Gordillo (2004). Landscapes of Devils.

Gordillo, Gaston. 2004. 2004 Landscapes of Devils: Tensions of Place and Memory in the Argentinean Chaco. Durham: Duke University Press.

Some insights from reading this really impressive and well written ethnography centered in the Argentinean Chaco and in the Toba but ultimately focusing on the multiplicities of contradictions, negotiations and denials that Argentina’s history present in relation to indigenous people, marginalized populations, uses and appropriation of resources, and the power of memory to struggle and the struggle for memory.

I recall an image which is my partner organizing the index of this book in one coffee shop we used to go, and how at the end, when the deadline was almost there, I also helped her to finished it. So, in a way I have an indirect marginal contribution to this book…

But going to the main things that attract my attention within it is the different forms of actions and one could say agency not only in relation to the Toba, the Anglican and other churches, the owners and workers of the Sugar plantations, the Argentinean State, the Army but also the non-humans actors: what Gordillo, Tobas and others call the devils. Here I would like to comment that in many ways these “devils” are no more than spirits, with powers to heal or do harm, to wisdom or un-memory, and Toba people navigate the relation with them in many different ways between selfishness and solidarity, scarcity and abundance. I do think that calling these spirits as devils produce different effects in different audiences. It is clear that the association spirits-devils comes from the Christianization of the Americas and the ideologies of the Catholic Church treating everything that was not their own religious ideology as source of the devil and evil. But my point here is that these devils can also be seen as the "weapons of the weak" using Scott's famous phrase. This is not only a landscape of devils, it is also a devilization of the social/natural landscapes. And the Toba, among many other socieites, used and keep using all the resources they have at hand to empower or challenge the extremely hursh conditions in which they were living.

I am going slightly out of the context of the book, but I think that types of discussion Gordillo opens in this book are somehow connected with the forms of appropriation of the past and the local knowledge of the physical and human environment. We can call these spirits whatever we want, Toba people call them as devils but ultimately we are defining their material symbolism and their efficacy in a realm of the western world that is very suspicious about these types of beings…I guess my point here is a discussion we have with some friends (included Gaston) between the tensions of historicizing or ahistoricizing the relationships between the “Toba” people and the “Argentinean State” and the diverse roles we give to the “Toba” people and the “Argentinean State” as the ultimate source of explanation/interpretation of the “real”… (We have this discussion in the class, and I still think that Gaston's book is very powerful but these entangled spaces could have been developed more in their "verticality" ("culture" or whatever we may call it) beside their "horizontality" (the spatial and historical relation between the Ingenios, the bush, the town and the missions), of course, there is no easy solution with this...)

The second point I would like to make is this. In Argentina, there is always a tension between the two major indigenous groups, the Toba in the north and the Mapuche in the south. Mapuche people have a totally different history in relation to confronting the State. The Argentinean State attacked them, dispersed them, gave children and women to the national elites as house workers and sent the men to the Army. The Argentinean Army even came 70 years before the Nazi Germany and put the Mapuche people in concentration camps and made them walk for hundred of kilometers, killing thousands in those actions. But although the Toba people were always considered as a people of indomitable warriors, after the missionarization, and even today, they are considered as more submissive than the Mapuche. If one looks at the more than 50 pictures that Gordillo’s book have, one would fine that more than 50% of them show a Toba (usually) men with a rifle or a machete in their hands. It is true they are hunters, and they use these weapons to kill animals, but one could also argue that some of the mixed feelings and contradictions criollo and white people have with the Toba is their fear that they may possible use their weapons and their skills and local knowledge against them. I do not know if this portray of Toba people with weapons has been deliberated or not. But this is something that struck me most. And I think it says a lot about the constant relationship Toba men have to have with their neighbors, the State and the non-human beings.

Foucault and Harvey.... The Spatiality of Domination

Michel Foucault. 1980. Questions on Geography. In Colin Gordon, ed. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings. New York: Pantheon.
------- 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books.
David Harvey. 2005. The Political Economy of Public Space. In Setha Low and Neil Smith, eds. The Politics of Public Space. New York: Routledge.

The self.
Foucault’s conception of critique can be traced in relation to his writings on Kant. Kant saw Enlightenment as a process of release from the status of immaturity in which we accept someone else’s authority to lead us in areas where the use of reason is called for. Enlightenment is self-enlightenment through reason and rational thinking. “Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage” and “Tutelage is man’s inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another” (2007: 29). Whereas Kant sees maturity as the rule of self by the self through reason, Foucault sees it as an attitude towards ourselves and the present through an historical analysis of the limits, and the possibility of transgression, of going beyond. Critique is thus a permanent interrogation of one’s limits, it is a self-creation, it is an escape from normalization, and a facing-up to the challenges of self-creation while seeking to effect changes in social structures that are also shaping the self. Foucualt defines the individual as “the product of relation of power exercised over bodies, multiplicities, movements, desires, forces.”

Central to Foucault is the interaction between self and self, and self to social reality, because these relations represent performative processes, powerful forces in which ‘truth’ is negotiated and legitimated through discursive and practical fields at various scales. Foucault was interested in how subjects came to stand for and act for the ‘truth’ of their own thoughts and practices and how this ‘truth’ was constructed in relation to governmental, institutional, and social administrative structures of power and knowledge. Another key element in his analysis was the different processes of internalization of power and hierarchical forces and the resistance to this internalization as well.

Foucault argued that technologies of the self must be understood as inextricably linked to his notion of governmentality: the guiding rationalities whereby individuals and social structures regulate and police norms of thought and behavior. According to Foucault, there is “contact point” where “technologies of domination of individuals over one another have recourse to processes by which the individual acts upon himself and, conversely, where techniques of the self are integrated into structures of coercion.” For Foucault, the main point was “the possibility of a discourse which could be both true and strategically effective, the possibility of a historical truth which could have a political effect”

Question: In Foucault there is a clear political effect, the individual becomes the principle of their own subjection, but do you think that these are descriptions of how the mechanisms of power function or do you think they are a mystification of these mechanisms that cannot understand the everyday forms of struggle that not only constrain but also expand individual and social possibilities of the self?

Bentham, the Panopticom, the super-ego, and our modern world
Panopticom: Efficient in terms of cost-benefits because it needed fewer staff, but ultimately the instrumentality and utilitarianism led to a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind. This technology is associated with a series of concepts such as mass surveillance, omniscience, total institution, governmentality and biopower. And it presupposes a hierarchical space, one that using Lefebvre’s words create a representations of space in order to produce specific forms of spatial practice and representational space.
In Freud, Bentham: Panopticism and the Super-Ego, Philip Tonner puts together Freud’s super-ego with Bentham’s panoptic. According to Tonner, for Bentham two main principles guide human action, and here I quote Benthams, he says
Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters,
pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as
well as to determine what we shall do. (Bentham, The Principles of Morals
and Legislation, p. 1)
So for Bentham the human goal was to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. And this process was a conscious one, for him individuals can be conscious of their drives. Thus the disciplinary structure of the panopticom was a sort of super-ego in Freudian’s terms, for Freud the super-ego is a mental agency specifically concerned with the internalization of external coercion. The super-ego is a voyeuristic mental agency. It keeps watch over the ego and keeps it in check. So in a way this panopticom-super-ego in it double-role of process and result is a coercive force, external to the agent, but which is gradually internalized. Thefore, the panopticom is dual, is both a process of discipline and the result of that discipline internalized.
And talking about coercion internalized, there is an article from the NYT on Feb 17, by John Markoff called “The Cellphone, Navigating Our Lives”. In one part it says,
Increasingly, phones will allow users to look at an image of what is around them. You could be surrounded by skyscrapers but have an immediate reference map showing your destination and features of the landscape, along with your progress in real time. Part of what drives the emergence of map-based services is the vast marketing potential of analyzing consumers’ travel patterns. For example, it is now possible for marketers to identify users who are shopping for cars because they have traveled to multiple car dealerships.
“When I go from point A to point B with my feet, there is something of real value there,” said Tony Jebara, a Columbia University computer scientist who is a co-founder of Sense Networks.
Recently, for example, Sam Altman, a 23-year-old Stanford University computer science graduate and the founder of Loopt, a pioneering friend-finding service, was having dinner in Palo Alto, Calif., when he noticed from the screen on his phone that his freshman college roommate was having dinner just two restaurants away. The two met after dinner at a bar, where they were joined by another former Stanford student who noticed on his display that they were socializing together.

Besides this friendly uses of map-bases services the flip side is that people are constantly being scrutinized via multiple technologies of surveillance. In a sense, we are not so close of Orwell’s 1984, actually we’re in a 1984 world. The panopticom effect in the prisoner’s mind and his or her use of public space could easily be described using these Orwell’s words: "It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself--anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face...; was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime..."

Perhaps this thoughtpolice that Orwell refers in 1984 is now what produce our current spatialized and technologized experience, a sort of neurotic panoptic world in which our lives are constantly being disciplined. Going back to Tonner’s article, one could think that what is behind the idea of panopticom, what sustains this effort to changing behaviors through spatialized practices is what Freud considered as the super-ego. Tonner says, “The super-ego is omniscient. With its pervasive eye the distinction between acts and intentions is blurred. With the super-ego in place an individual will feel guilty for ill acts merely intended but never carried out.” And this is precisely what Foucault describes in discipline and punish. Indeed, the normalization process that is being carrying on in the last 2 centuries in our modern world is one that transformed these technologies of the self so efficiently that one can say that what we see now is self-discipline and self-punish already internalized, and thus, naturalized.

Question: Do you think that these local forms of power concentrated in changing the individual behavior of prisoners, schoolmates, and patients now has overflowed beyond the total institutions and is flooding our current modern world? Or do you think that it was always-already all over only that was even more intensified in the total institutions? In other words, do you agree to see the change from the society of discipline to the society of control exemplified with the Panopticom?

The will to truth
For Foucault discourse is not “merely” words or concepts or ideas, is materiality and power-effects. This has to be highlighted. The dialectic relation between power and knowledge is that one produces the other, there is a history behind the production of certain knowledge that produces certain forms of power, and vice versa. But this knowledge-power is certainly spatialized in the space of the body and the political body of society.
What are the effects of this will to truth? How all this is interwoven with relations of power? For Foucault there is not geography of power but fragmented and always-resisted forms of power that were historically constituted through certain forms of knowledge. Thus, the archeology of knowledge traces the path, the “hazardous career that Truth has followed”, for instance with the changes in how prisoners were punished and how others were seeing this punishment. This led to different forms of self-correction, which was also a form of self-creation. The key was the self-correction, how inmates were self-transforming themselves through a technology that was working almost without human agency (although there was a human action that created this technology). Foucault in the interview we read suggests that his obsession with spatial concepts and metaphors were connected with his understanding of power and knowledge, for him power and knowledge can only be understood when we see them in space, how power is spatialized in certain knowledge and how knowledge is spatialized in certain power. They are inseparable connected. Faucault says, “Once knowledge can be analyzed in terms of region, domain, implantation, displacement, transposition, one is able to capture the process by which knowledge functions as a form of power and disseminates the effect of power”.

So one question I need to pose is: how useful and effective is to see how knowledge and power are spatialized? And how different is Foucault’s approach if we compare it with Lefebvre’s?

Splitting the see/being seen dyad
According to Foucault the central feature of the panopticom is the capacity to automatize and disindividualize power. It is the most efficient mechanism in which one group cannot see and is only being seen, and another group cannot be seen and is only seeing. This “marvelous machine” as Foucault calls it does not need coercion because the subject within him or herself is doing the work. This “laboratory of power” is a privileged place for the experiments of men. And for Foucault the more important corrolary of Bentham’s panopticom is that it multiplied and extended to the whole society. He says in page 207 “The panopticom schema, without disappearing as such or losing any of its properties, was destined to spread throughout the social body; its vocation was to become a generalized function.” Two types of discipline are doing this work, the discipline-blockade, the enclosed institution directed indoors towards negative functions; and the discipline-mechanism, which produce power-effects in the most effective and imperceptible ways. Foucault defines discipline in page 215 in this way, “Discipline may be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus,; it is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; it is a ‘physics’ or an ‘anatomy’ of power, a technology”.

So thinking in the anatomy of power as a technology, and going back to the dyad see/being seen does not sound it familiar to you this subtle power game of see and being seen? Have you checked your facebook today? What subtles techniques of power do you think now are being applied and working within ourselves?

Sociogeographical perceptions, expectations and material conditions of the public spaces
For Harvey, the public sphere is the place where “ambiguities of proprietorship, of aesthetics, of social relations (class and gender in particular), and the political economy of everyday life collide.” And he clearly points out to the political economy of space with an aim: to show the struggles over space, how public space is appropriated and ripped off, how is militarized and strategically constructed for excluding and controlling certain groups. For Harvey, the Boulevards in Paris were specifically built to “facilitate the state’s protection of bourgeois private property.” Reminiscent of Foucaultian ideas, the Second Empire public space for Harvey was also a spectacular space of seeing and being seen (and, of course, of not seeing and not being seen) in the wide Boulevards, departmental store and café shops. Wealth, power, commodity, fashion and consumption were produced at public spaces and at “interior states of mind.” Policing public space was as important as policing interior state of mind. The multitude was always there to jump and destroy the progress brought by the bourgeoisie, they needed to be under constant check to overcome bourgeoisie’s feelings of insecurity and vulnerability. These were disciplinary mechanisms used to resist using Foucault words “the fear of the plague.” But the public space can only be understood when considering the relational connectivity among public space, quasi-public space and private spaces.

Question: Why Harvey does not pay more attention to a political economy of public space from the perspective of the poor?

Basso (1996) Wisdom sits in Places.

Keith Basso. Wisdom sits in Places.
This is a very important piece of work in the literature of space and place. Its importance comes from the fact that it has engaged with cultural productions that were less considered in the anthropological approximation to how people live their worlds. For Basso, the act of name-placing and the name-worlds they imply was never really thought in depth. His focus in how “people speak with names” in the Apache experience in Arizona is what makes very compelling this book. It somehow resembles Bachellard’s ideas of the “poetic of space” and daydreaming we’ve seen last week but in a very different way. Here places are containers of wisdom and moral stories that people gain access in their everyday talks, when move through space, and when people are experiencing difficult situations. Basso is trying to show something that I guess is more present than we thought, how stories are emplaced, then spacialized, and reenact through spatial/temporal imagination. But there is a degree of depth one can say among these stories, some of them just “tell” or “recall” specific stories associated with topological and mnemonic forms of knowledge. But others have a “deeper” wisdom, according to Basso, when people “speak with names” they are relearning and embodying what the elders had done and, therefore, how people should or should not behave as a collective entity. These are moral cautionary tales sitting in places, ready to be perceived and apprehended by Apache people (or someone that has the capacity to perceive it such as Basso). I was trying to think about this idea of name-placing in my own society and see if I can find examples. I think people could say, “if you wear that dress you’ll end up in Godoy Cruz” (implying that you look like a travesti) or if a gay friend says, “I broke with my boyfriend and I went to Santa Fe and Callao” (implying he went to pick up a sex partner). But these two levels that Basso shows, the “surface” one which implies storytelling about specific places with particular associations, and the “deeper” one that involves strong sense of morality and even rules of what should or should not be done, are not easily ready to find in my mind when thinking on my own society. Still I consider that if we look with Basso’s eyes we may find these sorts of stories. The only problem I have with Basso’s accounts is quite obvious: his approach can be seen as essentialist, he is not so far away of Gupta’s and Ferguson’s critique to the usual idea of fixing people to places, the idea one people = one culture = one place. Only that he does it with a subtle approach. He has a very poetic and pragmatic way, he says these places, and the Apache way of naming them are constantly being created, it is an unstoppable process. But the problem I have is that not only wisdom sits in places, but ignorance too. I think Basso in his attempt to localize and highlight the name-placing process he somehow forgot to show the tactical and spontaneous use (in de Ceurtian’s terms) of places. It seems these are mythical and out-of-the-time places but they have particular histories and struggles not only between Apaches and the surrounding society, but also, and more importantly, among Apaches themselves like in the story of the family that did not want to share their corn and were enclosed in their home and have to shit inside. His linguistic and phenomenological approach leaves very few spaces for considering political struggles and conflicts among the Apache. It seems that everyone perceives the same and think the same (although he differentiate elder from youngsters, and more or less wise people) in relation with these places. I think overall Basso makes a very respectful and insightful analysis of Apache place-making and experience-sense of places and in doing so he moves into untransited cultural zones that problematize the relationship between the here and the past and the here and now. And as I said the only problem I’ve found is his tendency to flatten the social inner differences and to dissociate time from socio-political history (only certain forms of history are considered) in relation with those places.

Comments on Heidegger, Bachelard and Cassey.

Week 3
• Heidegger, Martin 1971 Poetry, Language, Thought. Albert Hofstadter, trans. New York: Harper. Chapter IV: Building Dwelling Thinking (pp. 143-159).

• Casey, Edward 1996 How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time: Phenomenological Prolegomena. In Steven Feld and Keith Basso, eds. Senses of Place. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press (pp. 13-52).

• Bachelard, Gaston 1994 [1958] The Poetics of Space. Maria Jolas, trans. Boston: Beacon Press. Chapter 1: The House. From Cellar to Garret. The Significance of the Hut (pp. 3-37).

Common reflections
The main point of the reading of this week, the phenomenological approach, is to put experience at the center of the analysis. In three texts the authors are debating with positivist and objectivist perspective of space that see it as absolute and empty. Space is not given or neutral, something that will be filled with culture. For these authors experience comes first, the being in the world, the dwelling is the primary source of knowledge. For the three authors place comes first and then space. For Heidegger, our experience of being mortals, our physical body in which we live comes first, its experience and perceptions and sensations then create the abstractions and racionalization of that experience as an objectified and out-there space. Not the other way around. It is precisely because we are dwellers, that we inhabit our houses and buildings, and the natural environment.
But what is to dwell? How buildings belong to dwelling? According to Heidegger the old English and High German word for building, buan, means to dwell, to remain, to stay in a place. To be a human being means to be on the earth as a mortal, it means to dwell and building can be seen as cultivating. One could argue that buildings and humans are constantly building themselves in a sense of inhabiting new forms and experiences (only if we take a poetic license to say that buildings are non-humans agent that have experience).
In Bachelard’s case his approach to how people experience inhabiting a (private) house takes a more psychoanalytical stand and a more poetic style. He wants to understand or better say evoke people’s experience when dwelling and inhabiting their own houses, although he seems to be talking about a mythical house. He brings into analysis a vertical approach to the experience of dwelling when he focuses in the attic and the cellar. He represents the cellar as the unconscious zone of the house, one that is always in the shadow, and the attic as the clear zone in which children play. There is a tension in his article in how places inside the space of the house reverberate in different ways and so construct different experience to the people inhabiting those places. Places through daydreaming (a sort of imagination) are also connected with memory, nostalgia and past experiences (especially early childhood experiences). But basically in Bachelard there is a distinction between the outside (public) and the house (private), between an exteriority and the feeling of intimacy and refuge.
Cassey, with his phenomological approach, is criticizing the modern view of space as absolute, epmty and infinite where places were only partitions of space. For Cassey, “Both sensations and spaces are themselves emplaced from the very first moment, and a very subsequent moment as well” (18), and he is very clear when he says, “we are not only in places but of them” (19).
I think what we can take from these readings is the necessity to place the body/subject as the perceiver, dweller, performer, actor that mediates between places and spaces. The lived body is the one that is emplaced and who experience space.

Massey (2005)

Massey, Doreen 2005 For Space. London: Sage. Chapter 12: The Elusiveness of Place, Chapter 13: Throwntogetherness: The Politics of the Event of Place, and Chapter 14: There are No Rules of Place and Space (pp. 130-176).

Places as integration of space and time, as spatio-temporal events always moving, open, in process of becoming within a sense of interconnection and transience. Natural places also constantly change. Everything everywhere changes but according to specific forms of “here”. However why we cannot grasp this constant change and tend to think in static and fix way “nature”, “culture” and “society”? It seems that Massey is thinking on the spectrum that goes from geological and planet scale to micro-movements of tiny stones, from the constructors of pyramids five thousand ago to “our time” everything is in constant fluidity considering at the same time “space” (“Geography”), “time” (“History”), “culture” (“Social Anthropology”), and “nature” (“Science”). And this encounter, this “here” and “now” is what “we” have. What is important of the place for Massey is the throwntogetherness, the negotiation of here-and-now, the steady fusion/fission of elements, a “coming together of trajectories” (141). Bodies (human, of water), places (mountains), and identities (political) are collectively shaped through practices, which forms relations, and “it is on those practices and relations that politics must be focused” (148) but more importantly for Massey space itself is the site of interconnection and social formations in a constant becoming of trajectories, histories and stories, indeed it is a constellation of trajectories both “natural” and “cultural” that are part of a continuous negotiation. And I like the definition of politics by Mouffe (quoted by Massey) that considers “the always-to-be-achieved construction of a bounded yet heterogeneous, unstable and necessary antagonistic ‘we’” (154). She takes the example of the City of London with its overpaid financial workers and how they impact in the high cost of housing and living: the inequalities of the system in which few are overpaid and everyone has to suffer the costs. More specifically, the last concentration of capital and wealth in the financial economy and the refusal to consider any forms of redistribution of the (national?) wealth with the allegedly threat that if not finance would go to Frankfurt instead of London or other regions within England would take a bigger portion of the tax revenue from London...But London/England is also part of the larger constellation of trajectories of the unequal relation north/south, first/third world in a Faletto-Cardoso vein. And these constellations are not stable or coherent both spatial and temporal because they are constantly changing and struggling. The problem of the social construction of place though is a political one, is the political position-taking within the spatialized social practices and social relations of power. Massey suggests that we are responsible toward place but yet there are no spatial rules from which guide our politics.

Malkki (1997)

Malkki, Liisa, 1997 National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity among Scholars and Refuges. In Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, eds. Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology. Durham: Duke University Press (pp. 52-74).

The deconstruction of a certain form of seeing and thinking in relation to entities such as nations and national borders, which implies ”sedenterian metaphysics”, these tensions between sedentarism and displacement, “rooted” and “uprooted” identities, “national” and “supranational” is what is at stake in Malkki’s article. She understands identity as “always mobile and processual, partly self-construction, partly categorization by others, partly condition, a status, a label, a weapon, a shield, a fund of memories, and so on” (71). There is a need to consider in new ways ideas of territory, belonging, roots, culture, diaspora, displacement and identity. But are these new questions? Like Malkki I also agree that people have always moved because of desire or violence. The first question I need to pose following Malkki’s believe in particular theoretical shifts that “give these phenomena greater analytical visibility” (53) in social sciences is why now (late 1990s) are these phenomena more visible? Because of the allegedly lack of grand narrative (Nation, Class, Rationality, Truth, etc.) that supposedly legitimate the order of things in the world? If people were constantly moving and societies were extending their influences beyond and beneath the national borders why the rooting/uprooting of people and the de/re-territorialization of (trans)national identities were not at stake before? It is true that identity has been intensely territorialized not only for the ones shown by Malkki, the displaced and the “refugees”, but also by people living the “homeland” too. Identities formations in the late capitalism have been centered in a dis-continuum that goes from the “rooted” “homeland” to the displaced/”uprooted” “refugees” in the “exile”. And these images are based in certain tropos taken by the botanical arsenal of images such as (national) “soil”, (home) “land”, “roots”, “trees”, “seeds”, and “origins.” And like real trees, roots have to be enrooted in one specific place/space/soil; they cannot be in different and discontinuous places at the same time (unless we re-consider what we mean by identity and belonging in different ways). This idea of “national geographic maps” is precisely what Gupta and Ferguson are criticizing in the other article we saw this week: the supposition that 1 place = 1 space = 1 culture as a monolithic entity with no ambiguities or incoherence. This is what Malkki, following Deleuze and Guattari, called a “sedentarist metaphysics” that produce a moral order that fixed and incarcerated “native” people in the “rooted” lands or pathologyzed “uprooted” “expatriates” in their “exile”.

Gupta and Ferguson (1992)

Gupta, Akhil and James Ferguson 1992 Behind “Culture”: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference. Cultural Anthropology 7(1):6-23.

The world has always already been spatially connected. What characterize the anthropological endeavor are certain forms of representation of culture, but when dealing with representing space it seems that within social sciences we need to use images of split, break, and displace. And this need comes from the unproblematic assumptions that cultural artifacts such as nations or countries and space are transparent and interchangeable monolithic entities that are “naturally” fitting. Of course, there is always a tension and something exceed the effort to map the territory, all type of mental and material mapping techniques have themselves a limitation to their ability to represent space. But the problem according to G&F (1992: 7) is that “space itself becomes a kind of neutral grid on which cultural difference, historical memory, and societal organization are inscribed.” And this non-neutral neutrality produces a generative principle in the social sciences while invisbilize space from social analysis. Space is everywhere in society but nowhere in the social analysis. But I think this idea of discrete cultures-spaces-places was highly influenced by the nation-states rhetoric of the last 200 years of one nation = one state = one culure, and this is not enough considered by G&F. Question: what we could not see in social sciences, the generative force of space within and beyond “culture”, only became visible after the fall of the bi-polar world and the meta-narratives from which they were sustaining their dominance? Why only after the 1990s social scientists began to consider space in itself as a problem and object of thinking? Or was it that according to G&F the new forms of flexible accumulation have de- and re-territorialized space breaking older notions of community, identity and difference? How are the processes that are territorializing in very different ways our identities?
But the problem is that spaces are experienced and constructed in very different ways and this make impossible the supposedly transparence of place=space=culture, spaces, places and cultures are not given. More over, places are made under a diverse range of ideologies (nation-state being only one among others) that politically imagine them as spaces. The problem is to recognize the hierarchical power relations and interconnection of spaces-places and criticize the natural disconnection. Difference come through interconnection, interconnected space always already existed. Localities or communities are not natural they come to be from the interconnected space, but “notions of locality or community refer both to a demarcated physical space and to clusters of interaction, we can see that the identity of a place emerges by the intersection of its specific involvement in a system of hierarchically organized spaces with its cultural construction as a community or locality” (1992: 8).
So another question is how to represent the social spaces and the cultural-political differences of the “other” and the “us” in the anthropological encounter without conceiving both as “pre-existing ontological entity”, more importantly how is constructed this difference when the world is becoming more and more culturally, economically, socially, and politically interconnected? The process of the production of cultural difference occurs in unbroken, linked space, traversed by economic and political relations of inequality. The problem is not how anthropology represent the others but the extra-textual roots of the problem of the politics of otherness/sameness. Because processes of de/re-territorialization have undermined the fixity of "ourselves" and "others" so we also have to reconsider what we mean by our and other cultures.