations external to them. The notion of externality is particularly important here. These TV programmes, in this regard, portrayed the political apparatus of the PJ as a structure that was imposed, from an alleged spatial and social-cultural distance, upon indigenous people who had no attachments to it. And the latter were presented as a homogeneous block of individuals leveled in their shared oppression. This view, however, results from a superficial and

Ships Stranded in the Forest: Debris of Progress on a Phantom River

In this article, I examine the debris that modernist projects leave in space and the ways in which these vestiges are interpreted, generations later, by people haunted by the long-term reverberations of their ruination. Drawing on theories of negativity, I look at local memories woven around these spatial sedimentations with the aim of examining the interpenetration of space, history, decline, and subjectivity. My narrative focuses on the remains of steamships that the attempts to turn the Bermejo River into a commercial fluvial route left around the town of Rivadavia in the Gran Chaco region of northern Argentina. In the 1860s and 1870s, businessmen and officials hailed the navigation of Bermejo as a project that would bring progress and prosperity to a savage region under the control of indigenous groups. Shortly thereafter, the Bermejo shifted its course, the navigation schemes collapsed, and Rivadavia entered a period of decline from which it never fully recovered. In this article, I examine how local views of the debris of ships and of a monument erected to commemorate them evoke multiple absences, chief among them that of the progress that the ships were expected to bring to the Chaco.

Ships Stranded in the Forest

In this article, I examine the debris that modernist projects leave in space and the ways in which these vestiges are interpreted, generations later, by people haunted by the long-term reverberations of their ruination. Drawing on theories of negativity, I look at local memories woven around these spatial sedimentations with the aim of examining the interpenetration of space, history, decline, and subjectivity. My narrative focuses on the remains of steamships that the attempts to turn the Bermejo River into a commercial fluvial route left around the town of Rivadavia in the Gran Chaco region of northern Argentina. In the 1860s and 1870s, businessmen and officials hailed the navigation of Bermejo as a project that would bring progress and prosperity to a savage region under the control of indigenous groups. Shortly thereafter, the Bermejo shifted its course, the navigation schemes collapsed, and Rivadavia entered a period of decline from which it never fully recovered. In this article, I examine how local views of the debris of ships and of a monument erected to commemorate them evoke multiple absences, chief among them that of the progress that the ships were expected to bring to the Chaco.

The luminescence of rubble

The provocative essays that Lucas Bessire, James Brooks, and Shannon Dawdy wrote for this dossier help us discuss how and why a sensibility toward rubble may contribute to a better understanding of the material and affective ruptures that define our world— and of the life-affirming practices and gestures that challenge this destruction. I sincerely thank Shannon, James, and Lucas for their insights and Michaeline Crichlow for the invitation to discuss the book with them. A striking feature of this collection is how different these three essays are from each other in content and style. Brooks draws from his work in the US South West to highlight illuminating parallels and counterpoints between his own experience and the places and people described in Rubble, chief among them the dialectic of “destruction and resurrection” of indigenous people on former colonial frontiers in the Americas and of the contested traces they left in space. Bessire and Dawdy, for their part, focus on the theoretical dimensions of my argument to offer thought-provocative interventions not only on the book but also on the challenges we face as critical scholars seeking to understand a complex, turbulent present. These two authors’ assessment of the merits of the book, however, could not have been more different. Bessire praises Rubble for revealing the agency and intellectual creativity of subaltern actors facing material legacies of violence and disruption and for showing that rubble, “far from being passive,” can be seen as a “vital technique” that is “imbued with a peculiar and significant force.” Dawdy, in contrast, criticizes the book for allegedly doing the opposite: that is, reducing local people to “abject subjects” defined by suffering and defeat and surrounded by “abject ruins,” an abjection she blames not on state and corporate violence but on my reliance on the class dualisms of “Marxism.” That Rubble can generate such contradictory assessments is indicative of broader tensions in the humanities on how to think and confront the fraught realities of the present, a topic to which I will return. Brooks’ ethnographic and historical narrative gives us a fascinating glimpse of the palimpsests of debris he encountered in New Mexico and their relationship with the violence that defined this former frontier of the Spanish empire in the 1600s and 1700s. In particular, he reveals the gaps that exist between local interpretations of some of these sites and what historical-archaeological research shows about them, which poses several riddles for those who, like him, seek to blend oral-history, ethnography, and archaeology. Brooks’ reliance on the “deep histories” of rubble revealed by archaeology opens up important questions that I did not get to explore in the book. But I did encounter, as he notes, similar riddles in my research, in which oral histories about some ruins did not 752574 CDY0010.1177/0921374017752574Cultural DynamicsBook Forum research-article2018

Empire on trial: : The forensic appearance of truth

The publication of Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth marks a formidable intellectual and political intervention in the analysis of the ways in which traces of destruction and violence are built into the geographies of our imperial present. The book is a collective effort of staggering scope, depth, and ambition that has one clear goal: to level a forensic gaze on state and corporate crimes. This is a gaze finely attuned to the negativity of matter, sensitive to the many ways in which rubble, buildings, scars, chemicals, bones, sounds, algorithms, videos, or photographs can become the evidence of crimes committed by the powerful forces that continuously ravage the world. This extraordinary volume is the collective work of Forensic Architecture, an interdisciplinary team based at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths College, University of London, which since 2011 has been engaged in collaborative work with partner organizations and activists from all over the world. The intellectual leader of this international effort is the noted architect and activist Eyal Weizman, the author of the widely acclaimed books Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (2007) and The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza (2012). Forensis draws from Weizman’s previous work on many levels, particularly in its emphasis on the materiality of violence and domination and the political power of an architectural, spatial, and forensic lens. In Hollow Land Weizman demonstrated how the Israeli state controls Palestinians through the manipulation of the materiality and architectural forms of the terrain (walls, checkpoints, roads, tunnels) and the control of vertical fields of vision (through hilltops, drones, and satellites). The Least of All Possible Evils, in turn, examined the logic of ‘the lesser evil’ used by imperial actors to justify their allegedly humanitarian violence; it also dissects the evidence that reveals the terrorist nature of this violence, such as the rubble and corpses created by Israel in Gaza. Forensis develops this sensibility in much further depth, and captures an outstanding diversity of traces of destruction from the world over; in doing so, it not only reveals the evidence of state and capitalist crimes but also proposes a novel political and conceptual sensibility. This is a disposition that resonates with what I have called—on the basis of my own ethnographic study of rubble—an object-oriented negativity: that is, a gaze oriented toward objects marked by traces of rupture and dislocation (Gordillo, 2014). Forensic investigations have recently gained enormous appeal in popular culture through TV shows like CSI. But this is a forensic gaze that seeks to solve only crimes recognized as such by the state, thereby celebrating state power and its apparatuses of surveillance. Weizman and his colleagues, in contrast, propose to reverse the forensic gaze and turn it into “a counter-hegemonic practice able to invert the relation between individuals and states, to challenge and resist state and corporate violence and the tyranny of their truth” (page 11). Forensis reveals that this tyranny is built on “well-constructed lies” (page 29) and draws on a ‘forensic architecture’ to expose them, understanding architecture not in a narrow disciplinary sense but as a ‘mode of interpretation’ sensitive, as Weizman puts it, to “the ever-changing relations between people and things, mediated by spaces and structures across multiple scales” (page 13).