Laurence Cuelenaere - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Cuadernos de Literatura 32 by Laurence Cuelenaere
Pachamamism, or the Fictions of (the Absence of) Voice
Papers by Laurence Cuelenaere
American Anthropologist, 2023
On the Migrant Image and the Violence of Photography * * Many migrants expressed hope that I woul... more On the Migrant Image and the Violence of Photography * * Many migrants expressed hope that I would bring their stories beyond their immediate situation; they made this work possible, and I thank each one of them for giving me permission to photograph them. Also, many thanks to the editors of American Anthropologist for their caring editorial advice, in particular to Gabriel Dattatreyan.
Laurence Cuelenaere, 2022
If the conflict between politics of documentation and aesthetics of expressions has long been the... more If the conflict between politics of documentation and aesthetics of expressions has long been the object of inquiry, it is time to let go of these debates to pursue forms of expression that do not seek to validate or invalidate documentations of events. Braided into camera/media narratives are reported facts and fictions, collective memories and individual testimonies, past and present, conservation and loss. In the field of photography, such notions have become a question of representation: a debate of form over content, of figuration over abstraction. My visual work interrogates these tensions, shifting boundaries, ambiguities, and affective spaces. "Journey to Amerika" presents migration to the United States with photographs that I have taken in Tapachula, which is known in Chiapas as "Prison City" (Mexico-Guatemala border), and in makeshift migrant camps in Reynosa on the Rio Grande (US-Mexico border). What pain and photography share, besides an incomplete reference to the world inside and outside of us, is their overwhelming immediacy, silence, and stillness. They both confront us with whom we are in our solitude. They are quiet, yet they demand a form of listening with our eyes. This has led me to raise the following questions regarding my own practice: How can I come to terms with my photography of people who are suffering, if the proliferations of representations of pain and suffering reproduce the same logic of violence they seek to disrupt? Is there a nonviolent way of looking at pain? Is there a way to interrupt and disrupt the circuity of representations of violence? And while there has been a shift of focus from the ethics of seeing (the gaze, voyeurism, witnessing) to an analysis of the social dynamics of the photographic event, my approach to photography offers a release from shame, bad consciousness, and guilt. As I am writing, an unprecedented number of migrants from Africa, Haiti, Cuba, and South and Central America are stranded in Mexico on their way to the United States. In fact, this is an historic displacement of people traveling to the United States. We all know that migration and displacement are structured by political corruption, white supremacy, and historical injustice. Yet life stands still for migrants who were deported or denied the legal process of seeking asylum in the United States under Title 42 (a public health measure introduced by President Donald Trump and continued by the Biden administration). The long migrant routes toward the United States are plagued by operating drug cartels, crime, kidnappers, guides, and human smugglers and continues to be extremely dangerous. Stories
R e s u m e n Este artículo aborda dos aporías en los discursos descolonizadores en Bolivia. La p... more R e s u m e n Este artículo aborda dos aporías en los discursos descolonizadores en Bolivia. La primera se manifiesta en la distancia irreductible entre perspectivas coloniales y descoloniales sobre las creencias y la vivencia de los wak'as deidades, objetos sagrados, santuarios. La segunda reside en las contradicciones la Teología Andina incurre en sus pretensiones de descolonizar la teología entanto que llama a un saneamiento de las creencias para que sean aceptables al cristianismo y define prácticas para la neutralizací on de la furia de los wak'as. Exploro estas aporías a partir de testimonios y conversaciones con intelectuales de extraccí on aymara. La amplia gama de discursos descolonizadores que he tocado en este ensayo (no se pretende hacer una evaluací on exhaustiva) acarrean posiciones contradictorias análogas al llamado al saneamiento y la neutralizací on por la teología andina. [Teología andina, creencias, Bolivia, descolonizací on, wak'a] A b s t r a c t This article addresses two aporias in decolonizing discourses in Bolivia. The first is manifest in the irreducible distance between colonial and decolonial perspectives on creencias (beliefs) and the lived experience of the wak'as (deities, sacred objects, or shrines). The second resides in the contradictions Teología Andina (Andean theology) incurs in its claims to decolonize theology inasmuch as it calls for a sanitation of beliefs to make them acceptable to Christianity and as it defines practices for a neutraliza-tion of the fury of the wak'a. I explore these aporias on the basis of testimonies and conversations with intellectuals of Aymara extraction. The wide range of decolonizing discourses I touch on in this article convey contradictory positions analogous to the
Based on ethnographic case studies in the Bolivian Altiplano (highlands) this article examines th... more Based on ethnographic case studies in the Bolivian Altiplano (highlands) this article examines the relationship between language and movement. In doing so, I include three levels of
analysis. I first identify two forms of analysis corresponding to cognitive linguistics and phenomenology. I derive a third level of analysis from my case studies. The richness of Aymara expression on walking manifests the need to understand the ways in which walkers exploit and suffer the world. In this regard walking involves physical displacement, knowledge of the world, and the endurance of the body. The ethnographic case-studies call for an understanding of the ways the body exploits and suffers the physical and affective constraints of walking: for example, age, traces of labor, habits, health, terrain, fatigue, boredom, and so on.
In this essay, I examine the distinction between the use of the Spanish word creencia in early co... more In this essay, I examine the distinction between the use of the Spanish word creencia in early colonial evangelical instruments and the Aymara term criyincia employed today on the Bolivian Altiplano. Whereas the colonial and contemporary uses of creencias refers to practices that have been expelled or have been located in the past, criyincias refers to the willingness to continue practices that secular and religious discourses have identified as erroneous. This essay underscores the paradox
of remaining within the influence of the wak’a (Andean deities) that have been emptied of meaning and power since colonial times—indeed, the willingness to partake of forbidden beliefs and practices. Why choose to remain vulnerable to the influence of the wak’a when their power, often destructive, could be neutralized by simply not believing in them? Colonial and contemporary samples suggest that if the power of the wak’a depends on believing in them, they prove to be unwieldy agents resilient to Christian and scientific unmasking of superstition.
This article addresses the participation of Indians in cultural genocide or ethnocide. We call th... more This article addresses the participation of Indians in cultural genocide or ethnocide. We call the participation in the destruction of one's culture ethnosuicide. This article pays particular attention to the contradictions ''salvage anthropology'' incurs in its aim to write histories of the vanishing while training research collaborators to objectify their own culture, thereby capturing them (not necessarily successfully) in forms of thought that lead to ethnosuicide. Whereas the intent of the evangelical practices such as the confession clearly calls forth the annihilation of one's culture, the practice of science might have unintended destructive effects. We imagine a hypothetical graduate seminar in which an indigenous student would face the requirement to make sense of his or her world according to categories and forms of interpretation and explanation favored by anthropology. The readings range from Malinowski's initial definition of anthropo-logical salvaging to Vivieros de Castro recent call for an ontological turn. We close with a reading of the Huarochiri manuscript (Peru 1609) that exemplifies the use of native collaborators to produce knowledge for extirpation campaigns in the colonial Andes. Critique of Anthropology 0(0) 1–22
emphasizes the concept of nature when investigating spatial semantics and natural philosophy amon... more emphasizes the concept of nature when investigating spatial semantics and natural philosophy amongst the Navaho Indians. He underscores the difficulty of grasping Navaho conceptions of space and time and warns his readers of the dangers of imposing a Western logic on non-Western worldviews. The differences between Western and non-Western worldviews suggesting (un)translatability has been addressed by a number of anthropologists and philosophers (notably by Quine, Evans-Pritchard, and Mary Douglas). In the 80s and 90s, scholars have analyzed how subaltern non-Western voices are extracted, recorded, transcribed, and studied primarily by North American and European intellectuals and how these exercised linguistic, political, and institutional violence (Jacques Derrida, Michel de Certeau, Paul Rabinow). The principal issue to be examined became the power imbalances implemented by scientific discourses. More recently, however, philosophers and social scientists have addressed the power imbalances by developing indigenous ontologies, philosophies, and juridical systems in need of recognition (De la Cadena 2010, Escobar 2010).
Until recently, Tulum was a small, quiet town. On the Caribbean side of Mexico, close to Mayan ru... more Until recently, Tulum was a small, quiet town. On the Caribbean side of Mexico, close to Mayan ruins, few cabanas lined its broad white beach and these drew mainly archaeologists. But targeted for tourist expansion with an eye to fashioning eco-resorts inflected by Mayan ontology and design, Tulum has become the head of a newly-founded municipality and, now with a population of 20,000, is programmed to grow to 250,000 in the next decade. Building is massive. Such as the exclusive city Aldea Zuma, an ecological island that will allow those inside to commune with nature, in luxury facilities, built on exploited ejido (indigenous) lands, and constructed by an itinerant and underpaid labor force.
The lives of these workers, a true precariat, are the subject of the photo exhibit by Laurence Cuelenaere and José Rabasa. Entitled “Imagining Precarious Life in Tulum, Mexico,” the photos aim to capture a moment, a slice, an encounter, to invite viewers to imagine how people, so precariously pitched, craft a semblance of life in the everyday. Of central concern to Cuelenaere and Rabasa is what, borrowing from Francois Hartog, they call “presentism”: a condition of temporality that, rooted to the here and now of getting by and making do, remains always grounded in the present. Seeing this as a marker of precarity, a condition that affects the totality of life and not just the labor or work of the precariat, Cuelenaere and Rabasa use photography to bring viewers into this presentist zone of an uncertain everyday. Exploring with their Nikon F2 and Hasselblad 500/C cameras the affective worlds of people returning from work, heading to one-room homes of cardboard recovered from debris, cooking and washing outside, greeting neighbors or dressing for church, the photographers trace the fragility of lives without future and past. What they also show is that, even amidst such uncertainty, smiles also glimmer suggesting something else: the potential for political insurgency.
The theme of precarious labor and life is taken up by many of the authors in the February issue of Cultural Anthropology. Registering this visually in the mode of photography, “Imagining Precarious Life in Tulum, Mexico” is a striking complement to these articles.
Pachamamismo es un término derivado del nombre de la deidad andina, la Pachamama, conocida como l... more Pachamamismo es un término derivado del nombre de la deidad andina, la Pachamama, conocida como la Madre Tierra. El -ismo añadido a Pachamama manifesta una filosofía, una agenda política, un programa pedagógico, una estética y un marco legal que define perspectivas no occidentales para una ref!exión sobre la intersección entre la naturaleza y la cultura. La Constitución protege a la Pachamama y sus festividades son reconocidas como patrimonio de la nación. En cuanto ideología el pachamamismo conlleva una contradicción que destruye las formas que busca preservar.
Pachamamism, or the Fictions of (the Absence of) Voice
American Anthropologist, 2023
On the Migrant Image and the Violence of Photography * * Many migrants expressed hope that I woul... more On the Migrant Image and the Violence of Photography * * Many migrants expressed hope that I would bring their stories beyond their immediate situation; they made this work possible, and I thank each one of them for giving me permission to photograph them. Also, many thanks to the editors of American Anthropologist for their caring editorial advice, in particular to Gabriel Dattatreyan.
Laurence Cuelenaere, 2022
If the conflict between politics of documentation and aesthetics of expressions has long been the... more If the conflict between politics of documentation and aesthetics of expressions has long been the object of inquiry, it is time to let go of these debates to pursue forms of expression that do not seek to validate or invalidate documentations of events. Braided into camera/media narratives are reported facts and fictions, collective memories and individual testimonies, past and present, conservation and loss. In the field of photography, such notions have become a question of representation: a debate of form over content, of figuration over abstraction. My visual work interrogates these tensions, shifting boundaries, ambiguities, and affective spaces. "Journey to Amerika" presents migration to the United States with photographs that I have taken in Tapachula, which is known in Chiapas as "Prison City" (Mexico-Guatemala border), and in makeshift migrant camps in Reynosa on the Rio Grande (US-Mexico border). What pain and photography share, besides an incomplete reference to the world inside and outside of us, is their overwhelming immediacy, silence, and stillness. They both confront us with whom we are in our solitude. They are quiet, yet they demand a form of listening with our eyes. This has led me to raise the following questions regarding my own practice: How can I come to terms with my photography of people who are suffering, if the proliferations of representations of pain and suffering reproduce the same logic of violence they seek to disrupt? Is there a nonviolent way of looking at pain? Is there a way to interrupt and disrupt the circuity of representations of violence? And while there has been a shift of focus from the ethics of seeing (the gaze, voyeurism, witnessing) to an analysis of the social dynamics of the photographic event, my approach to photography offers a release from shame, bad consciousness, and guilt. As I am writing, an unprecedented number of migrants from Africa, Haiti, Cuba, and South and Central America are stranded in Mexico on their way to the United States. In fact, this is an historic displacement of people traveling to the United States. We all know that migration and displacement are structured by political corruption, white supremacy, and historical injustice. Yet life stands still for migrants who were deported or denied the legal process of seeking asylum in the United States under Title 42 (a public health measure introduced by President Donald Trump and continued by the Biden administration). The long migrant routes toward the United States are plagued by operating drug cartels, crime, kidnappers, guides, and human smugglers and continues to be extremely dangerous. Stories
R e s u m e n Este artículo aborda dos aporías en los discursos descolonizadores en Bolivia. La p... more R e s u m e n Este artículo aborda dos aporías en los discursos descolonizadores en Bolivia. La primera se manifiesta en la distancia irreductible entre perspectivas coloniales y descoloniales sobre las creencias y la vivencia de los wak'as deidades, objetos sagrados, santuarios. La segunda reside en las contradicciones la Teología Andina incurre en sus pretensiones de descolonizar la teología entanto que llama a un saneamiento de las creencias para que sean aceptables al cristianismo y define prácticas para la neutralizací on de la furia de los wak'as. Exploro estas aporías a partir de testimonios y conversaciones con intelectuales de extraccí on aymara. La amplia gama de discursos descolonizadores que he tocado en este ensayo (no se pretende hacer una evaluací on exhaustiva) acarrean posiciones contradictorias análogas al llamado al saneamiento y la neutralizací on por la teología andina. [Teología andina, creencias, Bolivia, descolonizací on, wak'a] A b s t r a c t This article addresses two aporias in decolonizing discourses in Bolivia. The first is manifest in the irreducible distance between colonial and decolonial perspectives on creencias (beliefs) and the lived experience of the wak'as (deities, sacred objects, or shrines). The second resides in the contradictions Teología Andina (Andean theology) incurs in its claims to decolonize theology inasmuch as it calls for a sanitation of beliefs to make them acceptable to Christianity and as it defines practices for a neutraliza-tion of the fury of the wak'a. I explore these aporias on the basis of testimonies and conversations with intellectuals of Aymara extraction. The wide range of decolonizing discourses I touch on in this article convey contradictory positions analogous to the
Based on ethnographic case studies in the Bolivian Altiplano (highlands) this article examines th... more Based on ethnographic case studies in the Bolivian Altiplano (highlands) this article examines the relationship between language and movement. In doing so, I include three levels of
analysis. I first identify two forms of analysis corresponding to cognitive linguistics and phenomenology. I derive a third level of analysis from my case studies. The richness of Aymara expression on walking manifests the need to understand the ways in which walkers exploit and suffer the world. In this regard walking involves physical displacement, knowledge of the world, and the endurance of the body. The ethnographic case-studies call for an understanding of the ways the body exploits and suffers the physical and affective constraints of walking: for example, age, traces of labor, habits, health, terrain, fatigue, boredom, and so on.
In this essay, I examine the distinction between the use of the Spanish word creencia in early co... more In this essay, I examine the distinction between the use of the Spanish word creencia in early colonial evangelical instruments and the Aymara term criyincia employed today on the Bolivian Altiplano. Whereas the colonial and contemporary uses of creencias refers to practices that have been expelled or have been located in the past, criyincias refers to the willingness to continue practices that secular and religious discourses have identified as erroneous. This essay underscores the paradox
of remaining within the influence of the wak’a (Andean deities) that have been emptied of meaning and power since colonial times—indeed, the willingness to partake of forbidden beliefs and practices. Why choose to remain vulnerable to the influence of the wak’a when their power, often destructive, could be neutralized by simply not believing in them? Colonial and contemporary samples suggest that if the power of the wak’a depends on believing in them, they prove to be unwieldy agents resilient to Christian and scientific unmasking of superstition.
This article addresses the participation of Indians in cultural genocide or ethnocide. We call th... more This article addresses the participation of Indians in cultural genocide or ethnocide. We call the participation in the destruction of one's culture ethnosuicide. This article pays particular attention to the contradictions ''salvage anthropology'' incurs in its aim to write histories of the vanishing while training research collaborators to objectify their own culture, thereby capturing them (not necessarily successfully) in forms of thought that lead to ethnosuicide. Whereas the intent of the evangelical practices such as the confession clearly calls forth the annihilation of one's culture, the practice of science might have unintended destructive effects. We imagine a hypothetical graduate seminar in which an indigenous student would face the requirement to make sense of his or her world according to categories and forms of interpretation and explanation favored by anthropology. The readings range from Malinowski's initial definition of anthropo-logical salvaging to Vivieros de Castro recent call for an ontological turn. We close with a reading of the Huarochiri manuscript (Peru 1609) that exemplifies the use of native collaborators to produce knowledge for extirpation campaigns in the colonial Andes. Critique of Anthropology 0(0) 1–22
emphasizes the concept of nature when investigating spatial semantics and natural philosophy amon... more emphasizes the concept of nature when investigating spatial semantics and natural philosophy amongst the Navaho Indians. He underscores the difficulty of grasping Navaho conceptions of space and time and warns his readers of the dangers of imposing a Western logic on non-Western worldviews. The differences between Western and non-Western worldviews suggesting (un)translatability has been addressed by a number of anthropologists and philosophers (notably by Quine, Evans-Pritchard, and Mary Douglas). In the 80s and 90s, scholars have analyzed how subaltern non-Western voices are extracted, recorded, transcribed, and studied primarily by North American and European intellectuals and how these exercised linguistic, political, and institutional violence (Jacques Derrida, Michel de Certeau, Paul Rabinow). The principal issue to be examined became the power imbalances implemented by scientific discourses. More recently, however, philosophers and social scientists have addressed the power imbalances by developing indigenous ontologies, philosophies, and juridical systems in need of recognition (De la Cadena 2010, Escobar 2010).
Until recently, Tulum was a small, quiet town. On the Caribbean side of Mexico, close to Mayan ru... more Until recently, Tulum was a small, quiet town. On the Caribbean side of Mexico, close to Mayan ruins, few cabanas lined its broad white beach and these drew mainly archaeologists. But targeted for tourist expansion with an eye to fashioning eco-resorts inflected by Mayan ontology and design, Tulum has become the head of a newly-founded municipality and, now with a population of 20,000, is programmed to grow to 250,000 in the next decade. Building is massive. Such as the exclusive city Aldea Zuma, an ecological island that will allow those inside to commune with nature, in luxury facilities, built on exploited ejido (indigenous) lands, and constructed by an itinerant and underpaid labor force.
The lives of these workers, a true precariat, are the subject of the photo exhibit by Laurence Cuelenaere and José Rabasa. Entitled “Imagining Precarious Life in Tulum, Mexico,” the photos aim to capture a moment, a slice, an encounter, to invite viewers to imagine how people, so precariously pitched, craft a semblance of life in the everyday. Of central concern to Cuelenaere and Rabasa is what, borrowing from Francois Hartog, they call “presentism”: a condition of temporality that, rooted to the here and now of getting by and making do, remains always grounded in the present. Seeing this as a marker of precarity, a condition that affects the totality of life and not just the labor or work of the precariat, Cuelenaere and Rabasa use photography to bring viewers into this presentist zone of an uncertain everyday. Exploring with their Nikon F2 and Hasselblad 500/C cameras the affective worlds of people returning from work, heading to one-room homes of cardboard recovered from debris, cooking and washing outside, greeting neighbors or dressing for church, the photographers trace the fragility of lives without future and past. What they also show is that, even amidst such uncertainty, smiles also glimmer suggesting something else: the potential for political insurgency.
The theme of precarious labor and life is taken up by many of the authors in the February issue of Cultural Anthropology. Registering this visually in the mode of photography, “Imagining Precarious Life in Tulum, Mexico” is a striking complement to these articles.
Pachamamismo es un término derivado del nombre de la deidad andina, la Pachamama, conocida como l... more Pachamamismo es un término derivado del nombre de la deidad andina, la Pachamama, conocida como la Madre Tierra. El -ismo añadido a Pachamama manifesta una filosofía, una agenda política, un programa pedagógico, una estética y un marco legal que define perspectivas no occidentales para una ref!exión sobre la intersección entre la naturaleza y la cultura. La Constitución protege a la Pachamama y sus festividades son reconocidas como patrimonio de la nación. En cuanto ideología el pachamamismo conlleva una contradicción que destruye las formas que busca preservar.