Hugo Hortiguera

Vecinos en disenso/espacios en disputa: cuestionamientos a un nuevo espacio social (urbano) en El hombre de al lado y en La última frontera de Mariano Cohn y Gastón Duprat

This article examines the new Argentine social (urban) space of the last decade and its dynamics of appropriation, domination and resistance in two Argentine movies: El hombre de al lado (Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat, 2010) and the short film La última frontera (Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat, 2012). Based on concepts drawn from Hannah Arendt, Zygmunt Bauman and Roger Silverstone, it explores the fascination for describing the house as an intimate fractured space, where it is already impossible to handle conflicts. It analyses how these films exhibit an internal frontier in the common space, a failure that is installed in what could now be seen as an exasperated microcosm. It concludes that this naturalized fragmentation of the common space suggests a dissolution of social ties and reveals an interweaving of suspicions and distrust in the social spectrum.

Perverse Fascinations and Atrocious Acts: An Approach to The Secret in Their Eyes by Juan José Campanella

By focusing on the intersection of recurring universes between Eduardo Sacheri’s La pregunta de sus ojos (The question in their eyes) and its adaption in Juan José Campanella’s The Secret in Their Eyes (El secreto de sus ojos), this paper explores the persistence of certain ideological effects of “perverse fascination” that the film, unlike the book on which it is based, tries to provoke in its audience. It analyses the discursive links with a language marked by a political tension that evidences the failure of a social system that seems to place its community beyond the civilizational boundaries of reason (Agamben 100). Briefly, this article argues that the thriller explored in Campanella’s film serves the Argentine director to spread the idea of new social imaginaries that perpetuate, by a melodramatic imagination, the perception of a current chaotic community with no place for justice and where the rule of law has become unnecessary.

Women and Print Culture in Post-Independence Buenos Aires, by Iona Macintyre, Woodbridge, UK, Tamesis, 2010, 216 pp, £50.00 (hardcover), ISBN 978-18-5566-196-7.

Adrian Hearn is one of a new generation of anthropologists to conduct research in Cuba since the early 1990s, when decline of the Soviet period prompted a relative expansion of economic, cultural, and academic exchanges between Cubans and citizens of capitalist countries including Australia. Over the past decade and a half, increasing numbers of graduate students and academics have been able to navigate the continuing challenges of long-term fieldwork in Cuba. As a result, in recent years there has been a steady and growing stream of journal articles, edited collections and manuscripts vying to make some representative claim to capturing or analysing the tumultuous experiences that have shaped Cuban society in a context of ongoing state socialism in a post-Soviet world. Despite this recent proliferation of work from across the humanities and social sciences, Hearn’s book stands out as making a useful and original contribution to understanding the structural and cultural conditions in which Cubans negotiate to develop social capital and indeed political power at the beginning of the twenty-first century. At the core of the book are a series of chapters that deal with themes more frequently the focus of separate studies, each of which have thriving sub-fields in anthropology and across the social sciences. One theme is that of ‘folkloric’ organisations, the Afro-Cuban cultural groups that combine religious functions with community services, musical training and, increasingly, providers of cultural performances to tourist groups. Hearn has worked extensively with such groups in both Havana and Santiago de Cuba. In this book his focus is upon how the leaders of such groups work to achieve a balance between the spiritual practices of their community and the pragmatic need to keep organisations thriving both through economic sustainability and through maintaining political goodwill both to the state and to their members. Afro-Cuban groups flourished in the post-Soviet era, and other anthropologists have documented how increasingly Cubans have turned to religion not only for spiritual salvation, but also as an alternative form of economic mobility. Hearn’s work contributes a particularly useful explanation of how collaborations between Cuban state institutions and community groups largely centred on traditional or folkloric practices that have been quite successfully negotiated. The relevant Cuban ministries that cover arts and culture maintain goodwill, both nationally and internationally, by tolerating or explicitly supporting organisations that are designated carriers of Afro-Cuban traditions, thereby maintaining the capacity to licence some organisations or withdraw support from others. From the other side of this collaboration, leaders of cultural and folkloric groups can improve their social standing, create new cultural events for communities that are typically marginalised within Cuban society, and generate new economic avenues by having state sanction to engage in paid performances. Hearn includes a connected case study of international development agencies andNGOs and their role in Cuban society. Although the economic collapse that overwhelmed Cuba in